Getting the Most Out of Digg

Recently, I discovered an online tool that's made my most ambitious goals for Sam Bailey into something tangible, and I want to tell you about it.

Basically, Digg is a table of contents for the Internet, indexed by everyday users like you and me. When someone Diggs something for the first time, that article, video, or image gets added to the table of contents. As more and more people Digg it, it becomes more prominent on the Digg homepage, as well as in the news feeds.

For example, if you go to Digg.com and click on entertainment news, you're looking at the articles and factoids deemed most important, entertaining, or just plain "Digg-worthy" by the internet-viewing public. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you're seeing the articles that have only one or two Diggs apiece.

If you can use resources like Facebook and Twitter to get your own social network to Digg your stuff, then Digg becomes a tool to reach a much, much wider audience.

How many Diggs does it take to get to the top of the Digg list? On average, a thousand or so. Sometimes only a few hundred, depending on how many people are Digging stuff that day.

One person can get a few hundred Diggs, if they're smart about it. Together, a group can rangle up a few thousand. Here's how I'm doing it, for those who are interested:

Whenever I post something, I make sure to Digg it. That's step one.

On my social networks, like my Twitter, Facebook. MySpace and Linked In, all the status updates are handled through http://ping.fm/. Ping makes it easy to do, because one status update works for all the networks.

Twitterfeed.com is another site I use. RSS feeds are like simplified web pages, and most online blogs and lists have one. Twitterfeed will send Ping links to updates on any RSS feed, along with a little piece of introduction text.

Because Digg offers RSS feeds for the digging history of any user, I feed my Digg history to my Twitterfeed, add the text "Digg this!" and forward it to my Ping... to all my social networks! Every time I Digg something, it automatically shows up in the status of everyone who's connected to my Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, or MySpace. In my case, that nearly a thousand people, right there!

Because I'm working on these projects with a number of other people, it's easy enough to make sure we all Digg the same things. When we're all set up and organized, Each thing we Digg can reach a social network of tens of thousands...

If they Digg our stuff, that's enough to give our article, video, or picture a world-wide audience through Digg.

Can you Digg it?


(As an aside, each of my blogs is Twitterfed to my Ping, as is my Netflix. Automatically feeding RSS into your status updates is a great way to save time and keep people aware of what you're up to.)