Photo by Iydurg.

It’s easy to get caught up discussing high-level Digg strategies and complicated metaphors, but it’s important not to lose sight of the things that make the advanced stuff worthwhile.

Without the ability to gather links, subscribers and comments, your blog can’t grow. These three basic things are the lifeblood of your blog. It’s essential to be reminded (every once and a while) of how you can keep that lifeblood flowing.

Let’s get back to basics!

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Photo by Andrew Eglington.

Effective use of time is the main ingredient in creating a thriving blog or website. In this post, I want to explain some high-impact traffic generating techniques you can use that minimize time and effort without minimizing results.

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Photo by Brett L.

1. The social media runaway train. Perhaps the most sought after (and least frequently attained) route to a popular blog is rapid ‘growth from above’ resulting from huge traffic spikes, most frequently originating from Digg. This route was traveled by blogs like Zen Habits (did you know Zen Habits has been on the Digg front page more than 80 times?) and The Art of Manliness.

Getting started on this path:
Why You’ve Got to Digg Digg to Get Dugg
The One True Cause of Rapid-fire Growth

2. Grassroots growth. The most common form of blog growth occurs at the grassroots, where blogs and bloggers at similar levels of development collaborate from the ground up. The central idea here is that a lot of little links are just as powerful as one big, top-down growth event. This is one of the most community-based approaches, though growth yielded through this route tends to be consistent and slow-burn.

Getting started on this path:
Hansel and Gretel Link-building

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The thought of making the front page of Digg is something that divides most content-creators into three camps: those who want it and strive for it, those who want it but feel they don’t have a chance, and those who don’t want it at all.

The latter group usually believes (from experience) that Digg traffic is worthless traffic, though I think it has more to do with the combination of that blog with Digg’s audience, or that content with Digg’s audience, which determines whether the event of being on the front page will be worthwhile.

Having gained several hundred subscribers each time this blog has been Dugg, and having enjoyed the snowball effect of going popular on Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon as well, my own experience paints a much more positive picture.

The rapid rise of blogs like The Art of Manliness, which has gone from a few hundred to 5,000+ subscribers in a matter of weeks, mainly on the strength of Digg, demonstrates that brushing aside Digg users as fickle and commitment phobic might just be the easy (and certainly not the best way) out.

In this post, I want to talk about the most often overlooked aspect of what is required to write content with strong potential on Digg (and the same principle applies to StumbleUpon, Reddit, or any other social media service you can imagine).

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Photo by Tengis

This post is a lesson borne out of a challenge I’ve been facing at the moment: a growth plateau. It started at around the time I began to experiment with an inward growth strategy without external promotion: I would write good posts, new audiences would find them through links and social media, and the blog would grow on the back of its content and existing audience alone — or so the theory goes.

It’s a strategy that goes against common advice — that you should constantly be searching out new audiences and promoting externally, whether by guest-posting or by calling upon social media networks.

The result of my experiments? They haven’t worked for me. My old promotional strategies yielded more subscribers in less time, and while the inward method is less time consuming, it seems to yield significantly less results.

The experience has taught me that good content, even with an established audience, needs to be shared with new audiences on regular basis, whether that’s by guest posting, asking for links, writing easily linkable posts or promoting content on social media. If you only look inward, your blog or website becomes a walled garden, and it’s much harder for new audiences to enter that space.

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