Do you know the biggest secret to blogging? Digging, its all about Digg now, if you make a good post you can get Dugg and get over 100 back links and over 10,000 uniques.
Yeap, it's no secret, but like what ahkip said..can you get dugged? It's much harder now than it was before and if you try to hard you domain might just get banned for life which will ruin your plans. I read a post a few days ago on how a site was just 3 days old but was sold for $500 just because of the digg effect, the post can be found here: http://www.techsoapbox.com/digg-traffic-can-be-monetized/
Optimizing your content for social bookmarks is great to have some traffic boost. In my opinion getting on Digg's homepage alone doesn't worth much(as their traffic is difficult to get monetized), but the blogs/forums/sites that link you after that are increasing the level of traffic to that site (I mean in a permanent way) The key is to optimize your content, not submitting each and every page of your site to social bookmarks.
I've personally not found digg to be that good. As lots of blogs have been pointing out, digg appears to some to be on a download spiral and what gets on the front page is controlled by a small cartel of users. I've got better traffic from sites such as reddit and dzone. However on all of the sites, even if you only get a few diggs/votes/whatever and don't make anywhere near the front page etc, you still get a few useful backlinks.
Now digg is not good because there are few site were people are exchanging diggs . than what about real writers . search dig exchange in Google .
It's not half as hard as you guys make it sound, getting dug isn't hard at all... WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND...Dig others... very rare to get 100's of backlinks i think... BTW I can believe your 13 Gareth... Thats so totally awesome... Only If I new this site when I was 13... ~Sheen91
not really a secret is it? you get dugg, which tells other people that its an interesting articles, so they digg you and so on and so forth...
Why not use SocialMaker and not only submit to Digg, but several more at a time. That way you build more backlinks and have a better chance of getting picked up.
Getting on the front page of Digg still brings a fairly decent amount of visitors and backlinks. Even though it's on a downhill spiral it's still getting tens of millions of unique visitors per month. We have access to many of our clients' analytics and one of the biggest things we do for them is get them on the front pages of social media sites. Digg is still bringing in more visitors to them than any other sites (about 40,000 per month). The traffic is hard to monetize but the best thing is that it gets superb SEO which means lots of organic visitors that you can monetize. Focusing on Twitter/Facebook is probably the best overall social media strategy - if done right and non-spammish of course.
Content is always the biggest secret, in my experiences. A good tactic to marketing that is becoming popular is posting content relevant YouTube promotional videos for more traffic. Social networks too, link your blog to auto-post and generate content for you there.