Adding a Digg link to MovableType

Posted by Miles Evans

Continuing on my recent spat of articles on ways to improve MovableType for SEM and traffic building purposes, I have another quick yet effective hack which is guaranteed to yield some very nice traffic gains. In fact I am tripling my traffic with every digg submission, although the burst usually dies down after 24 hours. Here is how it works…

Digg seems to be the new Slashdot. Don’t get me wrong, I love /. And visit daily but the weakness of Slashdot has to do with the way stories are submitted and accepted. I won’t go into this too much but suffice it to say getting a link on /. is not easy, even if you submit a relevant and original story every day. When I say not easy I mean not easy like building a nuclear device is not easy. Digg is a better model article service as anyone can post a story and the user base decides which stories they digg, or think are cool. This way the cream rises to the top and the rewards are really well worth it. Can you digg it?

So I thought digg kicked so much ass I had to have a cool link at the bottom of every entry so I could easily add my posts to digg’s database. You can see it at the bottom of this post. Providing links to my articles in digg will help get some much needed exposure.

Now this is where digg can be really powerful. If you add me or another friend to your friends list, we will be abe to share our reading lists. A group of friends interested in the same topics can be a powerful force on digg. Keep in mind getting your story dugg to the front page on digg is the equivilant of a server crippling Slashdot link. The good news is even if you never make it to the front page on digg, if you write good quality content you will see some nice targetted traffic.

Salivating yet? If not take a look at this Slashdot vs Digg traffic chart from Alexa.

The code for creating the submit to digg link is simple. In your main index template find where you have your entry footer code. This is usually after <p class="entry-footer">

<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title="Submit <$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1"$> to DIGG" class="link-this" target="_blank">DIGG!</a>

You can also apply this to your individual or category archive templates. Nice and easy.

For a really huge list of tools for digg and digging check out this page.

Posted Feb 27, 2006 at 03:01 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!