Tuning Content For the Digg Audience
In my last article on Social Media I said getting more Digg traffic means understanding and appealing to the peculiarities of the Digg audience without alienating your own.
What do Digg users like?
- Pro Apple, Anti-Microsoft
- Pro Open Source, especially Linux, especially Ubuntu
- Anti George Bush, pro Ron Paul
- At least half seem to be Atheist, or at least anti-creationist
- Big on gadgets … iPhone, Wii and Xbox 360, PS3 not so much
- Webmastering, Freelance Design, Programming and Photography
- Anything mentioning Kevin Rose, Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart
- Cheeky/NSFW, especially celebrity NSFW (edited, originally had “Nudity” but “cheeky” is perhaps more appropriate)
- Geek TV and cinema, such as Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Lost, 24, Heroes
- Anti “The Man”, hate DRM, RIAA, Rupert Murdoch/Fox News …
Connect your topic somehow to bashing Fox News, containing celebrity nudity, or top 10 ways X is like a Heroes character and you will get more votes. Basically if it will appeal to a middle class white male teenage/college geek, then you are probably going to do ok!
Rather than just talk about theory, here are a few examples of articles that succeeded.
- Codswallop is the blog of Cogniview, most famous for their PDF to Excel product. They are all about productivity tools and Digg users love to find new software recommendations, so I came up with Top 10 Tools I Can’t Live Without
- Start Cooking is obviously a cooking blog, how did Raj and his team come up with a concept to appeal to Diggers? Food + Games = Top 23 Snacks for All-Night Gaming
- Copyblogger has been on the front page of Digg many times but I think the best successes come when the articles appeal to webmasters, designers and writers of all types, such as Does Telling Someone to “Click Here” Actually Matter?
- There are a lot of Freelancers using Digg, how can you make your topic appeal to them? I did the obvious thing and wrote My Top 5 Biggest Freelancing Mistakes for Freelance Folder
How have you tuned your content to make it appeal to Digg users? Can you think of other topics Digg users like? Let me know in the comments …
