Here’s a perfect example of how to shoot yourself in the foot on Digg (link)
What’s going to get more attention, clicks, or votes …
“How to avoid laptop loss at the airport”
or
“US Airports Lose Over 10,000 Laptops Every Week”
If you’re wondering why your submissions flounder look at your titles are they more like #1 or #2? get the hint …
Unless of course you’re submitting stories from your competitors website, in which case go with #1 every time 
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{ 13 comments }
To be honest, I would have Dugg #1, but would have just seen the second headline as a bog standard submission from a newspaper. If I’d written the item myself I would have come up with something different: Don’t be a high-flying laptop loser. Perhaps.
db
2 Headline tactics applied there.
1. Make it specific (so mention that fact 10,000 laptops are lost – not just that an undisclosed laptops get lost).
2. Appeal to people’s frustrations. People tend to dislike baggage handlers so shedding them in a bad light will appeal to their frustration.
3 tips to avoid the Airport Laptop Blues
#2 is a way to go
Case in point s to why the cred is low at Digg. Headline No. 2 is fudging the actual story.
@Russell: how is that fudging the story? It’s taking the first two sentences and re-arranging the words
yeah i can’t really see how it is fudging the story either…..
If we are in the Digg topic. Is it worth to get the digg traffic for a comercial website if the users that come to the site are such poor audience. I recently read this article on useit.com http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bounce-rates.html about bounce rate. Jakob Nielsen called digg – a “Low-value referrers”. So my question is it worth it?
depends what you want the traffic for
As the article states “People arriving through these sources are notoriously fickle and are probably not in your target audience. You should expect most of them to leave immediately, once they’ve satisfied their idle curiosity.”
This is just the way the digg traffic is. Click, see what it is about and go. Does digg generate links (beside digg itself), sales? Or is it only for news websites? Traffic for a sake of traffic, maybe it’s good when you’re seling your web
@Kasia: landing on the digg homepage puts your story in front of lots of other bloggers at all level on the food chain. If your story is interesting enough they write about it. The Digg traffic isn’t what you are after, it’s the exposure and the links that getting that exposure leads too.
@Michael
– yeah, you probably know 
You have a point. Thanks. BTW did you know that you rank #1 for “Digg seo”
Great post…it seems that there are more things “not to do” on Digg. Do you think Google will aquire them in the future?
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