So, you want to be DUGG? What makes a good candidate? Who actually does the Digging (ha! I made a funny!). I’ve been DUGG 3 times in the last month, only once is my own doing. But, in that time, I’ve noticed something about DIGG, Slashdot and the incoming links that follow your posts. Ultimately, all of this relates to traffic to your website.
A true DIGG/DUGG
Ultimately, I’ve only been DUGG once. I classify a DUGG as a decent amount of traffic or unique visitors. I get a good amount of hits, but its mostly from people just browsing around the site, not unique visitors. Getting 6,000 unique visitors in one day is being moderately (if that) DUGG.
Tagging
Some people, when they first start out, don’t tag their posts. I’ll admit, I was like this for the first year that I posted to my blog. In that time, though, all I was doing was just posting information on the Internet. I was building traffic. I didn’t even look at my stats or really see what was being linked to or what was popular. If I would have, I would have found out very quickly that the CMS Mambo (Now Joomla) was VERY popular. If I would have continued to hack Mambo up, I could have built traffic pretty fast.
- Note: If you’re just starting out blogging, you’ll need to build up a hefty amount of content before really getting into anything. The more content on your website, the longer people stay, the more likely they’ll click on something that will make you money. Don’t just create 3 posts and start an Adsense account - it doesn’t work that way. You can do it, but it really doesn’t work very well at all.
Now, since this is about tagging, let me go over something. If you don’t tag, you don’t get keywords thrown out to websites looking for them. Search engines no longer pay (much) attention to the Meta-Keywords block at the top of your HTML HEAD tag. Blog Tags are the single best way to get incoming traffic fast. The reason I say this is because I’ve had a post DUGG and attached to a CMS related website within hours of posting it. This happened because of the Tags I chose:
- blog, browser, cms, content management, language, resolution, review, software, Stats, template
Out of all of those Tags, “CMS” was picked up on CMS Planet. Now, Planet CMS doesn’t get my RPC Pings letting them know what the story title is, what the Tags are, etc. They subscribe to one of the 69 Ping Services I use (I’ll post something about Ping Services pretty soon) and look specifically for the “CMS” tag used in any post they see. So, if I wanted to be an idiot, I could boost my rank by using the CMS tag in every post knowing that they’d pick up the CMS tag every chance they got since its automated… Now, as nice as it is to be linked to by them, my blog has a better Technorati placement than they do, even though they get more traffic… Oddly enough, this post will help their status on Technorati because I’ll be linking to them. All of this over one Tag.
As a funny note, I can include the Tag “Lost” right now and it would boost traffic to my blog because its the number 5 tag seen on Technorati. I would have figured it would calculate the title of the blog in, but I’m not in the list (or I didn’t dig deep enough). Just for grins, I think I’ll tag “Lost” in and see what happens. I went ahead and tagged “CMS” back in because I wanted to show that by adding the right keyword, I could get a link in - it will show up in my comments and on Technorati by tomorrow.
If you’re just starting out on Blogging, start tagging with your first Post. By the time you’ve built up a decent amount of posts, you’ll be able to Tag without really thinking about it. Also, as soon as you create your blog, create a Technorati account and add configure your blog on Technorati to the best of your ability. This will include keywords, javascript to add to your site, etc. Update this information about once a month to prevent it from getting stale. The keywords you picked last month may not be fitting this month.
DIGG, Slashdot & Fark
DIGG, Slashdot & Fark are unique monsters. They can help or hurt you. In moderation, they can be a great thing to boost traffic. People try to post their blog a heck of a lot on DIGG to try to boost traffic on a newer blog - this is a bad thing™
Prematurely posting your blog to DIGG can cause all kinds of problems for you. Later on, if you have valid content, it can cause users to ignore your posts and make it harder to attract traffic. In the beginning, if they see trash, they will assume trash later. This has been happening a lot more since Adsense has been growing like no tomorrow. Everyone wants a quick buck by trying to get quick traffic. Here lately, it seems that a lot of sites want to make a quick buck by posting a 2 to 3 paragraphs of a few topics, every day and posting that to DIGG. When that happens, they normally get buried after the first few people click on it. What I really like seeing is something related to Adsense and how to make money. If you go to the page (in a round about way as to not increase their DIGG ranks), you’ll find that sometimes they’ll post a paragraph about what they’re going to do. You reading it has made them money, or so they think.
DIGG can hurt you even more by increasing traffic beyond your websites ability. This is referred to as the DIGG effect, Slashdot Effect, Fark Effect, etc… Go ahead and click the link. You’ll see a nice pretty graph of how bad traffic can spike in just a few seconds. God bless your little web server if this happens. Companies have been known to try to test their web servers capabilities by this effect and its happened accidentally as well [Sun]. There are even ways to prevent or help the load of the Effect.
Now, in Moderation, DIGG, Slashdot, etc. can boost your traffic ratings, boost your income (I can’t believe I wrote that, in fact, I’ve “told” Google to ignore it for Adsense…) and boost the popularity of your blog or website.
On top of this, it’s become a right of passage for Bloggers, Tinkerers and Website owners to be DUGG, Slashdotted, etc. There are even sites to explain how to get Slashdotted and how to survive a Slashdotting. Sorry if I talk about Slashdotting instead of being DUGG - I’ve been reading Slashdot or about 5 years.
Popularity
Blogging has been popular for awhile now and its just getting even more popular. There are companies that are attempting to boost their ranks with blogging, whether they do it anonymously or on their corporate website. Its helped as well. PR is PR, good or bad. If your name gets out to the puplic in anyway, they’ve heard of you. Its like the Iomega drives. A heck of a lot of people have heard of the Iomega drives because of PR, but can you remember why? Iomega has the Zip drive, the Clik! drives, etc. Can you remember the bad PR or just the happy memory of purple drives?
Now, the popularity slogan fits in here. My little’ol’blog is getting more and more popular, due to a few stories being posted on DIGG. On top of this, I update my Slashdot Signature every week to a new story to prevent it from being stale. (hmm…. never thought of that did ya?) My personal favorite signature is “The Microsoft 12 Step Program…” After posting this, I actually had to update the Post Slug (the URL address of the post) to make is shorter so I could fit the link into Slashdot’s small letter count of a signature block. Maybe after admitting this, I could rename this post to the Good, the Bad and Ugly of Blogging…
DUGG
I’ve mentioned that getting DUGG is a right of passage, I’ve also mentioned how you word your post and the information paragraph really can cause a lot or little traffic, depending on how well you do. Well, there is another thing that plays into this little algorithm: Time…
The time that your story is posted on DIGG has a major effect on how many visitors show up. Monday through Friday, during the US workday, you’ll get a little traffic, but not much. Posts that make it right in time for just before work (coffee time browsing while waking up at work) or after work, you’ll get many more hits. Many people like me will browse over the main page of DIGG then switch over to the Up and Coming stories. Usually, I won’t make it past the 3rd or 4th page before getting tired of it. So, when the masses are browsing over the site at the most popular times, your site needs to hit the Up and Coming pages. You need to get a decent amount of DIGGS before getting past page 5. I’ve gotten many of my hits between pages 1 through 5 and only 1 hit from page 22. Past that, you’re lost in a sea of links that no one reads or cares about unless they happen to randomly find you from searching.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any data about weekends. My last story that was DUGG happened at the end of work on the East Coast (4:25pm - my web server is setup to my local timezone). One of thse days I’ll get DUGG during the weekend but a Slashdot on the main page is pretty unlikely. If that happens, my web server is toast.
The Blog Secret to Success
There is a secret to getting DUGG and Slashdotted, and its VERY simple. Are you ready? Write meaningful content about something you like. Don’t write a post with 3 paragraphs hoping that will bring in all the traffic in the world, thus boosting your income with Adsense - ain’t gonna happen. Out of the stories I’ve had DUGG, 2 where 3 pages long in OpenOffice Writer (think MSFT Word) and 1 was 2 and a half pages. In all of the stories that I’ve been DUGG on, I’ve spent at least 2 days going over each one. In all honesty, I’ve worked on this one off and on all day.
Other than that, its up to you or your visitors (you’ll get less credit if its from you) to submit your site to DIGG. If the content and time are right, you’ll get a decent amount of traffic.
