Despite the compelling title this post might be a little disappointing to some of you.
This last week saw 3 posts from BlogStorm hitting the Digg front page so I wanted to share exactly how this happened.
The first post, about the history of Digg, was created because I have been a Digg user for over a year and I have a personal interest in Digg. Using some coding skills and the Digg API I was able to find out some information that nobody else had ever written about. The Digg community liked this so much that it hit the homepage within 2 hours when most stories take 10 to 24 hours to go popular.
While the first story was on the way to the homepage one of the top 10 diggers visited the site and spotted another story about MSN Live Search. This particular digger has a success rate of about 45% so whatever he submits has a very strong chance of becoming popular.
The final story about the first photos people take with a new camera was such a good one that it once again went popular in 2 hours and sent 50,000 uniques in the 2 hours after hitting the front page.
The second story sent around one fifth of the traffic of the first and third stories.
Luckily I was using my reputation monitoring tools and spotted the digg stories as soon as they were submitted so I could give them a digg myself.
As you can see there is no secret to this, just create remarkable content and you will attract links and votes on social networks.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve yet to hit the front page… which I guess is good or bad. Only on a shared server (but optimized the heck out of WordPress), so it’s iffy if the server would survive. Biggest social media attack I’ve had so far is a 5k visitor stumble-upon attack in a few hours.
I guess that is one of the funny things about Digg, some people report only getting 10k hits and others say they get 50k.
Nice Article. I think it takes a little bit more than a remarkable story. I have seen many remarkable stories flow by and never get Dugg by more than a few people.
I do admit, your camera story was so remarkable, I emailed it to my wife.
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