If you’re using Digg as a linkbaiting tool, then you’re perceived as a villain. Everyone from Digg itself, to the community, to other self-proclaimed social media experts thinks you’re the bad guy. Even though good linkbait provides value to the community (because who doesn’t like remarkable content?), if they know you’re putting up the content in the hopes for links, then they’re automatically on defense. Because of this, Digg has become very hard for marketers over the last year. It’s hard, but not impossible, and here are 10 steps that will improve your chances for success.

1. Submit with a good account. You don’t have to use a power account, but you should definitely submit using an account with a positive track record for getting content to the homepage, actively participating, and not always trying to submit hooky linkbait from shady domains. The community likes digging stories from other users that are known and trusted.
2. Check your commercial domain at the door. Sorry payday-loan-company.com, you have no chance of making the Digg homepage with a domain like that. You’re better off setting up a new domain or forgetting Digg altogether. The community doesn’t like promoting stories from commercial domains. Set up a new domain if you have to because links from that are better than no links at all.
3. Write a good title and description . I can’t stress this one enough. Even though it’s already been said time and time again, this is one of a few suggestions I just can’t leave off this list. Put extra time and energy into this one and make sure your title and description are rock solid before you submit.
4. KISS your content. Keep it simple — you have a better chance of gaining extra diggs if people can browse over and grab the meaning in mere seconds. These people are reading through a lot of other stories and they will appreciate you formatting and writing your content in a way that is easy for them to enjoy.
5. Randomize your diggs. Emailing, IM’ing, tweeting, and even calling your friends is a great way to get extra diggs, but mix it up. Completely randomize who you’re asking to digg your stories. Any kind of pattern has the potential to set off the Digg algorithms and that’s not a good thing.
6. Use natural timing. This goes hand-in-hand with the above tip. When you’re asking all your friends for diggs, make sure you spread it out. If you don’t think Digg will notice when you get 50 diggs in the first hour and only 5 in the second hour then you’re crazy. Again, the algorithm will catch this.
7. Use Digg buttons wisely. You know those big Digg buttons that you sometimes see at the top of blog posts? Those can be a great way to collect a few extra diggs from your readers. At the same time, you shouldn’t be using these on all your posts. Your readers will become blind to them, and the ones that don’t get a lot of diggs give off the impression that your site is a ghost town. I love to use the buttons, but I will only put them on pages I am actively promoting on Digg. Once my story hits the homepage I take them off.
8. Comments are great. Ask your friends to seed your submissions with good comments, but make sure they are really thoughtful and not overly positive. I’ve seen a fair share of stories get buried simply because of negative comments. Sometimes when users will leave one the rest of the community blindly follows them.
9. Wear camouflage. If your story looks, smells, feels, or tastes like linkbait then you’re fighting an uphill battle. Take a few extra steps to hide your true intentions: getting links. This is an area where common sense can play a huge role. You can be honest with yourself and judge your own content or ask a friend’s opinion. Good linkbait doesn’t look like linkbait at all.
10. Karma: it’s something that you always want on your side. Simple things like always making sure that you’re digging friends’ stories in return can go a long way. Use Digg too; don’t just jump on for five minutes once a week right before you submit. Spend some time reading through, digging stories you like, and understanding the way it works.

Bonus: Don’t put all your eggs in the Digg basket. Other social news sites can provide tremendous results. If your linkbait fails on Digg, then move on and put in a solid effort on sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon. These sites have huge audiences and shouldn’t be ignored. Some of my most successful linkbait campaigns have failed on Digg, yet ended up with over 2000 solid links.

If you’ve been involved with social media at all lately, you’ve realized that getting your linkbait on Digg has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, especially if you’re trying from a commercial domain. This has left many social media marketers scrambling for ways to please their clients or find new ways to attract links virally for their own sites. While Digg is the big daddy of the social news sites and getting a frontpage Digg is certainly worth its weight in gold, by no means is it the end-all. You can still attract just as many links leveraging other popular sites like Reddit and Delicious.

The key is to step back and refocus on your content strategy. Just about all the linkbait articles from marketers that I’ve seen lately are the hooky, one-off type of stuff. It sticks out like a sore thumb. You know, things like ‘Top 10 Reasons Your Cat is like HTML’. This kind of content works great if you can hit the Digg homepage, but otherwise it’s just not good enough content to collect any significant amount of links.

Generally people don’t want to bookmark or link to this type of article because it provides no real value to them. It can make for a fun read, but otherwise it’s useless. With Digg, it was simply a numbers game — get in front of enough people and regardless of the quality of content, it will get links. For social media sites other than Digg, this isn’t the case. Your content needs to be 10x better because you’re not reaching quite as broad an audience. The numbers game still applies here. However, this time you’re reaching less people so you need to step up your game and give them a better reason to link to you.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Great content alone is, in most cases, still not good enough to go popular on these social sites. You still need to have a solid promotion strategy, but that’s not the focus of this article. The focus on this article is stepping up your content game so you still build tons of links through social media marketing. The fun, hooky type of content needs to go. Instead, you should be focusing on creating valuable resources that will attract links and bookmarks and spread virally on its own from there. People should want to link to you because there is value for them. They want to give their readers links to resources that provide value to them too.

The keyword here is ‘resource’. Focus your energy on building out a great resource that genuinely helps people, and in turn it will help you by attracting links. People don’t want to waste their time reading an article about their cat and HTML. They won’t bookmark that, either. But give them a resource that helps them and not only will they read it, they’ll probably bookmark it too so they can refer to it at a later date.

I know this is all linkbaiting strategy 101. But somewhere along the way it seems like we’ve forgotten what really works. Maybe it’s because we got spoiled with easy Digg homepagers and that made us lazy. The bottom line is that you need to step back and focus on the fundamentals if you really want to have successful linkbait campaigns.

Last year I wrote a post called 5 Reasons To Put Viral Content On Mini-Sites, providing reasons why you might opt to use a mini-site rather than keeping all the content on your main domain. One of the reasons was because content might not spread due to your domain.

Even though mini-sites doesn’t always make sense from an SEO standpoint, it’s now getting to the point where they’re a must if you want to keep linkbaiting with your commercial domains. You see, commercial domains just won’t work on Digg anymore. Sure, you can fire off a successful linkbait piece or even two if you’re lucky, but try any more than that and you’ll see what happens. Your domain will be banned from any further submissions faster than you can say “Reddit.” Banning aside, a commercial domain itself throws up a red flag to social media users and will make it that much harder to get something popular.

Enter the mini-site. Setting up a mini-site is one great alternative for companies who suffer from the commercial domain plague. It will give you a new place to produce content in a non-commercial manner, which means you can now get back to your regularly scheduled linkbaiting. Just one problem, right? Why would you care about getting links to some other domain?

There are a number of different strategies you can implement here. The 301 redirect seems to be the most popular and most effective, especially if you’re looking to carry link juice. But it’s also a strategy that needs to be pulled off with finesse. For a while people were just using the 301 to mask the URL appearance on Digg and to get around a banned domain. Digg users are getting savvy, though, and seem to be picking up on that trick. A better approach is to set up 301 redirects to all the links a few weeks after the campaign is over.

I don’t want to get involved in the ethics of using 301s here. I’ll leave that up to your own judgement. The point is that you now have another reason to consider setting up that mini-site.

Cameron Olthuis is the Founder and CEO of Factive Media. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Getting your linkbait post, widget, or other content featured on the front page of Digg is one thing—a good thing, as this can drive a spike in traffic. Getting a whole bunch of links to that content, however, is entirely another matter. After all, the purpose of linkbait should be to attract links, not just short-term traffic. However, it seems that a lot of people measure success solely based on whether or not content becomes popular and the total number of Diggs it ends up with.

Contrary to popular belief, not every article that goes popular on social news sites gets good link volume. I’ve had campaigns that don’t even make the homepage for some reason or another, yet they gain a huge amount of links. I’ve also had campaigns that are hugely popular on Digg but didn’t collect many links at all.

This is why social media marketing and linkbait is hard to game and get good results. People can spam their crappy content to the homepage of Digg all they want, but that doesn’t mean it will generate links and work in the long run. Authority sites don’t link to stories just because they hit Digg’s home page. They link to them when they are solid resources and/or provide a real value to their readers. These hooky spam articles don’t. Therefore, they don’t collect good links. Sure, they get that golden link from Digg, but over time that’s not a very valuable link.

The point I’m trying to get across is that producing exceptional content is still the one and only way to go. And it really has to be exceptional, so be honest with yourself. It is also has to be presented in the proper way (but that’s a whole other article in itself). This can be very hard to do for a lot of sites. There are times where you really have to use that ace up your sleeve. But regardless, if you really want the long-term benefits of linkbait, excellent content is a must.

Social news sites are really nothing but a platform where you can expose content to very large audiences. It’s your hope that a small fraction of this audience will see your article as a valuable resource and link to it. If your article is spammy, people won’t link to it no matter how many times you put a “made by a Mac” button on the sidebar. Getting on the Digg homepage doesn’t impress me, but getting a thousand links to your incredible resource article does.

Cameron Olthuis is the Founder and CEO of Factive Media. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

The audience that makes up the majority of Digg users tends to be very fickle. The slightest whiff of linkbait and they will bury your story into the depths of hell, where it will never see the light of day again. They hate SEO and it’s no secret. This is the reason why it’s so important to make sure that you approach social media sites carefully and thoughtfully.

By now you’ve probably heard most of the things to avoid with your linkbait campaigns. Yet nothing from your site ever makes the front page of Digg, no matter how good the content is, or what power user submitted it. Maybe it’s because your domain name (or sub-domain) reeks of spam.

Yes, it’s true: stories do get buried all the time because of the domain name alone. If you’re trying linkbait campaigns on paydays-loans-blog.com, just stop now. Save yourself the headache and wasted efforts and get yourself a domain name that doesn’t stink so bad. This goes for sub-domains too. These show up on your submissions and should be treated equally with regular domain names. I’m not saying you can’t use sub-domains for linkbait—just make sure they don’t trigger any red spam flags.

A good domain name goes a long way on Digg and other social news sites. Like many other factors, it can make or break a good piece of content. Use common sense when launching your linkbait campaigns and be brutally honest with yourself. If you think there’s even the slightest possibility your domain looks spammy, then don’t use it. Register a new domain name and you can always 301 redirect it to your main site a month or two down the road.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

We all know what the KISS acronym stands for: keep it simple, stupid. In this article I want to talk about how this applies to creating content for social media marketing, namely linkbait.

You see, users from social news sites have very short attention spans while browsing these sites. They’re generally there to read multiple news stories and articles, and they don’t want to spend an enormous amount of time on any one story. Thus, it’s important to keep content in a simple format so these users can digest the information as quickly and easily as possible.

Formatting linkbait in the proper way is one of the key ingredients of an overall successful campaign. You can have a great article that would otherwise provide an excellent resource, but if it reads like a novel you won’t be able to keep the attention of many of these readers long enough for them to finish it, let alone link back to it. Here are some useful tips for formatting your linkbait content.

Use paragraph headers. When possible, use headers for new paragraphs or topical changes (for example, this paragraph starts with a header). This allows people to easily scan the page for the information most useful to them, and most of the time readers can actually get the meat from the article by only reading the headings, if they choose.

Leverage lists. There’s a reason that top 10 lists work really well on social news sites. Even though some people have been predicting their demise for years, it’s a psychological thing that will never go away. People skim content online like never before. Lists make it easy for them to skim that content.

Say it in pictures. Pictures really do say a thousand words. When possible, use pictures in lieu of lengthy paragraphs. Pictures work very well on social news sites and I often see pictures go popular on their own.

Now, of course these tips don’t work in every situation. There is no one cookie-cutter approach to social media marketing, and all situations are different. There are times when in-depth articles can actually work better then simplifying information. The more time you spend on social news sites, the better you’ll understand when and how to format each linkbait article. However, you can usually never go wrong with keeping it simple…stupid.

Cameron Olthuis is the Founder and CEO of Factive Media and writes regularly on social media issues for a number of respected publications. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

One very important factor in executing successful linkbaiting campaigns is to have power accounts on the various social news sites. Having a power account increases the chances of hitting the popular pages for the content you submit. Building up a power account takes a lot of time and one of the more difficult aspects of it is continually submitting content that the community will find valuable.

Enter Social Media for FireFox, a new browser extension that helps you easily find quality stories to submit. It saves you time by showing in your browser window if a story has already been submitted to Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. So as you’re out there looking for content you won’t be wasting valuable time trying to submit stories that have already been submitted. You will only be submitting fresh content.

That’s not all though; there’s one other super useful feature on this extension. When browsing Digg, Delicious, Reddit, or StumbleUpon you will see icons next to each submission. The little icons will actually show you if you that story has been submitted to the other social news sites as well. For example, you can visit the Reddit homepage and quickly scan all stories to see if they’ve been submitted to other social news sites. If they haven’t then you can be the first, because often what becomes popular on one social news site has a great chance of becoming popular on another. This isn’t always the case—each community has its own unique audience and they don’t always enjoy the same content. But it never hurts to try, and this tool makes it easy and painless.

If you’re having trouble finding good content to submit to social news sites then you should definitely check out this Firefox extension. Even if you already are a power user this will help you save time and easily find more good content to submit.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

StumbleUpon is a hot social discovery site that continues to rapidly increase in popularity. With the increase in popularity comes an increase in the potential traffic that it can drive to your sites. StumbleUpon has always been great at driving traffic and links, but lately I’ve started to notice that it is one of the leading social sites, often times sending more traffic than even Digg.

Most of the basic social media marketing tactics apply to StumbleUpon. It’s important to be an active user in the community who provides value and discovers great sites. It also helps to have a lot of mutual friends and people that will see your stumbles. However, there are some lesser-known tactics that can also help your stumbles become popular.

Pick the right topic. When you discover a site and submit it to StumbleUpon it asks you to pick a topic that you’d like to submit it under. It’s important that you pick the right topic for submission as this can literally make or break your stumble. If you submit to the wrong topic then people who stumble across that page will be less likely to give the page a thumbs up, as it might not fit the kind of content they’re looking for. By submitting to the right topics you will increase the number of relevant eyeballs that see the page and this increases the likelihood that they will give it a thumbs up. For example, if you’re submitting a site about surfing then submit to the surfing topic and not the general sports topic.

Use relevant tags. Just as picking the right topic for submission is important it’s also important that you assign the proper tags to your stumbles. Not only does this increase relevant stumbles but users can also search either on StumbleUpon’s site or using its StumbleUpon toolbar. It’s more likely they’ll discover your site if you use proper tags that accurately describe the page.

Get a little help from your friends. StumbleUpon offers a feature where you can send your stumbles directly to your friends. They will see a little red number next to the “stumble” button on their toolbar. This lets them know that someone has sent them a stumble and the next time they hit the button they will see that page. You can even send them a little message and they can reply back. This is a feature that you have to be careful not to abuse, and it’s very tempting to do so. Only send recommended pages to friends when you’re reasonably sure they’ll like the page. If you send too many it will annoy your friends and you’ll so no longer be friends. Trust me, I know. I’ve had a few people abuse this feature with me and after awhile I just deleted them as a friend.

Leverage groups and forums. StumbleUpon has groups for just about every topic you can think of and you can join up to 63 groups. Within some of these groups you have the ability to post relevant links for others in the group to see and discover. This feature is not available for all groups and can depend on the settings that the moderator sets for that specific group. The forums within the groups usually allow anyone to post links. Don’t spam them, though, or you can be deleted from the group by the group owner or moderator.

Create your own StumbleUpon blog. Did you know that can post HTML and images on your StumbleUpon blog? You can, and these help make your stumbles stand out to people that are browsing or stumble upon your profile. Not only can this increase your stumbles on certain pages but it can also help increase your friend count as others often friend people based on favorable impression from blogs.

Sometimes the little things can make all the difference for whether or not the pages you submit go popular. By taking a couple extra minutes to make sure you submit pages properly it will give you that extra edge and help you get more traffic and links to your site. Just remember, the content still has to be good and interesting to the StumbleUpon community.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

MySpace is a great social media site that marketers can leverage in a number of different ways. One of these is building up a large audience for your profile, which can then be used to drive traffic to your site, interact with consumers, create mind share, and even empower people to brand your company for you.

The problem is that most people don’t know how to build a large audience. And unless you’re a well-known, popular brand, chances are that if you build it they won’t come. Here are some things that you can do to build a large relevant audience on MySpace:

Gather in groups. MySpace has groups for pretty much every topic under the sun. Find the groups that are relevant to your business and start befriending the people who are members of these groups. It is also a good idea to establish a group of your own based on your brand or topic of interest.

Participate in forums. Many people are not even aware that MySpace has forums on their site. Well they do, and many of the sections are very popular. A good way to find people that have similar interests is to drill down into discussions based around relevant topics.

Find like-minded users. You can search for people on MySpace based on interests that people have listed in their profiles. What better way to find people that would be interested in your brand then finding them based on interests?

Seek out friends of friends. Usually people are friends because they have interests in common. Searching through friends of friends is a great place to find people who have a good chance of being interested in you, too. Not all friends of friends will be into what you’re doing, but there’s a good chance lots of them will be.

Don’t overlook friends of competitors. Just because a user has friended one your competitors does not necessarily mean they are loyal to that brand. Often times they have just friended them based on interests and not because they are evangelists for that brand. Besides, people can like more than one company in each space.

Promote your MySpace profile elsewhere. Link to your MySpace profile from your website. There’s a good chance that many of the people visiting your regular site also use social networking sites like MySpace. They may not even know that you have a profile. Let them know and they just might add you as a friend.

Optimize your profile for search. Having your MySpace profile rank well for your brand name is not only a good reputation management strategy but also a good way to increase your audience. Avid users of social networking sites like MySpace would often rather visit your MySpace profile then your regular site. So when they search out your brand make sure they have that option.

There are many ways to find potential friends for your company’s MySpace page. These tactics aren’t limited to MySpace—many other social networks work in a very similar way.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

The big news in social media last week was when Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Platform, which opens their API to allow third parties to build applications within Facebook.

This means that companies now have instant access to Facebook’s twenty-four million members. And, even better, applications developed for the Facebook Platform can serve their own ads or conduct transactions with consumers as long as they don’t interfere with the ads currently being served on Facebook.

This is great news for marketers that are trying to make their products useful in the social media space. There is however the risk that many marketers will fail in their attempts, as there is no room for push marketing in this new environment.

Build something useful. The bottom line is that the only applications that will be successful are the ones that are useful or provide value to Facebook users. If an application doesn’t provide value then no one is going to use it, and if no one uses it, it won’t spread.

Everything is viral. In just the few days that the Facebook Platform has been open we can already see the enormous potential for applications going viral. The most popular application has been the one offered by iLike which has gone from 1,000 users on Friday morning to over 180,000 by Saturday night and over 300,000 by Sunday morning. iLike’s infrastructure can’t even keep up with the demand and has led to them having to search for more servers.

So what makes an application go viral? It is essentially a snowball effect. Because your friends can see what applications you add within their news feeds, anytime someone adds an application it will be exposed to their entire friend base. So by adding an application you are essentially endorsing it and your friends are more likely to check it out. The more popular applications also have the advantage of showing up at the top of the list on the applications page thus exposing it to even more people.

Build apps that make sense. The most important thing is to build applications that make sense on a social network. This means that the applications should be social. People are on there because they want to socialize and either make new connections or strengthen existing ones. The applications that will be the big winners are the ones that will facilitate this. Not many people will be interested in applications that they can only use by themselves.

Let your existing users know. Although I said that there is no room for push marketing I do see one slight opportunity. That is to let your users know about your applications using your existing property. This can bring awareness where there might otherwise not be any. Announce it on your blog, put a link on your site, or include in it your next email newsletter. Whatever channel you use to communicate with your existing user base is what you should use to let them know about your new app on Facebook.

Communicate and help. There are a number of ways that communication can help your application succeed. The first is to provide support. If users are complaining that your application is broken or something is working incorrectly for them, either fix the problem or help them understand how to make it work. Second, ask for their feedback and ideas to improve your application. There’s a good chance that they can think of many ways to make your application more useful that you may not otherwise think of. Be open to communication and take advantage of the help and feedback from the community.

Because the Facebook Platform is so new we are only able to scratch the surface at this point of what works and what doesn’t. There are sure to be many interesting and innovative ways to market on Facebook in the future. Can you think of any? If so, please leave a comment.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.