Using Digg to Promote Your Bukisa Articles

Adapted from my original article How to Use Digg to Promote Your eHow Articles.

If you've been on the internet for any length of time you probably already know that Digg is a popular social news site. Anyone can head over there, submit an article, and (if enough users vote on it) it can appear on the front page. I've previous written about how to get your article to the front page, but this time I'd like to explain how to use Digg to promote your eHow articles through passive search engine promotion.

Step 1. First we've got to forget the front page. The goal of submitting anything to digg is usually in hopes of getting that content to the main page of the site. This is a task all on it's own - instead our goal is going to be driving traffic through search engine promotion. You see, the amount of traffic you'd receive from a front page hit is very large - but this traffic is also notorious for it's lack of "quality." Digg users have a phobia for advertising so you're not going to make any money off them. They generally don't finish reading an article they click on, and the burst in traffic disappears after a few hours. So aspire for the front page, but don't worry about not actually making it.

Step 2. Submit it! Don't worry about who votes or how many people click on your article. Simply submitting your article to the service helps it get ranked much higher in search results - even if no one votes for it. Once Google sees Digg linking to your article, they'll decide it's of much greater value and list it towards the top of their search results. This ultimately ends in a steady, long term flow of traffic via search engine promotion.

Step 3. When you submit your article, aim for the same keywords you used to write the article in the first place. An easy way to fill out the form is to use the same title and first paragraph as your title and description. I would remove " | Bukisa.com" from the title, as it may be confusing to Google and hurt your search engine promotion. Also make sure you choose the right category to maximize your boost in pagerank, and don't submit too many articles at once. If people get annoyed by your article and "bury it" you'll lose that valuable pagerank listing (and the search engine promotion that goes along with it) forever.

Step 4. Speaking of pageranking, Digg has a much higher pagerank than Bukisa. Pagerank is a key factor in search engine promotion. Often times you'll search for your article on Google with odd results - the article itself doesn't appear, but the digg synopsis and link does! This is less than ideal . . . by the time people click the link from Google to Digg, they may not click the link from Digg to your article. In order for the search engine promotion to apply to your original article and not your digg listing, you should try to build lots of quality "backlinks" (links to your article from other sites). Having your Digg listing show up is still better than nothing, though!

Step 5. You can actually use your Digg listing as a "companion" to your article. Once you've exhausted backlinks on a keyword linking to your main article, promote your Digg one instead! For instance, I did an article about "secular drug rehab". The article had enough search engine promotion that those keywords pull up my article on Google as the top result. I also wanted to target the phrase "atheist drug rehab" but that wasn't actually in my article anywhere. I went to digg, Dugg my "secular drug rehab" article but changed the digg listing title to "atheist drug rehab". I built a few backlinks to my digg listing, and now people searching for "atheist drug rehab" find the digg page with a link to my article.

Additional Tips

It's far better to digg several articles that get no vote than to spend forever trying to get something to the front page. Let the search engine promotion do the work for you. Do some time/benefit analysis and you'll see that simply submitting your articles to Digg and moving on is the way to go.