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You find a great story. You submit it to Digg, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

But when you check on it the next day, you are disappointed to find that it only got 3 Diggs.

The Secret of Digg

New users often wonder how some people manage to get hundreds and thousands of diggs, day after day.

It's simple: top Digg users have established social networks of friends on the site who vote on their stories.

You can build a strong Digg network, too... without gaming the system or begging people for votes. This article will explain how you can organically develop a network of friends who will help you and exponentially increase your chance of hitting the Digg home page.

All it takes is about 30 minutes a day and a desire to digg lots of interesting stories.

Getting Started

After you've signed up for a Digg account, you need to learn your way around. Spend a couple of days just playing and exploring the site. Digg stories that interest you, and take a close look at the submitter's profile and statistics.

Does this person digg a lot of stories? Submit a lot of stories? Do they have a lot of friends? Do their stories get made popular?

Before you try to make friends, you need to spruce up your own personal profile first. Click on the "profile" selection at the very top center of your screen.

First, upload an icon. If you don't have a picture, you are a complete nobody on Digg. Your icon is one of the few things that will make you stand out and help people to remember you - so be creative. The display size is small so keep it simple and 100kb or less.

Then, at the top left of the screen, select "Manage Profiles" or "EDIT."

Make sure your name, location and IM username are entered. Adding a link back to your personal blog or website will give your profile a lot of credibility. Once your profile is completely filled out, you are already way ahead of about 90% of the Digg population.

Next, go learn about the different news categories. Digg is a tech-focused news site, so there isn't a category for every kind of story. Get familiar with the upcoming stories sections, where new stories germinate before some of them are "made popular" and voted onto the home page. Practice searching and sortng through the results (by most diggs, most commented, cloudview, etc.)

Building Up Your Network

Making friends on Digg is a bit oblique; the personalities behind the tiny icons may seem elusive, inaccessible or downright weird at first. Unlike MySpace or Facebook, there's no easy way to contact people, browse their photo albums or break the ice first. You mostly look at a user's statistics, and then scrutinize what kind of stories they Digg and submit and then form your opinion from there.

You can instantly add anybody as a friend, even site founder Kevin Rose or the #1 digger Mr. BabyMan. Once you've added a friend, it means that you can see their story submissions and diggs easily and vote on them, too. But adding a friend won't directly help your content on the home page. You need a two-way, reciprocal friendship. You want people to add you as a friend so they can see your stories.

You don't want just any Digg user to befriend you, either. 99 out of 100 Diggers don't participate much and are worthless for helping promote your content. You're on the lookout for active and savvy diggers, like yourself.

Beware: many of the Top 100 Diggers are slammed – some spend 15 hours a day hustling RSS feeds and digging a massive stack of stories – so they are less likely to pay attention to a new user like you.

A Hardcore Digg User's Stats:

Look for someone moderately active who seems likely to enjoy and digg your content. Their stats, their friends list, and previously submitted stories will gives you clues about whether you should make the effort to hook up with them.

An ideal Digg friend:

• Checks in and uses the site daily
• Diggs a lot of stories
• Checks for stories that their friends submit and diggs them regularly
• Submits stories that you will enjoy following and voting on
• Doesn't submit way too many stories
• Doesn't have 50 zillion friends

A More "Approachable" Digg User's Profile Stats:

A good place to make new friends is on the upcoming section of the news categories that interest you most. Click on "Upcoming Stories," sort them by "Most Diggs" and see if there are any stories that interest you. If it's a cool story and interesting description, then most likely a cool person submitted it. Scope out their profile and if they fit most of the above criteria, try adding them as a friend.

Follow and Digg Your Friends' Stories - Every Day

After you've added a few active Digg friends, then you need to start digging their content . Click on your profile (1), then on the friends tab (2) and then submitted (3).

Or if you are on the home page, you can just click the "Friends' Activity in 48 Hours" panel:

Now you'll see a list of the stories that your friends submitted. Check in at least once a day and digg ALL your friends' good stories. Go all the way down the list and don't leave anyone out. (If you don't like their taste in stories, you need to to pick a more compatible friend... just like in real life.)

After a while, the active users will notice that you're voting on their stories. And soon enough some of them will surely befriend you, and start to Digg your stories, too.

More Tips on Building a Powerful Digg Network:

• More friends is not necessarily better. The more friends you have, the more votes it will take for your story to hit the home page. Better to have 20 active friends than 400 deadbeats.

• Digg has a feature that will try to block you from adding friends too quickly. To get around it, just Digg about 10 or 20 stories, and then go back and see if it will let you add another friend. Digging stories is seen as a natural activity pattern that can reset the limit.

• Frequently check the "See Who Befriended You" section of your friends list. Look closely on the profiles of the people who have added you as a friend. If they look like a legitimate (i.e., not an icon of a hot babe with an account created yesterday) active user, try adding them and see if they start to digg your stories. If they don't, you can always dump them in a few weeks.

• Prune your friends list every few months. Get rid of deadbeats who aren't socially interacting with you or following your content. Search for new people who will take an interest in digging your stories. You can find out who diggs your stories by looking at "Who Dugg or Blogged This?" button at the bottom of your story descriptions. Better yet, use this tool to find out who is digging your stories. Check them out and see if you'd want to befriend them.

• Get the right people to notice you by leaving sincere, intelligent, personal comments on their stories. If their story doesn't make the home page, they are likely to check who voted on it and read all the comments.

• Your reputation on Digg depends primarily on the quality of the stories you submit. It's okay to submit a piece of content you wrote every once and a while, but be sure to mix it in with a healthy ratio of other great content that the community will enjoy. If you submit spam or crap, Digg will restrict your account and users will quickly blackball you.

The Sweet Taste of Success

So, finally, you've paid your dues. You've been active for a few weeks and you've dugg hundreds or thousands of fun stories. Now you find people are automatically reading and digging stories that you submit. You're nurtured a genuine, symbiotic connection with some of your friends and you start to understand their quirks and personalities.

At this point, instead of submitting a story and getting 2 diggs, you'll get at least 10 or 20. Because you're hooked up. And you know people. You're finally grooving with the social aspect of "social media."

Once you your story gets a bump of more than 15 or so diggs, it has a fighting chance. Your story becomes visible in the "Upcoming Stories" section, and if the content is truly compelling then it will make the home page.

When it breaks on through to the other side, you'll finally get a hit of the Digg Crack – the massive emotional rush of creating national news and reading the hundreds of comments and reactions to your story. It's one of the strongest buzzes that that you can get while sitting in front of the computer.

And it's not rocket science or voodoo magic... it just takes participation. So, what are you waiting for? Flick open your Firefox tabs and start digging!