A Comprehensive Guide To Going Viral on Digg (part 2)

For those of you that enjoyed our first article about the techniques that we use at Voltier Inc.  (www.voltier.com) while launching linkbait via digg.com for our clients, here is part 2.

Get Your Friends to Help you Digg
As mentioned by simmel_tree, we did in fact intend to mention the digg friend factor. There are two instances that need to be addressed when it comes to the impact of friends on digg.

Having a lot of friends on digg may increase your odds of gaining initial popularity through intra-digg organic means. Having a lot of friends means that you open yourself to the potential for having any of those friends come across your story before it becomes “popular.” Have enough friends and a good story could be dugg to the front page simply because it had a good deal of initial visibility in the submitters digg friend community.  

Using real life friends to help you get that initial push by asking them directly to vote for your story. (Warning: this method has questionable ethics and is something digg works hard to combat. Use this technique at your own risk of being banned.)  In our experience, the threshold for making it to digg’s front page is somewhere around 50 diggs within 24 hours. The problem is, digg has gotten pretty good at figuring out who is trying to game the system. Clearly having multiple accounts vote from the same IP would be easily caught. They also filter for most popular proxies, so that one is most likely out of the running, too. Although we don’t employ this technique, using AIM buddies or other Instant messaging buddies seems like the best way to generate multiple digg votes from unique IP’s. Who knows, you might even be able to leverage something like myspace. Make sure that you link to your hosted article on your home page and have them click the “digg this” button there. If you send them directly to your article’s digg page, the referrals might look a bit sketchy having 50 people from AIM vote for the same story in 20 minutes.

Digg Titles Revisited   
As mentioned in the first part of this article, being successful on digg requires a title that really catches someone’s interest. We strive for ‘to the point’ titles that present our article in the most interesting light possible. Here are some ways to add quality to your title:

•  Use unique adjectives
•  Stay away from trite or clichéd phrases
•  Give your title a sense of value; make your reader feel as though they are going to miss out if they don’t click
•  Ask an interesting question
•  Use authority words like “Best, Most, Ultimate, Greatest, etc.”
•  If your article is a picture say so in the title (pic; w/photo; image)
•  If you can, make your article into a list. DO SO and then quantify that list in your title (Top 10, Top 20, etc.)
•  Have either an extra long title, or a very short title  

What you might want to consider here is a trick Shoemoney wrote about that helps guide readers’ eyes to your article (http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/02/06/google-adwords…)

In addition to the ability of your title to grab readers’ attention and convince them to click, your title is the single most important thing in terms of the linking benefits your campaign generates.  If your content goes viral, the majority of the links pointing back to your site will have the exact anchor text as the title you choose for your article.  An important consideration here might be to create a title that is likely to be repurposed in a slightly different way by those linking back to you. It is better to have a varied anchor text, so it might be wise to create a title that others are likely to append. It would also be interesting to see how incorporating vocabulary that is commonly misspelled might lend itself to more varied anchor text, or through the injection of language that isn’t completely ubiquitous. In any case, however, your article’s title needs to have your keywords in it.  This is essentially your opportunity to control the anchor text of literally thousands of backlinks, so choose wisely.  

Leveraging Digg Comments
After submitting a digg or reddit post, make sure that you are the very first person to comment. Alongside the number of votes an article gets, many people consider clicking or not based on the number of comments the article has. The more comments, the more relevant it seems to many readers. This is where having the first word can make all the difference. It is your opportunity to start an interesting conversation and create buzz beyond what your article provides. Do your very best to encourage conversation without being so controversial as to anger any large percentage of readers. In addition to attracting more visitors because of a high comment number, you are also increasing the likelihood that readers will vote for your story. If you post a comment, you certainly have an opinion on the story. Although I can’t give statistics, my impression is that voting rates for people who comment are many times greater than passive readers.   By generating a really intense discussion in your comments section, you are essentially creating a piece of content within a piece of content.  The more interest and hype you can generate, the better off you will be.  

Try out story ideas that might not be 100% unique, yet regularly make it to the front page:

• Comic Strips like Calvin and Hobbes (especially true of reddit.com)
• World Record Breakers (world’s biggest, oldest, ugliest, etc); must include picture or video.
• Recycled stories from other social media sites. Do not paraphrase or copy, but look at what has been uniquely popular on other social media sites and add something or spin it in a different way.
• Using a voting method for boosting diggs (digg this to support such and such)
• Anything having to do with Wii news, Digg news, hating Microsoft, loving open source projects, Linux, ubuntu, Unix, Apple (iphone or ipod mostly).

Here is an excellent resource for looking at popular topics on digg: http://scoutd.com/categories/top.aspx

Why you need to take advantage of Digg for marketing now
The trend of social news and social search marketing are not going to go anywhere. The democratic idea behind user-regulated websites is simply too ingrained in American Culture, and perhaps even in humanities genetics. The popularity of digg and digg type sites will only grow. It is important to learn the skills necessary for marketing oneself or ones business in a democratic self regulated marketplace. There is no doubt that more and more marketers will realize the viral potential of creating content specifically for digg. Understanding and adopting the new practices in this new marketing field will give you a great advantage in what promises to be a very competitive marketplace. This is a new and exciting time for Advertising and Marketing, so jump on in and start swimming because pretty soon, the water is going to get pretty crowded and only the strong will survive.

Considerations before launching a digg (just in case it goes viral)
This is certainly a lesson I wish we had learned sooner. Although getting dugg is difficult, you must always make sure you are prepared for success. Once your story hits that tipping point of popularity, if you have not prepared… you’re sunk. Many hosting companies are not prepared for the numbers in traffic that you are likely to see from a front page digg. Most web servers put protections in place for huge jumps in traffic to any single source. When a story is dugg to the first page, the huge increase in traffic to your hosts web servers is generally seen as a “denial of service” attack. When this happens, your site will go down. So, how can you stop this from happening without resorting to buying huge massive amounts of bandwidth and a dedicated server? Here are three simple suggestions.

1. Talk to your hosts and let them know the potential for increased traffic. By doing this you can avoid them, assuming it is some sort of attack on the server.
2. Use remote hosting wherever possible. Flickr for images, Youtube for videos, etc. If you are taking images from other sites to feature in your own, you should rehost them; don’t damage another site by using their content. And always remember to ask for permission.     
3. If your article is inside a Wordpress blog, there is a very useful caching tool that can also be a lifesaver. More info here:  http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/johnny/2006/09/17/handling-the-digg-effect…

*although some may have thought to host on a blogspot hosted blog or equivalent (and thus avoid any bandwidth/traffic restrictions), don’t forget about the end goal: unless it’s a blog you are promoting, the article needs to be on your domain to pass any link value post-digg.

The Dark Side
For the more Black Hat out there, I have compiled a few ways that lean a bit more to the dark side. Here are some Sketchy (and not officially recommended) ways to go viral:

• Pay Per Digg. This is probably old news to most, but if you haven’t heard, the website usersubmitter.com provides a service where diggs can be bought for a $20 start up, and then $1 per digg. You can also become a digger and receive $.50 for every three stories you digg. This really is the ultimate in subversion of digg. It works against the founding principles and promotes stories that may not be worthwhile or interesting to the digg community.
• Contests. We have seen this sort of thing as a method for gaining popularity in other social networks. Something to the effect of: I will give one of the people who diggs this story $1000. This works simply because there is a great deal to gain with almost nothing to lose. For anyone other than those who see it as their duty to protect the integrity of digg.com, digging these type stories should be a no brainer, if given even a modicum of proof that someone might actually get paid. Although I have seen this work on other sites, I could not find a good example. Digg moderators/users are probably usually quick to squash these sorts of attempts. This isn’t to say it wouldn’t work in other mediums such as a Facebook or myspace group, or less well regulated social media sites.
• Outsourcing Diggs. Ok if you do this one, you are probably going to hell. Basically, the idea is exploiting extremely cheap labor in developing countries to be digging drones. I’m only including this because I thought it would make for interesting discussion. I would venture to say that this sort of activity will become a huge problem in the near future, and is probably far more widespread today than most would think.

Here is a more in depth article on this: http://www.themulife.com/?p=613

And a recent article on this type of exploitation here: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-654822,curpg-1.cms

• Giving Diggers Huge Power. What I mean by this is to give diggers the opportunity to make an impact on your life or someone else’s life in an immediate way. There are three types of digg stories that are often successful in this way:
• The Hoax.  Can’t find anything legit to write about? Make something up! Make sure that is both interesting, and difficult to disprove. An excellent example can be found in this video by Mark Erickson of “Infinite Solutions”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9SK_M_nVWA. This was also talked about in more depth at: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/marketing-yourself….

SEO Considerations:Leveraging the links
A number of previous articles we have written asked some important questions from an SEO perspective regarding the overarching effects of getting an article dugg.  One of the key questions in this arena concerns the value of leveraging any and all linking opportunities (even if such opportunities are not directly related to your site’s topic).  In our article “Anatomy of a Super Digg,” published on SEOmoz last month, we outlined the effects a top Digg post had on the overall ranking of the site whose domain it was hosted on. As Rand Fishkin has previously discussed, the effect of such an effort is a kind of rising of the tide for the entire domain.  Even if the page is an orphan, its popularity and power is passed on, in part, to the entire domain in which it resides. (If this weren’t true, wouldn’t it render practically all the online SEO ranking tools our there mostly ineffective, including the PageStrength tool?)*

This method of link building created a bit of controversy, with people from both sides addressing the merit and ethics of creating an unrelated story, hosted on an orphan page, and not linked to the main domain in any way.  To some, this tactic is equivalent to gaming the engines.  That is to say, such methods can be seen as a direct attempt to falsely increase the assumed relevance of a site, thus diluting the SERPS with content that may or may not be valuable.  To some, this tactic is little better than spam. 

Others disagree, seeing such a method as similar to common advertising tactics employed by corporations outside of the SEO realm.  For instance, it is not uncommon to see an ad campaign that has little to nothing to do with the product it is promoting.  Such a campaign serves to promote the product solely through its own sensationality, and the association it creates with a specific brand.   

Creating Targeted Linkbait
In terms of creating linkbait, most would probably agree that it is much harder to create a very highly targeted piece of content that will go wildly viral.  Looking at some of the most viral pieces of content on the net in history, you’ll find some very random material.  This doesn’t mean with the right idea you can’t create highly targeted content that will be extremely popular, it just means that if your site is about an overweight 14 year old boy who likes to pretend he’s Luke Skywalker, you’ll have a much easier time creating viral content that is on topic than if your site is about, say, mortgages.  While this may seem obvious, it brings about an important unanswered question.  Would it be better to extend your time and effort creating a smaller amount of less effective viral campaigns that are on topic, or would you be better off creating highly effective campaigns that are less related to the site you are promoting?

Site Branding
Another important consideration here is the power of your viral campaign to aid in the branding of a site.  When considering companies whose marketing promotions are not immediately connectible to their product or service, you’ll often find that their promotions are aimed more at an attempt to aid in promoting their specific brand, or connecting a certain association between their brand and the message or feelings conveyed by their promotion.   An example that comes to mind is the somewhat bizarre lymon campaign created for Sprite.  While the commercials were bizarre and hard to associate with Sprite as a delicious and refreshing beverage, they at least added a level of intrigue that took an old and recognized brand and added some new life to it. 

In our realm, a branding gold mine can be found within the site like Digg.  A recent marketing campaign put out by toyota for their Scion brand is a great example of how viral content (and this is in our opinion highly viral content, although it has yet to garner a great deal of attention) is being used to promote a product, even if the ad itself is only by the stretch of the imagination, relevent to the product.  You can check out the video on Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAXwxV6wS2Y

Branding your Ariticles
At present, there are a number of popular sites that often publish popular articles on Digg.  To their great advantage, they leverage this opportunity to expand the recognizability of their brand by linking their content directly with their brand.  This is accomplished by publishing articles with titles that include your site’s name, or provide some reference back that allows readers to associate your content with your brand.  For instance, our company might try something like;  “Voltier’s News: Woman Gives Birth to Cat.”  (Sorry, this is a horrible example.)  The point is, a number of companies/sites have been able to inject their brand into their posts without negative effect or backlash.  This is, however, a dangerous game.  It is a tactic that allows users to immediately identify your content with your site, so it extremely important to protect your reputation and be seen as a philanthropic source of interesting and valuable information, rather than a greedy SEO looking to overrun social media sites with useless information.  While this tactic could be extremely helpful in branding your site, I would only recommend trying this if your brand has already gained some authority on its own.  (Like SEOmoz….why don’t you guy’s do this with your posts?  You get Dugg all the time.)

Monetizing your traffic
Here’s the thing about trying to monetize your digg traffic: don’t bother.  There is literally no point.  Your best possible bet at getting money out of a digg article is by using Adsense.  We’ve tried on a few of our articles, to test and see how the traffic might convert, and have seen absolutely nothing but dismal results.  At best, you can probably expect to make about 1/2 a cent per digg.  I’m not exaggerating here.  Users of sites like Digg and Reddit are terrible converters, not only because they’re more savvy and blind to advertisements than the average user, but also because of the way they surf through digg.  Most users will browse through stories, going back and forth to each article.  Convincing a user to navigate away from Digg beyond one click is quite hard, and as a result, you’ll be hard pressed to get your page views up beyond more than 1-2 per unique visitor. 

Not to mention, trying to monetize your traffic is a sure fire way to make your readers angry.  Not only will they fail to click your ads, or buy your products, but they will also fail to vote you up.  One of our number one stories on Digg made us a mere $100, and most of that was the result of residual traffic from other sites.  This type of behavior from the users of these sites presents an important challenge in converting one time readers into regular readers.  

There are a few things you might want to try that might be able to hook a percentage of your viewers.  You should definitely have;

• Prominent RSS feeds
• Buttons for other social media sites
• Browser bookmark
• Other interesting, readily available articles (don’t make your readers leave your site to find on digg what your site doesn’t offer them)

After you’ve gotten a considerable amount of traffic, and are ranking well on Digg, Reddit, or a similar site, you may want to try some more “in your face” methods of gaining repeat visitors.  Some of these methods may anger users, and you risk being voted down if you’re too forceful in your methods.

• ask for newsletter sign ups
• offer free content with registration
• promote a podcast
• ask for links
• add a prominent link to another digg article you’d like to go popular
• other various calls to action or lead generation techniques

      Some Experiments and Questions for Future Investigation & Discussion 

1. Create two brand new domains with content & design created in a way that allows neither to gain an edge in rankings based upon ad copy or on page factors– then create two viral campaigns of similar link building power, with one being relevant and on topic, the other being off topic.  Track the resulting rankings.  (Anyone think this would be impossible?)
2. Track the ability of mildly viral content to get pages indexed.  We saw a brand new domain (as in having the domain registered hours earlier) get indexed within hours.  Perhaps this was a fluke?  This is definitely worth more investigation.  Also, it would be interesting to see how many brand new pages could be indexed with such an effort.  
3. Tracking the staying power of links generated by a successful linkbait campaign.  It would be important to track not only how many backlinks could be generated through a viral effort, but how they decreased over time.  We have seen from our own efforts that links drop off quite a bit–20-30% of the links within two months.  It would be interesting to see how this might affect any positive effects brought on immediately by a digg.