Promote My Site

My goal when doing any task is to figure out a way to automate it as much as possible while still getting the maximum possible benefit. So I love tools, even when there is a quality tradeoff. I can sweep my kitchen a lot better than my roomba, but it does an adequate job and saves me an hour a week (minimum) - I will take that tradeoff in a hurry.

When we started looking at social bookmarking and social networking sites for another project, one of the things that really struck me was how hard they were to use as a content provider. You want to wander through piles of "Ron Paul is Better Than Jesus" posts on Reddit or read about "Dog Altzheimers Test Kit" posts on Digg, then that is pretty easy.

You want to start putting out posts like, well, like this one then you get into some work. And I'm not talking content creation - I'm just talking tracking the process of putting a post summary on a half-dozen or more sites a day. Then you miss a day (sick) and you have twice as much work to keep track of. I am organizationally challenged on my best days but this really pushed the limits of my stick-to-itivness.

And if you look past the tippy top sites and figure out that there are niche audiences out there served by hundreds of relatively active social bookmarking and networking sites, well, the problems inherent in using them all get pretty involved pretty quickly.

If you want to skip straight to totally overwhelming, try having different logins for different personas. I'm not talking about sock puppets, but legitimate different logins. If you run a tech site (think anything from Gawker) you will post one kind of article, have a certain friend network, etc. If you also run a site dedicated to Welsh Corgi's, well, that will probably have another login and social network. This, to me, is entirely legitimate. But if you have 2, 3, or more blogs it is overwhelming.

Overwhelming even with post-it-notes, the gateway drug to Excel spreadsheets.

So I started looking for real solutions and tools that were out there in white-hat SEO land and quickly realized that there were a few broad categories.

The examples range from very minor productivity enhancers:

• Ekstreme's Socializer
• OnlyWire
• Social Bookmarker
• Social Poster
• Post Toaster

To semi-automated tools:

• Mass Automation RSS Bookmarker
• Tag and Ping
• Web2Submitter

With full outsourcing efforts available:

• Submit Edge
• Register Everywhere
• Performancing Services

This is obviously not a complete list of all the providers in each pile (I have several hundred bookmarks) but just a sample of some names you might recognize.

Something that might not occur to you is that you can roll your own without writing complex PHP/AJAX/whatever:

• Macro Express
• iMacro
• CoScriper

None of these options are inherently ‘evil' or ‘good' though some have a lot more ability to lean in one direction or another. For example, one could choose a high quality outsourcing company, like Performancing, or you could go find someone who has two pages hosted on GoDaddy and a crew typing furiously in Delhi. You conclude who is more likely to adhere to the social networking and bookmarking site's TOS.

And that is precisely the trick: adhering to the spirit of the TOS.

I'm not a lawyer, I can't tell you if I use digg "legally" when I log in and post my stuff, but I can tell you that I follow the User Interface (UI) and the "normal" screen process and whenever I see a recommendation for behavior I try to consider that like a host asking me to not put my beer down without a coaster. So I think about the TOS as a social contract rather than a legal one. (I just heard a thousand lawyers scream. Cool.)

I think one could take a semi-automated tool like RSS-Bookmarker and use it ‘in the spirit' of the TOS for any site, or one could post cute dog pictures to a Canadian Political Pligg site like Canada Kicks Ass. (Side: they are #1 in the SERPS for "Canada Kicks Ass" - how cool is that?). Same tool, different outcomes.

The "good" or "evil" is in you, not the tools you use.

I'll be writing some posts examining the different categories and talking through what we found and what our conclusions were.