Digg: Why You Should Digg Your Own Posts

There are two trains of thought when it comes to digg. One believes that visitors should do the digging to create organic links. The other believes that the blogger should do the digging. This way, visitors only need to click the 'digg' button.

I digg my own articles, but not all of them. I also limit the number of posts I digg. I try to write one or two articles that are 'top quality' and newsworthy and only digg these.

I've also created 2 or 3 blogs which ask my readers to vote on a post. The objective is to increase your post diggs so you can get on the first page.

Widgets

That leads me to wonder what Netvibes was thinking when they made their new widget:

I love widgets. I use them whenever I can. But why would I want to add a widget to my blog that promotes other people's articles?

I want a widget that promotes MY diggs, and encourages people to add their number to my digg - much like they come to my blog for my blogcatalogue recent viewer list.

I do like the new digg tools that you just copy and paste into a blog. You can write a great article and then paste one of the buttons into your page

Feel free to click the button and digg this story. I want to get a zip download of this button and change the words to, 'vote' for this story. I am not great at changing widgets, but they say it is not hard. I like anything that helps promote 'my' blog, or a blog in my network.

Swarm

I've watched their SWARM demonstration, but personally, I don't think digg works this way unless you belong to a group of people who are focused on digging articles. divanetworking doesn NOT include digging each other's articles each month as this is against their terms of service rules.

Digg'n is Not Enough

One thing you need to remember is that 'digg'n an article is not enough.' To get onto page 1, the blog needs tons of comments. Most of the blog posts that hit page one have more than 100 comments. This doesn't need to make you despair. These comments (and digg votes) do not always need to be generated within the first few days, months, of the post.

You can continue to promote a single article months - and years - after it was posted.

How to Make Digg Work

My best advice is not to try and digg everything. If you digg everything, or tons of articles on the same topic, then Digg might consider you as spamming the system. I haven't found that search engines pay attention to these links.

The main benefit is in the social networking aspect. Yes, digg a main portion of your 'good' articles. But, choose 5 - 10 really good ones and promote them on a regular basis. You can use links and 'read more' tags to take people to your best articles.

This has a two fold benefit. First, it will increase the number of diggs that page receives. Second, it will increase the Page Rank of that particular page.