Digging Out

When I started this blog I did not realize that I was painting myself into a corner by focusing on Digg. I had many plans for the Digg Coach but have now decided to take a different path.

I will no longer be updating this blog but will, instead, be opening up another one of my blogs as a TV/Social Networking blog.

Within the next week I will be changing my blog, Arabelle's Alley, into focusing on TV as well as Social Networking. I invite you to join me there.

Thank you.

For All Diggers

"The issue has been building up for a few weeks now. It’s taboo, of course, to discuss Digg.com in a negative light, but there have been “closed-door” secret meetings amongst diggers recently. Via GTalk, it’s a hot topic among active diggers. A couple of weeks ago, Tamar Weinberg posted Why Nobody Should Buy Digg. It details some of the circumstances behind recent bannings and the apparent turnaround in how Digg handles them. In short, they don’t. If you’re banned, Digg won’t talk to you. They won’t talk to anyone else about you.

Regardless of how many hours (days?) you put into Digg or how many great stories you contributed over that time, if you get banned, you no longer exist. The question is, why?"

Top Digg Words

"Digg,a social networking Top 40 of what people are reading, can make a campaign or idea go viral. Want some advice on how to wire your Digg posts for tippability. An analysis below of the top 25 words of Digg from Corporate Rants (overall hint -it it's new or you have an exclusive , it will hunt)."

Digg Comments

"Although the general opinion ofl Digg faithful can't be judged based on comments on one story, can it be said that there is a Digg revolt in the works that is led by a group of individuals who are fed up with Ron Paul stories, crazy videos and a broken comment system?

If the comments on that story are to be believed, a revolt could happen.

As one commenter put, "I think Digg has been the social site that went downhill the most in 2007." Is it true? Did Digg really go downhill in 2007? Obviously, I tend to disagree with this sentiment and I truly believe that Digg was the best social destination of the year. But why have so many disagreed?

Consider these comments on the Digg page (all of them highly dugg by fellow members)"

Digging Ajaxonomy

"If you have been using the popular service Digg you know that it is very easy to submit a story and to see it start to gain traction just to be buried into the dark abyss. What I find particularly frustrating is that you don't know how many people buried the story and the reason for the bury. If you have seen Digg Spy you have noticed that the application does show buries, but you can't just track data for a particular story.

After much frustration Ajaxonomy is now releasing a Bury Recorder application. How the application works is you take the story's URL (This is the URL of the page that the "more" link on the Digg upcoming/popular pages takes you or the page that clicking on the story title takes from your profile i.e. http://digg.com/[story]) and put it into the application and once you click "Watch for Buries" the application will start recording any buries that the story receives."

Digg And Publishing

"I’ve only had a post reach Digg’s homepage once, back in 2006, and I see no great loss if it never happens again. Why would I forgo those thousands of visits? Because Publishing 2.0, like most commercialized blogs, is essentially a trade publication (to use traditional media labels), and just as my content has little relevance to Digg’s niche audience, so too does Digg’s audience have little value to Publishing 2.0.

What I’ve just said might come as a surprise to many niche blogs and traditional media publishers who play the volume game when it comes to selling the value of their online audiences. Many tech blogs report audiences measured in shear volume, i.e. hundreds of thousands or north of 1 million, and those numbers are goosed by avalanche traffic from Digg."

Happy Holidays

The Digg Coach will return Dec. 27th.

Selling Digg ?

"It’s been a little more than a month since the last rumors surfaced about social news site Digg trying to sell itself for at least $300 million. A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal."

Digg: New Features

New features coming to Digg:

Customizable Alerts

Groups

More here."

"Follow these 3 “simple” steps to get on DIGG front page and rocket your traffic"

After Diggs

"So we’ve had a good night sleep and the first thing we did when we woke up was obviously jump out of bed to check yesterday’s statistics and see the damage Digg.com had done to our little blog. Just before we fell asleep, we had counted 1300 diggs, at this moment the number of diggs is a massive 2256!

Once the picture post hits the frontpage and doesn’t get buried, changes are you’ve just created a nice PR5 domain. Not just because of the linkjuice Digg passes on, but there are tons of sites out there that publish the popular stories from the Digg front page. Popurls.com is one of many for example. Also a lot of .edu sites have mirrors up in case the Dugg site crashes. (We did once yesterday, but a few Apache tweaks sorted that out.) All you do is wait for the next Google update to come around and you’re more than likely going to receive a nice PR.

The Stumble Effect

Bloggers and webmasters out there who watch their traffic as closely as we do have been amazed by the “Stumble Effect”. Many know about the sudden burst of traffic that comes from the “Digg Effect” when a submission reaches the front page of Digg (or even better, if it reaches the “Top in All…” section on the frontpage). This is normally a day of joy (or terror if your server bombs) followed by limited tricklings of traffic.

Stumble has a different, more steady infusion of traffic that it can send to a website that gets stumbled, especially if it is hit by multiple top users. The effect is sustained, but more importantly, can be rejuvinated by a thumbs up and/or review by the right person/people.

Digg, on the other hand, has the advantage of having “controlled” traffic. Anyone watching their posts as they’re submitted and rising on Digg can pinpoint if and approximately when their page will go popular. You know when the traffic is coming and you know when it will stop."

Digg Headlines

"Instead of forcefully making a boring topic appear interesting, this digg user took something that would guarantee attention (Google founders) and related it to a quite uninteresting topic. The result is a Digg headline that probably got enough *blind diggs* to make it popular and it ended up getting 562 diggs (as of writing this article).

I have to admit, when I saw this headline I was in a hurry as well and gave a blind digg before I had time to read the page itself.

The only problem with this linkbait (although to be fair it was just a test) was that it could have been done much better (in terms of optimizing the landing page and in attracting links, if the digger had set up a page on their own site instead).

If you want to do some linkbaiting for your website but are having trouble making your content *interesting*, stop forcing the issue. Instead, follow this simple 3 step process:"

It's In The Mixx

"It was very strange to see that every time I was reaching 50 diggs a group of users was starting to post bad comments like “Blog Spam” or “copied and pasted from here …link…(to another profile)”.
And it was stranger to see that others were having the same problem.
It’s clear that many blogs have been banned because of such comments.
So, it happened that several popular people on Digg to leave the website to find another heaven.


Besides that, Mixx knows how to attract the ex-diggers on its website and it created a special place in the forum, called Digg Refugges, dedicated “For those of you who have been a victim of the heavy hand of digg.”

Mixx is working non-stop to improve the website by adding new features every day, and announcing them on the blog.
The Facebook application, Customizable Mixx Buttons and the Mobile Mixx version for the iPhone are just a few of the last enhancements."

Digg Or Mixx ?

New startup Mixx, which went in to private beta just two months ago, may be finding itself with the right product at the right time. Digg users, including top contributors, are showing an increasing amount of frustration with the Digg community, and many are leaving.




"In fact, every headline that reaches Digg's home page receives an average of 129 links, according to search marketer Neil Patel, and each of those links can push an online business' traffic closer to the coveted top spots in Google or Yahoo!'s results. Digg is by far the greatest source of links and traffic among social media sites: A popular story on the site gets as many as 100,000 unique visitors. Sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine and Propeller can each add between 5,000 and 10,000 more."

Daily Diggs

Not much time to Digg? Don't feel like searching for articles?

Here's the easy way.

http://digg.com/users/sweat1951/history/favorites

Every time I digg an article I save it to my Favorites. I can then have all the articles in one place and can post this one link.

This link can be used repeatedly as favorites are updated daily too.

Submitting A Story To Digg

When you click on the Digg button after reading an article you may be taken to a page where you will see that you are the first person to Digg it so you must submit the story. It's very simple.

1. You will be asked for the the article's URL.

2. You write a brief little bit as to what the story is about.

3. Scroll down to categories and choose the appropriate one.

4. Scroll down and you find one of those boxes where you type in the code which shows you aren't a bot.

5. You may come to a page that says similar stories have been submitted. None of them will be the one you're entering so scroll down and hit the Submit button and you're all done.

Why Digging Is Important

Let's begin by explaining why Digg is so important to everyone.

In one word; exposure.

Remember the Save Jericho campaign? It's a prime example. Jericho fans would Digg any Jericho post and the Diggs would number in the thousands.

Once a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes “popular” and jumps to the homepage in its category. If it becomes one of the most popular, it qualifies as a “Top 10”. If a submission doesn't receive enough Diggs within a certain time period, it eventually falls out of the “Upcoming” section.
The system only works when users actively participate on a large scale, so make sure to do your part and Digg content that matters to you!

Basically, the more Diggs an article gets the more people who will see it. I'm not talking about 10, 50, or even 100 Diggs-it often requires thousands. Do you want a network to stand up and notice fans? Do you want more viewers to your blog/website?


The promotion and burying of stories is managed by an algorithm developed by Digg. There is no hard number of Diggs/buries to promote or remove a story. It's based on a sliding scale that takes several factors into consideration, such as number of Diggs, reports, time of day, topic submitted to, Digging/burying diversity, etc.

One of the keys to getting a story promoted is diversity in Digging activity. Until the algorithm gets the diversity it needs of users Digging the story, it will remain in the Upcoming section. That way, the system knows a variety of people will be into the story. This means we all need to digg a variety of topics and not just the few that are only of interest to us.


Here's an article that will explain more.

Introducing The Digg Coach

Terocious and I would like to thank everyone who attended Digg Chat. It was a lot of fun and we'll do it again soon.

Everybody had great ideas during chat so this blog was born from those ideas. Terocious and I will be working together to bring you information, tutorials, and various pros and cons of using Digg. We hope this blog will be a central location where you can find anything you would like to know.

This is a blog for every fan of every show and anyone else who wants Digg information. Leave us a comment if you would like to ask a question or have a suggestion. We welcome any Digg articles you may run across.

Many thanks to Terocious for the beautiful header and for the title. I was struggling trying to find just the right name for this blog when he popped up with a title and picture.

Since this is a new blog please bear with us as we grow and add more articles.

Welcome to The Digg Coach!!!!!!!