We all know that efficient and wide ranging friending on Digg is a critical success factor (CSF) for digg story promotion. Yes, yes, I know, first you have to write the worlds most awesome link bait. But you still have to be able to get enough people to vote in the beginning to get it above the crowd.

I was gonna write something clever, but that picture just makes me clench, so let's go straight into.....

Finding People Who Post Your Kind of Story

You could go into digg, search, poke around, and try to find people who post stories about "SEO TOOLS." Or you could do it the easy way and just go to Promote My Site and click on the link for the Digg Friend Finder.

Once again, screen grabs and annotations are via Fireshot - awesome and free.

When you get to the Digg Friend Finder page you'll see some explanatory text and some ads (this is ad supported freeware after all), but most of us, let's face it, do not read directions, so your attention will be drawn to:

It's simple enough - just add in some keywords and hit the Search button:

What you can see is that 100 different articles were found with BOTH the keywords "SEO" and "Tools" and that part is 100% complete. This is all through the Digg API so parts are fast and other parts are not so fast. In fact, what you'd see if you kept watching would be:

You'll notice that it continues to find friends - it went from 9 to 78. This is because the actual part of finding the people via the Digg API is very slow. Go figure.

At any point in this process you can click the Show Friends button and get a display of your potential friends:

Neat. So, if you're an SEO and you're posting to digg on SEO topics, why aren't those people your friends?

One last feature: the radio button toggle between profile pages and submissions

just changes the links so that they either go to the person's profile page or the page with all their submissions. A minor feature, true, but if you want to look at all 78 people above then it will definitely save you some time.

What Happens When They Block This?

They can't. Well, they could, by changing their API and TOS, but they won't do that. You can read all about Architecting SEO Apps for Digg if you want more info.

Closing Comments

This service went sailing through our beta/QA process - people just seemed to get it. If you have any questions just contact us at help@promote-my-site.com, leave a blog comment, or you can also find/PM us at SEOMoz and Sphinn .