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What does it take to hit big time with your blog on Internet? That is a question that requires thought before answering. Off course a little marketing and a killer article. The article must also be “right” for the publishing time, people must feel like this is something worth reading now. You can’t write something which the readers doesn’t have a need for or are interested in at the time of publishing.

Finding the advantages in the issues

With every community based article-rating-site comes a few issues and different ways of dealing with them. When you submit your article to one of these sites the key to success is to know the issues and take advantage of them. The communities are big and they have lots of visitors all around the clock. However, as with every website most visitors come from U.S and other countries where the inhabitants are awake in the middle of the night. At least from my point of view (I’m from Sweden you know). And off course that is when most articles get dugged or rated. So if I’m going to submit an article I better do it late in the evening or even later, Swedish time, if my story is to be on the front page.

Different kinds of corruptness

The biggest issue is without doubt corruptness or people agreeing on voting for an article in advance. That is great for those doing it but makes everything so much harder for everybody else. I’m going to take you through the issues with three of the biggest rating-style websites out there and give some tips on how you’re supposed to succeed.

First, we have the most known of them all, digg.com. I love this website because it’s the least corrupted of the three or at least I think so. I have heard of people selling votes but I’ve got no experience of it myself or have heard from anyone who has. I do believe that users who succeed have many friends and that their friends vote for their stories. The biggest problem or resource with Digg is that you can see what your friends have voted for.

A couple of days ago I learned about something known as the Digg-effect. What I understood of it was that an article on the front page of dig could generate enough traffic to overload a smaller unprepared website. A few days ago I experienced exactly how much increase in traffic that meant. When one of my news stories was popular I got a massive 4000 visitors that day. For me that is so much I hardly understood it until the day after. Since the story wasn’t one of those I considered to be one of my better I wanted to come up with an explanation for it’s promotion on Digg. It is my opinion that the Digg community was in a terribly good mood. If it was plain luck or the work of God, I don’t know but I think getting lots of friend could do the trick.

Reddit.com generates even if it’s not very good. For beginners at reddit they can be frightened by how fast their story disappears and gets “buried”. The most important thing here is the title of your article since nothing else is displayed. If an article is just spam the quite rough community will make it disappear with lots of bad ratings. Then what is the advantage or issue? It’s the easy of registration. Within a couple of minutes you can register multiple users and rate your article over and over again.

Off course this can’t go on for very long. Sooner or later someone at reddit will discover it…

Netscape.com is the most corrupt website I’ve ever seen. But at least it takes some work to become popular there. The biggest issue or resource here is the friends system. While Digg have a limit for the amount of friends your allowed to add at one time Netscape don’t. And if that wasn’t enough they’ve provided a feature called “share this story” which allows you to send it to you friends. Well, only five at a time but it’s still a feature that allows you to easily spam your friends.

The only sad thing about Netscape is that even if you get your story to the front page you wont get that many visitors.

Conclusion

The best site succeeding in, that generates most traffic, is definitely Digg. I know it’s hard but one must get to know Digg before submitting. Learn to see the signs of a community in the right mood.

These articles are worth reading

How many digg votes does it take to get to the front page?
Netscape’s Digg Clone Is Kaput
How to Write a Popular Post