Making Money with the Digg Swarm
I spent just over three hours playing with the Digg Labs new toy, the Digg Swarm. There's another tool called the Digg Stack which I ignored because it didn't make much any sense to me, but I found the Digg Swarm fascinating.Aside from the fact that it's brightly colored and moves, The Swarm is one of those things that just conveys a feeling of intense understanding - a real look behind the scenes, see the wizard kind of thing. More importantly though it's a fascinating, real-life sociological experiment and it has a great deal to offer in that respect.
Naturally, my first thought was to how I can use it to make money.
The nature of the Digg Swarm is a graphical representation of the semi-anonymous interactions social networking sites produce, and observing it for a while yields some valuable lessons. My goal is to apply each of those lessons to internet marketing, blogging, and a whole host of old and new marketing techniques.What's popular?
Popularity and the preferences of the masses of Digg users are keenly focused on the areas of technology (due to the nature of the platform and its founder), entertainment, and free stuff. During the day, Diggers are mildly interested in the business world, at night they want to be entertained, and always-always-always they want to see pictures or videos of somebody doing something stupid or getting hurt (especially if it involves a monkey).The Lesson:
- Time your blog posts and marketing campaigns to coincide with the rise and fall of online interest and use data gathered from the Digg Swarm to maximize your investment (whether time or money) from pay-per-click marketing campaigns, press releases, blog updates, etc. Watching the Swarm for 15 minutes or so a few times a day, a few days a week will give you a 30,000 foot view of what the world is into at different times of the day.
- If you're posting your own material to other social networking sites to increase traffic, or if you want to be the most popular Digger on the block, knowing how to time your articles for peak interest will yield the greatest results.
- Have videos of a monkey? Good god, get them online and put some ads next to them ASAP!
Individuals can be very influential.
Observing the swarm led me to the conclusion that some people have too much time on their hands. I noticed some Diggers digging articles for hours and hours at such a rapid rate there was literally no time to read them all. These uber-Diggers quickly cast wide nets around them, pulling story after story to the top of the lists and sparking smaller swarms with exponential effects.The Lesson:
In online marketing as in life, some people lead the pack. Not because they're smarter, but because they have the confidence to make their opinions known and the crowd will follow. Figuring out who those people are and putting your product/article/headline in their hands is a key element to successful marketing. An individual with a wide sphere of influence is worth a thousand voices with none.Headlines that sell
The most important lesson learned from the Digg Swarm is that quality is second to timing and marketing; an unfortunate but consistent truth in the business world.Digg Swarm provides a meaningful real-life example of this by displaying the article titles that quickly rise in popularity and the simple writing mechanics that apply to almost all of them.
The Lesson:
Learn to package your product. Observe the mechanisms that trigger interest in others and use them yourself - you'll find they're very simple. Of the articles promoted most rapidly on the Digg Swarm, the majority of them contained some sort of implied promises in their headlines. Most often used were:Numbered titles Something for nothing
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