I’ve written previously about how useless it is to have a large number of social bookmarking icons at the end of every post. In that post I also suggested that you occasionally ask your readers to digg or bookmark your story on a particular site. But that doesn’t always work.
Case in point: Rich Schefren’s announcement of his Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 being released. In his blog post he asks his readers to vote for the post on various social bookmarking sites. Despite a lot of traffic - more than 20,000 downloads of the report in the first 24 hours, and over 200 comments on the post - it looks like he only received three (3) Diggs.
You could say that you first have to give something before you can receive. But in this particular case Rich gave away great information big-time before he asked for the favor of a Digg.
I think it comes down to the fact that people don’t like being told what to do. This is especially true for Digg which portrays itself as a grassroots system that highlights news stories in a very democratic way. You also need to make sure that your story fits the profile of of the social media site that you’re targeting. Spend some time on the site and look at the types of stories that become popular. One of my favorite examples from Digg is this story from someone shopping at an Apple store at 3 am. The story consists of mostly photographs of an empty store. Huh? I’m not suggesting that you go down to your local 7-Eleven at 3 am and take pictures. But the type of stories that become popular are not always the ones you’d expect.
Have you had any success in asking your readers to Digg your stories? What do you attribute your success to? A real good viral story? A loyal readership? Comments are open.
On a related note take a look at this story on how one active Digg user thinks the Digg algorithm works. It provides a lot of insight into what happens after your story has been Dugg.
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