To Digg Or Not To Digg - That is the question

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Website In A Weekend recently had the 7 More WordPress Plugins You Need To Take Your Site To The Next Level stolen outright, posted on another site without attribution. I found it from the pingback when it was posted on Digg. That was a clue: time to dig into Digg: revive the moribund Digg account and get these articles posted.

First, I checked the Terms of Service to make sure posting your own articles was allowed. Here’s what I understood:

It’s fine to submit your own stuff.
It’s not fine to game the system.

Having a “digg party” is probably out of bounds, especially when used to game Digg ranking up very high. Intense activity in a relatively small network of people is pretty easy to catch.

On the other hand, if your interest in digg is as much to establish first publication, not get to the top page, it doesn’t look like the Terms of Service frown on that. If your friends subsequently digg you up, well, you’re not responsible for their behavior. A small number of people digging a small number of articles isn’t going to trigger too much concern.

When doing research on topics, it’s smart to Digg the articles you like, or digg up articles already listed on Digg. It costs you very little time, and helps authors get credit for the work they did. The authors can see who dugg their articles, and you may get the favor returned.

I read on someone’s marketing blog (can’t recall, will keep an eye out), that the typical Digg user isn’t a very good customer anyway. This marketer reported practically zero conversions from people referred in from Digg. So no need to spend much time on it. Contrary evidence welcome!