Speaking
Niel Patel – CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Chris Winfield - President & Co-Founder, 10e20
Tamar Weinburg – Blogger, Rusty Brick, Inc.

Neil’s speaking first
Introduction to Digg

Average story that made the front page gets 129 links
Over 10,000 visitors in 1 hour
Great branding

Requirements
Content/pictures
Video
Audio

Does not recommend submitting a podcast to Digg

Important factors
Number of votes
Time you submit
Subitter - people who have been active in the community for a while have more clout
Number of friends

Unwritten Rules
No self-promotion
Can’t pay for votes
No spamming
No SEOs Allowed

Fun Facts
.7% of stories make the homepage
Top 100 users control 56% of the homepage’s content
You can’t control what people say

Tamar Weinberg is now speaking

Viral Content
Lists
Games/Quizzes
Controversy
Breaking News
Videos
Pictures (digpicz.com - all the Digg pictures that have made the main page)
Technology/Science

A solid title and description are critical
Be careful when you’re marketing your content. People are quick to point out mistakes.
Make youself identifiable and create an avatar
Provide all of your contact information, email, blog, name, Skype, etc.
Befriend users and Digg your friends stories
Comment on stories, snarky comments win on Digg
Promoting your posts in private is safest. Most Diggers will bury you if you’re trying to promote. Pownce, Twittter, Facebook are good to use. You can use Digg shouts but use sparingly if at all.
Enhance your Digg experience with extra tools (Smart digg buttons, a Digg alerter, Social media for Firefox)
Tools are found at www.techipedia.com/2007/digg-api-tools/

Diggers hate seo
Be aggressive when networking but be professional about it
You don’t want the same people Digging your story all the time
Get a diverse amount of people to Digg your story
About 20 Diggs takes about 2 hours, not always, but it’s more natural than 20 minutes
Push up what’s in front of your story
The initial boost is critical
It’s impossible to get unburied once you’ve been buried

Subscribe to Digg’s RSS for good content ideas
Focus on the categories when submitting
The sports section isn’t too popular. Getting visibility here is relatively easy.
The science section is pretty easy too.
Digg places a handicap on top submitters.
New users takes 30 - 40 Diggs to make the front page

Chris Winfield from 10e20 is now speaking

You can get between 10,000 and 100,000 visitors in a 24hr period
People look for Diggable content
When you get onto the homepage of Digg there’s a social media snowball effect
Getting on the homepage leads to sales
Diggers have thier own language (FTW for the win, i can has, RTFA - read the f*cking article)
Digg users love the ipod/iphone, Ron Paul, technology
Diggers don’t like Fox news or George Bush
Do not submit press releases to Digg
Overtly selling products is frowned upon
Diggers don’t like faking it

What works?
Diggers love chuck norris, video, things blowing up, being destroyed
Dove video - progression of average woman being made-up for a supermodel shoot
List - They’ve worked very well. Life insurance company posted a 19 Things you didn’t know about death. Did very well.

When creating content to post to Digg, 10e20 stripped out the sidebar navigation of the site’s page
Use numbers instead of writing out the number. Making the title simple is best.
The description needs to be opinionated and highlighting key points. Start the conversation here.
Choose the right topic. This is very important.

Case Study (travel industry - worlds best subways)
After it makes the homepage of Digg, the snowball effect starts to happen with ebaumsworld, nowpublic, influential blogs, etc
Over 100,000 visitors in 24 hours
Over 200 new email lists sign-ups
12 new bookings from blog referrals

There are hundreds if not thousands of sites out there that will allow you post content. Some have been around longer than others and are sometimes more established which can potentially provide you with a louder voice when spreading the word. This Guide will help you get the most for your link building efforts and hopefully show you how to avoid spammy pitfalls while implementing your campaigns.

Definition
There are sites that are strictly for bookmarking, meaning that the text fields simply require the URL, Title, Description, and Tags, i.e. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Bluedot.us, Simpy, etc. However there are other sites that fall under social news (Reddit, Digg, Shoutwire), Social clipping (ClipClip.org, Clipmarks), How to Guides, Directories, List sites, and tons of niche sites that fall under these categories. So how do we make sense of all this noise so that we can most effectively leverage them? First we have to save, then organize.

Organization & Categorization
Different folks have different ways of organizing their campaigning efforts. For me, I use FireFox and store all my useful search marketing links as such:

You can see the large amount of subcategories that I have under link building. The most used categories are the Bookmarking (General) and Social News (General) but you can see that these verticals branch out to other niche sites like Social News (Shopping) and Social News (Tech). It’s important to make sure that the content you are submitting is relevant to the site you’re submitting to. If we submit content about baby products to the tech site we’ll obviously get zero attention and probably some angry readers. Additionally, this won’t help you build a presence within these sites. Since most of these sites have a social or sharing aspect to them, you’ll want to aim towards building a trusted profile. You’ll want to be seen as someone who is contributing to the site’s intent and not just peddling your wares.

Accounts & IP Addresses
It’s best practice to open an account in every site with the same username, password, and email address. This keeps things simple and you won’t be running around trying to remember the unique password you created for dogmeetscat.com. Also remember that most of these sites record your IP address and associate it with the username and password that you’ve created. If you create three accounts with three separate gmail addresses for dogmeetscat.com, they might know that these three accounts are coming from one IP and are most likely being used to spam the system. Don’t be surprised if you’re IP address gets banned if you’re doing this.

*If you have to be a dick you could use open wi-fi networks to create accounts. This way you can have 3 accounts for dogmeetscat.com and have a unique IP address for each account.

Fields: URL, Title, Description, and Tags
When bookmarking your content, be sure to change the Title and Description of your post for each site that you post to. This prevents the bookmarking sites from ranking for the content you’re trying to get your URL to rank for. It will also look less spammy, because there’s no way that 10 different people will submit the same URL with the same description. Maybe the same title but entering the same title and description for every site you post to will obviously indicate that a single person was submitting the same content to multiple sites.

Use common sense and practice these same methods (non-duplicitous) when submitting content to social news, directories, list sites, how to guides, wikis, etc. Oftentimes you won’t be able to add anchor text with your keyword phrase to these locations. If you can, great! If not, the next best thing is to make sure that the keyword(s) that you’re trying to rank for are contained within the URL of the content to be submitted.

How to expedite the bookmarking process
There are a few services out there that can help you post quicker by basically populating the javascript bookmarklet links of the bookmarking sites with your content and then displaying the posting link for your quick posting pleasure. Here are a known few:

http://socialposter.com/
Good but it’s slightly buggy when it processes the content for submission. It sometimes adds symbols to the information or removes commas. It also directs you towards using the same Title and Description for each post. User interface is pretty bland but it does a good job at speeding up a tedious process.

Alexa: 46, 261
Compete: 97,436
Yahoo! Backlinks: 6,658

http://www.onlywire.com/
Another mass bookmarking application. This one records your account information. However these guys seem rather shady because in their TOS they claim they have the right to add their own affiliate links into a user’s bookmarks.

Alexa: 5,122
Compete: 39,477
Yahoo! Backlinks: 51,294

http://www.addthis.com/
AddThis is a widget that blog users can add to the bottom of their posts. When you click on it, you can choose from a list of 34 different bookmarking sites to post to. This is not a web app, simply a widget.

Alexa: 3,206
Compete: 2,067
Yahoo! Backlinks: 3,199,868

We here at Squareoak would love to hear more information about this topic. If you have anything to add or know of other web applications that perform similar functions, we’d love to hear it.

Happy Bookmarking!

Ah Digg you’ve been great…I mean, we still love you, no hard feelings or anything but every time we try to talk about what’s important to us, it’s like it doesn’t even matter. I think this will be better for all of us. This way you can do your thing with your categories and us with ours. I just don’t think we’re compatible, ya know? I’ll come visit from time to time, I mean, we can still be friends right? Anyway, you’re the best Digg. Thank you for being so understanding.