Over the past few months there has been a lot of talk about the new Digg. Hundreds of people in the search engine marketing industry are upset that their old “power user” techniques no longer work. But Digg is still one of the most popular social media communities and no matter how irritating it is you have to adapt to their changes. To help my readers with this process, I have composed the following list of top 10 mistakes to avoid on the new Digg.

1. Adding too many friends – as you probably already know Digg now undervalues the votes of any one who is on the submitter’s friends list. So the days of having 1,000 friends and getting a story to the front page within minutes are gone.

2. Using a boring title or description – this is even more important than it was before as Digg now places much more attention on getting random Diggs. The best way to convince users to Digg your article is with a title and description that not only catches their eyes but also encourages them to read the articles.

3. Leaving the standard icon – some bloggers have joked that you need to leave the standard image as your icon but this is 100% not true. You still want to make sure that you have a bright and memorable image for an icon.

4. Only submitting content from one domain – this was bad with Digg before they made the new changes, but it is even worse now. You need to submit content from dozens of different domains if you want any of your submissions to get attention.

5. Not commenting on articles – now that having a huge friends list is a bad thing, the best way to get yourself noticed on Digg is by your activity. This includes making good submissions AND making frequent comments on articles.

6. Only Digging popular articles – to get your account attention you need to Digg articles when they are still deemed “upcoming.” It’s also a good idea to comment on these articles because if it becomes popular your comment will be at the top.

7. Sending shouts for every submission – if you send shout outs for every submission you make then it will look like you are only using Digg to get traffic. You should try to submit regularly and only send shouts every once in a while.

8. Not Digging any shouts received – yes friends Digg’s are not counted as very strong votes, but that does not mean you shouldn’t Digg any of your friends submissions. It is still good to be active on Digg and voting for friends content is still a good way to do so.

9. Only submitting in “boring” categories – with the old Digg bloggers often suggest to submit an article to an obscure category as a way to get it more attention. The opposite is true now, you want to submit your content to popular articles so they can get as much exposure as possible.

10. Not adding any friends - even though Diggs from friends will not make an article popular, they still can get it listed prominently in the “upcoming” section. So having some friends is still important, but just don’t add too many. I would say it’s probably best to stay under 100 friends