WP COLLECTIVE

With the emergence of DIGG in 2004, many different social bookmarking sites have popped up over the past couple of years; Reddit, StumbleUpon, Float to name a few. There’s even an open-source application called Pligg that you can download and install on your server for your own customized version of “Digg.” There’s no doubt that if your content shows up on the front page of one of these sites you’ll receive a ton of hits. One could argue that your ability to make the front page of Digg can make or break the success of your site. Many a server has gone down due to the overload in visitors from social bookmarking sites (a.k.a. “Digg effect”).

How Can I Optimize My Blog for Digg?

There are a couple of ways in fact. The first and most obvious way would be to create a Digg account and submit every single blog post that you create, but logging into Digg every time and entering every piece of information can be a bit cumbersome. What you really want to do is add a Digg badge to your posts. What badges do is submit your blog post to the social bookmarking site of your choice and auto fills the forms, thus taking care of half the work. Aside from any content/description tweaks that you may have to do, after submitting with a badge, all you have to do is click “Submit” and you’re finished.

Text/Custom Badge

For a text or custom badge, wrap this block of code around your text or image:

<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&bodytext=<?php the_excerpt() ?>”title=”Digg this story”></a>

From inspecting the code, you can see that it inserts your post’s permalink, title, and excerpt into the link which then auto inserts that info into the designated fields on the Digg submission page. If you’re one that likes spice everything up and deviate from the norm, this is the code you’d use.

Standard Digg Badge

For the standard Digg badge, insert this piece of code into the loop of your theme:

<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

This type of badge is a lot more noticeable. It leaves a heavier footprint on your page, and calls for readers to click on it. If you only want to integrate one social bookmarking site into your theme, use this method.

Multiple Badges

At the bottom of every WP Collective post you’ll see multiple, but smaller, badges that submit to various social bookmarking sites. In our case we have Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Twitter. If you’re using Wordpress, there are tons of different plug-ins that let you pick which sites you want to submit to, and generate the code needed to display them within your posts. Here are a couple of plug-ins that you may find useful:

Sociable: Automatically adds links on your posts to social bookmarking sites. (What we use)

Social Dropdown: This plugin displays several social bookmarks in a dropdown. Unlike other social bookmarking displays, this does not cause clutter. This plugin displays several social bookmarking options in a dropdown.

Social Bookmarks: The Social Bookmarks plugin for WordPress adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts and/or pages that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of social bookmarking sites. Furthermore, the plugin adds a page in the WordPress admin section that lets you customize it. See the Customization section below for details.

There you have it! A rundown on how you can “socialize” your wordpress blog. Remember, adding these links is but a fraction of the battle. Remember to always post meaningful, helpful, inspiring, motivating, and entertaining content. Doing so will ensure that people spread the word of your site.