Getting Buried in Digg, Not as Bad as it Sounds
November 30th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Social NetworksIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Without any intervention on my part my post on What’s one Digg Worth got submitted to Digg. I didn’t plan this story but it dropped in my lap so I’m running with it. It’s absolutely the goal when working your own stories for them to stay up as long as possible, the longer they’re up the more traffic and links they will drive. When you play on Digg you have to understand getting buried is part of the game, and sometimes it happens. However it’s not quite as bad as it sounds as you can see in the graph below.
This graph is pretty typical of what a “normal digg” looks like, slow steady growth over a few hours, followed by a change in vote velocity when you make the homepage. If you stay on the homepage it will stay steep until you get pushed to page two, three and so on. If you get buried the steep curve is small and the taper off starts sooner and that’s the part I’d like to look at.
Since my hosting package here is firmly separated from all of my other hosting by a nice thick layer of tin foil I can’t give you hourly stats, but I can tell you I was still getting “digg votes”, digg traffic, non digg traffic, and most importantly links even after I was buried.
So what’s the takeaway from all this
1) Try to get dugg and make it good so you can stay on the homepage you get the most mileage out of your story that way.
2) If you can’t get dugg, go for some hoax marketing that will get buried, but still get you a lot of attention. I have to admit I’m jealous I didn’t think of writing a story like “A Sony Playstation 3 Burned down my House”
3) Lather, rinse, repeat
Heading off any questions the cool digg graphs came from DuggTrends Graph Pages, and please don’t Digg this one the fan boys over there are probably ready to lynch me right about now …
Sphere It
November 30th, 2006 at 6:02 am
Hmmm… Are you sure those graphs aren’t just a Hoax? (JK)
I’ll bet this gets Dugg anyway. Someone is going to read the first half of the story and Digg it. You should have put that last line at the top. ;^) I wouldn’t be surprised if this is on the front page in the morning.
November 30th, 2006 at 6:53 am
I only been on your feed a couple of day but the quality of your posts are just right up there Graywolf! When will you be starting your own program on WMR? Reveal Reveal?
November 30th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Hoax Marketing?
Like what the democrats did to the republicans in the last election? Marketing non truths?
Digg is Google Bombing, period.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:22 am
Hoax marketing is a subset of viral marketing which was endorsed my Senor Cutts. Heck I even remember him linking to a site about werewolves, vampires, and unicorns or some such thing, and last time I checked they weren’t real either. Lastly hoax marketing is nothing new I’d like to think that Orson Wells War of the Worlds radio broadcast serves as a hallmark moment in hoax marketing.
November 30th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Example of hoax marketing from this morning that got a LOT of diggs and hit the frontpage: http://digg.com/tech_news/Get_me_out_of_this_job
November 30th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Well, this has hit the digg front page….
The irony is amazing. Nike, you did it again!
November 30th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Foiled by the BoneyB!
December 4th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Thanks for the tip … Rule number 2 for getting to the front page : no matter what your subject is, mention Ron Paul in your title, and you’ll get about 100 free diggs. The Ron Paul fanboys won’t read your article, so it could be about vacuum cleaners, but as long as the title is “How Ron Paul feels about Vacuum Cleaners” you’re golden.