Social media news popularity sites like digg, reddit, mixx, etc. are the latest sources for huge traffic, backlinks and search engine marketing. If your post hits the front page of one of these sites, you will get thousands of visitors, hundreds of back links, and repeat visitors to your blog.

However, it is not easy to hit the front page of these sites. Every day, hundreds of people submit thousands of articles to these sites but none of them make it to the front page.

Most of the articles submitted to these sites are spam, of very low quality and self promoting marketing materials. The regular visitors of these sites demand good quality, informative, fact filled, and funny contents. Contents that attack a different angle to old materials may also do fairly well.

By following the five steps described in this article, you will be able to reap the benefits of traffic and back links to your site without wasting time and efforts.

1. Know your audience. The first step to creating posts that get the attention of the visitors of these sites is to study the front page stories on these sites. Different sites cater to different tastes. Find out the type of contents that are popular in each site. For example, stories dealing with technology, liberal politics, and entertainment do well on digg.

If you are writing a story that does not quite match the popular topics of the site, you need to create an angle for satisfying the taste of the site’s audience. For example, conservative politics does not do well in digg but if you can talk about religion in politics in an entertaining way, it may get more votes than a serious post on why religion should be a part of politics.

2. Announce your presence. Sign up for a few sites and create your profile with authentic information about you.  Include your blog links in your profile.  Upload a picture so that everybody knows you are a real person, not an unknown spammer and scammer.

3. Drum up your post. Use some visual cues, like a digg button, on your high quality posts. This invitation helps your site visitors to submit your stories to the news popularity sites easily. Don’t use these buttons for every post. You don’t want every post submitted to these sites. If you submit every post, regular visitors of these news popularity sites will consider you as a spammer.

4. Create a friends network. Locate a dozen submitters, preferably bloggers in your niche, whose posts regularly appear on the front page. These submitters know what succeeds on the site and they spend lots of time finding stories that are likely to get votes. They also compete for stories to submit to these sites before anybody else.

Include these power submitters in your friend network and read stories submitted by these users. If you find a story interesting, positively vote on the story. Post comments on these stories.

Find out the sources of the stories of the power submitters. Subscribe to these sources using your RSS reader and set up Google alerts for news items related to the topics. If you find a story that matches the criteria, submit it before anybody else.

5. Share your stories. Once you have established yourself as a positive contributor to these sites, invite a few power submitters to read your high quality post and comments on it. Use twitter and instant messages for taking your networking efforts with the power submitters to the next level. Not all of your network friends in the news popularity site will respond positively. However, you will find a few who are willing to share their insights with you.

Announce your best posts to your twitter followers and inform about them to power submitters using instant messages. Don’t do it for every post. It will annoy the recipients and they will abandon your as fast as they can.

If some of your twitter followers are bloggers who are interested in your post, one of them may create a post spun off of your article and provide a link to your original story. If this happens within a few hours of you publishing your post, it will boost the quality of your story.

Getting your stories into the front pages of news popularity sites is hard work and time consuming. If you want to invest the time and efforts, the reward in terms of traffic and backlinks can be worth it.