Ask HN: Help Get Each Others Startups on Digg? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help Get Each Others Startups on Digg?

4 pointsmstefff16 comments

Hey,

This idea came to me this morning. Most of us are in the same boat, or at least trying to get there. We all have or are considering perusing startups - mostly web-based ones. Promotion is obviously one of the hardest issues to tackle in the process. I've been a big fan of this community for a good amount of time - mainly because we all have the same focus, and we all contribute so much to help each other. I think, and this is not just for myself, that we should all promote each others sites on Digg - for simple, and effective promotion. Lets make it a precedent for members to post their startups and on top of the constructive reviews and criticism we offer, we can help move the site up Digg for free exposure. Why not?

Again, please don't think I'm doing this just to spam my site around. Of course I'd love the exposure but I truly think we could help each other out with this; as we do with everything else.

If you like my idea, please Digg my site below. And feel free to start posting similar links.

Thanks, Mike

http://digg.com/tech_news/Streetread_Google_Reader_meets_Wall_Street_3

I think you'll generally find that Digg is a big waste of time in terms of promoting a site. It takes a reasonable amount of effort to get anywhere near the front page, and then when you do you get a crush of mostly unqualified traffic from users who are not likely to ever visit your site again.

Self-submissions and "Digg groups" rarely ever work to elevate you above the bowels of the "Upcoming" pages. One of the things that Digg seems to be particularly good at is detecting this sort of activity.

Your time is better spent improving your app and promoting it where it is relevant. Wait for someone else to take an interest in it and let them submit to Digg/Mixx/etc.

I agree completely, but getting there is a decent start and does help circulate promotion. Why not help each other out?

Yes, it's helpful. Just like buying a lottery ticket theoretically means that you stand a chance to win $x^n.

If you can get some interest, then by all means go for it. I just think that you will find that the "exposure" is worth less than the effort required to gain it (and I recognize that the effort is low).

Well I've gotten plenty of exposure, I just thought the small effort might go a long way. Plus like I said, it just seems like a good boost we could help each other with.

Once it's on Digg, it usually ends up syndicated on many other sites, and generally the word gets out. It helps a lot with inlinks, blog posts, etc. This just seems like something simple we could all provide for each other.

Dugg it, I think I saw you somewhere else a few weeks ago, metafilter?

A stumble question for anybody who knows. I was getting a bunch of traffic from Stumble Upon and decided to throw up a digg button. Of course, it was late and I didn't test it properly, so it essentially broke my site and nobody stumbled it anymore.

Once a site has been stumbled once, and not thumbed up, is there any way to get it going again?

My site is www.hearwhere.com

Start with Stumble Upon. Less work and more traffic.

It's about the quality of traffic as well. Quality readership does not really exist on digg.

Of course. Without a doubt. It really does help get the word out. A lot of people visit through digg, digg articles get syndicated all over, most end up high on delicious, bloggers write about digg articles, etc. I said before, if this is something we could propagate for each other - why not try?

How do you get a site popular on Stumble Upon - just get tons of people to favorite it?

You can also pay $0.05 per visitor. The trick is to make sure your site is immediately appealing, otherwise the user will just click "stumble" and go on to the next site.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads

pretty much. There's no "front page" to get to on stumble upon. Every person who thumbs the site up essentially forwards the stumbled page to everyone on their friends list. Interesting sites propagate through stumble upon very quickly.

Yea my last site got "stumbled" a bunch of times. Serious amount of traffic but I read that you really are only getting half of what your stats say because of how the software works. Not sure. Still good though.

Do Unto Other Social News Sites As You Would Have Them Do Unto You?

To try to vote-stuff Digg would be to condone vote-stuffing of News.YC, too.

Alternate suggestion: just submit your site here for peer review. Include a Digg-this button on your entry page, as appropriate. Then those moved to Digg it will... without any unseemly quid-pro-quos or voting bloc behavior.

Dugg! :)

Thanks!

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