Over at Reddit, a user has posted some of the sordid details behind the gaming of Digg with infographics. To many, this is no surprise, but the frankness of the whole thing has made it popular.
Roughly, my work flow would go like this.
- Come up with an idea for Digg-bait that was somewhat related to the site we wanted to plug.
- Research the hell out of that topic to find the most interesting stuff for an infographic.
- Write the infographic.
- Pass it to an artist to produce.
- Schedule a time for it to go live. This was actually carefully coordinated. The time slots were valuable and the network of people was finely tuned. This was the most surprising part of it for me.
- Submit at the scheduled time.
- Tell everyone I could find to vote it up. Get them to tell people too.
- Watch it hit the front page.
- Add an embed code at the bottom with proper, SEO-friendly HTML. This code would have the domain we wanted to boost in it as a link.
- Spam other sites with it too for bonus points. Email large blogs, etc. to try to get them to run with it too.
I should add that this took well more than a day. It would take several days to get a concept, research it, write it, produce it, and then wait for the time-slot.
If you’re not quite sure what he’s talking about, you can look at a site like OnlineSchools.org . While I’m not saying they are part of this business, they have many Infographics on their site and each one is just as he describes.
