Michael Gray

How to Guarantee Your Stories Will Fail on Digg

Posted on July 7th, 2008
by Michael Gray in Social Media

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 Responses to “How to Guarantee Your Stories Will Fail on Digg”

  1. User GravatarDavid Bradley Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 5:03 am

    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. User GravatarJason Green Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 5:16 am

    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. User Gravatarjosh Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 7:05 am

    3 tips to avoid the Airport Laptop Blues

  4. User GravatarVygantas Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 8:22 am

    #2 is a way to go :)

  5. User GravatarRussell Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    Case in point s to why the cred is low at Digg. Headline No. 2 is fudging the actual story.

  6. User GravatarMichael Gray Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    @Russell: how is that fudging the story? It’s taking the first two sentences and re-arranging the words

  7. User Gravatarjosh Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 12:42 am

    yeah i can’t really see how it is fudging the story either…..

  8. User GravatarKasia Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 5:47 am

    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?

  9. User Gravatarjosh Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 6:06 am

    depends what you want the traffic for :)

  10. User GravatarKasia Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 6:17 am

    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 :)

  11. User GravatarMichael Gray Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 7:01 am

    @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.

  12. User GravatarKasia Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 7:10 am

    @Michael
    You have a point. Thanks. BTW did you know that you rank #1 for “Digg seo” :) - yeah, you probably know ;)

  13. User GravatarNick Stamoulis Says:
    July 21st, 2008 at 10:07 am

    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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