Dirty Digg Trick – Leverage visits to a Popular Article onto Another
May 19, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: Traffic
For the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting a bit with the new Digg API. My goal is to create a smart Digg plugin that can be added to WordPress with a lot more customizable options than the usual Digg button plugins. The plugin is very close to a beta release here on the site, but today I wanted to talk about an idea for a dirty Digg trick.
The idea is pretty simple. If you get an article that starts to do well in Digg, your site starts to receive a lot of targeted traffic directly to the post. Most sites these days put up a Digg button, which encourages visitors to Digg your post directly from your site. You can see an example of a button in action on our post 10 Tools to Help You Select a Web 2.0 Color Palette.
To embed a Digg button, it just takes a small bit of Javascript code, something similar to:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
digg_url = ‘WEBSITE_URL’;
</script><script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
When a new post reaches the front page of Digg, it generally receives hundreds of additional Diggs over a very short period of time. These additional Diggs are mostly un-needed because your post already made the front page and unless it goes on to receive a lot more, recieves little to no benefit from the additional love. It is this fact, that allows our dirty trick to work. What you do is simply change the WEBSITE_URL on your Digg button, which is embedded in the popular post, to the URL of a new post submitted to Digg. This way, every person who visits your page is actually seeing the Digg button of a different post and not the one they’re looking at. So, every time the user clicks the embedded button they are showing support for your secondary article and not the one they just read.
In my quick experimentation I noticed that most people will blindly commit a digg to your new article, even if it’s not the one they were originally reading. It’s actually amazing. As a result, you can basically leverage one popular article into the promotion of a second popular article.
Even better, you could work with fellow bloggers and do a traffic exchange. A popular article on one site leverages a new article on the other. Once the new article becomes popular, you leverage that new traffic onto a third post on another blog and so on…
A dirty trick for sure but in a few test cases I’ve run on another site, it works exceptionally well. So, as long as you’ve figured out the basics of getting an article to the front page of Digg you can consistently leverage your traffic to get more articles promoted.
Almost evil enough to make John Chow proud >:)
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4 people have left comments
its really a evil trick but one must have an article which is in the front page of Digg for this trick to work which is not so frequent
What I would really like to know is how to get on the Digg front page?
I think it’s evil enough to make him proud
). Brilliant.
That is a pretty evil trick! I’ve been looking at digg, but I’m not sure it fits well with my site. Since I mostly write about my life right now, it doesn’t make sense to clutter up my page with things that people won’t use.
Maybe some day, I’ll take over the world. For today, I’m content