I'm going to propose something rather radical. You should get rid of most of your friends on social media sites that you're targeting to promote your site.

We've talked about how you should stop shouting on Digg. But you can take it one step further. Most social media sites now discount the value of a vote from a friend. While they encouraged everybody to build up friend lists through the features of their sites, at the same time they devalued the votes on your submissions from your friends. The social sites can't make up their mind, but you can.

What if your account on a site such as Digg had just enough friends to have a footprint that looks reasonable, but mostly got votes from people completely unrelated to you? That would be the ultimate power user. So how do you go about doing that?

The "Normal" Digg Strategy

Most gurus will tell you that you should follow the strategy of friending the top users on a site and vote for their submissions. We've promoted that strategy quite a bit in these pages too. You get the attention of the top users by giving them vote love, and in return they'll start to vote for your submissions. This strategy works particularly well on Digg.

The problem is that it takes a few hundred votes to get to the first page if you're mainly getting support from friends, and there are only at best a few hundred users on Digg that understand how the game is played that will reciprocate. But once in a while a story hits the front page with < 100 votes. How can that happen?

In those cases, the stories are getting votes from such a wide variety of unrelated yet strong profiles that the algorithm flags them as hot. So your strategy should clearly be to get the attention of those top users, but without actually making them a friend on the site.

You could just create an account and start sending emails and IMs to the top 100 Diggers, but you'd get flicked away as a social flea since you haven't shown them any support. Unless you're someone everybody knows that strategy isn't going to work that well. But what if you could easily vote the submissions of the top 100 without ever friending them in the first place?

It's Staring You Right in the Face

One of the main reasons that people build a large friend list on Digg is that the site makes it very easy to view the queue of submissions of your friends. When MrBabyMan wants to "support his friends" (known to the rest of us as blind voting people he has "vetted"), he just goes to his friend's submission page, opens every link, and clicks the Digg button. Or perhaps he just loads the RSS feed of his friends submissions (see the little feed icon in the top right corner of the "all recent activity" tab on that page?) and votes them from a reader. If you want to be one of the people that he does that for, you need to start digging all his submissions until he notices you and makes you a friend. You'll also need to submit content that he feels that he can trust. Lather, rinse, repeat for the Top 100 Diggers and some percentage of them will friend you back and you'll have a stable of votes you can call upon when you're in need.

But you don't have to friend him to get his attention. There's also an RSS feed for his submissions page. Just load the rss feeds for the submissions of the top 100 Diggers into an rss reader and you'll have a steady stream of content that you should digg in order to get attention. And you didn't have to friend anyone!

Making This Easier

Since this is Promote My Site, we're obviously going to show you a technical solution to make this process easier. Instead of maintaining 100 different RSS feeds, you could just use the Yahoo Pipes mashup of the top 100 Diggers submissions. This pipe reads the SocialBlade Top 100 list to pull out the top diggers and then combines the feeds of all of their submissions into a single feed.

Instead of going through the pipe, you can just go directly to the RSS feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=qtyf1ery3RGVaDdodfQQIA&_render=rss. Yes, it takes a little bit of time to run, but you won't notice that if you're accessing it from your reader. And you'll always have a steady supply of articles from the Top 100 to Digg.

If you were smart you'd be jumping on those articles and digging and commenting on them as soon as they became available.

If you were really smart you'd consider posting the good ones to other social media. People often complain that a lot of what MrBabyMan submits is from Reddit, so turnabout is fair play, right?