Promote My Site

Easy, right? Sure it is, there are lists all over the place. But how many of the lists reference only the working social networking and bookmarking websites?

None of them. Well, none of the big lists. When you get a smaller list, like the Festivus List from Tropical SEO, then those are pretty much guaranteed to be good. (Until link rot sets in, of course.:)

The most excellent blog, Everything 2.0, has a continuously updated list of bookmark sites but quite a few of the things on their list do not actually work.

What do I mean by “work?” Well, in my simplistic universe you have to be able to register, login, and post. I don’t actually require that it work all the time - the smaller sites often seem to run out of bandwidth at the end of the month. Fine. Or the operator goes on vacation (for a month if he’s French) so no stories can get promoted in August. Okey-dokey.

But you have to be able to blip around the non-working sites when you find them without having a lot of sturm-und-drang. You also need to be able to delete them from your daily to-do list when they’ve become more trouble than they’re worth or when they are just down too often.

So you need a looooong list of social sites and you need to keep it fresh.

It does not help when the lists that people put up are not easy to pull down and use. I can grab the list from 3-Spots or Everything 2.0 pretty easily, but take the WatchMouse list of Slow and Inaccessible Social Networking Sites. It’s a freaking jpeg. A jpeg. That is so useless.

Are they trying to protect their IP? I could have a Mechanical Turk type all that in for me for two bucks. I could pay a guy on eLance a fin to create a detailed spreadsheet on each site.

But why make me do that?

We have a solution for you, and I’ll talk about that tomorrow.