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 Paul Worthington

I thought I’d take a little time out from our regular content flow to write some follow-up thoughts on the post ‘Why Great Writing Doesn’t Matter Online‘. It’s something that many of you had mixed feelings about and I seem not to have made myself as clear as I would have liked. When an argument is read in a dozen different ways by a dozen different people — intelligent people, too — that’s usually the writer’s fault, and I take responsibility for that.

For many, it was as if I had written a post titled ‘Why Writing Doesn’t Matter Online’. The word ‘Great’ didn’t figure in to it. I was at various points seen to be railing against grammar, spelling, and basic expression, advocating impenetrable, careless, or very poor writing, and devaluing anyone who takes pride in their writing work. These things are the opposite of what I hoped to communicate, and it shows that I myself have a long way to go when it comes to writing with clarity.

If this much isn’t known, writing is what sustains me, writing makes me proud, writing causes my life to bloom. If I couldn’t write, my world would be gray. To be seen as anti-writer and anti-writing (even by some) is never what I intended.

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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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This is the free 27-page eBook version of a post series that appeared on Skelliewag in 2007. It’s completely open-source, so do whatever you want with it: offer it as a download on your blog or website, share it with friends, or sell it and make a million!

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Photo by Helico

I want to share a post idea anyone can use. It’s almost guaranteed to produce one of the best blog posts you’ve ever written.

It’s an idea with limited uses, so I’d suggest that you use it wisely. It will also take some time to do it justice.

The perfect scenario would be one where you have ample time to write but a lack of inspiration. We’ve all had those days, and I hope this will be your Get Out of Jail Free card in dealing with them.

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