It's a very powerful way to boost traffic to your site, as well as building high-quality one-way inbound links.

If you don't already know Digg, it's a site that llows its members to vote for, or "digg", articles on blogs and online newspapers and magazines.

The idea is that if 2000 other people think a story is good, then you might well like it too.

Digg is basically a popularity contest for websites.

In fact, it can bring so many people that the server your site is hosted on can literally break under the pressure.

The first article which got dugg was called "How to Fake a Web 2.0 logo". You can read it here: http://web-design-book.com/2007/01/23/how-to-fake-a-web-20-logo/

The day before I wrote the article my site got 555 visitors. The next day we got 47,501.

That's a massive 8,500% increase!

You can take a look at the statistics here:

http://web-design-book.com/2007/01/25/what-does-a-digg-look-like/.

The next story I wrote that got on the Digg.com homepage did so well it crashed our server within the first hour, because we were getting so many hits.

Obviously this means that before next time I'll have to upgrade my server.

The story was called "How to fake a FedEx logo". You can read it here: http://web-design-book.com/2007/02/03/how-fake-a-fedex-logo/

1. Come up with a catchy title. It's no coincidence that both my stories that got dugg have a similar name. I think the combination of the "how to" with the word "fake" helped grab people's attention. Keep the title short, punchy and use edgy words like "fake".
   
   
2. Have a rant. People seemed to like the "ranty" nature of my articles. I tried to make it short, snappy and funny.
   
   
3. Help other people have a rant. I think part of the reason both stories got dugg was that they allowed the "diggers" (as people who use Digg are known) to have a bit of a rant about something that annoys them. With the first story, it was Web 2.0. A lot of people hate it - so they loved the opportunity to moan about how rubbish the whole idea is.

   The second article was basically a story about somebody talentless taking a short cut , so it let people moan about talentless cheats, but it also let a lot of people moan about big companies like FedEx and pretentious designers.

4. Have a nice picture. Both my stories had one or two pictures on them for people to look at, which QUICKLY EXPLAINED WHAT THE STORY WAS ABOUT - I think that helped.
   
   
5. Post in the evening, on the weekend. My first story was posted late on Friday evening UK time. My second story was posted the following Saturday evening. America was asleep, so it took less people to digg the story before it was "made popular". Also, it meant that when America woke up a few hours later, I got thousands of visits.

Richard Quick is the author of the new web design book "Web Design in easy steps". He has a background designing websites for multinational companies and works as a web designer in Cornwall, England.