Everyone wants internet fame, myself included. Perhaps one of the most popular ways to get internet fame today is to hit the front page on Digg, get a billion and twenty five Stumbles (thumbs up) on StumbleUpon.

There are many ways to get internet popularity - but I’ll focus on the two that I think conflict and complement each other the most. Digging and Stumbling upon request from the author (or a friend), or only Digging and Stumbling articles that you genuinely enjoy.

I read over 100 feeds a day - that is hundreds of articles per day, thousands of articles per week and I often get emails from blog authors asking me to Digg or Stumble their posts. For a while there, I was trying to be a “good” online friend and Dugg and Stumbled posts when asked, but I realized that I was sacrificing the value of my vote for the “value” of being a “good” online friend.

Now, I’m practicing Digging and Stumbling posts that I feel are of good quality - do they have great grammar/style/appearance? Does the author have some authority on the subject, or are they just making up posts to generate traffic?

A few things that will turn me off from a post - no matter how interesting the subject matter:

• A lot of grammatical errors; we will all make grammatical errors, but try to minimize them with editing and proofreading. If English is not your first language, have an English-speaking friend read your posts, to make sure that you are using syntax that is used in “real life.” I’ve noticed from teaching English to non-native speakers that English can be difficult to read and write, especially for those who are relatively new to English!
• Does your post make sense? Or are you trying to cram 20 different ideas into one post? It is one thing to have a post that follows a specific theme or to have a post that connects topics like cats, airplanes, SEO and cell phones (unless you know of a cell phone using cat who knows SEO and flew an airplane to New Mexico - but if you honestly do, perhaps you should be hanging out with the cat instead of blogging! )
• Long posts can be informative, helpful and even entertaining. However, break things up a little bit. Don’t use one big paragraph for your entire post - nobody will read that! On the same token, use pictures and bullet points to break up the monotony of a longer article. Write your article so that a reviewer or somene doing a quick “read-by” can quickly acertain the point of your post - and either hang around and read it, or go on elsewhere.

Does Digging and Stumbling posts give you a huge boost in readers/traffic? In a recent discussion about this, Daniel from Hack Your Day says that actually reviewing a Stumbled or Dugg post gives a website up to 400 visitors. Sounds like a lot of people, but only 3-4% of them will become return visitors. That’s 12-16 repeat visitors on average!

I can infer that if you just Digg or Stumble a post, you are not going to generate as much traffic - people want to know what drew you to the article - and if you don’t say a word, they may assume that you just Dugg or Stumbled the post on request, rather than because you really enjoyed it.

Use your Diggs and Stumbles wisely - the value of them may not seem like much - but 12-16 repeat visitors over time can add up to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new readers per month!

So what say you? Do you Digg and Stumble on Request? Or do you only Digg and Stumble articles that you enjoy or find some value in? Let’s hear it in the comments!

 
photo credit: Richard Stebbing, Evan Sims

Open until July 11, 2007