How Not To Be Buried On Digg

Six or so months ago, it used be easier to get on the homepage of Digg. Lately, sites have been having problems. Most of these troubled sites are usually about online marketing or other business-related topics. It seems that users are burying these stories for no apparent reason. A buried story dies with no chance of reaching the home page and gaining a lot of traffic and attention.

Based on monitoring and reading comments that users leave on Digg, here are some of the reasons these users are burying stories:

• Domain: Many Digg users don’t like marketing or SEO sites. If you have a domain name using SEO or marketing keywords in it, they may judge you – and bury you– based upon your domain name.
   
• Title & Description: You would think that many users click through, read a story and then vote if they like it. The reality is that many users just vote based on the title and description alone. If they think something is too corporate or spammy based on those, that can cause a bury.
   
• Comments: Diggers love to comment about stories on Digg. In many cases, others read the comments rather than the story itself. So, if the first comment is bad, others may jump on the bandwagon and also start assuming that the story was bad.

At the moment there is no solution around these problems, but here are two ways you can improve your odds of not getting buried:

1. Create A Funny Moment: Many Digg users are in their early 20s and enjoy humor. Even if you are submitting a serious story to Digg, if you use a humorous title and description, you can improve your odds. If you analyze some of the most popular stories on Digg, many of them used funny headlines and descriptions. It’s harder to bury something that makes you laugh.
    
2. Relate To Your Audience: As said, Diggers are young, independent and often not traditionalist. So some stories won’t play well. For example, if you pitch a story on how high paying jobs only come to those with college degrees, many on Digg without degrees (and perhaps no intention of getting one) might dislike it. Remember, the best way to understand how to relate is to know the audience by actually using Digg itself. You’ll quickly learn what they like and dislike.

Just like any other form of marketing, succeeding on Digg all about targeting your audience. If you can appeal to the Digg audience, you can still succeed even if you run a marketing or business-oriented website.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of 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.