It’s no secret that getting a story or post on your site or blog promoted to the front page of Digg.com can lead to a sudden influx of traffic… and a lot of traffic. Digg traffic has even been known to crash servers from time to time. A lot of webmasters and bloggers publish stories just for the purpose of trying to get their hands on some of that Digg traffic. Is it a smart idea or a waste of time in the long haul? Is Digg marketing here to stay, or is it just another one for the fad marketing column?

How it Works:

The idea behind Digg is that users will come across interesting stories on the Web, and “digg” them, or basically vote for them. The stories with the most votes are listed on Digg’s home page. The purpose is essentially to let the users of the site decide what stories are newsworthy, as opposed to an editorial team. It puts the power in the hands of the users.

It wasn’t long before Digg was popular enough that stories listed on the home page were receiving massive amounts of traffic from Digg users wanting to check them out. Now webmasters and bloggers write stories, add them to Digg (or hope their users do by adding Digg buttons to their sites), and hope they get enough votes to make it to the Digg homepage to get a slice of that traffic pie.

Fad or Fab?

FAD - Here’s why – There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Digg, often due to the fact that the same users had been repeatedly gaining the home page positions when submitting stories (by allegedly forming Digg groups to digg each others’ stories when each of them posts), among other things. Digg is another example of a great idea that’s been corrupted in some ways and twisted for promotional use by the webmaster community – something that group is quite good at.

While there’s no argument that Digg can lead to a lot of traffic, and quickly, posting to Digg simply isn’t a solid marketing strategy long-term. There are a few reasons for this:

• Digg itself doesn’t want the service used entirely for self-promotional purposes. Any time the service itself is fighting the marketing tactic, there’s just no long-term potential. A marketing technique can’t have staying power if it’s always going to have to find its way “around the rules.”
• The more self-promotional Digg seems to become, the less users on the site will actually care about any story on the home page that isn’t their own. Rather than users actually interested in hot news stories, you run the risk of the bulk of users being there just to promote stories rather than to actually click and read them.
• The traffic from Digg isn’t that valuable anyway, in a lot of cases. There’s a heavy tech-oriented userbase, so sites targeting audiences such as webmasters might do alright, but sites not dealing with tech or entertainment aren’t going to get a great ROI on their time by attracting that same tech audience. That audience tends to be the most ad-blind, meaning it’s unlikely that traffic would convert to ad clicks for those monetizing sites that way. Even when selling ads on your site independently, based on traffic, you often have to justify that traffic. Showing the bulk of traffic coming from sites like Digg demonstrates less of a value to advertisers, potentially pushing your ad rates lower, at least with advertisers that understand the system and habits of those users.

Overall, Digg is great as an ego-boosting tool, but doesn’t lend itself well to being a quality long-term marketing tactic. While some of that traffic can certainly be monetized, you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that sites doing well by Digg couldn’t be doing even better by turning their marketing attention elsewhere.