December 04, 2007
10 Steps That Got Me on Digg's Homepage Overnight (Literally)
What follows is the story of how I (unwittingly) managed to get onto the homepage of Digg. Disclaimer: I don't consider myself an "expert" when it comes to stuff like this, so don't consider this "authoritative" in any sense. It's just a chronicle of what happened to me while I was trying to drum up some interest for my new podcast: Red Monday.
Step 1: Come up with an (unusual) idea.
I love to write stories, and I dream about one day becoming a successful TV or movie producer, but unfortunately I don't have the money or inside connections to do that right now. So to pass the time, and to satisfy my creative muse, I write audio dramas--character driven or science fiction stories, mostly. I write the scripts, find voice actors and musicians, mix in sound effects on my computer, and put it out on the internet for people to hear. It's fun, and I put a lot of work into it, trying to make it sound as professional as possible. (If you want to hear some of my work check out Silent Universe or Red Monday).
Step 2: Cook up a stupid publicity stunt to promote it.
Like a lot of independent content producers on the web, I came up against a conundrum: I had some cool stuff I wanted to share, but I needed a way to find eyes (or in this case, ears). I wanted to reach a ready made audience for my audio dramas, and so it seemed logical to target one of the largest podcasting conventions in the country: the Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario.
Since this event draws tons of podcasters each year, it can be difficult to stick out amongst the crowd. I mean, granted, there are about two other black people doing podcasts out there (besides myself) but I mean "stand out" in the sense of "please come check out my show."
Lacking a couple extra thousand dollars laying around in my sofa to buy a booth at the convention, I decided to try something inventive. Since my new podcast, Red Monday, is about terrorism and political intrigue, I figured it might be clever to play the "mystery" card and dress up as a "Secret Service" agent at the expo. I bought a pair of 11-dollar aviator shades from Wal-Mart, dusted off my only suit and hit up a local prop store to find a twirly ear-dongle...like the kind Agent Smith wears in The Matrix. I ordered some red envelopes off the internet (red envelopes, Red Monday, get it? Uh, yeah), stuffed them with a cryptic-looking "classified" message, and was off.
I didn't realize what I was getting myself into...
Step 3: Go too far with the stunt and get in trouble with the authorities.
I guess I sort of went overboard with the whole "Secret Service" shtick.
After casing the keynote interviews of Howard Lindzon (Creator of WallStrip) and Jim Louderback (CEO of Revision3) and conspicuously passing out my "red envelopes" to random people, there was a buzz going around about my presence. I felt like I had created some waves and gotten some people's attention. I took a seat in a vacant booth in the exhibit hall--where the expo organizers had setup coffee tables for people to sit at--and within a few minutes people were approaching me, asking what I was about. It seemed like I was making some good success.
That high promptly ended when I was "happily" accosted in the hallway by Tim Bourquin, the Founder and CEO of the expo. Apparently I had created a buzz... but according to Bourquin, it was for (get this) scaring women.
What?
Stay with me, here. Apparently my "Will Smith Men-in-Black" impression had rubbed some people the wrong way, and they had complained to security. It's strange, because I hardly talked to anyone, and the people whom I did talk with were all impressed with my imaginativeness. But after I had been sitting in the exhibit hall for a few hours, getting as much (if not more) attention than some of the people who had dropped thousands of dollars for a booth, I was quickly identified as a "problem." Go figure.
After expo reps threatened to confiscate my badge (three times!), and I was ejected from the exhibit hall, I finally managed to pass out all of my envelopes and chalked up the incident as a learning experience.
Step 4: Blog about the incident on the Internet.
A few days after this all happened, I blogged about it. I figured it was an interesting (and amusing) story. But instead of going through a lot of redundant detail, I'll just link the post here.
Step 5: Come up with a catchy title. (IMPORTANT!)
I'm an occasional reader of Copyblogger, so I have to give props to Brian Clark and everyone over there for inspiring this step.
The Copyblogger folks talk a lot about how to write effectively, but one of the articles they put up that stuck with me was titled "How to Write Headlines That Work." In it, Brian talks a little bit about something called a Question Headline, which must "do more than simply ask a question, it must be a question that...the reader can empathize with or would like to see answered."
As I was considering my article, I figured I would give it a toss at Digg. I recalled from earlier visits to the site that I had seen several stories having to do with government abuse of power, the NSA wiretapping scandal and the like. So somewhere along there, I got a snappy idea for a pretty sensationalist title:
"Is the FBI spying on Podcasters?"
It seemed simple and provocative enough. After all, that was the whole point of the "mystery" stunt. Satisfied, I... moved onto Step 6.
Step 6: Submit it to Digg.
With my story in hand and my title finalized, I sent the story to a friend of mine and asked him to digg it.
Step 7: Tell your friends.
Then I told my friends to digg it. I logged onto Skype and started messaging all sorts of people, pointing them to the digg link and asking them to vote up the story if they liked it. I don't have a lot of close personal friends online, so this only got me to 8 or so diggs. (By the way, here's my Digg profile if you want to friend me).
Step 8: Tell people who are not your friends.
Afterwards, I gathered up the business cards from all the people who I had traded info with at the podcast expo, and I e-mailed them about the story. Since they were all there, I figured it would be relevant to them. After that, I proceeded onto my Bloglines account and looked up the term "podcast expo" to see if people were blogging about their own experiences at the convention. When I found some people posting about the expo, I e-mailed the authors, told them who I was, and pointed them to the story. Some people told me to leave them alone, other people thought the whole incident was hilarious. It was pretty much hit or miss, but I got to over 30 diggs that night.
Step 9: Pray.
At this point, the whole incident was pretty much out of my hands, so I prayed about it (I'm a Christian and I'm religious, sue me).
Step 10: Go to sleep.
It was getting kind of late, so I hit the hay. But in all seriousness, this is important: you have to know when to stop and let things take off on their own. There comes a point where the soufflé will either rise or it wont, and obsessing over it usually doesn't change that. So get some rest.
Post Mortem:
The next morning I awoke to quite a surprise: my story had over 160 diggs and had made "popular" sometime during the night. I was ecstatic. But after I calmed down, I took a closer look at things and realized my story had been buried a few hours after making popular. "Why?" I wondered. It turns out my super-sensational title was just that. After the initial flurry of interest that propelled the story home, more weary-eyed diggers pushed the story down because it was too sensationalist... the answer to the question "is the FBI spying on Podcasters" was "no," and it was just a funny story about a guy who bit off a bit more than he could chew with a viral marketing bit.
So the moral of the story is, I guess: Be sure to come up with good content (of course), and a good title (this is key), but don't go overboard with it. If you setup huge expectations with your title, you better be prepared to fulfill it, otherwise (sooner or later) it will probably come back to bite you in the arse.
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Posted by MarcXavier at 07:12 AM | Comments (0)
