Diggers keep on Digging
Glen Allsopp / 
6 Comments / 
September 13th, 2007 / 
Subscribe via RSS
Have you ever wondered just how important a headline can be on the likes of Digg? Well…hopefully this will make things a little more clear.
What Happened?
Just over a week ago, I submitted a story to Digg that made the homepage with 82 Digg’s, the site then went down.
The story received over 300 Digg’s even though the site was down and no mirror had been posted. If that’s not clearer than ever that your Social Bait headline is very important then I don’t know what is.
What’s a good headline?
Just because I’ve said a good headline is crucial, it doesn’t necessarily help you understand what one is. Once you start to emmerse yourself into these social media websites where headlines are crucial, you will soon start to see what works and what doesn’t. If you want to learn more about the Copy side of thing’s then I would read CopyBlogger.
Some good examples of headlines include:
- Titles that represent a list. Something that shows off the following content well, for example 7 Easy Steps to Speed up Your Site. Lists work because they are scannable and that means they can be read quickly, people don’t like to waste their time. Allow your headline to reflect the content.
- Interesting News. Interesting news can pretty much sell itself due to the fact that it’s interesting. Who wouldn’t want to read a story when the title is ‘Man arrested for Google Bombing‘?
- Something Controversial. Vanessa Fox caused quite a stir when she wrote ‘Why the SEOmoz Quiz is Completely Wrong‘. Something along the lines of ‘I don’t like the SEOmoz Quiz’ just wouldn’t have the same impact in terms of getting people interested and drawing people into the conversation.
- Write a Tutorial. People love to build up their knowledge, a headline that explains how they can learn something and what they can learn is always interesting to people. Even more so if it’s relevant to them, a good example is ‘How to Code Categorized Sitemaps for Wordpress‘, Wordpress blog users who know SEO is important are going to eat-up headlines like that.
If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our
RSS feed?
cool ! funny that the diggers kept on digging without reading the stories!
lol that’s weird, I would have never expected that.
“Who wouldn’t want to read a story when the title is ‘Man arrested for Google Bombing‘?”
The fact that people would keep on Digging the story, even though the page had crashed suggests that reading the article is in fact, not the key criteria.
I guess a fair bit of it is down to people liking the “concept” of the story and will Digg it - so that what they think the article is about is shared as widely as possible.
Amazing, glen
Glen, I wanted to let you know your dedication to these subjects is very insighting and educational.