Why Do People Submit to Digg - Reason #7

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Muhammad Saleem who runs the Mu Life (an excellent blog for anyone playing in the social bookmarking playground BTW) has nice post on 6 reasons why people submit to Digg. However like a lot of people he misses out on #7, which can have far more benefit in the long run.

In my younger days I played chess, while I was only a C class player one of the skills it taught me is “ply” or thinking moves ahead. You make you moves not only based on the moves your opponent will make next turn but what he/she will make 2, 3, 4 or five turns from now. So sure you can “work Digg” for your short term goals and make enough to buy value meal at McDonalds with the money you’ll make off of adsense. If you have a kick ass day you might even be able to supersize it. But if you’re really smart you don’t care about all that stuff, it’s irrelevant, you want the big kahuna, the one who lives at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View California, Google.

The real reason you want to submit to Digg is links, the more the better. Links from the scrapers, links from the clones, links from every duggdog, dogdot, smugmug, fakerug, and pollywug who will republish your links, you want the free pure unadulterated raw one way link love that can only come from a natural non SEO infested backlink. In fact you want it so bad you’re willing to give up your super scraper, markov chain powered, text scrambler and uniqueifier to do it, your willing to do it the white hat way and actually write good content.

Part II of this is that you want that user data. You want those people coming to your site, you want your url passing through the Google Toolbar, you want them visiting more than one page, you’re willing to actually learn what works in the offline print and advertising world and become the biggest attention whore in the universe to get to visit any spot on your site you think will keep them from hitting the back button. You’ll make up headlines like “Aliens hold Bar-B-Que in Trenton eat Turnpike Resident for Desert” just to get them to click on one more page. You know that if you do it often enough you attract the attention of the Google mother ship and her spiders will descend on your site, and with enough links and enough positive user data she will anoint you with trust. Getting trust in Google is like scoring a date with the Prom Queen, and that is why people submit to Digg.

2 Responses to “Why Do People Submit to Digg - Reason #7”

1. Dominic Says:
   January 15th, 2007 at 6:28 am

   I got to agree with you there.
   I recently did something to one of my whiter hat sites that got me some links from the wiki and a handful of other trustworthy sites.
   And all of a sudden it suddenly starts ranking for whatever I throw at it.
   Needless to say, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the site in question.

2. Hone Says:
   January 17th, 2007 at 12:11 am

   If I was trapped in Ground Hog day I’d rather be scoring a date with the prom queen.