1. Never (ever!!) submit pages from your own sites. Never Digg anything from your own sites. This is the most important rule of all, for this it is on top of the list. If you plan on following just one rule on this list, this has to be it. It is single most important rule, and not following it will make yoou very unpopular with the guys at Digg.
2. Create a proper and complete profile with an image as well as links to your websites and profiles on all the other social networks you are registered at. Your profile is a very important part of your site activities. It allows people to get to know you a little better and maybe even identify with you and/or your ideas. The default image provided by Digg doesn't make a good impression on anyone. A properly filled out profile, on the other hand, invites social interaction. Digg is a social site, so it is very important to be social. Most of the traffic I get directly from Digg is people visiting my blogs and websites through links on my profile. (And it is probably the same for most everyone else.)
3. Avoid using Digg´s shout system whenever possible, and be careful what you share with the public via the Facebook connection. Even if you keep your shouts private, people and search engines can (and will) still see and find them. These shouts can hurt you. Some people as well as search engines may view them as a sort of spamming.
4. Take the time to make friends with your Digg contacts on other social sites that offer a private message system in which private messages are never made public and accessible to search engines and strangers. Or better still, use instant messaging and email.
5. Invite your Digg friends to submit your content for you, and do not use the same person too frequently…get a rotary system going. (Make use of the private message system on other sites to suggest what to submit and get Dugg) Not every page on your site is a worthy candidate for submission. Be selective and only offer them links to the best content you have on your website or blog. Be very critical of your own work. With time, you will know what will have mass appeal and what won't. Don't act like you are naïve or stupid. Don't submit things that will most likely only get a few Diggs. Submitting your content to Digg and getting a low number of Diggs will hurt the reputation of your website or blog in the long run. Google rates your content in part by the number of Diggs it receives. So, choose wisely.
6. Ask real life friends who are also members of Digg to submit and/or Digg your stuff. (Same thing…contact them on other sites or via email) Make 100% sure those friends are not connected to your Digg profile in any way.
7. Digg a huge variety of content submitted by others (and not just by your friends), from the upcoming section, but don’t Digg anything lame. Always think mass appeal. Ask yourself: "What would the majority of people assume about me if they were to see this in my Digg history?" If it's not something good, just don't Digg it, even if you really like it.
8. Make sure you comment and say something intelligent and useful that will not get voted down on at least 50% of what you Digg. Commenting and interacting with others is the essence of being social. You have to be social on a social network, or it just won't work. You should try to be among the first to comment on new stuff as frequently as possible, and try not to give the impression that you are some sort of idiot. Also, vote up intelligent comments that you like, made by others. The more frequently you are amongst the early commenters with something intelligent to say, and the more social you are, the more likely it will be that you will catch the eye of more powerful Diggers who like you for what you have to say as well as what you Digg, and they will be more inclined to check out the other things you Digg, and in time possibly Digg things that you Digg. More powerful Diggers have the crowd appeal that you don’t have (for now). Their followers are what you are after, and the only way to get to them is through those powerful Diggers.
9. Do not try to friend the top Diggers until you have established a very strong profile and have a lot of experience. They are not going to friend you back if they don't know who you are and have never seen you around the site. It would be best to wait for them to friend you, first.
10. Never friend anyone on Digg who breaks one or more of the above rules. Just remember the old saying "Birds of a feather flock together". Don't become "guilty by association". Anyone who breaks the above rules is a poor quality Digger and his or her activities can and will get you marked as a spammer or poor quality Digger yourself, which will result in your account getting banned or, if you´re lucky, people just not Digging your stuff. If that happens, then you will be of no further use to your mutual Digg friends, and they will not be willing to help you that much. They may even stop following you altogether. Leave the poor quality Diggers who break the above rules as just followers and do not friend them. Don’t follow them - or you will be following them to failure. Associate yourself only with responsible and honest Diggers.
Now, what kinds of things should you submit and Digg besides the obvious stuff that has mass appeal and quality content from your friends? Submit and Digg high quality pages that link to yours. Your aim should be indirect traffic coming from those sites to yours and not from Digg to yours. This is one easy way how you can reward people who are kind enough to write about you. You give those pages more traffic and a boost in pagerank and have more links pointing to you in the search engines´ top 10 results.
Your goal is not to get a lot of traffic from Digg. The goal is not to increase the pagerank of your own site(s) (this will happen anyway if you follow these suggestions). The goal is not for your site to make the front page of Digg.
Your main goal is to take over the entire front page of the search engine results so all links will point to you, directly or indirectly, when someone searches for something.
Most people never go to page 2 of the results. They usually find what they are looking for on page 1. If every article on page 1 sends them to you, you WIN BIG TIME, even if your site happens to be buried on page 8 or 10 of the search results, which it will not be if you are paying attention and learning from what you read here.
The higher the page rank of the sites that link to you, the higher your page rank will be. Why have a bunch of PageRank 0 sites linking to you when you can actively do something about it and help promote them to PR3 or higher? This is one of the few cases where being nice can really pay off. Being nice can (and in time will) help you to get right to the top.
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