Promote My Site

Our Digg Genesis

We started off reading and "digging" stories from our favorite RSS feeds and quickly moved to posting some of our own writing. "Uh oh," you say, "bad blogger."

No, not really. For three reasons:

• It's not against the TOS at digg
• As our readers will know, we don't have a spam blog in any way
• It had it's own punishment in terms of public yawning at our posts

Because we are very interesting writers (*cough*) but not to the digg crowd and certainly not on every post. Our first 40 postings averaged 3 diggs each. I swear, you could scan your BK receipt, post it to "offbeat" and get more diggs than that.

But, not being totally oblivious, I started reading some articles on how all this stuff worked (or how people thought it worked!) and our average over the next 10 stories doubled to 6 diggs/story. Whoo, hoo, if we were a startup we'd have been worth $1B by then!

After a bit more attention over the next 10 stories we bumped our average to 24 diggs/story. From there our average over the next 15 stories went to 45 diggs/story.

Any my last story finally got "popular" and got 700+ diggs by this article.

Now, lest you assume I was spending my entire life on this, well, uh, no. I did around 70 stories over 7 months, or a couple per week. I was spending a lot more time digging (2,000+) stuff. A lot of that was shouts but a lot more was stuff I found by looking for people submitting stories with keywords I cared about.

So, to summarize, rocky start but a good strong finishing position, pretty good citizen. Maybe I give myself a B+, which would make Digg better than High School, in retrospect.

The Landmine Tripped

Not by anything I did outside the TOS, nor by a flame war, and not even by some self proclaimed Digg guardian. Nope, some sockpuppet knocked our blog out of bounds for Digg.

I posted a digg (Best. Digg. Shout. Ever.) about an absurd shout I got from a user called SteJules. I won't go into details but he'd been a Digg member for 31 days and had over 10K diggs and had a 20% hot rate. The shout was 800+ words and was priceless. It just begged for digging and though I was careful not to be ad hominem about it, I figured since he'd sent it to around a thousand people, I posted it. And it got 100+ votes in two days.

And it got our site banned by SteJules and his friends. Which is a long and boring story, but they did it on purpose by going back through posts from months before and burying them as spam. Nice.

Banning is Forever

Which is when I discovered that there is NO appeals process. You know how blogger will lock you out or require a captchya to post? Annoying but after a few days it usually gets put right. Google gives you a penalty, you can fix that in a few weeks. But no such process exists at Digg. (I actually have friends who know the guys what run Digg but you don't call in favors for stuff like that. Which makes it worse, actually.)

Being Innocent is No Protection

Oh, you say, you don't submit your own site and other people only do it sometimes. Well, what if someone creates a user, says that their home page is your domain, and starts, once a day, submitting your stories. After a few weeks they get their friends to swarm them and mark them as spam.

Bye-bye.

Diversify

Look, our business model does not require that we get traffic from Digg, but if it did, we'd be toast. We'll, we'd be toast unless we wanted to change our domain name, 301 redirect hundreds of pages, etc. And even then the "breathing space" only last until some other sock puppet bully gets you banned. So diversify into other social media sites. There are a lot of them, and if you read the articles under our "niche social media" tag you'll get a flavor for what is out there. In the meantime, while being a model citizen is smart, it certainly won't protect you.