Digg is seen as the “Grand Daddy” or the “Big Kahuna” of Social Media Networks. It has the ability to send an enormous amount of traffic in a given direction.

However, since the major algorithmic update in January, it’s been much harder to get your Digg submissions to the front page. Also, it’s not unusual to see stories in the “upcoming” section with 300 – 400 Diggs and they still don’t hit the front page, and I saw a story today with 1010 Diggs and it was still in “upcoming”! Back in the old days, we could get almost every article onto the front page, now the odds of getting a submission to go “popular” are less than 50%.

Getting your story a significant amount of Diggs is hard work and very time consuming. Preparing an article or piece that you think will work takes hours and hours of tweaking and can cost a considerable amount of money. All that work will be wasted if the story gets buried or expires, which is statistically more than likely to happen.

Even many of the top submitters have stopped submitting to Digg to protect their high “popular” percentage and continue to appear to be successful on Digg.

However, there are many other Social Networks that can generate large amounts of traffic and are much easier to find success with. I’ve listed the top few other networks you should try:

1) reddit.com
2) del.icio.us
3) buzz.yahoo.com
4) stumbleupon.com
5) fark.com
6) Propeller.com

Using these networks, you can generate as much traffic – if not more – than an average front page on Digg. Also, it will require considerably less effort and your failure rate will be far lower than on Digg.

Give it a try, submit ten articles to Digg. If you’re lucky, two of them will become popular and send, say, 40,000 visitors. This is basically just an average number that you’ll probably get for a couple of regular stories becoming popular.

Submit the same ten articles to the other sites, and if you know what you are doing, there is a good chance that you’ll have an 80% success rate. I bet you could get at least 100,000 visitors. Getting a hit on Propeller can net hundreds of thousands of visitors too, so that one certianly shouldn’t be avoided.

I’m not saying forget Digg, just focus your efforts on the other networks, as you can have much greater success for less money, less time, and a lot less heartache.

I’ve had a lot of comments asking why I didn’t put Mixx on the list. Here is the reason: I’ve never had a decent amount of traffic from Mixx, the most being around 1000 visitors. It requires much effort to get your story to the popular section of any network, and your effort is best spent elsewhere.