For lots of bloggers, Digg is one of the top referrers for blogs. There are other social networks, not as big as Digg is, but worth submitting your articles. Before you start submitting your articles, there are several points to think about.

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There are several ways and techniques to help people submit your articles to one, or all, social media site. But that’s not everything you need to do in order to make people remark your articles. In order to make your articles just pop out of the crowd, we must do something special.

While writing your posts

It all starts, once you start writing your posts. There are several types of articles that stand out of the crowd on itself, we don’t have to improve them. But most of the articles will, without some special care, never go popular.

What should you do, when you’re aiming for succes on social media websites;

• Give critics to well known people/sites in the world, as they are popular they are likely to have fans. Fans seem to be attracted to critics on what they adore. The best known example is giving critics on Apple. Apple fanboys just don’t cope with critics addressed to their favorite manufacturer and your post will get lots of exposure.
• Praise Apple to heaven, instead of giving critique. Hit the Apple fans again, but this time by being on their side. When you praise a product of Apple, or discover a cool new feature, most Apple fans will vote instantly. Make sure you name the brand, in your title.
• Use lists, enumerations and lists again, as they seem to get popular instantly on social media. Posts like “8.000 free fonts” or “Free premium Wordpress themes” will strike like a bomb.
• Write about the social network itself, as most networks are totally in love with themselves. Critique will work too, but be carefull. Critique could damage you’re reputation.

What you should not do, what has been done thousands of times;

• Write articles about scoring on social networks, this has been done several times and will not work. Yes, I do write about it in this article, but this article isn’t aimed at social media.
• Write old news, social networks recieve thousands of posts daily. It is not likely that old news will hit the frontpage. Try to be the first submitting hot news instead!

Once you go submitting

The article is done and published, you have arranged a small hype around it via friends on MSN, Twitter whatever and the article is ready to be submitted to the networks. Before you do that, read through the following tips.

• Ask a few friends to give the initial votes, as 10 votes looks far better than 1 vote. Other people will get attracted to the article, when they see it gets lots of votes. Hopefully they’ll vote aswell.
• Spread the initial votes, to make them count for real. Most algorithms detect the initial stream of votes and will give less value to the initial votes. By spreading the votes of your friends, you will make the article rise gradual.

There are a few things you should not do, once you go submitting;

• Don’t submit the article yourself, as experienced users of social networks will notice you promoting your own articles.

While we’re waiting

Now the article has been submitted and you’ve done everything you could. But while we’re waiting for the votes to roll in, we have several things to do.

• Ask your friends to vote, but don’t beg for it. As begging for votes will likely harm your reputation, act cool and behave like you would do normal. Asking people to vote is considered ‘normal’, but begging is way out of limits.
• Install a plugin, to make it more easy to vote. Visitors from social network tend to be more lazy as normal visitors, so make it as easy as possible. To do this, we have several (Wordpress) plugins, like the Sociable plugin that recently got updated by Joost de Valk. For each blogging software, there are plugins that will do exactly the same as this one.

For all readers that want to support this article, feel free to Digg it. I do have to follow some of my own guidelines, don’t I? This Digg button will make your vote count, so what are you waiting for?

After all, this articles does seem to be aimed at social media, aww…

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