What Digg and Social Bookmarking Can Do For Your Music
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When social networking was originally created in the 1990s, no one knew that it would become the indelibly powerful marketing force that it now is. The growth of new technologies in the early 2000s made it possible for sites like MySpace to become so incredibly massive that their populations would rank them amongst the top 10 most populous nations in the world.
So, it’s no wonder that just a few years after that, there are dozens of cool little add-ons to the social networking experience that can help out the aspiring musician just as much as a well built and executed MySpace page. One of those features is social bookmarking with sites like Digg.
For those that have not used the massively successful bookmarking tool, Digg is essentially the Internet social community’s way of voting on content. There are billions of web pages and millions more added each day, so how do people know which ones are worth viewing? After all, we only have so many hours in the day to read.
Simple, they vote on it.
Digg allows its users to submit links to the service in any number of categories along with a short story description and a reason why it is a good website, story, or link to check out. Other users then vote on how good the story actually is, by clicking the “Digg it” button. Those sites with more Diggs than any other sites will appear on the front pages – some sites have been known to get thousands of Diggs in just hours.
The best part is that you can implant a small button or link on your website, MySpace page, or blog that allows your readers to Digg your content on their own. It’s a built-in way to ensure that, if you provide updated, interesting content on a daily basis, your fans vote for it – it’s as simple as that.
There are plenty of other sites out there as well that offer similar services. You might have seen their icons plastered on blogs that you read every day, allowing you to post links to De.licio.us, Facebook, Stumble Upon and a dozen other services. It’s all the same idea. You like a site, you vote for it. If everyone likes a site, it gets voted high enough to receive even more traffic.
And, that’s the goal for your music, is it not? By creating a web presence with a good blog and a well built portfolio, you can ensure that you create new traffic by convincing your existing traffic to vote for you. The more votes you get, the more people will see your page and the more fans you create. It’s a never ending cycle, and if you play it right, you cannot lose.
Go ahead. Digg it!
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Comment by Jimmy Shelter on 2 April 2008:
Digg is really useful site, but I think for bands StumbleUpon, del.icio.us & reddit could be even more useful.
The ‘Digg-effect’ is really temporary, while traffic from StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, while smaller in number, keeps coming and coming.