A recent IM chat session went like this,
“btw, digg is broken. i didnt get front with like 215 diggs, 107 comments”
It’s a shame isn’t it. is the party really over?
But what’s that I hear?
Music?
You mean the party is still going?
Digg used to be so easy to get to the front page, easy in the sense of after studying it for a year and spending more time devoted to it than trying to figure out what “Lost” is all about.
But it looks like those easy days by the pool are over.
But that’s not quite true is it. After all, digg is not the goal. If you think it is then you are missing the point. Digg, is a step towards the goal, a pretty good step, but still only a step. I can still get front pages but it’s harder and not really worth the time till I figure out that special move which gets my stuff in again.
Think about this: there are more people on my IM list working full time to game digg than are actually working at digg. And we are not doing it to be cool, we are doing it to pay the rent/mortgage/bookie.
Who do you think is more motivated?
More from my IM chat.
” maxyRo: still digg traffic is overappreciated
high bounce rate, poor returning visitors
me: agreed, but I think it’s the wrong question
it’s exposure, not traffic which is needed and exposure to the linkerati
diggers do blog, and it’s the bloggers we want, so they link to us
maxy.ro: yeah, but with a worthy amount of effort
you can get this from SU, reddit”
The chat was with MaxyRo
he’s a good guy, who “gets it”. I suggest you add him to your friend list.
The chat was a long and interesting one. Basically for me it came down to one salient fact.
I only need one person to read my linkbait.
That one person is a blogger from an authority site like the New York Times or the BBC or CNN etc. And for them to give me a big fat, juicy authority link. I don’t need the 3 million diggers with Dorito stained T Shirts shuffling though my blog. I just want that one golden link.
The reality is that 20 or 30 links from OK blogs and websites will do, even then, you only need 20 or 30 of the right people to read and then link to you.
It is that teeny, tiny group of people your linkbait should be aimed at, digg is simply a vehicle, a blunt instrument if you will to get those 20 or 30 people.
If a salesmen has to knock on ten doors to get one sale the nine doors which said no were not his objective, but it enabled him to get to that one. But, what if the salesman does a bit of research and profiles that one sale, enabling him to ignore the deadbeat doors.
He increases his success rate to 100%
Spending more time thinking about who it is you want to get a link from, building a profile of that member of the linkerati, finding out what they read, what makes them laugh, what they link to in the past, do they link to stuff that annoys them, do they like crunchy or smooth peanut butter. Knowing this will allow you to craft, hone, mould your linkbait to be the most irresistible piece of web content ever. Making them so excited to be able to link to you they knock over their coffee and ruin their latest issue of “Linkerati Monthly”.
The point being, digg is not social media marketing. It is the 10 kilo lump hammer of marketing, when what you really need is a laser guided missile.
So how do you do that? Well, maybe I’ll tell you later.