Why Gatherers Need to Digg (and Netscape, and...

Like many of you, I joined Gather because I am a writer looking for an audience. Sure I have my own website which receives a trickle of internet traffic (most of which is due to errant search engine queries), but it's nothing compared to the amount of exposure my writing has received on Gather. By publishing to the right groups and networking with many contacts on the site I'm pretty much guaranteed that someone will read my work and possibly drop a comment or rating as a result. On occasion I've had the pleasure of having an article featured on the Gather homepage leading to much more exposure and feedback. In comparison to publishing on my website where my writing is at the fickle mercy of the search engine, Gather has definitely broadened my reach as a writer.

But is it enough?

Granted, Gather is a great community, but to some extent it is a gated community. An article published to Gather will probably get noticed by active members in your contact list and the groups to which you've published, but that's about as far as it will go. Even articles published to the main page of Gather, though receiving increased onsite exposure, still probably won’t increase visibility of your work outside the friendly confines of Gather.

So what can be done to attract more readers (specifically, those not currently Gather members) to your work?

One viable method to increase visibility is to use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon or Netscape. These sites are user generated news aggregators where the members decide which articles should be featured. On sites like Digg, users create links to articles or webpages that they find useful, amusing, or newsworthy. The bookmark then goes into the submission queue where members can leave positive (Digg it!) or negative (Bury) feedback on the article along with providing comments. Bookmarks with more positive feedback (i.e. Diggs) are placed further up in the queue leading to greater visibility on the site. Comparing the traffic ranking of Gather to four popular social bookmarking sites (link), you’ll notice that these sites have a much greater reach than Gather, so a well indexed bookmark on one or more of these sites will lead to more readers than posting to Gather alone.

So if I Digg every article I write on Gather the readers should come pouring in, right? Not necessarily; there is a catch. For your article to move up the page, members of the site have to promote it. Because these sites are also social networking sites, there are established member cliques that exist to promote each other’s bookmarks (mass demotings have also been known to occur). This is one aspect of social bookmarking that Gather members with many onsite connections can use to their advantage. Contact members of your Gather network and ask them to join your Digg or Netscape network as well. There’s no reason why you can’t connect with Gather members on another site, especially if it’s another social networking site where it is advantageous to have a large network of friends.

Currently Digg is the biggest of the social bookmarking sites and Gather is already integrated to allow readers to easily Digg your article. However, Digg tends to favor tech and political articles and doesn’t have a section for fiction or poetry, so many Gatherers would find their content shut out. Also since it’s the biggest, there is more competition to move up the page so it would require a large enough following and many “Diggs” to move up the page.

Of the sites available, Netscape would probably be a good fit for many Gather members. Unlike Digg, Netscape has more Gather friendly categories to which members can submit their articles. Also like Gather‘s member base, Netscape users skew older than Digg users. Netscape doesn’t have as many members as Digg, so theoretically it could be easier for a large Gather network to promote their content on the site.

Note: If you do submit your Gather articles to these social bookmarking sites, it helps if your submission is relevant beyond the interests of Gather. An article which is Gather specific or could be classified as a general blog post probably won’t fare well on these sites (ex. this particular article is Gather specific and not of interest to people offsite, so there’s no need to create a link at Digg or Netscape). Depending on the site’s TOS, constant submission of these articles could be considered spamming and may get you banned from the site.

So which site should you use? As many as you want, obviously. Feel free to submit bookmarks to any or all of these sites plus the few others I didn’t mention. Even if your article doesn’t skyrocket to the top of the main page, at the very least you’ve created another avenue to which potential readers can access your content.