1:00 AM
Paul B
I am a pretty active Digg user. I like to keep up to date on the latest and greatest, and I like to see some funny stuff too. Digg is a great place to keep up with current events and to get a good chuckle in. It is also a great place for traffic as everyone well knows. The key to getting traffic on Digg though is to make it to the front page. If you simply submit your story, 9 times out of ten it will never reach the front page. People try very, very hard to get to the front page, and never succeed. That's a the cold hard truth.
There are some tools available on the internet though that can give you a little bit of an edge, and all of these are 100% kosher with Kevin Rose and his cronies. Here are my five favorite Digg tools:
- BiggBoard – This one is really handy because it allows you to track your submitted stories on one page to see how it is going. The idea is to watch your story move from the left of the board all the way to the right through the various “Hot” categories until you reach the front page. Another cool feature is you can see if your story got buried if it doesn’t reach the front page.
- Friend Statistics – This site will let you know who the deadbeats are. By that, I mean it will let you know who is digging your posts, and who isn’t so you can drop the dead weight. The only way to reach the front page is to have people Digg your stuff right? So this tool can help you figure out who is, so you can trim the fat in your friend’s list.
- Digg Watcher – This tool is kind of cool to set alarms for your story submissions. You can configure it to notify you when it goes popular, when your story reaches a certain number of Diggs, when their is a comment, or when someone simply Diggs your article.
- Digg Comments Viewer – By the same guys that gave us Digg Watcher above, we have a nice tool that lets us track our comments on Digg to see how our comments are doing. It shows you how many up votes you got and how many down votes you got, and will computer your average.
- Sub Digger Plus – Finally we come to my new favorite. Since Digg got rid of their shout feature, I have found it rather difficult to see what my Digg friends are doing, and for them to see what I am submitting. This tool sort of works like Stumbleupon and takes you through all of your friend’s Digg submissions using the Digg toolbar at the top, and their toolbar at the bottom. It really makes digging your friend’s stuff easier, and lets them Digg yours in return. It also has a really cool list view that will show you all of your friends submissions in one spot so you can see what you have already read, and what you haven’t.
Of course all of these sites are just tools. A means to and end. The truth is that if whatever you are submitting doesn’t have good enough content it will never reach the front page. So don’t start using these tools, and think that this is all you need. Get your content in order, then start using these tools. That is how things work.
Know of any other cool Digg tools that I missed? What’s your favorite? Let us know in the comments.
