Bridging the Gap Between E-Commerce and Digg

Most marketers know by now that social bookmarking sites such as Digg offer huge benefits. In and of themselves, they can drive huge amounts of traffic (into the 10′s of thousands from a single frontpage story on Digg), as well as sometimes providing a one-way dofollow link to help your SEO efforts.

The benefit extends beyond Digg’s site itself, however. The more people discover your content through social bookmarking sites, the more people you have writing about you, linking to you, and subscribing to you.

The problem is that e-commerce and social media bookmark sites have a “ne’er the twain shall meet” relationship. Digg strictly prohibits commercial content in its terms of service. And even if a site doesn’t prohibit it, you won’t get very far with a post that tries to sell people something. After all, that’s not why people use the sites.

You’ll often see newbies on Digg submitting homepages, products and categories in the hopes of finding a magic bullet to boost their traffic and sales. These posts rarely get any natural clicks, and if the submitter gets enough people to vote it into the recommendation engines, they’ll quickly get buried. Worse still, the entire domain (including all subdomains) may get banned entirely from Digg.

Fortunately, content that works well for an e-commerce blog also often works well on social bookmarking sites. Top ten lists, images of product design, breaking news stories relating to your store – all of these can be great content for social link sharing sites. Remember why people use these sites – to discover interesting content – and keep that in mind while writing your blog.

The key is to make sure that the page you’re submitting isn’t blatantly commercial – in fact, make sure it’s not even subtly commercial! Trim away any links to products, especially obvious ones with product imagery. Don’t talk about how you sell any items that might be a part of the story, and definitely don’t include any prices. You can always add inter-content links back in after the story expires from the social link scene. But at the time of submission, there shouldn’t be more than a single link to your store in your main navigation or footer.

If that’s not feasible for your business, another idea is to create a completely separate site with content that relates to your store, and dofollow links back to your site, but without an “in your face” connection between the two. Submit and promote your content site, and as it gains popularity, use it to drive traffic through to your store.

It’s also good to vary the type of posts you submit. People will start to notice trends when they vote on your stories. If everything you submit says “Download…” and eventually leads to a free trial for your software, you won’t have many friends. (I use that example because I just unfriended someone like that myself.) Also make sure you’re also submitting news stories from popular sites (major networks, for example) to keep things varied. A good rule of thumb is that no more than 10% of your submissions should be to your own site.

Digg users especially are highly tuned to spam, so do your research well and participate for awhile without submitting, to get a feel for how things work. Then work really hard to generate great content. A little preparation and a lot of understanding will help you succeed in driving traffic to your e-commerce site through Digg.