Give and ye shall receive - the secret of being Dugg

While writing a draft post on a wonderful Wordpress plugin, Gregarious — which really wasn’t going anywhere exciting or interesting (probably will remain a draft forever) — I thought about an experiment I’ve been trying for the past several days.

If you Google “make digg homepage“, you’ll see around 10.7 million results. Most of the articles focus on the type of content you should write, catchiness of headlines, adding Digg widgets…….and a bunch of other tips that mean @#!* all if you don’t have a lot of regular readers and/or Diggers.

This experiment I mentioned is based on one of these articles that made the Digg front page a few days ago. Only this time, the author actually seems to know what he’s talking about. Brett Borders of Copybrighter wrote a step-by-step guide, which can be traced back to a simpler version from THE HORSE’S MOUTH, Mr. Calacanis back in December of last year.

Only Brett went into much more detail and his version is a little more user-friendly for beginners.

The concept is simple, just like the title of this post, “give and ye shall receive”. If you do something for someone, most people will try to return the favour.

There are thousands and thousands of people that spend a good portion of their days submitting, voting, and controlling what goes popular on Digg. I’d have to think they do so primarily for a bit of an ego boost — feels great to have your name in the limelight — and it helps them stay on the edge of popular culture.

These are the people that you want to add as friends on Digg. You’ll want to start by following Brett’s first few steps in building your profile so you’re taken seriously, then you have to track down people that have a high submission to popular ratio in the categories that relate to your blog.

If you look in the Business category, click on the names of the members that submitted popular stories, see that they submit on a regular basis and have a good number of their stories made popular, add them as a friend.

The idea is to find as many of these people as you can, and develop a Digging relationship with them — platonic of course.

I won’t rephrase too much of Brett’s article, but that relationship means that you’ll want to check into Digg a couple times a day, and Digg every single one of the stories that your friends have submitted. (Click on “Submitted” under the “Friends’ Activity in 48hr” panel on the right side of the homepage) Also, comment on their submissions that you find interesting, or have a smart-ass remark for in mind.

They’ll notice your niceties and do the same for you. As a bonus, their friends that also know how to game Digg and like to help others out, will Digg your stories as well, thanks to that little green banner in the corner.

The more of these popular friends you add and whose stories you Digg, the better the odds of you making the homepage and seeing a good 15-30,000 new visitors hit your site.

Obviously, if what you’re submitting to Digg isn’t good content, you won’t go popular and will probably tarnish your Digging exchange with some of your friends. So only submit stuff that you’ve put a lot of work into and think has the legs and market to carry itself in a Digg category. Also, don’t be afraid to submit good stories outside of your blog. Helps develop your reputation.

Read Brett’s entire post over at Copybrighter and you’ll be well on your way.

Having only started to develop my network for a few days, I can already say that I have a dozen or so people who Digg every one of my submissions, and then get the trickle effect from each of their friends. Look out MediaTemple bandwidth overage bill, here we come!

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