As a webmaster, you know the importance of getting traffic to your site. Without traffic you have no customers, so traffic is the lifeblood of your web business. You probably also know many of the key methods for getting traffic, from pay per click to article marketing. What you may not know is that there are some other tricks you can use to get more traffic to your website.

Have you heard of Digg? Digg is a website that was created a number of years ago to let people in the website community at large submit news stories that they believed were of interest or importance. The founder of Digg believed that news and information should not be completely controlled by the major media companies, and that the web community could identify news stories that were important but that perhaps the major media companies were ignoring.

Digg operates on a voting system. Every registered Digg user can vote for any news story they deem important, or they can bury a news story they think is not important, or is spammy. This way, news stories that the entire community believes to be important will get lots of votes and will rise to the top page of Digg.

The number of people who view the Digg front page is really large. When websites get top page exposure, they can expect to get a huge flood of traffic, at least for a few days or a week.

So how does the average webmaster make use of this site for site promotion? The first step is to create a new Digg account so that you can submit and vote on stories. Creating an account is easy to do and completely free.

Once you have created an account, then you can submit a story. Your story will be some newsworthy item about the website you are trying to promote, and it will include a link to your site. It is possible to get some exposure for simply explaining the product or service you ae offering. On the other hand, you are not likely to get a large number of votes that you need to get top page billing on Digg this way.

If you have a funny or shocking or unusual story or video, it will be much more effective for you to do that. For example, if you own a site that discusses and promotes car insurance programs, you can create a video slide show of bizarre car wrecks and place that video on your site. Then create a Digg story with a link back to that page. For better or for worse, people want to see shocking videos like this and will be interested in coming to your site.

The downside of getting Digg traffic is that it tends not to convert at a very high rate. You may get a tone of traffic to your shocking video, but most people came to your site to see your shocking video and not to consider purchasing your products or services. On the other hand, Digg can sometimes drive so much traffic that you still get some conversions even though the ratio of conversions to visitors may be low. You never quite know what will happen so it is always worthwhile to give it a shot.