The three C’s of a strong social news profile are content, consistency and contacts. If you follow these tips, your success on social news sites will become that much easier.
Reliable Sources. Make sure the blogs and news sources you’re submitting from are reliable and have quality information. Make sure they aren’t sending false information to the readers. And if you see that they might be trying to game social news websites don’t submit their content.
General viewpoint. Find a viewpoint in which the majority of the users will have interest in, or even care about. Take a look at the top submissions for the day. Those are basically the stories which most people have interest in. If you don’t find stories for all audiences, the users will either bury your story, or it will just be left unnoticed. Try thinking from a global standpoint. Does your town hockey championship really effect people half way across the world?
Large list of blogs/news sources. If you are just starting out and you want to find some good reliable blogs to submit content from, take a look at some of the top users submissions (what sites they link to.) You can also scavenge the site for links constantly making it on the homepage, and consider putting some of those sites into your RSS Reader. Also try out some of your own sites you enjoy and think have content worthy enough for social news. (Right now, I have about 200 sites which I think have worthy enough content.) In the end make sure YOU have interest in what you are reading.
Fast RSS Reader. My recommendations for RSS Readers are: for Mac Net News Wire (which just went completely free) and for Windows Feed Demon is the way to go. If you’re always on different computers an online RSS Reader would be best. I recommend Google Reader for this. Try read your feeds twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening.
Submit often. Aim for about two-three quality submissions a day. That is what I have had the most success with.
Add Friends. Try find users who’s interests you have in common, or if you their posts are the same types as yours. You should then add them to your network of friends. Try interacting with these users either by a shout, a direct message or IM. This is one of the keys ways to make your profile and stories more know when you are first starting out.
IM Friends. IM (instant message) some of these friends you have added, and get to know them a bit. You can then send the odd submission of yours to them – to vote for (make sure they are okay with this.)
Vote for your friend’s submissions. Be sure you actually read the content of the story first and enjoy it. Hopefully next time that user will repay the favor by voting for one of yours.
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Digg recently added a new section to their site called “Digg The Candidates.†What this section basically lets you do is digg which U.S. presidential candidate you think should win the 2008 elections.
You have the ability to support as many candidates as you want but friending someone from both parties makes really no sense at all (you can un-friend them too.) While this page might not be as accurate as some of the polls, it does give a good sense of what candidates diggers support and which they think should lead our country.
The candidates are divided into two lists based on the party they are running for. They are ranked on the amount of people who have added them as friends. And under their names it shows the last story they have made a favorite.
Each candidate now also have their own digg profile, where they digg, submit and comment on different stories. You can reach their profiles by clicking on their name. This gives a sense of what they are up to, and what issues they are supporting at any given moment.
For the Democrats Barack Obama is in the lead followed by Dennis Kucinich. And for the Republicans Ron Paul is in the lead (with a whopping 9340 diggs, the leading candidate on digg) followed by Mike Huckabee.
“Digg The Candidates†section on digg is an incredible way to expand deeper into politics, give the users a voice on who should win the 2008 elections and also gives the candidates another campaign method, showing what issues they support in our country.
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Here is a list of tips and tricks that can help you become more successful (and get your stories on the homepage) on social news website.
Submit frequently
Submitting stories on a regular basis can only be a good thing when you’re submitting quality submissions. There is obviously a better chance of your stories making the homepage when you have submitted over five or six a day (rather than maybe one or two.)
Network of friends
When first getting started on a social network you will need to add friends (and lots of them.) First, make sure you like and enjoy what the person is submitting. Second, take a look at how many friends they have. If they don’t have any friends, chances are they won’t add you (meaning he/she won’t be able to see the stories you post.) Find someone who already has a network of friends (make sure that person votes for his/her friends submissions.)
You can then go ahead and add that person to your network. The next time he/she submits a story, give it a vote. If he/she returns the favor by voting for one of yours, a friend to your network has been added. You now have to be constantly checking and voting your friends submissions.
Some people might say this is cheating, but its not. If someone enjoys someone else’s submissions there is nothing against adding that user to your friends.
Eye grabbing icon
The plain old white icon every social network starts you off with is just not good enough. Try finding a cool icon that grabs people’s attention, and makes them want to look at your story. Some of the best colors to do so are: black, blue, red and yellow.
RSS Reader
Having a fast RSS Reader that collects all the latest post from your favorite blogs is the best way for you to find stories to submit. It is fast, easy and efficient. Build a good set of blogs that work on the social news site your on, and be sure to check those feeds regularly. Try searching through your RSS Reader at least twice a day (once in the morning, once in the evening.) A great free online RSS to try would be Google Reader. The best thing about it, is it online.
Find stories that other people have interest in, not just you. Think about the community, and if the users really want to read the story you’re about to submit. Try and stick to things that the majority of the people will like. For example, some of the topics working on digg/reddit right now are: lists, pictures, politics and technology.
Sending a quick message or shout to your friends can make you more engaged with them and the likelihood of them voting for your story will go up. Maybe just a quick: “Hey, How’s it going? Like my submissions? I’m really enjoying yours” can do the job. Who knows, you could even make a real friendship online by messaging someone☺.
If you follow these steps your success on social news websites can be just that much easier. 
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Reddit is known best for its wide variety of links submitted to the main site, which allow you to directly click to a new story or picture. Well, there is more to reddit than just thousands of links covering numerous different points of interest. Once you dig deeper down into what reddit has to offer, you will find 8 different communities (also know as a subreddits). Each of these communities consist of a different topic (Politics and Programming are two of the more popular ones) and are there for people who would prefer to only see content that matches those topics. Understanding the subcultures within reddit is an important part of understanding how to be successful on reddit as a whole.
These different subreddits are located on the top right-hand side of reddit.
Clicking on a community will bring up its own reddit page with only links consisting of that topic (each having their own unique alien logo 
).
Getting back to the main reddit is simple, just clicking on the logo in the top left-hand side or you can click on where it says ‘reddit.com’ in the other communities.
The eight different communities are: programming, science, politics, business, gadgets, sports, gaming and entertainment. These communities divide the political savvy, to the people who just enjoy gossip entertainment news (two obvious different points of interest.)
Submitting a link is basically the same as submitting a link on the main reddit page. Although in the programming, science and politics communities you have the ability to submit the link also to the main reddit. The link will then show up in both of the ‘new’ pages (the main reddit and the subreddit you submitted it to.)
These communities really add to reddit and make it easier for the user to dig deeper down into the links they really want to read and directly match their interests. For many new users, it is a less intimidating way (and sometimes easier) way to build up your karma and understand how reddit works.
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Recently, Digg added many new “social” features to the site. Including more personalized profile pages and the ability to shout your friends a cool story or just a short message. This quick post will be looking into the “shouts†feature on digg and how to get the most out of it.
Shout a story
Say you’ve got a story you submitted to digg and you think one of your friends on digg will really like it. Clicking the share button (located under each story) will bring up a screen with all of your digg friends. From there you can pick and choose which users you want to shout the story to.
Those users will then get a notification in their incoming shouts section on their profile page indicating someone has shouted a story to them. But remember, don’t over shout your friends with all of your submission, that is obviously not a good idea
Shout a message
You also have the ability to send your friends an actual typed message. All you have to do is go to your friend’s profile and on the top right-hand side click send shout. It will then take you to a message box. When you’re finished the message, just click shout it. The person you sent it to will then get a notification in their profile page (the same place shouted stories go to.) They then have the ability to shout back to you.
The shout feature is a really cool way to interact with your digg friends and is a really nice addition to the site. When used properly it can be a good way to bring your friends attention to a story you are looking to promote. But as I said above, it is best used sparingly for promotion.
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What is RSS?
An RSS Reader is a simple and easy way to read your favorite news site or blogs. Instead of going out to these site to read the most recent stories or posts, the newest stuff comes to you, all in one simple page. Even more convenient is having a Reader which is online, reaching it from any place in the world.
In my eyes Google Reader is one of the best online RSS Readers on the web. For the first time user, just getting used to the whole RSS thing, this post will talk about: a) How to subscribe to a feed b) view your feeds c) the cool features built into Google Reader and d) just some nifty little tricks you can use while you’re at it. Remember, being a master of your RSS feeds is also a very important way to build up and maintain powerful social media accounts
The first thing you would have to do, is head over to reader.google.com and sign up for a free account. From there, you would want to start building up your subscriptions.
Subscribing to some of your favorite RSS feeds is simple (here’s 10e20’s feed for example). All you need to do, is go to the blog you want to subscribe to and find the little (or big) RSS button on that page. From there, you will have to Copy that URL, and then in Google Reader you just need to click ‘add subscription’ and paste that URL there. From now on, whenever that site is updates you’ll be able to see the most recent post right inside of (the online) Google Reader. This obviously saves people tons of time when they’re reading over numerous sites daily.
Now that you’re setup with all of your favorite sites, its time to look at what Google Reader is really capable of.
“Tagging” different subscriptions is a simple way to filter out only the sites you want and don’t want to read at any given time. Tagging all your sites having to do with Apple, is a great way to see only the Apple news and keep everything else separated from it. The more tags you have, the easier it is to find what you want to read about. You also have the ability to tag a subscription with more than one tag, if it falls under more than one category.
“Starring” different post is also a key feature in Google Reader. Maybe you want to come back to that post at a later time or you want to show it to a friend. You can then see all the item you starred in the tab called “starred”.
Google Gears is built into Google Reader. What this means, is that you can still view your feeds even after you disconnect from your Internet connection. You can read the latest 2,000 feeds Google downloaded, the last time you were connected to the Internet. This is a really cool feature because you still have the ability to catch up on your feeds even if you’re on an airplane (or a place where there is no Wi-Fi.)
“Expanded view and list view” are two different ways you can read your feeds. If you are going to read all the stories in a subscription at once, I would recommend the expanded view, which shows the entire articles. If you are just going to pick and choose what you are going to read the list view would be the best, having the ability to just glance at each title.
“Trends.” There is a tab in Google Reader called ‘”Trends.” That’s where you go to see the amount of stories you read in a day, week or month and compare which days you read the most. You can also see which of your feeds are the most active and which are the least active. I try and check my most inactive feeds regularly and see which ones I should unsubscribe to and which ones no new content is coming from.
“Sharing” different posts in Google Reader a great way to keep your friends updated on the stories you are reading. Each Google Reader user has their own public page with all of their shared stories, which anyone can look at and read.
Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use in Google Reader to become a little bit more productive and faster at reading your subscriptions.
- j – item down
- k – item up
- s – star
- t – tag
- r – refresh
- m- mark as read/unread
- shift+s – share
- shift+a – mark all as read
One last thought about Google Reader, is that there is about a 30 minute delay, between when the post was submitted on the site/blog and when it shows up in your Google Reader. So for the guys who love their breaking news and post it right away to social news websites… this may be your one drawback. If you need immediate updates a tool like Rasasa which pushes RSS directly to your IM might be the way to go.
But, overall, Google Reader is one of the simplest (but still feature filled) online RSS Readers out there and is totally recommended for the average user who just wants to efficiently check their news sites and blogs on a daily basis.
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A few weeks ago Chris did a post on Search Engine Land about 6 Content Types That Work on Digg so I decided to follow that up with a quick post about what works on Reddit.
Submitting a story to Reddit is easy, although finding a story that enough people will vote for and like, might be hard. Here is a list a of 6 things that can increase the chances of your story becoming popular.
1. Pictures
If the picture is funny, amusing, interesting or just plain stupid, you would be sure to get tons up votes. How ironic… redditors up voting pictures (but it really does work!).
2. Politics
U.S. politics obviously works best on Reddit (and bashing Bush is always a plus). 57.22% of redditors live in the U.S.
3. Interesting Articles
Whether its: “Top 10 ways to save for college” or “Why are people so addicted to coffee?”Redditors really like learning new and interesting stuff they might not of known before.
4. Current Events
Adding “BREAKING” to the beginning of the headline is a great way to grab some redditors attention (but make sure it really is breaking news).
5. Science
Reddit has a subreddit for science news. Submitting a science article there, is for sure a way to get the story popular.
6. Technology
Redditors dig tech articles, especially stories about Microsoft or Apple.
What works for you on Reddit?
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The top two social news website, Reddit and Digg have their differences. Even though Digg is more popular, Reddit might have the edge right now due to these four cool features (you might not have known were even there).
What’s Hot Now
Reddit’s main page is a lot different from Digg’s. Reddit’s main page stories are all current stories based on the amount of points it has and the time it was submitted. So, if you submitted a story first thing in the morning and throughout the day it only received 10 points, the chances of it being on the main page at night is very slim, but if the story has 100 point it’s a whole different story. Once your story on Digg reaches the homepage, that story can be moved off the homepage within a couple of hours, due to the ongoing stories reaching the same page as yours. It would be great to see a section on Digg for “what’s hot now.â€
Recommended
Reddit tracks the stories you upvoted and then find users with similar voting habits as you and puts it onto one page called, recommended. That’s where Reddit will try and find stories you might like based on your interests. Reddit will then get to know you more and more and will become better at finding you stories that you might like. The more you vote, the better your recommended page will be.
Commenting and voting ads up or down
Like Digg, Reddit too has ads on their site, although Digg has had ads for much longer than Reddit. Reddit gives you the ability to discuss and vote on each ad. Under each ad it says ‘reddit this ad‘, thats where you would go to comment on the ad. For example, if you hate ads that move, you can tell the whole community how you feel. And if the ads are really cool and you don’t mind them on the site, you would be sure to actually upvote the ad.
Clicking on that will then take you to the screen below, where you can then vote and comment on the ad.
Stats
Reddit has a page on their site called the stats page, where you can see the top karma gainers of the day and week. In Digg’s case it would be how many homepage stories you have. Digg did have this feature a while back, and each user had a rank next to their name on the stats page. Christopher Finke has made a webpage with the top 100 users (and top 1000 users) which is updated weekly. This page is a great way to identify the top users on Digg and is also a good way to get some media attention or to give tips to new users of the site.
There have actually been some rumors going around that some of these features might be coming true for Digg. So keep those fingers crossed!
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