How to Make the Digg Home Page

You can build a strong Digg network without gaming the system or begging people for votes. These steps will explain how you can organically develop a network of friends who will help you and exponentially increase your chance of hitting the Digg home page.

1. Getting Started. After you’ve signed up for a Digg account, spend a couple of days just playing and exploring the site to learn your way around. Look for Digg stories that interest you and take a close look at the submitter’s profile and statistics.

2. Personal Profile. Click on the “profile” selection at the very top center of your screen. First, upload an icon. Be creative, your icon is one of the few things that will make you stand out and help people to remember you. The display size is small so keep it simple and 100kb or less. Then, at the top left of the screen, select “Manage Profiles” or “EDIT.” Make sure your name, location and IM username are entered. Adding a link back to your personal blog or website will give your profile a lot of credibility.
3. News categories. Get familiar with the upcoming stories sections, where new stories germinate before some of them are “made popular” and voted onto the home page. Practice searching and sorting through the results (by most diggs, most commented, cloudview, etc.)
4. Starting your network. Unlike MySpace or Facebook, there’s no easy way to contact people, browse their photo albums or break the ice first. You mostly look at a user’s statistics and then form your opinion from there. You can instantly add anybody as a friend. Once you’ve added a friend, it means that you can see their story submissions and diggs easily and vote on them. More friends are not necessarily better.
5. Adding you as a friend. Adding a friend won’t directly help your content on the home page. You will need a two-way, reciprocal friendship. You want people to add you as a friend so they can see your stories.
Be on the lookout for active and savvy diggers who will participate and help promote your content. Instead of looking to just add to your number of friends, look for someone moderately active who seems likely to enjoy and digg your content. Their stats, their friends list, and previously submitted stories will gives you clues about whether you should make the effort to hook up with them. To find diggers who share a same interest you can click on “Upcoming Stories,” sort them by “Most Diggs” and see if there are any stories that interest you.
6. Follow and digg your friends’ stories – every day. fter you’ve added a few active Digg friends, then you need to start digging their content . Click on your profile (1), then on the friends tab (2) and then submitted (3).
Now you’ll see a list of the stories that your friends submitted. Check in at least once a day and digg ALL your friends’ good stories. Get the right people to notice you by leaving sincere, intelligent, personal comments on their stories. After a while, the active users will notice that you’re voting on their stories. Soon enough some of them will surely befriend you, and start to Digg your stories, too.
7. Digg home page. You’ve been active for a few weeks and you’ve dugg hundreds or thousands of fun stories. People are automatically reading and digging stories that you submit. You’re nurtured a genuine, symbiotic connection with some of your friends and you start to understand their quirks and personalities.
8. Since you’re now hooked up and you know people, you should be getting at least 10 or 20 diggs a story. Once your story gets a bump of more than 15 or so diggs, it has a fighting chance. Your story becomes visible in the “Upcoming Stories” section, and if the content is truly compelling then it will make the home page.

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