Have you ever been spammed by your friends to read their blog and “digg it”? You may have noticed that there are several icons on the bottom of each of my posts. One of them is a Digg button, which provides visitors with an opportunity to give the post a “thumbs up”. I personally don’t spam people to get them to click that little button, but as they said in that Seinfeld episode, not that there’s anything wrong with it.

Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, was recently ranked No. 2 by NorthxEast’s fifty most influential bloggers and in their November 2008 issue, Inc. Magazine called him The Most Famous Man on the Internet. Why? Quite frankly, Digg could potentially send more visitors to your blog in an hour than you’ve had in the last year. That’s pretty influential, isn’t it?

As the dominant social bookmarking site today, if a post on your blog makes its way up to Digg’s front page, there’s even a good chance that your blog site will crash since it won’t be readily able to handle the mass frenzy of visitors. The truth is, only a small number of posts will ever make the Digg front page. That doesn’t mean Digg can’t help you boost your traffic.

Here’s how it works. First, you have to register with Digg. Then simply choose the Digg button that works for you and put it in your code. Depending on your template or admin tool, this can be done several different ways (this post, however, isn’t about how to add code or widgets). Once you get the Digg button on your posts, the first thing you should do after posting is click on your own Digg button! That sends a message to Digg that it exists. As visitors see your post, they have an opportunity to click that Digg button to vote on it. Every post has a chance to vaulted to infamy; so even a blog site that’s been up for only a few weeks can rub shoulders with a Fortune 500 blog that’s been around for years.

Some people recruit their family and friends to Digg their posts while others use traffic boosting networks to Digg each other’s posts. I simply click once to submit it and then I forget about it; I’m all about the organic method, which isn’t usually the most effective. There is no right way or wrong way to use Digg, but if your goal is to reach the Digg front page, you have to really get the word out, which may mean spamming some of those friends who spammed you!

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