7 Tools for Pulling out the Backhoe with Digg

Digg is a great tool in itself for social media promotion but it’s always been pretty tough to crack the viral code.  Even with a great Digg profile that is established, it’s hard to get content up front and in the eyes of people.

Digg consistently holds ranking in the top 100 sites worldwide according to Alexa traffic rankings, and holds a spot in the top50 for the US.  As of Feb 2010 it was ranked in the top 10 web 2.0 websites based on inbound links.  It’s popular, yup.  And it takes some powerful tools to take advantage of the submission service and boost your campaign.

Social Blade: This provides dig users with submission analytics, a list of the best Digg users and community forum for social interaction.  With the information provided through analytics, you can examine the content that gets on the front page and emulate their path to success.

Di66: A service similar to Social Blade, as it offers a streamlined analysis of some of the most common traits among popular Digg stories and how they perform.  Features include submission tracking, as well as vote trending.  This enables you to examine blueprints of major dig stories so, again, you can emulate the steps they took to success.

DiggWatcher: This is a great tool that keeps you from staring at the Digg site refreshing the stats to watch them climb.  This simple, downloadable flash application sits in the background and notifies you every time you receive comments, new Diggs, or when you break the popularity threshold.  This is a great way to free up your time while enabling you to continue keeping tabs on how your Digg content is doing.

MiniDigg: An Adobe Air program that allows you to keep tabs on your own content as well as the stories of others.  It actually allows you to monitor a story as it climbs in popularity without staying logged into Digg.

Firefox Digg extension: This is a great plug-in that I use while browsing the web and working on other clients when I’m not utilizing Synnd for social bookmarking.  This simple tool is a lightweight version of the website that lets you Digg pages as you find them and will display the Digg stats of a site in real time as you browse.

Friend Statistics: Since Digg is a social site at its most base definition, friends are important.  The people you consider friends or associates should be actively digging your stories to help you and you should be doing the same for them.  This great app lets you know which of your friends are Digging your content and which are completely ignoring your ugly mug.  Building up your Digg friends is necessary if you want to achieve success with your Digg submissions.

BiggBoard: Once you log in using your Digg username, you open a veritable cornucopia of stats.  With BiggBoard you can track every submitted story as it climbs through various hot categories.  This is also a great tracker or vehicle for research to determine the best category for stories you intend on submitting.  Above all else, it’s great for letting you know when a submission gets buried and is no longer eligible for the glory of Digg Front Pageness.

Digg isn’t easily cracked, and the people behind the usernames don’t sugarcoat their opinions.  It’s a tough crowd, and they demand quality.  Spam and other garbage won’t even be tended to, and will be left to rot.  If you want to succeed on Digg, you need to appease the massive.  No amount of tools can help you if your content is garbage.

Nevertheless, there are easily hundreds of articles and stories that hit the front page of Digg each day, and there is no reason that you cannot get your content listed among them.  With good content and effective use of these tools then this could become your year as a Digg Pirate.