Digg

There was a time when a story on the front page of Digg was the holy grail for any web publisher. But in more recent months, the average Joe has moved on from the once and powerful bookmarking site because of the monopoly caused by power players in the game. Then Facebook and Twitter rose in favor and it looked like Digg had met its match. Until now.

I am sure many people know of the traffic-driving and link-buildling benefits that the efficient use of Digg can produce. In case you don’t know, in my case I have been able to drive from 600 to over 1.6 million pageviews and generate from 8 to over 700 editorially placed links pointing to sites that I have promoted to the Digg front page.

The term “link bait” or “Digg bait” is sometimes used in a negative light, meant to indicate a type of post that is meant to pander to a lower element than most blog posts. But while this can be true and often times is, it is also not always the case. What the term “link bait” actually means is that the post is the type of work others will want to link to. The types of content people want to link to is as varied as the types of content available on the Web, ranging from pure garbage to enlightened discussion.

First of all your article will not go popular automatically once you submit it on Digg.com. If you are a power user (e.g., a Digg user with many friends, who participates actively in the community and have sent many stories to the front page in the past), then you’ll probably get a good amount of votes right after the submission, but even in this case it usually takes from 10 to 20 hours to get the story promoted the front page, provided the story is a good one and matches the interests of the Digg users.