A 'Must Read' Digg Experiment

I thought I would let you in on a little experiment I am currently doing so you can follow my progress. I have no idea if it is going to work, but here goes…

The Goal

The main goal is to get onto the front page of http://digg.com. The secondary goal or backup plan is to generate 20 or so good quality backlinks within articles back to the blog post and site. I have read many reports about people getting onto the front page of the social bookmarking sites and having a mass of traffic, new readers, backlinks and buzz. Search engine traffic relies on you having numerous backlinks to your site and one sure fire way of achieving this is to get on the front page of digg.com

I don't know if my campaign is going to work, but I'm willing to give it a go! If I fail, I will just try a different approach but I will still succeed in generating 20 + good quality backlinks to my site.

The Plan

Ok… the plan is

1/ To write a great article… (Already done)
2/ To publish the article on my site (Date for publishing is 26th March)
3/ Contact 20 websites and blogs about the campaign, pay for a review on each of the blogs which point back to the article. (Half way there)
4/ Ask a friend to submit the story to digg.com
5/ Add the digg count button to the article to make it easier for readers to digg it
6/ Email the url to all the bloggers who are writing a review about the article
7/ Beg my friends and contacts to digg the story
8/ Email the story to other bloggers and websites to ask them to review it.
9/ Switch on my 'special powers' to succeed with this
10/ Write about my Digg experiment and understand more about buzz marketing.

The idea is to create a buzz about the article, through other bloggers which 'should' spread virally (Ie. From one site to the next). The bloggers regular readers will read my article on my site and if they like it, they will 'hopefully' digg it.

I know there are lots of conditional 'shoulds', 'hopefully's' and 'maybe's' in this campaign, but its a bit of fun anyway!

My Budget

My budget for this is $1000 - I already have 8 reviews in place at present and I am looking for about 10 other bloggers to write a paid review about my article. I'm sure some people will say that this can be achieved without spending $1000, but I am not in the position to achieve it without spending this amount, therefore I am willing to speculate to accumulate and learn along the way.

So… Wish me luck, and if you have any suggestions, feedback, strategies or ideas I would be really grateful in hearing them. Also, if you would like to earn a bit of cash by doing a paid review of my article, please let me know and we can come to an arrangement. All I ask is that your blog or site gets more than 100 visitors per day to make it worth my while.

I will keep you informed of the progress.

The article will go live on 26th March and the reviews will go live on the 27th March, so keep an eye out.

Here are a few further reading resources on this topic that will help you understand better.

http://www.the-trukstop.com/articles/2007/digg_front_page.html
http://blog.nometers.com/?p=12&
http://webtrafficorgasm.com/