If like me, you’ve read all the articles about how easily you can get onto the Digg homepage, but have so far struggled to create that killer piece of content, then you’ll probably want to hear about alternative methods of achieving social media bookmarking success. A small percentage of people may get it right first-time and receive the necessary 25+ diggs to become a promoted story straight away, but the rest of us will probably have to work a bit harder, learn from our mistakes and build up towards the ton of traffic and nice amount of new inbound links which come as a result of a popular story!

I find there seems to be a new “I made it onto Digg once so I’m an expert” post every other day now, so here’s my “I haven’t made it onto Digg yet, but have managed to get some traffic from a few of the smaller sites” post instead! It’s obviously not impossible for beginners to get popular on the main sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Reddit, but it certainly is easier if you have an active social bookmarking user account and a blog with thousands of daily readers and RSS subscribers.

Can’t get onto Digg, why not try the smaller social media sites?
Just because you’ve had a few unsuccessful attempts at getting a popular story on Digg that doesn’t mean you have to be a complete social media failure. In my experience some content I’ve posted in the past hasn’t been what the Digg crowd have wanted to see (or at least vote for), but it has gained some traffic from alternative social media websites. There’s plenty of social media sites out there which you can gain traffic from, many of which are listed in SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 awards from last week, I’ve focused on four of the social media voting websites I’ve had the most success with below.

PlugIM
PlugIM is a fairly new social media website, which uses a very similar voting system to sites like Digg and Reddit, the main advantage being that it takes around 3-4 votes to get a story promoted to the homepage. While a promoted story here isn’t going to give anywhere near the same amount of exposure as the del.icio.us homepage, it’s still going to get your site a few extra clicks which could possibly turn into inbound links. Plus when setting up an account you can add your RSS feed so that all new posts are entered automatically so you haven’t really got too much to lose.

BUMPzee
BUMPzee is another good one where you can have a featured story with a low amount of votes, again posts are automatically inserted to be voted on. The BUMPzee widget has also become quite popular recently, so this could be another good way to get noticed by similar bloggers and gain more traffic and potential links. Like PlugIM, Bumpzee gives a good idea about what works well on the smaller stage, which can only be good practice to getting it right with the larger audiences (although there are differences between each site and it’s users).

StumbleUpon
I wouldn’t class StumbleUpon as a small social media website, but it is an easier method of getting users to your content. If you get enough thumbs up toolbar votes StumbleUpon can be an excellent source of refering high quantities of traffic, this does use a time-based algorithm but a steady amount of clickthroughs is normally delivered over a longer period of time as well, rather than going into how this works in more detail it’s probably easier to read my how to increase StumbleUpon traffic post instead.

Netscape
Netscape, like StumbleUpon is by no means a low-traffic website, but it is easier to get attention from your stories than the big three (at least in my experience anyway). An example of this would be that last week my post about the linkbaiting vs directories link building debate, while not popular enough to make the Netscape homepage, did make the Tech section. Many stories do get listed on these category pages, often only requiring the first vote to remain on the page. I’m certainly not an expert about using Netscape but would definitely like to become a more active user in the future, this guide is also very useful to help learn a bit about how the system works.

Personally I plan to continue leveraging my content to sites like these and hope that by gaining some extra readers and potential social media voters, in combination with some improved, quality content, this will help to make the push from a story which gets a few votes and 10 clicks to a homepage featured item read by thousands. In the meantime if your a powerful user at one of the top site’s please feel free to submit this post! ;)

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