We are very pleased to announce that Digg and Promote My Site will be partnering to provide Digg's next generation of power user tools. This intiative represents a change in direction for Digg and will be a significiant benefit to the internet marketing community.

Kevin Rose may have said "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the past we've taken the postion that power users and marketers tend to harm the Digg community, so we've taken steps to make sure that their efforts are not successful. But given the economic times, it only makes sense to explore as many revenue opportunities as we can find. Beer is expensive and we can't just rely upon a bunch of teenagers to keep clicking those snorg tee ads to keep the lights on around here. It's time to let the professionals get to work and start generating some real revenue."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but insider sources hinted that it was an all cash deal. Under the agreement, Digg will license Promote My Site's previously discontinued suite of power user digging scripts and integrate them into the site in a new product christened the Digg/PMS Suite. For a monthly subscription fee of $99.95, power users will be able to promote their stories on Digg without interference from system administrators or that pesky "Whoa Cowboy" message. Buries, while they will still appear to register on the site, will be ineffective against users of the Digg/PMS Suite and the users will be notified of who is buring their stories. Digg/PMS Suite users will also receive an allowance of 10 "zaps" a month. These "zaps" can be used to ban members of the Digg mafia that only comment and do not submit any useful content to the site. This feature is expected to greatly improve the user experience for all concerned. Futhermore, any previously banned user will be able to have their account reinstated by purchasing a subscription to the Digg/PMS Suite.

A release date for the enhanced Digg/PMS Suite was not disclosed, but it is expected to be in the vicinity of April 1, 2010. In the meantime, users purchasing a subscription to Promote My Site's PMS Social Suite will be in line for a discount on the Digg product if and when it is released.

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?

Most people that talk about strategies for using analytics on Digg and other social networks are after the holy grail of a front page. I think that's misguided.

The Front Page Can Rock

First, let's talk about the benefits of a front page.

• Traffic - A ton of it. A front page on Digg can crush your server. You'll get a ton of people to see your site.
• Rankings - The scuttlebutt in SEO circles these days is that Google is tracking traffic via their toolbar, and having a lot of traffic actually helps you perform better in the SERPs. It's a very difficult hypothesis to prove either way, but from what I've seen the rich do indeed get richer.
• Links - The more people that see your site, the more likely some blogger is to give you a natural link.

More Trouble Than It's Worth?

A front page is nice if you can get it, but in fact it may be a lot more trouble than it's worth. Let's talk about some of the downsides:

• Lack of Conversions - The flood of traffic you get from a front page typically doesn't convert. The bounce rate is extremely high since the typical Digger isn't looking for your offer. The kind of people that surf the social media sites don't sit there with their credit cards at the ready.
• Commercial Offers are Seen as Spam - It's almost impossible to go front page with a commercial offer, so your link bait usually has to be on a domain that has a link to your offer. So while you may be building a strong backlink, you aren't geting strong traffic.
• Bandwidth Costs - You'll have to have a lot of bandwidth available to handle the storms of traffic if you're successful, which can be expensive if the traffic isn't translating directly into revenue.
• Time Tradeoffs - With a strong profile and participation in a few key groups you can get 50 votes on most any story with 5-10 minutes of work. But getting past the Digg mafia to the front page can mean babysitting that story for 24 hours. Just look at the cost benefit and thing about how that time could be used elsewhere.

Lots of Singles, Few Home Runs

Given the choice, would you rather have a player that hits .800 but only gets singles, or a home run hitter with a .050 average? Being able to always get on base is a lot better than racking up the strikeouts with a few home runs inbetween.

That's not to say that you shouldn't want to get to a front page, just don't make it your life's work. I know people that are completely consumed by getting to the front page, and they get visibly depressed when it doesn't happen.

Submitting a story and getting 1 or 2 votes is pretty much useless. Why do votes matter? Each vote is really an internal link on Digg to your article's page. Sites with a heavy amount of internal links but very few links to the page that links to your article won't pass much link juice. It's even more powerful if the votes you're getting are from powerful users with toolbar pagerank. This is a key reason why those programs that autosubmit your article to 1,000s of social networks are pretty much useless.

There's no way to prove it, but from what we've seen the magic line seems to be around 50 votes. Less than that and there isn't enough link juice coming from the site to push your article up the SERPs. More than that and you can see some surprising results.

This climb up the SERPs you'll see is short lived. As fast as the article goes up, it's also likely to go down just as fast. The entire scenario can play out in 2-3 days. But that's true if you hit the front page as well, so it makes sense to have a steady stream of singles rather than always trying to hit the home run.

Those of you who have been with us for a while remember the good old days of Digg (last summer) when all you needed was a good greasemonkey script and you could click your way to Digg riches. My have times changed. Now even mentioning the concept of a script will get you the evil eye.

A lot of us got banned when Digg was on a banning rampage. It's not a big deal -- a Digg banning is a red badge of courage these days. While some notable names have moved on to other social networks such as Mixx, most of the banned players have come back with a new account. And something tells me that Digg isn't too happy about that.

An Odd Email

My LtDraper account was banned by Digg. If you waste time clicking that link you'll see the famous Oops screen. It seems they weren't too happy with my writing and releasing for free a greasemonkey script that allowed people to delete their shouts with one button click. So imagine my surprise when I received the following email a few weeks ago:

Hey there! Sean Graham is your latest fan. He became your fan because he likes what you are up to on Digg and wants to see what you think is interesting. You can either leave him as a fan or add him to your own list of friends. Check out his profile here: http://digg.com/users/tbsmediallc?OTC-em-fn1
Cheers,
The Digg Crew

A Phishing Attack!

At first I thought this was just a bug in Digg's system. It's not like they're not the masters of producing bugs. And it may very well be.

But then I started to think about it some more. This could be a rather sneaky "phishing" attack by Digg. Just send what look like innocent emails to the email accounts of previously banned users and see if they click on the friend link to check it out. They could then easily look at the IP address and check that against the IP addresses of current users. If someone had changed their IP address and started a new account, they'd be able to catch them.

I've asked around to a few Digg power users with new accounts, and they've started seeing the same thing. Digg is sending out friend notification emails to users that have been banned. I'm now getting a few of those a week now.

I posted this theory over at the Warrior Forum and R Hagel suggested that:

If that was their evil plan, now that link will be associated with a bunch of IPs (as I'm sure a bunch of people will click on this link in your post).
Hmmm, maybe that was your evil plan all along? :}

If this is just a glitch in Digg's software they're inadvertently sending me spam. Yes, it's spam because by banning me they terminated our agreement and no longer have permission to send me email. It's UCE through and through.

How to Sink the Boat

I said at the time that Digg was wrong for going after the script users. They were in talks with Google at the time and Google probably told them to do it since their interest was in the quality of links coming out of that PR 8 domain. That didn't work out so well. More importantly, according to popular reports, their traffic and revenue have gone down since September. I can understand revenue going down when the economy started to tank, but social media sites should see an increase in traffic as people scramble to network to find jobs and have extra time on their hands.

Digg has been running at a loss. Their business model is to be a hot company and attract venture capital. That's not a viable strategy for the future. They shouldn't be turning away users that used a script in the past but are now clean. They shouldn't be wasting precious time and resources on a witch hunt.

Before Digg went on its banning rampage, they had a little bug. If you had friended someone that had their account banned, you'd get an error when you clicked on the "remove friend" button in their interface. If one of your friends were banned, you couldn't remove them.

That wasn't such a big deal when bannings were few and far between, but with the recent spate of bannings Digg had created a bit of a problem. There is a hard limit of 1,000 friends for a user on Digg. So if 100 of your friends had been banned, you were effectively left with only 900 slots.

A few days ago I noticed that Digg had finally fixed that problem. I don't know when it happened, but at some point they implemented a kludge that allows you to delete friends that have been banned.

The Good News

As the saying goes, I told you all that so I could tell you this. By fixing that bug, they've introduced a new bug which most power users will find is a real feature. If you were a banned power user, one of the most stinging aspects of the ban is the loss of all your friend data. You'd spent months building up a nice friend network, and now all that data was gone. But is it?

Try this page: Oliver Taco's Profile. Yep, it's the oops page as expected. Now try the same page but via the Digg API. Again, as expected you get a "No such user" error return. Now, try this: Oliver Taco's Friend List.

The data is still in the database. They couldn't delete the linkages because that would obviously break something else that allows the banned users to be removed as friends. So the upshot it that even if your account is banned, you can recover your friend list. Just replace the user name and change the value of "offset" to 100, 200, 300, etc and you'll get pages of data 100 records at a time. If you want a list of your fans, just change the "friends" to "fans". BTW, that's an XML file that you can download into Excel if you want to see a pretty spreasheet.

Of course, if you were using a tool like the PMS Social Suite none of that would be a concern because you'd be concentrating on building real relationships outside of social networks and wouldn't be a victim of the whims of Digg.

We've talked about finding profiles on Digg that have Toolbar PageRank to pass. It's one of the criteria for finding an Interesting Digger. But how many Digg profiles are out there that have positive Toolbar Page Rank?

The answer is quite a few, even after you get past the Top 1000 Diggers:

This is based on an analysis of around 100K Digg profiles. Here are some key take aways from this analysis:

• 4.3% of Digg Profiles Have Rank - That's a pretty significant number when you factor in how very few users are really active. It's been my experience that with a few months of active digging and attracting strong profiles to make you a mutual friend you can build a profile with positive link juice. Guess what? You can add links in your profile directly to the URL of your choice, and they're do follow. Consider that a bonus in additional to everything else you get from Digg.
• You Don't Have to be in the Top to Get Value - The Top 1000 are only about 25% of the profiles with positive link juice to spend. There are a lot of strong profiles that never get a submission to go popular. You can fly under the radar on Digg and still get a lot of benefit.
• Having Positive Page Rank Will Get You More Friends - It's a self feeding cycle. As your profile becomes more powerful, more people want to be your friend, making your profile even more powerful.

What level of activity does it take to get a Digg profile with positive page rank? Check out these stats:

As you can see, the average amount of activity for a user with positive pagerank is pretty low. 4,298 Diggs is only 200 Diggs per day for 21 days. 10 comments/day for 31 days will get you into the average number of comments. 5 submissions a day during that first month will get you into the average number of submissions. The numbers of friends, mutuals, and fans is not that high. That's not to say that if you do just those things you'll get a Digg profile with positive pagerank -- you still have to garner the appropriate internal links on the site into your profile. In other words, you've got to get the right friends in order to build up the profile. But it clearly does not take an extraordinary amount of activity to make it happen.

It's even more interesting to look at the numbers it takes to reach the various levels of pagerank. There is actually a trail off in the amount of activity between 6 and 5, except for the number of fans. Which makes sense -- fans are a one way link into your profile, so having more of them will bring more internal juice.

Take a close look at the PR 1 column. It really does not take a lot of activity or numbers of friends/mutuals/fans in order to get to that first level. You could easily build a user with those characteristics within a month.

Remember when we suggested that you Cross Pollinate Your Social Media Profiles? This makes even more sense in light of these statistics. A few inbound links from other social networks can dramatically improve your link juice. If you look at some of the PR 6 profiles, they've got incoming links from blogs because people talk about them. Supporting your social media profiles with incoming link juice from your other web assets can be very helpful. As your profile becomes more "high profile," you'll add friends and juice.

Now, if only there was a way to buy a book and some software that would show you exactly how to build a powerful Digg profile and make the process easy. Oh wait, there is a book on how to Dominate Digg! And it includes free software!

I can't tell you how many times I've seen messages like this on the profile page of a Digg user:

Add me as your friend. I'll digg your shouts if you digg mine. I'm an active digger and I'm always looking for people to reciprocate shares/shouts. Active diggers only please.

There's only one small problem with this. Votes from shouts are mostly useless.

Votes from your friends are heavily discounted. Votes from shouts are discounted even more. This was probably a result of Digg trying to crack down on gaming of the system. If your strategy is to Digg your friends shouts heavily and then shout your stories, you won't have a lot of success. Take a look at MakiMaki's profile:

Add me as a friend if you wanna. I never shout stories. Not even once. So read and digg only what you like.

MakiMaki understands how the system works. He doesn't shout -- he expects his friends to look at his submissions and vote from that. You'd do well to follow his lead.

But Shouts Get My Story Seen!

The biggest argument in favor of shouts is that even though the votes are discounted, they at least will get your story noticed by enough people to give it a critical mass to get it to the next level. The converse is that if you've got 50 people that you can count on to Digg your story from a shout, you're only getting the benefit of about 5 votes. Wouldn't it be better to get half of them to allow you to send them an AIM or an email asking for a vote? Then you'd get the full strength of their vote and you'd be well on your way to popularity.

The better argument in favor of shouts is that you don't care about making the front page. If you can get 50 votes on a story from a shout, that's 50 incoming internal links for the search engines to see and you've accomplished your goals. That's completely valid, but wouldn't it be better to spend your time building your relationships outside of the purview of Digg and getting full strength from your votes?

Build Relationships, Not Friend Lists

Hopefully the recent spate of bannings on Digg has taught social marketers the valuable lesson that it's much more important to build up a set of relationships rather than a friend list owned by the social network. If you were a banned digger and you didn't maintain an offline database of your friendships and how to contact them, you were pretty much out of luck when the ban came down. On the other hand, if you were investing in relationships, building up another powerful account is only a new IP address away.

Now, if only there was a way to find out the email addresses, twitter names, and AIM addresses of your friends list with just the push of a button. Hmmmm......stay tuned!

Being a prolific commenter is a key to social media success on any network, but especially on Digg. Aside from being able to expose your great prose to all humanity, there are many excellent reasons you should leave comments on as many stories as you can:

• Get Seen - Leaving comments gets your name out there. People start to recognize you. If they recognize you, they're more likely to Digg your submissions. It's human nature -- we tend to like to deal with people we already know.
• Get Friends - In addition to being seen, there are a certain number of people that will add you to their friends list if they appreciate your comments.
• Be a Participant - A high comment count will help to deflect charges that you're just a social media marketer and not giving to the community.

The Right Ways and Places to Comment

Make sure that your comments are relevant, insightful, and not likely to anger anyone. "Great Story" is not a comment and is likely to help you pick up a bury posse. Don't comment unless you know what you're talking about. It's just like going to a party -- don't be a blowhard, and don't be the guy handing out business cards to everyone he meets.

Leaving comments on any old post won't do. It doesn't do you any good if your comments aren't seen. The key is to be one of the first commenters on a story that makes it to the front page. Most people have left their settings to view comments in the default behavior, which is to order comments by oldest first. If you're one of the first to comment, your picture shows up right above the fold for the story which will be seen by thousands.

The best way to do that is to look for stories that:

• Are Submitted by a Top Digger - These are the people with the best chance of getting a story to the front page.
• Don't have more than just a few comments - And preferably don't have any comments. But if you can be one of the first three to comment, you're in good shape.
• Are on a story with enough votes - You want the stories you're commenting on to have enough votes already that they're likely to hit front page.
• Are on Diggable Content - After you've gotten some experience, you'll be able to easily spot stories that will make it to the front page. Concentrate on those stories.

Making it Easy

You could, of course, go wading through the Digg Top 100 list and check for submissions that don't have any comments yet. That's a lot of mouse clicks, and by the time you find a story it's likely that you won't be there in time to comment. Or you could use the Dashboard on the PMS Social Suite, which provides you with nice list of clickable links to stories that meet all these criteria. Watch this video for a quick tour of how easy it is to do this:

Just Do it Every Day

Just make a point of adding five good comments every day. Make it part of your daily routine. In time, you'll be a popular member that no one suspects of being out to dominate Digg!

You can now have a few quick peeks at the new capabilities of our PMS Social Suite! We've put up a few videos on YouTube that walk you through some of the really interesting points. For starters, here is a quick overview of the dashboard:

Hot Articles to Submit

There are a lot of reasons that you want to submit excellent content to social networks, other than just being a good unpaid worker for these sites:

• Build a Following - Submitting articles that are likely to hit the front page will bring you exposure to the community, resulting in more people seeking you out as a friend. It's a lot easier to have people find you than to find other people.
• Get Your Percentage Up - Having a higher "Made Popular" percentage will bring you more credibility, helping you even further in building your friends list on Digg.
• Hide Your Real Submissions - Yes, you're doing this because you want 1 out of 20 of your submissions to be for URLs that will actually make you some money. If you only submit your own stuff, you'll get labeled a spammer. But if only 5% of your submissions have this hidden motive, you'll fly right under the radar. Don't take this as advice to submit your own material. What you should really be doing is building up a large enough offline friend base that you can get other people to (seemingly) randomly submit your material. And, of course, you'll want to be able to submit things for your friends without appearing to only submit items with a financial motive.

We've made this much easier than it is to do by hand. We constantly track over 200 rss feeds with a history of making it to the front page of Digg. We present you with a list of articles randomly selected from these sources and verified to have not already been submitted to Digg. Just click the link and you'll go to the article page. If you've got the Digg This Firefox Plugin installed, just select the text from the article that you want to be in the summary and right click the menu item to Digg the article. Viola, you've made a submission that's has a chance to make it popular!

Interesting Diggers

One of the more useful features of the new dashboard is the Interesting Diggers section. We've got a crack team constantly delving through our data to find Diggers that would make good friends, but aren't necessarily the first people you would look at. In fact, you probably wouldn't find the few hundred interesting Diggers out there out of the hundred thousand or so active Diggers. What makes an Interesting Digger? We talked about them in our article on Stalking Small Game on Digg. Here's the sofware in action:

If you noticed that Digg posted a blog article announcing the retirement of Digg Spy, then you read this:

"One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won't be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very small subset of buries on the site actually appeared on Digg Spy due to the small window of activity that was actually visible through the feature and any "patterns" that people perceived by watching the buries have always been grossly inaccurate."

The fact that Daniel Burka felt the need to include that paragraph shows that he knew exactly how wrongheaded their thinking was.

Let me translate for you: Digg, which prides itself on being democratic and transparent, has decided to go from murky to completely dark. If Digg were really acting transparently, buries would be visible. You'd be able to see both "Who Dugg This?" and "Who Buried This?" in their interface. In the short term, it would be very easy for them to just add a /buries endpoint in their API. Their reasoning of "you could only see a few buries" just doesn't cut it. Now we're going from a just a little bit of visibility into absolutely nothing. For a company that thinks of itself as a Web 2.0 leader, they really don't get it.

It's Going to Break Some Software Out There

I suppose it doesn't bother Digg that they're going to invalidate the work of outside developers. Poisoning the ecosystem is never a good way to build a following. You wouldn't see Google do something like that. Perhaps culture clash was one of the reasons the acquisition deal didn't go through.

It will be interesting to see if the Digg Alerter still works after Diggspy is taken down. Hopefully it won't just lock up when it can't connect to the Diggspy to monitor buries. Long time users of the PMS Social Suite will notice that we had to remove bury monitoring from our tracking screens. There's just no way to know now.

A Toxic Environment

Digg has created a toxic environment by being secretive about buries. Digg's biggest problem isn't the script users, it's the Bury Brigade. Roving bands of high school children are terrorizing fine upstanding citizens on Digg by burying stories they disagree with. Having perfectly good stories get knocked out of consideration for the front page has probably done more to turn off potential power users than any other aspect of Digg. If Digg wants to grow its user base, they're going to have to make the environment more inviting. And that means getting a leash on some of their undesirables.

The flip side to this argument if that if Digg were transparent about buries then we'd all have more insight into the algorithm and thus they'd be a victim of more gaming. But this just doesn't cut it. Even if you have perfect numbers, you can't completely reverse engineer the underlying algorithm. There are just too many variables. Google's data is completely available for anyone -- you can go look at all the pages in their results and do your own analysis. Yet outside of Google, nobody knows what the real algorithm is despite literally hundreds of thousands of very bright people trying to figure it out. And they're free to tweak their algorithm every day if they wish. Reddit's algorithm is open source and it doesn't hurt them.

It has also been claimed that if buries were public there would be more disagreements among users. I guess that's because Digg believes that secrecy breeds trust. Of course, the real problem is that when people are able to hide behind complete anonominity and not take responsibility for their actions they're willing to do horrible things to each other. If Digg wants to make the bury brigade behave, then just make bury information available. The backstabbing would go away. How many people automatically assume that someone who made a less than positive comment about their submission buried it? If the information were open everyone would be a lot better behaved.

The underlying problem is that Digg gives buries way too much weight. Of course there's no way to know, but everyone I've ever talked to has the impression there is not a one-to-one value differential between diggs and buries. Digg could of course clear this up by making the data public, but it seems they think we should just trust them.

Fix the Spam Bans

You only have to look at the number of quality sites that have been banned from Digg as spam to see the problem. Digg's complete lack of any review or appeal process for banned sites is pathetic. Say what you will about Promote My Site, it's not a spam site. If it is, I'd like to know where our checks are from our advertisers! While many in the Digg Community may not agree with what we have to say here, we're not spammers. Most of the children on Digg don't understand that just because you don't like something doesn't make it spam. If the spam report data was public, then most of these issues would be cleared up. People would only be willing to mark the truly spammy sites as spam.

An easy fix for the spam problem would be to make the spam data completely open. When a site gets marked as spam, it would get a flag on articles that says "Users have reported this site as spam." Diggers could then go to a separate page and vote and comment on whether they really think the site is spam. That way you wouldn't have sites whose articles received several hundred diggs get marked as spam by a few brats and have quality content removed from the system.

Don't Sweat the Buries

Getting the to front page is great work if you can get it, but it shouldn't be the reason you're working with Digg if you're trying to promote commercial content. A front page on Digg can bring a ton of traffic, but it won't monetize very well. Diggers don't click ads and since living in your Mom's basement doesn't provide a lot of disposable income they don't tend to buy very much. Even if you're making money from ad impressions, it still probably isn't worth the time and effort it takes to get a front page.

Let's make a baseball analogy. It's much better to be a .500 hitter than racks up singles, doubles, and triples rather than a .050 hitter that hits home runs. The home runs just aren't enough to make up for all the strike outs, even if you're a home run leader.

If you can consistently get a story to 100 Diggs, then you can build a lot of search engine love. If your friend list that will consistently vote your stories are mostly PR 3/4 profiles, you've got a powerful SEO machine. The long term benefit from being able to dominate a keyword niche on Google will far outlast the flood of traffic from a Digg front page. The traffic you get from the search engines is far more valuable -- those are people that are looking for what you have and are ready to buy.

It's not a flashy strategy. It won't make you famous. But it will make you money. The last time I checked, not many stores accepted fame as payment.