Getting a front page digg can be a godsend to the new webmaster. You’re guaranteed tens of thousands of visitors, and if your dugg page is any good, hundreds of backlinks. I got my site dugg in the second week with my article on defeating censorship, and had 50,000 pageviews and 400 backlinks by the end of that week. That’s gold right there.

I’ve found a few ways to game the digg system. In no particular order, here are the best ways to make sure your submission makes it to the front page:

1. Use the Digg Effect on Itself - I don’t know why, but Digg allows you to post a link to another upcoming Digg article in front page comments. Utilize the thousands of visitors to a new post to get your own out there. If your article is relevant to the discussion you’ll make it to the front page too, but if it isn’t you’ll at least get another 10 or so diggs.
2. Comment on Your Own Submission - Posting comments on your own article submission is a great way to get a couple more people to look at your submission. It’s tough to keep getting Diggs after your initial few hours. Comments make sure people watching Digg spy at least see your title.
3. Use Powerful Headlines - This is the most important rule for Digg and for blogging generally. The more shocking or grabbing a title the better. There’s a reason a good headline sells newspapers, and the same applies to the internet.
4. Post a Link to Your Digg URL in Your Page - Give Digg users as many opportunities to digg your post as possible. A link on your page can give you a whole lot more diggs, and that’s especially important when your post is upcoming.
5. Use the Exponential Growth of Traffic - Lots of news sites are incorporating digg links on every page. That’s because once a site has a certain number of loyal readers, they can influence more and more of the digg frontpage results. Most front page articles only take 40-50 diggs. Sites like news.com have tens of thousands of visitors a day. Can you see their opportunity?
6. Incorporate Keywords Digg Users Like - A while back I submitted a story about using Ubuntu. I had a whole lot more visitors than normal, because there is a group of people looking to promote Ubuntu through digg. About 40 searches for ubuntu resulted in clicks on my article. Other keywords are Google, Apple, and Open Source.

If Digg really starts to get huge, I can see communities of people digging each other’s stories, but that would get pretty lame. Maybe if someone set up an AIM Bot that sent your digg url to everyone else to digg… hmm.

These are all potentially big problems for the Digg system. What do you think is the solution? How would you handle these problems if you were working over at digg? Are these problems really that bad?

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