'Digg This' Badge: Don't Display it on Every Article

Digg is a great tool for content producers on the web. You can submit your best stories - and if other people like them, you'll get voted into the content spotlight.

Not every story is going to be a winner, though. Chances are that few (if any) of your stories will make it to the front page. So why display the "Digg This" button on every page?

'1 Digg' Is Not an Impressive Stat

It's easy to place the 'Digg This' badge into your blog template. Then every article can immediately be Dugg by the reader, and you'll have a nice up-to-date count of how many diggs your article has.

The problem is that most of your articles won't have more than a handful of diggs. Let's face it - not every article is cut out for the front page.

It's been suggested that this could easily come back to bite you. If I'm reading your article and see that it has been dugg by one person - probably you - do I have any incentive to keep reading?

Not really. Seeing a high digg count is going to pull me in, but seeing a low digg count is going to signal to me that the article wasn't that interesting for other people. Chances are I'll just walk the other way.

Only Show the "Digg This" Badge for Popular Content

The solution, then, is to wait until you have ten or so diggs on an article before you plaster the badge on the page. When an article has over ten diggs, you can finally say, "Look. Other people liked this. You will too!"

If you're using Wordpress, you can use the Conditional "Digg This" Wordpress Plugin to automatically filter which articles get a badge. If you're using something else, you'll need to manually decide which articles deserve a badge and which don't. Or, head over to the Digg API and develop your own plugin for your own blogging system.

So Should I Stop Digging All My Articles?

Not at all! While you don't want to abuse the system and get flagged as a spammer, there's nothing wrong with submitting a lot of articles to digg.

You still get plenty of benefits - backlinks from Digg in your profile, exposure in syndicated feeds, and traffic from Digg's readers. You never know which article is going to take off and which isn't, so keep on Digging. Just hold off on the 'Digg This' badge until your article really deserves it.