What Is Digg?
May 7th, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
Digg is one of the ‘next-generation’ websites that allows a lot more interaction between its users. On a simplistic level, Digg allows you to submit ‘news stories’ which can in fact be anything you think might be useful to other people. Once a story has been submitted to a category it will appear in that category’s “Upcoming” section – which is a quickly revolving display of the most recent news stories. In the brief hour (if you’re lucky) or so that your story will be listed in the ‘upcoming’ section before being superceded by more recent articles, if your title is catchy enough then users will visit your post and if they like it then hopefully they’ll give you a “Digg”, and you know you really shouldn’t have bothered if you get a few “Bury It” ratings. Digg can prove a useful tool for websites looking to gain more exposure and catch more regular readers in the process…
The Wikipedia description for Digg is as follows:
A community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment.
The website incorporates features of social bookmarking, user rating systems and user networking. Digg and other social bookmarking websites should be taken seriously by websites and Companies looking to make a break onto the Internet publishing scene. Imagine you’ve written a really interesting press release or useful how-to article that you’ve published on your website – in addition to obtaining organic search engine visitors, by submitting the story to Digg you should gain a handful more visitors.
If enough Digg users like your story and give you enough “Diggs” then you could even be listed on the Digg homepage. Your ten minutes of fame (or more likely up to 24 hours) will catapult the amount of website visitors into many thousands – all I can say is to make sure your webserver can handle the traffic in advance! Some websites that have benefitted from Digg homepage stories have quoted roughly 40,000 visitors that day alone, and declining values (but still high) for the following few days. Due to the ‘story reviewing’ rather than ‘purchase making’ intentions of many Digg users, despite these high traffic levels, click through rates (CTRs) may actually decrease. It must also be mentioned that not every story you submit will be featured on the homepage, even if you go for a meager rate of 1 story in 500 being featured, it’s one of those strategies where the potential benefits are great with very minimal potential downsides.
In summary, social bookmarking and user rating sites such as Digg can be another useful tool in the website promoter’s arsenal.
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