Promote My Site

[Note -  don't put  slashes and plus signs in your  article title if you have SEO friendly  URL addresses that  mimic your title.  I'm just saying!]

Beta testing is a very strange thing to watch. Some people ask for access and do nada. Others use the software in ways that, frankly, are puzzling. Some people complain about everything ("I hate red" is my favorite). Others give you attached excel spreadsheets of bugs they want fixed and features they'd like to see. Stack ranked. Bless the OCD among us because they are the one true beta testers!

But what I really live for are emails like these:

I started using your Social Suite with the expectation that this was yet another silly Digg tool that would be "eh, clever" and not much more.

I was completely wrong. Once a week or so I usually comb through each of my four Digg users, in rotation, to look for people who are banned, or who have stopped using digg, or who have dropped me from their friend list so I'm shouting at an empty cubicle. It takes me, literally, all day to check the high points. So I spend 4 days/month grooming my network. I drive 100K+ hits/month onto my websites, so this is time well spent, though it is really boring.

I plugged my digg logins into your tool, hit "research," went to a soccer game, and when I came back the work was done.

So this thing saved me eight hours. The first day I used it. Plus I actually had a lot more information to make better decisions.

Then I noticed the "unfriend" button and realized that I could save another three or four hours a month.

I look forward to being a charter subscriber. Do I get a discount?

Wow. And no. :-)

Wow, that may be the most specific post title I have ever written.  But I want to capitalize on the extreme amount of google love we're getting lately to save someone else a LOT of time.

We're doing a beta of our Social Suite and it depends on iOpus's most excellent iMacro for FireFox.  Except that they released a new version (6.0.4.1) which killed our software.  Thanks guys.

So, how simple could this be: we just needed the previous version (6.0.3.9). 

Which is NOT on their website.  Nor is it mentioned in their otherwise comprehensive wiki. And when you try to search google for it, well, good luck with that. 

So, it turns out that previous versions of iMacro for FireFox are kept on the FireFox/Mozilla website.  Go here to get version 6.0.3.9 and earlier versions of iMacro for FireFox.

You know what else I know now?  There is (often) a "see all versions" button at the bottom of the addon for FireFox that gets you to the same place. 

One of our beta testers is in Oz and sent me this story about Comcast putting a 250G limit on monthly downloads and added this comment:

Here in Sydney we pay $89.95AUD/month for 768K DSL with a 2G limit on combined uploads and downloads. Every 10M over that limit costs $0.25AUD. What in the world are Americans doing on the internet?

Wow. Bandwidth limiting.  And, no, I don't know how you could need 250G/month unless you were watching live streaming moves.  At one/night at 9G per movie, that would about do it, I guess.

25 years ago there were no video stores near me, 15 years ago there were a dozen, and now there are none again. 20 years ago I signed up for AOL (CompuServer was for noobs), 15 years ago they put in volume pricing plans by the minute, 5 years ago they took 'em off, now it is free.

How are ever gonna explain the recent past to our kids?

It's been kind of dark on this blog, but we're in a whirlwind beta testing our Social Site Automation toolset.  We're going to open up the private beta to around 20 more people, so please feel free to contact me (olivertaco@promote-my-site.com) if you'd be interested in giving it a shot.

You should be familiar with social media marketing and have extensive Digg experience.  Plus you should be willing to break out into lots of smiles and a few giggles.   The software runs in FireFox (only) and requires iOpus iMacro.

This has been an interesting beta, and I'm composing some thoughts for a longer post.  Which might even have some smart stuff in it for other people heading into beta test. 

Our Digg Genesis

We started off reading and "digging" stories from our favorite RSS feeds and quickly moved to posting some of our own writing. "Uh oh," you say, "bad blogger."

No, not really. For three reasons:

• It's not against the TOS at digg
• As our readers will know, we don't have a spam blog in any way
• It had it's own punishment in terms of public yawning at our posts

Because we are very interesting writers (*cough*) but not to the digg crowd and certainly not on every post. Our first 40 postings averaged 3 diggs each. I swear, you could scan your BK receipt, post it to "offbeat" and get more diggs than that.

But, not being totally oblivious, I started reading some articles on how all this stuff worked (or how people thought it worked!) and our average over the next 10 stories doubled to 6 diggs/story. Whoo, hoo, if we were a startup we'd have been worth $1B by then!

After a bit more attention over the next 10 stories we bumped our average to 24 diggs/story. From there our average over the next 15 stories went to 45 diggs/story.

Any my last story finally got "popular" and got 700+ diggs by this article.

Now, lest you assume I was spending my entire life on this, well, uh, no. I did around 70 stories over 7 months, or a couple per week. I was spending a lot more time digging (2,000+) stuff. A lot of that was shouts but a lot more was stuff I found by looking for people submitting stories with keywords I cared about.

So, to summarize, rocky start but a good strong finishing position, pretty good citizen. Maybe I give myself a B+, which would make Digg better than High School, in retrospect.

The Landmine Tripped

Not by anything I did outside the TOS, nor by a flame war, and not even by some self proclaimed Digg guardian. Nope, some sockpuppet knocked our blog out of bounds for Digg.

I posted a digg (Best. Digg. Shout. Ever.) about an absurd shout I got from a user called SteJules. I won't go into details but he'd been a Digg member for 31 days and had over 10K diggs and had a 20% hot rate. The shout was 800+ words and was priceless. It just begged for digging and though I was careful not to be ad hominem about it, I figured since he'd sent it to around a thousand people, I posted it. And it got 100+ votes in two days.

And it got our site banned by SteJules and his friends. Which is a long and boring story, but they did it on purpose by going back through posts from months before and burying them as spam. Nice.

Banning is Forever

Which is when I discovered that there is NO appeals process. You know how blogger will lock you out or require a captchya to post? Annoying but after a few days it usually gets put right. Google gives you a penalty, you can fix that in a few weeks. But no such process exists at Digg. (I actually have friends who know the guys what run Digg but you don't call in favors for stuff like that. Which makes it worse, actually.)

Being Innocent is No Protection

Oh, you say, you don't submit your own site and other people only do it sometimes. Well, what if someone creates a user, says that their home page is your domain, and starts, once a day, submitting your stories. After a few weeks they get their friends to swarm them and mark them as spam.

Bye-bye.

Diversify

Look, our business model does not require that we get traffic from Digg, but if it did, we'd be toast. We'll, we'd be toast unless we wanted to change our domain name, 301 redirect hundreds of pages, etc. And even then the "breathing space" only last until some other sock puppet bully gets you banned. So diversify into other social media sites. There are a lot of them, and if you read the articles under our "niche social media" tag you'll get a flavor for what is out there. In the meantime, while being a model citizen is smart, it certainly won't protect you.

If you would be interested in beta testing our new social media automation product before it is released, please drop me an email.

You should be

• An experienced Digg user
• Wiling to install iMacro for Firefox
  
• To spend at least a few hours using the product (My guess is that you will, like I did, fall in love with this product, so it shouldn't be too painful.)

We're very excited about how this will accelerate your ability to be successful on digg.  And if you're of an analytical bent, you will love what you can find out about your (and others) friend networks.

I was reading through the usual stuff this morning and hit this about a TechCrunch post that

ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users.

Yes, it is. Or would be if it were true.

Do Some Numbers

I always like to run the numbers up and down until I get something I can comprehend. I look at Alexa a lot for that - and yes, I know it is imperfect.

Alexa says that yahoo.com got 45,000,000,000 (yes, 45B!) page views last month. Holy moses, did I do that math right?

Alexa also says that google.com got 26,000,000,000 (26B when it's home alone) which is in the same ballpark, but who would have thought yahoo would have more traffic than google?

Wait, there are more numbers.

3% of the yahoo traffic went to the homepage - 1.35B page views.

16% of google's traffic went to their homepage - 17B page views.

Ok, that starts to sound like I understand the world.

(Side note, 20B mail.yahoo.com vs. 3.6B mail.google.com page views. Hmm.)

Drilling Down Into the Numbers

Ok, back to the 300K clicks/second thought experiment. If Alexa is right and 3% of yahoo traffic goes to yahoo.com and another 3% to news.yahoo.com then we have 2.7B page loads/month.

There are (30 days * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/hour) = 2.9M seconds/month. (Or you could google "seconds in a month!")

So, 2.7B page loads/month works out to around 1K/second for the home page and the news page.

I Call BS on TechCrunch Math

I dunno, if he'd said 300 clicks/second (which is non trivial!) I'd still have been impressed.

Now, did the story stay on the front page for an hour? That is 18K visitors, which is pretty impressive. Not 300K but still.

Don Is Smarter Than I Am

I asked Don to review my math and he pointed out that I just went the long way around the barn. If Yahoo could send 300K clicks in a second then that works out to 25B/day.

Another way to think about that: everyone in the world has to click on that story. Five times.

Compare Yahoo to 55,000 Digg Hit

I have this article on digg bookmarked because it is so well written and thoughtfully analyzes digg traffic, secondary spikes, etc.

And over a 4 day period he got 55,000 visitors from digg. He compares that surge to an earlier one where he got 0ver 40,000 visitors from digg.

How hard it is to get to the front page of digg versus yahoo news?  Easier, I think. 

Conclusion?

One thing we know is that digg sends traffic (a trickle, but still) forever on stories that get good vote volume. And you do get good feed additions too.

Now, if someone told me that Yahoo sent as many feed-friendly folks as digg I'd belive them, at least provisionally. But once the story is off the Buzz page I would be shocked if you continue to get traffic.

I'd love to opine on link love, but I don't have anything to base my opinion on. I know that is shocking on the internet, but there you go.

I started looking at this article to make sure my BS-O-Meter wasn't defective (it wasn't) but along the way I started to think about the relative size of social media "waves."

The otherwise very very smart Don Dodge posted this gem that gets some bits right:

I talked to a Facebook App developer at the ReMix conference. He told me his app is generating 300 million page views per month. Wow! Then I asked what kind of CPM (Cost Per Thousand) ad rates he was getting. He shrugged and said somewhere between $0.02 and $0.05 per thousand. That pencils out to between $6K and $15K of advertising revenue per month for those 300 million page views. Pretty good for a couple of young hacker/coders with very low overhead, but not the kind of business that commands million/billion dollar valuations.

Basic Assumptions

What I don't know about Facebook could fill Wembly Stadium with just enough room for a Flock reunion, so let's assume:

• This is app is at the median of the top 50 Facebook apps
• The actual income is at the top range of $15K/month
• The top app earns 10X what the bottom app earns and it's a smooth distribution

So, the total revenue for all 50 companies is around $12M a year.

No Money In the Ecosystem

Take these three data points:

• I have a friend who runs a three person shop that supports Cisco routers for a fairly large school system. He billed $3M last year. That is $600K/person.
• We work with a small Oracle outsourcing shop (5 guys in the US and 25 in India) that billed $7M last year. That is $230K/person, but if you cost average that by salary dollar the number is $700K/person.
• There was a local business paper article about a 12 person company that does custom Microsoft VP/Apps/whatever programming and just broke $7M in total revenue or $580K/person.

What's the point?

There is a LOT of money in the Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft ecosytems. I'm sure all three of these remora companies are too small to even barely come to the notice of Microsoft/Oracle/Cisco.

If any of them were doing Facebook work they'd be #1 with a bullet.

But I bet the 25th largest Facebook Widget Maker can get some 1:1 time with whomever they choose.

Let's review: $12M/year in the Facebook ecosystem and, what, a couple billion for each of the big three? Hmm, well, there may be a network effect from the users of Facebook, but the outside world is starving to death.

Wiser Words

Let's parse one particular part:

Pretty good [$15K/month] for a couple of young hacker/coders with very low overhead, but...

It may sound good to make $15K/month, but that is only a buck eighty a year. Take 50% out to pay for taxes and basic health insurance and you're making $90K. Hope you don't have any hosting or other costs....

So, really, it's krep income, even when you come near the top.

Valuations

The next bit is even more interesting:

... not the kind of business that commands million/billion dollar valuations.

Good lord, Facebook is "worth" $15B to Microsoft and a host of other people and it's certainly going through money like this bubble will never pop.

Let's look at the valuations of our ecosystem companies for a second:

• Oracle - Market Cap=$112B, Rev=$20B, Operating Margin=34%
• Microsoft - Market Cap=$280B, Rev=$58B, Operating Margin=40%
  
• Cisco - Market Cap=146B, Rev=37B, Operating Margin=25%

(By the way, if you aren't impressed with a HARDWARE company like Cisco having a 25% operating margin, you should be.)

So, Facebook is worth 10% of Cisco or Oracle and 5% of Cisco? I think we know that is crazy talk. But if that is the talk, then why is Dan dissing the 300M page views of a Facebook widget maker? Isn't Facebook just a bigger aggregator of page views?

Do Some More Facebook Math

What did Zuckerberg have to say about Facebook revenue on a con call in January of this year:

Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 million to $350 million.

Currently they have 450 employees, so this year their revenue was $333K/employee, which is not bad.

Next year they plan to have 1,000 employees ... yes that keeps their revenue/employee pretty much flat.

Remember the 25th most popular widget maker pulling in $180K gross/year? He's not looking too stupid, relatively.

How does this math work again?

Summary

There aren't very many people making money adding value to Facebook, it monetizes it's users poorly, and management plans to ramp staff and keep revenue/employee flat this year.

[Bump and update: two hours after posting and  we have the number one slot for our own  whois search.  Neat.]

This is not yet another weary re-telling of the Google Blogscoped article on whois this morning. I am sure our readership has an almost 100% overlap with the blogscoped guys. I am also sure that at least a few "SEO Bloggers" will duplicate the article with some added tips and tricks.

No, whenever I read a google "trick" or "feature" article I always use it on my site name and our key, er, keywords to see what will happen. I can't remember who suggested this to me, but I'm sure it was someone a lot smarter than me (that's a bit set!)

Whois Promote-My-Site.com on Google

So type in "whois promote-my-site.com" in google and see what happens:

Which is accurate and cool and handy - at least a dozen times a year.

But what struck me is that our site did not get even one mention in the results.

Hmmm.

So I tried some other SEO domains (seomoz.org didn't show up in the first two pages, etc...) and found that this is a common issue - lots of mentions of the site from other sites, but no direct link.

Then I bumped into seobook.com having the first four results. And it is because he has a "whois tool."

Not being entirely without wits, I immediately wrote this post about google's whois tool and what I found when I queried "whois promote-my-site.com."

Because now I'll rank with a good article on whois and how it affects my site. Assuming that there isn't some strange search logic going on in google-land.

We use filezilla as our Pointy Haired Boss friendly (*cough*) ftp front end. It rocks, and it is free - what more can you ask for?

Lately I've been testing screen capture software and have been spending a lot of time rebooting my PC (install/uninstall) and reconnecting to our servers, shoving a video up, testing it on several different computers. Rinse and repeat.

And it was really bugging me to have to change the destination directory to /home/pmsforms/images. Sure, it was three mouse clicks in a sea of other mousing, but my backbrain was telling me I was being a luser.

Timesaving Tip

Yeah, how stupid am I? Go to the File->Site Manager dialogue box, go to the Advanced tab and set the default remote directory.

Heck, if you have more than one directory that you use a lot you could create two different profiles that take you where you need to be.

Wish I'd thought of looking for this about a thousand mouse clicks ago!