Digg is the wet dream of every blogger out there. Getting frontpaged will get you massive traffic, but most important, if the story is good, will get you dozens of links and a lot of exposure. These are far more important than the actual traffic which, even if you can get numbers like 40,000 or 90,000 visitors in two days, doesn’t convert very well (except if you have high paying CPM advertising).

So, how do you get your stories successful on Digg? I’m going to tell you how I would do it if I would start all over again.

Create a strong Digg profile

I saw a lot of unexperienced users creating an account on Digg, then starting to submit every blog post they write and then asking themselves why the heck don’t they get popular and why their blog gets banned from Digg. This isn’t rocket science, but it requires some work and time spent building your profile.

1. First of all, after you’ve created your account, customize your profile. Upload an avatar, write something about yourself, leave some contact details (IM or e-mail). No one likes a person they know nothing about.

2. Start digging stories. From the popular section, from the upcoming section, doesn’t matter, just digg. Also, a very good idea would be to comment some of the stories you like. And I mean serious and valuable comments, not just “Oh, that’s great”, “Cool” and so on.
Tip: It seems that if your dugg stories in the upcoming section get popular, your profile’s power will grow. The same with comments. If your comments get a lot of diggs when the story gets popular, your profile will benefit from that. So try and leave interesting comments on stories with a lot of diggs, that have big chances to get popular.

3. Once you get your diggs count at around 1,000 and maybe a few comments, you can start adding friends. Don’t do that right after you create your account, because a lot of users you add won’t do the same. I get several requests every day and only add a few new friends per month. Because I don’t want someone who has 50 diggs and no comments to be my friend. So, as I said, begin adding friends. My suggestion would be not to go for the top users (most of them will add you back only when you have a pretty strong profile). And don’t start adding 50 friends at a time. Start with maximum 10 per day. After you add them, I suggest starting to vote on their submissions (http://digg.com/users/YOURUSERNAME/friends/submissions). Besides the fact that this will increase the chances of the user adding you also as friend, you’ll also build up your profile. I am still digging almost all of my friends’ submissions, even if it takes two hours every day just to do that).

4. Start submitting stories. If you are active, you’ll that there are a number of sites that repeatedly get submitted to digg and diggers love them. To help you, here’s a list of where the most popular stories came from. Add those sites to your RSS feed and keep an eye on them. Once you see an interesting story, submit it to Digg. It probably won’t go popular, but your profile will build up.

5. You’ll notice that there are a lot of diggers that leave their IM users. After you’ve created a decent profile (that could take weeks, even months) you can start adding them on your IM (GTalk, YM, AIM or Skype, doesn’t matter). This will allow you to easily interact with fellow diggers. You’ll see there are a lot of diggers out there who only share votes on IM (that’s good, because it will get you extra votes), but some of them are really cool persons and I’ve had a lot of fun talking to some of them. Besides the fun part, this also allows you to connect more with others and become more influent in the community. After a while, you can even ask more experienced diggers to submit your stories (quality stuff, of course).
Tip: Most top users share their IM usernames. Don’t add them as friends and ask them right away to submit one of your stories. Most likely you’ll get a negative answer and the digger could make a bad impressions about you (you know what they say, “the first impression really matters”). So ask them to submit your stories only after you’ve built up a relationship with them.

The conclusion is that creating a strong Digg profile is not hard, but it takes some time and a lot of hard work. There are days when I spend more than 6 hours on Digg (besides the regular work). These are the main steps you have to take and I’m going to write more detailed posts about how to succeed on Digg, so stay tuned.