Entrepreneurship

digg, digg clones, pagerank, and wordpress plugins

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ February 27, 2007 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

It’s no secret that submitting stories to Digg.com is a nifty way to create backlinks. It’s also no secret that digging all of one’s own blog entries is a pretty straightforward thing to do. Each entry might only get one link coming back, but so what? That’s a backlink you didn’t have before, and links ultimately lead to pagerank (that
s jargon for google lovin’) and traffic (people like you). And traffic leads to dollars, provided you can monetize.

So now we have lots of vertical market niche clones of digg floating around, largely based on an open source CMS called Pligg (google it for now — I might put the link in later). There’s a brief, non-comprehensive list here.

So why don’t we have a wordpress (blog software) plugin coupled with a service that keeps up on these things and automates it? I bet a great deal of the “blogging will someday be my day job” crowd would pay a few bucks a month for plugin that updates itself with the current submission mechanisms on all of these digg-style sites. The service side would include

• A comprehensive, up-to-date list of suitable digg clones
• The under-the-hood techie details allowing the pluging to submit, even given site changes. This would be what the monthly fee actually pays for.
• Profile information for each submission site (every one of these needs a registered account, of course)
• For more dollars per month, you get more than one (!) digg per article. In other words, I’ll digg you too, for a fee. This one might not be so cool, though, since it feels a little less angelic than “white hat SEO”

Incidentally, I did notice one thing as I was browsing this list. PlugIM, a digg clone focusing on… um, driving traffic and monetizing eyeballs, has an RSS plugin that auto-submits everything in your feed.

Nifty little tool. It’s what actually sparked the idea for the product described above. Now if only I wasn’t so busy playing basketball four hours a day…