How to Get at the Top of Digg, and What You're Doing Wrong: Get Massive Traffic to Your Blog, Website, or AC Content

I love Web 2.0., and most of all, I love social bookmarking.

But call me greedy. Right now I'm not interested in social bookmarking for web browsing. (For that, try popurls.) Instead, I'm interested in how it can promote content and build traffic. That means, how social bookmarking can make me money.

With this article, I will focus on Digg, what it takes to get to the top of Digg, and therefore how to make it work for you.

Dig Into Digg

Digg is the giant of social bookmarking with a current Alexa rank of 95. That means, by Alexa's ranking, it is the 95^th most viewed website on the internet. If your content makes it on the front page of Digg, expect thousands of page views in one day.

So, the question is, what content does well on Digg? Surprisingly, it can broken down to a few key points.

You Need a Sensational Title

Articles with sensational titles are more likely to be viewed, and articles that are more likely to be viewed are more likely to be "dugg." It's simple mathematics. (This could be because the button to "digg" up is much larger and more obvious than the button to "digg" down. It could also be because viewers ignore articles they don't like or aren't interested in.)

Take this popular submission, "George H. W. Bush claims Athiests aren't Citizens and can't be Patriots." The title isn't capitalized properly, "atheists" isn't spelled properly, and the article itself doesn't present much more information than its title. Even more damning, it's old news. The link leads to a quote from an interview in 1987! Also damning: it's from a not-so reliable source, neither journalistic nor academic, a site called positiveatheism.org. But what a title! Immediately you are going to get reactions, and with emotional reactions come clicks, and with clicks come diggs. Digg thrives on this stuff.

The George H. W. Bush article had 394 comments and 2154 diggs. If you know how to stir people up with your title alone, you too can post old news on Digg and watch the traffic come in.