We are getting close on have a Firefox 3 compatible version of Social Media for Firefox. We are sorry it wasn’t ready with the FF 3 launch but it is coming and it is going to be sick. We have taken the opportunity to add some upgrades. Here are some quick features we are working on if you happen to have any additions you think would make it be an even better tool we are all about it and please add in the comments.

We are looking into
> Showing Thumb Up, Down and Review Counts for StumbleUpon and let you choose which combo to display
> Adding Mixx and Sphinn
> Letting You Choose Which Sites to Have Displayed in the Bar
> Adding some really cool social news hubs to be able to scan the content but I don’t want to release the sites yet as we are testing and I don’t want to get people hopes up.
> We are thinking about Taking out Del.icio.us they have made some upgrades so we are testing but if we release right away it will be out as it never works and their API is not supported very well. We can always add back in.

Again any other ideas please send them over the tool has had near 100,000 downloads and we plan on making it even better.

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Despite the huge audience and Brand that Digg has it is still widely misunderstood by new users. I get so many emails and talk to a lot of people all saying things like, “I submitted my homepage to Digg and no one voted on it?.” So I hope this article can help you understand the the process of a successful Digg which should also help you in understanding why only good content makes it and how it makes it.

This is not a how to spam article, this is an article that will hopefully help you better understand the life of your stories on Digg. If you better understand the stories and the process you can increase your chances for a front page Digg. This is from my experience this isn’t written in stone and with that if you have any additions or comments to add please do.

Within the 24 hour time span that your story is allotted to reach the front page of Digg there are different milestones that it needs to reach to better it’s chances at “Going Popular”. This article will discuss what I feel from my experience are the most important milestones in order.

1.) Hot In Your Sub Category:
If you submit a story to Science > Environment, your very first goal is to get it into the Hot Up and Coming Sidebar for Environment. This is done by getting a good amount of Diggs right off the start to separate your story from the rest of the pack, but even more importantly you need Diggs from non friends or those that don’t often digg your stories. Getting Diggs from from users that don’t frequent your stories is the best way for a story to grow in a way that is pleasing to the almighty algorithm.

This can be tough for a new user, a lot of people think that when starting out on Digg your story is automatically in front of thousands of users who will vote for or against it. This is not true, in fact unless you submit a story from a very popular website or blog and they have some sort of Digg Button on the site notifying the readers that it has been Dugg your story will be seen by virtually no one unless you have friends.

The most important thing before starting to submit stories is to go interact on the site and Digg stories from categories you like, then add the users that submitted those stories to your friend list and get involved in the community.

How do you get Diggs from non friends? I’m not going to go into all the hows there are a lot of ways both positive and negative in terms of how the algorithm sees it. It seems like for the most part users are using shouts, but you can also send out emails, IM’s, twitters etc. whether you think that is legit or not is up to you. The black and white of it is you shouldn’t pay for Diggs. Getting Diggs from “non friends” is really important as it makes your site look more “viral” or “natural” in that users that don’t have any interest in you as a user are voting positively for the article. The quicker you can get on up and coming hot for your sub category the quicker you can start to get in front of a larger audience on Digg and hopefully attracting more votes from early on. When first perfecting your Digg skills your first priority should getting on “Hot” for your category as quickly as possible as this will always place your story in front of more Digg users

2.) Hot Up and Coming Main Category:
This is the next step in your stories progression. Again if you submitted to Science > Environment and your story has been on the Hot Sidebar in Environment for the last couple hours you now want to make sure your story gets on the Hot Sidebar of Science to reach more concentration of users. You will see here that the avg votes are higher than that of the Hot for the subcategory as you are now competing with all the subcategory stories in one place. You will need more Diggs to get here and again a good ration of friends vs. non friends is essential. If you look at the stories that have 20 Diggs and under that make the “Hot” section of a parent category they have virtually no friends that have Dugg the story. Whereas there maybe other stories with 72 Diggs not on “Hot” yet because 68 of them are from mutual friends.

You want your story to reach this status as quickly as possible as there will be a much larger audience viewing your story which can get you more votes if the story is any good. Try to do it before the 12 hour half way mark if you can, giving an additional day of being on the side bar. This is really the first time your story will start to reach the make it or break it status, watch the comments and you can look at buries at the Bury Recorder to get a feel for how the community likes the story but more importantly the headline and description. When you are on the side bar your headline is all that shows as the snippet of the story, this and a thumbnail is the sole reason people will click through to view the rest of the story, so it has to be tight and good. I recommend the “Inverted Pyramid” method for most stories. If your Title is misleading or showing the story out of context in hopes to get more votes you will get buries for this. When I first started out on Digg I used to think this was needed and every time my story got in front of a lot of people they started to bury and comment on the Title being misleading and the story would die. Think of ways to succinctly tell the entire story in a few powerful words.

3.) Up and Coming Most/Hot in All Topics:
The last milestone to the stories growth is reaching “Hot in All Topics” and the “Up and Coming All Most” page. This is where the most Diggers will see you prior to a front page, this is where you can see your story grow 60 votes in 30 minutes. There are a lot of people that subscribe to these pages and or come to the site with these pages as the main pages to scan and look for good stories that are not front page yet. To get here your story has often passed the test of a decent title, good amount of comments and a lot of natural Diggs.

There are some exceptions as far as passing the test for the Up and Coming All Most page you can spam your way to that page with nothing but friend or bought votes you will see stories there that are 4 ours old with 180 votes all from users that are 2 days old, but it is just a matter of time before the right amount of people bury them. You don’t need a good ratio of friends to non friends to make this page, but you will to go Front Page so it is important you have it nonetheless.

The most important part of reaching this page is to do it quickly because again you will be in front of more users that are not your friends and if they like the story and vote on it your story will increase it’s chances on reaching the front page. It is best to try and reach this with 12 hours left or earlier but that isn’t always the case. if you can reach this by at least 15 hours you will still have 8 hours left in front of a larger audience.

Those are what I feel should be your 3 main targets or goals as you are promoting your stories, again I am not condoning spam, and it doesn’t really matter if I was cause the Digg community is getting larger and much better at burying spam and crap. On the Getting Votes from non friends again things that can legitimately help are opening up your shouts to all and then shouting to people that are not mutual friends. Shouting is what I think Digg made to answer people sending IM’s and emails, they know you are going to share the story regardless so why not do it through the site and in a way that will drive more page views to Digg. Also if you have “real life friends” that use Digg don’t add each other to your friends list and help each other out, but I also think it would be really easy for an algorithm to see voting patterns whether they are from friends or not so this would not work one very story if all you do was Vote each others back and forth.

If you need help finding good content to submit to Digg use the Social Media for Firefox Plugin it has been downloaded over 50,000 times and has helped hundreds of people build really good accounts at the different social sites.

Other Posts on Social Media:
- 12 Tips to Making the Front Page of the “New Digg” (Humor Kind Of)

- How To Research Your Social Media Campaign

- Viral Marketing for Boring Industries

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter or follow Matt Siltala on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status.

I am sure you have read or listened to the hoopla going on over at Digg, If you haven’t to sum it up, Digg wants to even the playing field by tweaking the algorithm so that every submitter not just users with a lot of active friends can make the homepage. A lot of top users are seeing their stories die never hitting the front page with near or over 200 diggs while new users are hitting the front page with under 30 diggs. Last year in order to get to the front page you would sign up for the long haul, by digging and commenting others stories until you were noticed by enough users, then submit quality content and watch how close you get, then rinse and repeat (in a one sentence nut shell). This year you need to be more creative no more using Digg for the social aspect, no more late night chats about the natural high you get when playing the game that is Digg. If you are like most up and coming “middle class Diggers” (Hat Tip to Reg) seeing your stories mysteriously buried at 18 diggs after an hour, or hitting 189 diggs in 7 hours with a super sweet timely submission only to watch it die at 210 then you may want to try these tips.

1.) New Account - First log out of digg, clear your cache, cookies etc. then reset your IP settings to get a new fresh IP. Then go sign up for a brand new account, “diggorama”, “diggalicious”, “diggorati” any of those could be a sweet user name (if anyone has those I apologize, I made those up just now).

2.) No Avatar - Do not add an avatar, an avatar that you use on other social sites is social remember we need not to be social to succeed and adding an avatar is a sure sign of an “in for the long haul” digger, we are trying to look “Natural” here.

3.) LOLCats - Go digg some LOLCat stories there are plenty, make sure you don’t digg any pages that are deep down, no up and coming, no up and coming all/most nothing that would make your account look like you know how to use digg. Stick to the front page and subsequent front page archives. You can get away with the Top Ten FP’s in all topics widget on the right side.

4.) Submit - Now that you have dugg a dog licking a screen, an Anti Giuliani, and 250 Ron Paul Stories you are ready to submit. If you are having a hard time finding that great story first from a quality blog or trusted news source, go to a top diggers submission page, and grab a story that he has submitted that has 60 diggs in 3 hours and submit it with your account. Don’t worry the Digg Dupe engine will never catch it.

5.) Beg - Lastly since you can’t get any diggs from friends here are some tactics of scrounging up enough diggs to make the front page. Remember you only need 18-35 diggs so it can’t be too hard.

6.) Cover Your Tracks - Clear Cache, Cookies etc., reset IP, create new user name then digg the story and rinse and repeat (this will also give you 35 “Quality” accounts to use for your next submit. Remember when you make the front page you will get a lot of fans and they will start to digg your stories and you will never make the front page again.

7.) Be a Good Neighbor - Knock on your neighbors houses and ask to use their computer real quick.

8.) Caffeine - Hit up every Starbucks or Cyber Cafe in your town, you could probably get it done in about 5 1/2 hours since you aren’t a top user praying at 23 hours and 58 minutes

9.) You’ve Got Mail - Email your mom, dad, brothers, sisters, friends and everyone that doesn’t know what digg is and tell them to sign up then digg your story, then send you their login to use for a later.

10.) RSS - this is actually probably the most realistic, dump all your friends on your old account or use that new account with no avatar, and set up RSS alerts for all your old friends and have them do the same for you, just don’t comment on their submissions that would leave bread crumbs.

11.) Airports - Grab an Amex (to get rewards) and hit up every terminal in the airport

12.) Outsource - Use a Freelance site to hire some overseas diggs. Pay them 2 cents to digg your story. Actually since the Dollar is so crappy you may have to pay a lot more, but hey you are trying to get the FP so that your blogspot sub domain will have a chance at the digg effect.

I am sure I could think of more, if you have any please leave them in the comments. If you don’t believe the above read the comments of this story with a screen shot of a story going FP with 19 diggs. Maybe this is a way to get every digg user to have 5 accounts so that the investment banks can say we have 15 million registered users instead of 3 million or whatever it is.

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Some might consider it a blessing to be able to see everything as a marketing opportunity (as I do), but sometimes I wonder if its a curse.

Let me explain -

Here is a picture of my son I took the other day with my iPhone (thus the sucky quality - sorry) of something my son had discovered to be one of the “funnest” things he had ever done (his words). He decided this all on his own too, that going down a steep hill in his Tonka truck would be a good idea:

Just looking at the picture, it looks like a normal picture of a kid having fun with a toy, right? Well here is the problem for me. I look at this picture, and my mind starts to race, and gets flooded with so many marketing ideas that I think I am going to explode if I don’t act.

The very first thing that comes to my mind is this - I may have a client selling children’s toys, and what I start to think about is how I can use this to better market their site, make it go viral, build links, and of course - trust. For example - finding 9 other uses for a Tonka truck (besides the one pictured) and trust me, my son has about 20 other uses of that Truck that I think Tonka had not intended. Then, I can create some amazing content for a blog post worthy of building up a ton of links - “10 Uses Of Tonka Trucks They Never Intended [PICS INCLUDED]” and it would probably end up being pretty dang funny post that would get lots of attention.

Now don’t get my wrong, I can appreciate a funny picture of my son without thinking about some way to monetize it, but I just wanted to share with you a little insight to how our (Chris and I) brains work. We have blogged in the past that anyone can find a way to make their topic go viral (even for a boring industry), and all it takes is a little creative thinking (just like this with this picture).

Hopefully this makes sense, and you see my point of just thinking outside the box in order to take advantage of marketing opportunities. I guess I am lucky to have the kind of son I have, as he is ALWAYS giving me more then enough ideas to be able to go viral with!

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Over the past month I have read a lot of blogs talking about horror stories of their premium content that they took weeks even months to write getting submitted by social media users that have poor quality accounts. They go on to talk about how they get jacked because the person submitting has no friends or they don’t know how to submit and their articles go no where but to the abyss of the dead pool.

Easy Solution: Change the URL
The solution is very easy, most of you know this I am sure, but I saw no one saying this in their posts or comments about how they had giving up hope on a particular blog post. If it gets submitted and goes no where, then change the URL, 301 Redirect the old URL and then submit it through a decent account. If you story gets 70 Diggs and is 5 articles from the front page on Up and Coming and doesn’t make it then you may be screwed, as a lot of people will have seen it and you will get buried for trying again. It can work though, you just wait long enough and vary the title and description :). If the story goes to the land of “One Voters” then resubmit it right away and reap the benefits. As your blog grows in readers this will happen more and more, just know that on the super premium content you don’t have to give up hope.

I don’t care what you say there is one thing that is an absolute about promoting content on social sites, and that is if you don’t have a good account with others watching your submissions, you will get nothing to the front page. The only exception would be you if the blog you submit is very popular with thousands of active readers, and they had the Digg this button on the site after you submitted it, enabling the readers to vote it from the site instead of on Digg or any others. It wont go popular on Digg or Reddit unless there are others to Read it and vote. The content has to be given the chance to be voted and if there are no friends watching or the story doesn’t make Hot in Up and Coming in it’s category then no one will see it.

Now StumbleUpon you can get by with a lesser account as the submission will get put in front of some people through the tool bar but if you are a lesser account it will need the Thumb Up of a power user or two in order to gain the traction you want. What can happen in SU like in the link int he first paragraph, is most people that are starting out don’t know how to use the category tags the right way. This will destroy a good submission. What usually happens is they go super quick and use a suggestion from SU on some super competitive tag, or they don’t think about the real content and submit it to a not so popular category.

One tip you can do at SU is if you have your own site, submit it then watch the traffic, and if it isn’t that good (in the hundreds) then edit your submission and switch some tags and categories and see if it improves. Rinse and repeat and you can get a good idea of what works. We once submitted a story on a blog related to surfing but about Eco-Friendly stuff, it was originally submitted to the surfing category, got maybe 150 visits in two days, we switched it to environment, and it exploded, new subscribers, comments, links and thousands of visits.

If you have a lesser account work on building up a trusted network of friends before submitting, then start with high profile news sites etc to test out your account. This way you will build your account faster and won’t burn the blogger trying to make a living from home in the meantime.

*Edit: I have been getting some hate on this from people that say they have “lesser” accounts at social sites. This post is not to rag on someone with an up and coming account. Everyone starts out with a junk account. This post if for content writers who unfortunately might have someone with no friends submit their stuff to social news, where it stays at one vote for it’s entire life span.

This is also not tips about submitting duplicate content, is it really duplicate content if no one but the submitter reads it?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter or follow Matt Siltala on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status.

You can use Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Mixx to increase your sites traffic, links, and branding which has a result on your bottom line, you can network in Facebook, Linkedin or Myspace to get more leads and referrals, but, what can you do to make a buck with Twitter?

Twitter users out there I’m sorry if I offend, but I am too busy to use anything just to tell my long lost cousin where I got my lunch, I am too busy to do anything online that doesn’t have a direct result in ROI for my business, projects or clients, thus I have never seen the need to sign up for Twitter. The only way I have heard about monetizing Twitter has been things where people link to a coupon with an affiliate link to something they supposedly did.

I was thinking about some possible new strategies the other day to leverage Twitter to drive a lot of traffic, followers and hopefully $$ back to you. These are not tested, and if someone has tried it I would love for them to post in the comments what they did and if they saw any direct result to their bottom line.

This could work for a lot of industries, I’m going to lay it out in seo and real estate, but the idea is the same for virtually any industry.

Make a Name in SEO
If you are an up and coming seo/viral marketer and you have some serious skills but you don’t have the rockstar status yet, you could set up a twitter account with one purpose, to track every single step and decision you make in order to market a site to the number one spot in Google.

This will only work if you have serious skills, but what you would do is pick a super competitive industry like Cancer, or Work at home, etc… and start with everything from keyword research to domain registration. Every day after you tweak a page, get a new link, front page digg etc… list it in Twitter. You would have to be see through so if you buy a link from Yahoo Directory, or “negotiate” a new link make sure you talk about it. Say, “I just got 6 links, one sitewide, 3 contextual, and two footers and I used these anchored texts…”

You wouldn’t have to give out the domain to start instead you could do a weekly or monthly update on the traffic and ranking changes and then when it reaches the top 3 you release the domain so all can see. This could generate a lot of buzz in itself, if you start saying, “I’m number 8 after 3 months I should be able to release the domain in a couple of weeks stay tuned.” People will make sure they check back often to grab whatever tid bit of info they could use to better their rankings.

It is an idea, but I bet a lot of people would subscribe to it, and watch it. I wanted to do this myself but we are just too busy and we are already getting more business then we could ever want. If I did do it I would do it with nothing but bought links and directories or something controversial like that, to get more attention and to prove that I could get something top 3 with nothing but paid links.

Real Estate and Other Industries
This could work for a real estate investor that wants to sell consulting or coaching. Set up Twitter to show every call you make, from finding the deal, to visiting the property and securing a loan. Tell it all, “I visited 4 properties today, here is what I found….” Despite what you think about the current real estate market I have some close friends that are killing it right now, making a lot of money, if they wanted to sell that knowledge they could promote it on a day to day site like Twitter.

This could work with a service business franchise, or web design, or really almost anything if you tweaked it right. You could do it for weight loss, or endurance training. It would work for cooking, or stock trading.

You could document your day to day activities on building a powerful Digg or SU account from scratch.

Dugg 50 Stories, half from friends 10:15 am

Added 7 new friends 10:45 am

Became a Fan of 10 top 1000 Diggers 11:15 am

Submitted 3 Stories, 1 from NY Times, 1 on Ron Paul :), 1 random site I saw on Reddit, Did this using Social Media For Firefox (shameless plug) 12:10 pm

Dugg 200 Stories, started with friend submissions, went through FP’s for the last 2 days. 1:10 pm

Deleted 5 friends that have not been active in over 30 days. 1:35 pm

My stories are just over an hour old, NY Times has 12 diggs, Ron Paul reached the front page :), Random Site has 6 diggs. 1:40 pm

My stories are not on up and coming yet, but all have 39 plus diggs, maybe too many friends vs non friends ratio. Need to send some emails 12:30 pm

Like I said I have never used Twitter as a publisher, I have read other Twitter pages, but I am no expert on it, if there is such a thing. I thought this idea had some merit and I am too busy to do it, so I thought I would share it.