By Allan Maurer
SAN FRANCISCO—When enough readers share links through the Internet aggregation service Digg (www.digg.com), the resulting hits considerably boosts a Web site’s traffic and many visitors may keep coming back. Digg’s Matt Van Horn tells TechJournal South that companies can increase the traffic they see from Digg referrals by following certain “best practices.”

In an interview this week, Van Horn previewed the best practices for getting the most out of Digg that he will outline at TechJournal South’s Internet Summit at the Raleigh Convention Center in November (For more information or to register see: www.InternetSummit.com).

Van Horn leads content syndication and strategic partnership initiatives for Digg, which allows users to “Digg” content on the Internet and posts the most popular stories on its site, which draws more than 35 million unique visitors a month.

In the past, the site could drive so many new visitors to a link in a short period of time that servers would falter and it would be difficult for surfers to get to the linked page. Users called it the “Digg effect.” Now, Van Horn says, advances in server technology prevent that from happening as often.

But the site still sends bursts of traffic of 20,000 or more clicks in a half day after a story appears on Digg’s homepage. Digg also has 650,000 followers on its Twitter page and any story that garners 2,000 diggs is tweeted. “Publishers love that,” says Van Horn, “getting that additional syndication from Twitter. A lot of publishers are also using Twitter to kick up the number of their Digg links,” he adds, “engaging their own communities to digg stories.

Van Horn meets with Digg’s publishing partners to help them get the most out of the service.

What are the dos and don’ts of getting the most from Digg (and other syndication services)?

First, Van Horn says, hiding the Digg button behind a general “Share” button, “Is not the best way to do it,” he says.

Many companies have resorted to putting the growing multitude of ways to share stories behind just such a button because they don’t want to list 20 or more different services. “So they hid them. But they lose traffic as a result,” says Van Horn, who says he plans to back up his suggested best practices with statistics during his Internet Summit talk.

The way to optimize traffic from Digg and other shared services, he says, “Is to focus on the ones that matter to you. If you see on your traffic logs that Digg, Twitter, and Facebook are bringing you the most traffic, focus on them and put everyone else behind the Share for niche users who are part of the other communities.”

One of the company’s most successful publishing partners, Van Horn says, is Time.com. It not only shows the Digg button, it also shows how many diggs a story receives. “Digg users are much more likely to digg a story if they see that content has already been submitted,” says Van Horn. Any site can do the same with Digg’s free and open API or its widget builder, he notes. “By the time of the Internet Summit, anyone could have one on their site,” he says.

Time.com also showcases their best content on every article page.

Since launching its integration with Digg, Van Horn says, Time.com has seen its traffic double. A lot more sites are adding the Digg widget showing the number of diggs a story gets, he adds, and these days it’s hard to find a site without a Digg button.

Van Horn points out that many newsrooms and content creators have begun looking to social media for trends. Some are even creating fulltime positions for people to focus on social media as the New York Times recently did.

Van Horn says his talk in November will also cover using Digg with Facebook and Twitter. “We’re fully integrated in Facebook and seeing a lot of additional syndication for content creators” via that platform, he says.

Van Horn notes that while Digg started out as a tech news only site, it now covers a broad spectrum of topics. It’s most popular topics now are world and business news, entertainment and off beat news. “It has definitely become more mainstream,” says Van Horn.

“I think the Presidential election was an early catalyst for that,” he notes.

At the November Internet Summit, Van Horn says he will offer statistics, case studies and formulas that have worked for publications on how to best use Digg.

Online: www.digg.com; www.internetsummit.com

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