Digg has an immense amount of traffic and getting landed on the front page will send a tsunami of new readers to your blog or website, but getting onto the front page is incredibly difficult.
Getting onto the front page of a smaller, more appropriate niche portal, by contrast, is much easier, quicker, and ultimately you get a better return on your time/traffic ratio in the short run.
I have yet to determine the long run implications, although I am fairly certain that my high placement on DZone’s front page is what resulted in my 10+ Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers article being picked up by Lifehacker.
Here are 7 reasons why niche sites like DZone and DotNetKicks give you a better return on your time spent promoting/traffic ratio than Digg:
- Digg has a very hostile user base; niche sites have supportive ones – The more popular you are the more criticism you will be subject to.
Small communities are filled with passionate users who are genuinely interested in the specific subject covered by that site; Digg users are interested in a wide variety of topics, and if your article doesn’t meet their quality standards (or more accurately, your title; many of them never read the article), it’s the bury button for you.
In addition, any site that makes the front page of Digg is going to be subject to flames, but this is true for any really popular website; when my Firefox article made it to the front page of Lifehacker I was raked with some genuinely good suggestions but also there were a ton of dive-by readers who just wanted to take a pot shot at AjaxNinja.
- A lot of Diggers are in it for promoting themselves as power users – There are a number of Diggers who simply have egos; this is true of any online community. Some power users simply love the service and love spending time on it; others simply have nothing better to do; and others still simply want to feel important or feel that they have influence and attempt to do so by leveraging themselves against a large community of users.
The second and third types of power users are the ones who cause trouble; they’re not in it for legitimately helping everyone else, they’re in it for their own amusement or to advance their own agenda.
In a small niche community like DotNetKicks I don’t have to worry about Digg users who are PHP/Anti-Windows zealots burying my Phalanger article. My Phalanger article even made it to the front page of DZone, a community that has more than its fair share of PHP users, but since DZone doesn’t have a bunch of Anti-MS power users hell-bent on burying anything that makes MS look good, I still made it to the front page.
- Digg has too broad of an audience – Digg is great if you’re a blogger who comments on news, liberal politics (you will NEVER see a Little Green Footballs article appear on the front page of Digg), Ubuntu Linux, offbeat news, life tips, the occasional SEO article, iPhones, or random photographs, but if you write about something outside of that realm then you’re not going to get much of a following from Digg unless your article is exceptionally good.
update:A reader on Sphinn has pointed out that LGF has actually made it to the front page as recently as 43 days ago. Duly noted.
Take a look at at the front page of Digg’s programming section. Upon writing this some of those “popular” articles have been up there for over 20 days; this indicates to me that the world of Digg/Programming is not very fast-paced or happening. Take a look at the Digg/Programming/Upcoming section too; many of the “hot” articles have less than 10 votes. My article on Phalanger, which was buried, had 16 diggs and it generated maybe 30 unique visits total.
That same article made it to the front page of DZone and DotNetKicks within a day or two of me posting it, and they stayed there for approximately 24 hours.
- Digg’s high volume of stories makes it hard to get noticed – Unless you have a ton of traffic to your blog naturally, it’s going to be hard for users to find your article when it hits page 2,3, or 4 of the “upcoming” section of the appropriate category within a few hours of your submission; this is especially true for programming, where there are more articles submitted than there are people who Digg them.
DZone and DotNetKicks have a much lower volume of stories and it’s a lot easier to get yours noticed once you add it to their list of new submissions. The readers of DZone and DotNetKicks simply have less shit to filter through.
- Digg’s categories are too broad – There is no category for ASP.NET, PHP development, or Facebook Application Development; there is simply “programming.” This means that if you’re hoping that Digg users will find your article in the programming section of Digg, then they’re going to need to not only be interested in programming, but Diggers interested in your kind of development specifically.
Niche sites are already governed into one general category, like DZone is all about software development in general and DotNetKicks is about .NET development, but they also give you a more fine-grained amount of control through additional sub-categories; this makes it easier for interested readers to find your works in their listings.
- Digg is not transparent; we don’t know why some stories get buried – One of my recent free-lance pieces on health and fitness that I wrote for Dumb Little Man was initially Dugg by one of Digg’s most powerful users, Mr. Baby Man and it received 40-60 votes within a 4 hour Window of submission. That’s more than enough to appear on the Hot section for Digg/Health/Upcoming, but the article never appeared there. Dumb Little Man is one of the most popular blogs out there (top 1000 in Technorati.)
Update Jay White of Dumb Little Man wrote me this morning to inform me that while Digg’s algorithm is a bit odd, DLM made it to the front page as recently as last week.
Tamar Weinberg wrote a great letter to Kevin Rose addressing some of these transparency issues with Digg and I’d recommend giving that a read.
However, I’d like to point out that niche sites like DZone and DotNetKicks are VERY transparent; you can even download the source code for DotNetKicks. With DZone you can see how many people looked at the article, how many people clicked the link, how many voted it up, and how many voted it down. DotNetKicks adjusted the front page of the site based upon how long it’s been up there, although the Kicks do help. There’s no secret sauce behind most niche portals.
- In order to improve your effectiveness and visibility on Digg, you have to invest a lot of time into its social network – A lot of SEO sites out there recommend building “power accounts” on major social media sites like Digg and Reddit. While I believe that networking with other people with similar interests is a great thing (it’s actually one of the things I enjoy most about StumbleUpon), I don’t believe that bloggers, companies, and website owners should have to invest HOURS into using Digg like it’s World of Warcraft.
Bloggers should be spending as much time possible reading, researching, and coming up with interesting material to write about, not methodically gaming a social network for leverage. If you spend a lot of time using social networks because you enjoy using them, then go for it.
If you’re willing to spend hours tweaking your site for search engine optimization, why not spend some of that time building up a social network?
- I don’t have to spend any time building up a social network if I use niche sites to drive interested readers to my content and
- people who use search engines are not casual browsers; Google users are users with intent and they will click on my advertisements at a much higher rate than social media users.
In a nutshell, I think using small Niche sites to promote your content will not only save you a lot of trouble, but I think ultimately you’ll find more interested readers rather than casual browsers from niche sites.
If you want to find a niche social network for your blog or social network, I suggest you look at my article, 30+ Media Sites for Promoting Your Blog.
Add me to your social networks
If you want to add me as a friend I’ll go ahead and friend you back.
Update: Corrected some typos; I was in a rush for boxing practice when I wrote the last bullets :p
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Comments 18
Some good insights and all true.
dugg by me
Posted 13 Sep 2007 at 10:32 am ¶Thanks for the comment!
And for the Digg. Wouldn’t it be ironic if this article made it to the front page? I guess my next post would be “Well…. shit.”
Posted 13 Sep 2007 at 10:38 am ¶Update: within 30 minutes of digging we got our first overly hostile comment on Digg! Horay!
Posted 13 Sep 2007 at 11:09 am ¶Digg’s days numbered. There is way too many negative/know-it-all people over there… f-them
Posted 13 Sep 2007 at 11:21 am ¶Techcrunch posted a site that looks more user-friendly then Digg, and Arrington seems intrigued by it.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/13/mixx-to-take-a-new-look-at-social-news/#comments
Within minutes of posting, the first “diggnation” hostility came out, LOL. Drives home point #1 completely!
http://www.mixx.com is the URL
Posted 13 Sep 2007 at 2:52 pm ¶Thanks for the link Bluedog! I went ahead and threw my two cents on TechCrunch.
Posted 13 Sep 2007 at 6:37 pm ¶I think you’re missing the point of the power of Digg though. It’s not about getting to the front page of Digg, it’s about being able to leverage it’s power for higher ranking in Google. See Google likes Digg and will list Diggs up fairly high in the niche listings. So if you are blogging about ‘underwater rats’ and your blog is ranking 500 (are there that many searches for this?) and you get one of your articles dugg, that article might come in at the #13 listing on a Google search, therefore indirectly driving readers to your blog. Social Posting is not about the network you’re posting on as much as how well Google likes that network.
Posted 14 Sep 2007 at 6:11 am ¶Very good points. I’d like to add that if a social network for your niche doesn’t exist yet then why not start your own with Ning?
http://www.ning.com/
Even if it doesn’t become the next Digg (or even the next Netscape, I mean Propeller) it’s worth it for some links.
Posted 14 Sep 2007 at 7:37 am ¶@Stacy,
That is an excellent point.
@Anthony,
Again, great point; the only problem is the chicken and the egg with social networks – you’ve got to have some momentum to get the thing rolling. It’s not impossible but it may be time-consuming.
Posted 14 Sep 2007 at 8:31 am ¶Great article. This one should be on your list too. http://www.spinsnap.com
It’s similar to Stumbleupon, but depends less on power users and is more of a level playing field.
Posted 14 Sep 2007 at 12:06 pm ¶Nice write up.
I gave up on Digg/Programming a while ago. At first it was okay, but something happened in the last year or so and all programmers must have just went over to reddit, DZone, DNK, etc.
Posted 14 Sep 2007 at 4:17 pm ¶All good comments, in fact I gave up on Digg for health and medical news because it was all so broad and not broken into categories and started another site with some friends (meddlinks.com). I’m guessing we’ll start seeing a rise in niche social networking sites, but nothing like what Digg is.
Posted 15 Sep 2007 at 8:38 pm ¶We’re actually developing a digg alternative as we speak. It’s been live for just over a month now and has actually had over 300,000 unique visitors thus far. The site is http://www.tagsum.com
We’re focused on making social media more social. Digg added it’s social networking features, but really they just made it easier to game the system (seriously, just by adding hundreds of friends and shout spamming I got over 20 articles on the front page of digg in a one week period).
Anyhow, we don’t want to do what digg has done. Everything is tag based so you can create the narrow niches that truely fit your submissions. I nthe control panel we have friend feeds so you can keep an eye on what your circle of friends is doing on the site. We have a full featured private messaging system, and real profiles complete with a drag and drop photo gallery system. Keep an eye on our site over the coming months as we continue development (oh, and we actually have a picture section unlike digg )
Posted 23 Oct 2007 at 10:11 am ¶Hey Brian,
I sent you an email too but I figured I’d reply to you here also. I went ahead and signed up and I’m going to submit a couple of things. I have a quick question though, is Tagsum ONLY for submitting news items exclusively? What about just popular items that regular users might be interested in, like how-to and do-it-yourself articles? It seems like Tagsum is directed more towards news.
Posted 25 Oct 2007 at 10:48 pm ¶Thank you for joining up and giving me some feedback.
As far as the content goes, you can submit anything you like. The members that are there have been submitting quite a bit of mainstream news, but we specifically designed the site to use tags instead of categories so our members can submit anything they are interested in, and keep it easy to find. Doing a quick tag search in the search bar for DIY returns these for example http://www.tagsum.com/news/search?q=diy&t=tags . We have a feature coming soon where you will be able to subscribe to tags that interest you. So for example if you are only interested in football, cars, and diy projects, you will be able to subscribe to those and have that info delivered straight to you.
Posted 26 Oct 2007 at 7:22 am ¶Very useful article. This is my first visit I will be bookmarking your blog… Thanks!
Posted 29 Jun 2008 at 12:08 am ¶Good post, we hope you are right as we are putting a great deal of effort in developing a family of niche social bookmark sites. The first up are http://www.keecricket.com , for the cricket fan and http://www.keemedia.net for the Pr professional. Many more to follow
Posted 28 Mar 2009 at 3:43 pm ¶I totally agree with you. In fact id like to recommend a site dotnetshoutout.com which is similar to dotnetkicks as the name suggests for .net programmers.
Posted 09 Apr 2009 at 12:55 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 6
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