Digg, Social News, and Social Authority Building
What is Digg?

Social Marketing is made up of many different aspects. The
important thing to remember is that anyone wanting to earn
money online should be prepared to invest the time and
effort required to build a genuine business. Using social
media should be just one part of your overall
traffic-building strategy, not the entire nor the only
strategy you incorporate.

I share 4 key components of social marketing below.
Learning the basic principles of social marketing and how
it works will go a long way in helping you with not only
your marketing efforts, but your notoriety and reader
retention.

Blogging is Crucial in Social Marketing

Your blog is naturally a social marketing tool. By using
good posting strategies, linkbait, clip marks, utility
posts, commenting, growing your audience, setting up social
widgets, content exchanges or blog carnivals, and social
media optimization you will have set a powerful base for
your website. The building blocks of social marketing
success are one of the critical components to making your
online business not only visited more, but critical to your
monetary success.

Using Social Sites Properly

Learning the common social site features will enable you to
grasp how to use these communities to their highest
potential. Creating a powerful profile is very important.
Making friends on social sites is just one power networking
strategy, along with having others submit respond to, and
vote on your content. You also want to understand the rules
for each social site so that you don't get your account
banned. Tagging is another critical aspect to your social
marketing, and being able to measure your marketing results.

It's a Conversation, Not a Sales Pitch

Starting conversations is a power strategy. Knowing the
Golden Rules of Social Networking will enable you to get
maximum views for your social networking, forum activity,
and on how to find social networks in your niche. Learning
Social Power Linking Strategies will enable you to drive
organic traffic to your site, and will provide you with
continuous streams of repeat visitors. People who are
searching for information in your niche will find you
because of the social marketing strategies. Social
marketing does many things, it not only puts you in front
of those who are in those specific social sites, but
because you are creating links, regular followers will come
simply because the search engines will notice all your
efforts and all the organic traffic that you are creating.
This in turn will help you with your search engine rankings.

A System Is Critical To Being Efficient

In order to incorporate these strategies you need a system,
a guide, on how to do this effectively and a place where
you can share your findings and questions with others.
There are several communities where bloggers band together
and where social marketing tactics of all kinds are shared
and discussed in great detail.

Great free communities to get involved are MyBlogLog.com,
BlogCatalog.com, and SocialAuthority.Ning.com.  People
interested in social marketing and better blogging tactics
are working out new social marketing tactics and helping
each other progress in busy communities such as these.
Digg ( http://www.digg.com ) is a news-oriented, or "social
news" website, where the majority of its content is
submitted by its users. Digg's users also rate the site's
content, determining what's important enough to go on the
front page, and what should be removed.  After signing up
for a free account, Digg's users can submit, review, vote
on, and comment on news stories and other content they find
on the Internet.

The idea is that instead of searching the web for useful
content, people can just make one stop at Digg and see the
latest current events, feature stories, videos, podcasts,
and other content ' selected and rated by users instead of
by an editor.

Digg is an important tool in building your online presence.

If a link to your content is submitted to Digg and receives
a lot of positive votes and comments, your website can
receive hundreds or even thousands of visitors within a
short period of time. There  is a great deal of the traffic
that will probably quickly read the article or post and
leave but, there's a good chance that the more targeted
visitors will browse your site and sign up for your
newsletter and/or RSS feed which will also help you to
receive incoming links, trackbacks, and social bookmarks.

You may receive comments, earn extra income, have your rss
feeds picked up, and many other possibilities may come from
having your content submitted. How does Digg work? In order
to make your comment live, Digg requires you to enter your
name and email address, and then use a password and
confirmation link they email you.

How do links get on Digg's front Page?

All new content starts out on Digg's Upcoming Page. Digg's
ranking system for each piece of content submitted is based
on an algorithm (yes there is an actual algorithm to
compute a story's importance and popularity on Digg!) that
considers things like  the category the link was submitted
to, how many diggs and buries the link has received, how
quickly they've occurred, how valid they are, and the
identity and IP addresses of the people voting on the link.

When a link receives enough diggs, it gets moved to the
home page of its category. If it then makes the "Top 10"
articles for its category, it receives a lot more exposure.
However, if the link doesn't receive enough diggs within 12
to 24 hours, it's removed from the Upcoming Page to make
room for new content.

There is another way to make your submissions more visible,
and that is by you genuinely participating in the Digg
community (submitting, digging and commenting on other
people's content), the more your profile and content will
be noticed by other Digg members. That increases the number
of people interested in submitting, digging, and commenting
on your content.  We call this "Social Authority" building.

What Kind of Content is Successful on Digg?

Digg moves content in and out quickly, with thousands of
other story links competing for attention and votes,  so
although content that is considered  "linkbait" on a blog
may be successful, it may or may not be as successful on
Digg.

That means your Digg content has to grab people's attention
fast. You may need to change the angle of your content
slightly, or give it a catchier headline and description to
make people stop and look at it as they scan quickly down
the Digg content links.

Unlike a regular blog entry or website article that's
posted more or less permanently online for people to read
and comment on, content has a short lifespan on Digg. On
Digg, it's all about what attracts people in a fast-moving
environment with lots of competing links.


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Jack Humphrey is an expert in social marketing with over 10
years experience in SEO, link building, and blog marketing.
 For more information on getting more traffic with social
marketing see http://www.socialpowerlinking.com