Russ cautioned us that he does not endorse black hat tactics. In fact, most of those tactics are expensive, hard, take time to do well, and likely over your head. So don’t bother with it.
According to Russ Digg is all but dead. Their traffic is down and all homepage links are 301 links so only a percentage of link value gets passed along and nofollow links are likely around the corner. Great.
Now what?
Reddit. Specifically SubReddits.
Russ made one thing clear to us – if it’s not about links he doesn’t care about it. He also checks Reddit, a lot. There is a large, and growing traffic base there and with subreddits there are a diverse array of categories being explored from politics to just weird random stuff.
Of course all homepage links are followed. So what do you do? Go out and find dead and dying subreddits, ones with high PageRank but have been all but abandoned. He was able to scrape and categorize over 9,000 subreddits categorized by PR, Last Post Date, and average votes.
His example was for a cell phone company. In this case, he found a subreddit on Haiti Disaster, and would do the research on communications degradation after natural disasters. Submit it, know how many votes the average link on that homepage needs to get there, and just like that you have high PR subreddit links.
Some other social bookmarking sites he highlighted were:
- Delicious – pr 7, nofollow, syndicated widely, easy to game (paid), if you have a yahoo account you can vote.
- Plime – pr5, small community, and eclectic, WTF type posts, quick-to-ban, grab odd-news from Plime and submit. Don’t forget to Be A Damn Human, and actually listen to the community.
- StumbleUpon – Russ says he’s done with it, can’t tell if he’s getting links or not.
Russ suggested we use Clicky for real-time web analytics to see people as they are coming in and from where. Find inbound traffic from forums to find conversations across the web as they happening and nurture them.
(Make sure to first register at the forum and comment on some other stories before moving to your own thread).
In this case what you’d want to do is comment regularly but don’t push it. Be willing to answer questions and be helpful, however if the community truly loses interest then just drop it.
PageRank Pinging
The most important thing to do is to follow through with PageRank pinging. Find all the referring sites quickly with Clicky, and use Russ’ linkbait pagerank pinger (see below).
Follow through on paid linking – Wait a couple of weeks, find all sites linking to the submission page (digg & reddit) and find the contact info of those sites and ask them to switch to original source. Russ recommends you be willing and ready to pay for it, for their hassle to go in and change the link. $10-$20 should do the trick 
Also, you can find relevant sites to syndicate your viral infographic, and simply pay them to do top stories of the week and include yours ($20 – $30).
Russ’ tools:
If you want Russ’ tools, I believe he would prefer if you DM him directly on twitter, so feel free to follow him, ask him to follow you back so you can DM him, and be nice, respectful, and courteous. You won’t regret it.
