Why the hell should you digg that guys shout?

It may be a big deal getting lots of fans on Digg. Most of us get minimum ten friend requests daily and there is a whole bunch of friends on Digg.Now, how many shouts do you get on email everyday from all of these friends? Quite some isn’t it? And how many do you reply to or digg? Well, keep the answer to yourself.

The question is - How can you effectively use the friends and community on digg to market your websites on Digg?
The answer probably is in the question itself - You are trying to “market” your sites.

Digg is a community where everyone is on the look out for networking. The basic motive of course is to harness the power of community. Let me take you through the process of “digging”.

Step 1.
Submit a story.

Step 2.
Shout/share it with your friends.

Step 3.
Grow your friend circle.

Step 1 and Step 2 are comparatively easier steps, but what matters most is the third one - growing your network.

How can you grow your network on Digg?

Anyone might have easily guessed that digging the maximum number of stories is enough to take you get popular on Digg.
Well, I don’t know about everyone, but this happened to me. I thought digging the maximum number of articles on digg can get me  popular. And I made it even a practice to digg a good number of articles every day, religiously. But, there was no big difference in the “popularity” as such.

Now, the bigger question is - What do you mean by popularity on Digg?

Well, popularity (or I’d call it power) to me is the power to submit a story and declare that this story is going to get 1000 diggs in the next couple of hours.

Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee and I wonder if the top diggers would say such a thing. But essentially, what all of us are aiming to is to be able to submit a story and when you share it with friends, all of them digging it.

I’d call it the the  Digg Power Quotient.

Digg Power Quotient = (No. of diggs on an article in an hour / No. of friends in the circle) / No. of diggs from the community in an hour

This may not be the best metric though sometimes because we’ve all seen cases where a guy with less than ten friends submitted a story that made it to the top. Excluding all those “miracles”, if there is someone who has a very healthy “Digg Power Quotient”, then I think he has the potential to make a story popular.

This article may not make any sense at all because Digg is an unpredictable community sometimes, and things can work at a totally different pace and dimension than expected, for the good or the bad. But some pointers on how to be a popular guy on Digg is interesting !

What practices will get you popular on digg?

Again, with all the unpredictability taken into account, let me share a few observations.

1 - Digg ONLY relevant articles that are related to your interest.
In the frenzy to get more numbers, people go around digging anything and everything, and end up being everywhere. This may not look good on you if you are trying to build an image. For example, if you are a techno geek who blogs on technology, it makes sense for you to digg through articles in the technology corner and not the fashion and lifestyle section.
The reason is that, when people find that you are more active in one particular category, they’ll derive an impression that you are an authority on that topic and this is good for brand building.

2 - Participate in the community
In the rush to digg more articles, we tend to forget the fact that Digg is a community. A very sensitive community. Digg’s popular members are all very well networked and communicate with each other a lot on the digg platform. They see it more as a place to share thoughts with like minded people. And anyone who can’t adapt to this, may stand out of the crowd. And handling things single handed is not a good idea on digg.

3 - Comment as much as you digg
Rather than digging or submitting much , try commenting more, at least as much as you digg, and you will see the results. Commenting is a good way to generate interest among the community and gain trust. Here again, you got to really genuine while commenting or you’re gonna get burned out spamming.

4 - Create a circle of “trust worthy” friends
Friends are always good. The more the merrier. But make sure they are “trust worthy”. By trustable I mean, you got to make sure that whenever you send a shout, you get the story dugg by him. Well, it is not possible all the time, but a 90% hit ratio is satisfactory.There are a lot of guys who’ll add you and keep bombarding with shouts, at the same time never responds to your’s.

5 - Don’t digg stupid articles
Aww…did someone had to tell you this? These days there are lot of “spam” being submitted to digg. The titles make no sense, neither the description, nor the URL. If you are on a digging spree, it is most likely that you’ll digg one of those articles. So keep away from them so that, people don’t misunderstand you for a spammer.

6 - Respond well to shouts
Next time when someone see your shout notification in their email, they shouldn’t go “Oh no!  Not that guy again! “. The simple solution is that you have to respond well to others shouts whenever they send you one. Only then will the community recognize you a trust worthy guy.

7 - Create trust among the community
This is probably the most important and significant thing out of all these stuff mentioned here. And probably the most non-comprehensive. It is easy to talk about it, but to measure as to how much of it you actually earned is quite difficult. Simply because there are a lot of metrics that go into it, and it takes time to gain trust.

8 - Sharing is the key
While digging keep asking this question - “When is the last time I dugg a story just because it was interesting?” n
Essentially, the idea is to keep digging interesting articles from the web so that you can share it wit the world. Keep away your marketing interests and genuinely participate in the community. It will reward you.

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