Promote My Site

I'd like to thank everyone for their testing on the Social Suite with Digg Analytics and Automation. It was, well, interesting. I've done a lot of beta testing inside client sites but haven't really released a program into the wild since before the internet. (Remember FidoNet and shareware distribution? Yikes!)

At the end of the day we decided that it was usable enough to replace the old Digg Friend Finder. Which, given the number of daily users, was a pretty uncomfortable and tricky decision. However, the actual traffic on the free version of the Social Suite has gone up from the old Digg Friend Finder, so mission accomplished there.

Mainly, however, it was quite a learning experience for us in how people use automation software when it's not part of a larger corporate sponsored project.   We clearly recognized that individual or small company buyers had different price and function points, but the variable cost of time and overhead is so much less accounted for in smaller firms that a lot of our positioning was probably not necessary.  Fascinating. 

Social Suite Beta Test Pre-Natal Expectations

I was expecting a LOT of criticism for the UI. I quite like it and it has a lot of technical advantages from our standpoint, but it is not the typical UI.

Not one word.

I was also expecting people to balk at installing iMacros (especially since you have to install the previous version because of bugs in the new release) and running the Suite in its own Firefox window.

Not one word.

I thought there were too many columns of numbers in the Find Friends panel for people to really wade though them. It turns out people ignore the numbers they don't understand or think are unimportant. Fascinating.

We got a lot of good feedback about our documentation and how to help reduce the complexity of what the suite can do. Over the next week or so I'll be publishing some articles to help people use both the free and premium versions of the software.

Beta Test Post-Mortem

This is going to sound strange, but our take homes were:

1. Our target market uses paypal rather than Amex. We were startled.
2. People want videos rather than user manuals. I guess it's the YouTube phenom coming home to roost. I actually find it easier to write a manual. (Yes, I own a typewriter, why do you ask?)
3. We were right to go with value based pricing and to aim for "professional diggers."

Value Based Pricing

There are (broadly) two ways to price anything: cost or value. Walmart prices own-brand cornflakes a price+markup. Apple prices everything at value. The difference differentiates your market.

So when we decided to price the first version of the social suite we tried to balance off users, user time/value, revenue, support costs/expectations, server load, investment timeline, etc. We put a stopwatch on a lot of in-house testing, spoke to the alpha users extensively about the value proposition, and did some magnificent fiddling on a whiteboard.

And came up with a buck an hour.

If you value your time at more than a buck and hour and use digg to drive revenue, then you should be paying us to use the social suite. And our beta testers, as they converted to paying customers, confirmed this observation.

Why Not Charge More?

If you look around, there aren't that many SEO tools that successfully charge an admissions fee. So our goal was to establish a precedent and, as we add value and reduce time/cost we will raise our prices.

If You Missed the Beta

Look, if you were taking a nap under a lilly pad or something, just go to our contact us page and drop us a line and we'll help you out.

Do you spend your days in the drudgery of promoting your web sites? We've listed over 2,000 Social Media Websites as ripe grounds for promoting your articles. But the comment that we seemed to get the most was best summed up by katfrench on Sphinn:

"Seriously, though, post a list of two thousand social bookmarking sites and Sphinners will get a headache at the thought of all the time it would take to register.""

Why You Shouldn't Try to Submit to 2,000 Social Networks

• You Shouldn't Submit Your Own Stuff. I agree that there's nothing morally wrong with promoting yourself, but most of the communities out there will tend to vote you down if you just blow your own horn. It is far better to have a variety of people submitting your articles to the social networks, if only because then you've got a wide range of IP addresses submitting your articles. And let's not forget that Google was making noises earlier this year about devaluing links from social networks where it appears that the owner of the site is linking to their own pages.
• It's a poor use of your time. How much are you willing to pay for links? How much is your time worth? It's a matter of looking at your investment of time and how much a link or traffic is worth to you. If you decide a link from a third tier social network is only worth about a nickel and it takes one minute to submit the article, you're saying your labor is only worth $3/hour to do this yourself. If you live in the US, you can't live on that.

Why You Should be on as Many Social Networks as Possible

This sounds like a contradiction with the first section, but it really isn't. There are a lot of very good reasons that you should be on as many social networks as possible, instead of just focussing on the first tier like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, etc.

• Cover Your Bets. What if you had spent hundreds of hours building up your site on Digg and they decided to ban you? Or what if Google's solution to the social nework self linking problem is to just dramatically discount all links from Digg? Concentrating on just a few social networks is really putting all of your eggs in one basket. It's dangerous and foolhardy. You should spread your risk across as many platforms as you can.
• Little Guys Bring Better Traffic. Yes, StumbleUpon and Digg can bring massive traffic, but the bounce rate is also astromical. Is it really worth paying for the bandwidth to bring in 100K visitors that spend an average of 15 seconds on your site? Who aren't really interested in what you have to sell? On the other hand, getting 5-10 good targeted visitors from a specialty site can lead to a conversion rate that will make it worth your while. It's just a question of whether you want to be able to brag about how much traffic you have, or whether you want to make money because you've got real visitors that are interested in what you have to sell or will click your ads.
• Little Guys Have Less Distance to the Top. Your submission on Digg will end up several levels away from the top page with the big PR boost. Even if it makes it hot, it will fall off and the long term link juice gained will be fairly minor. But on a small social site, your submissions will be fairly near the top. Would you rather be 10 steps away from a PR 9 page, or two steps from a PR 4? My gut tells me hitting singles all the time is better than hitting home runs but batting .050.
• Little Guys Aren't Filled With Jerks. There's no "bury brigade" on the small sites. The editors of the sites are pleased to have people submitting stories, as a lot of them end up seeding their own stories
• The Link Math is Astonishing If you concentrate on the top 3, you can at most get away with submitting 3 articles a day across them. And you'll have to bury that within many others each day so you don't look like you're only self promoting. 3/day = 15/week = 750/year. So for a year's worth of work you'll get 750 links, and if you're lucky they'll have an average PR of 1. That's not going to do much for you. Now what if you targeted 400 sites? The math now works out to 400/day = 2,000/week = 100,000/year. Now we're talking.

So Build a Bot, Right?

Wrong! Even if you could code a bot that would handle submissions on 400 different sites, it just wouldn't work.

• It's from the same IP address. Editors tend not to like bots (imagine that!), and your bot is coming from either a single or a small group of IP addresses if you use a proxy. Banning your IP is pretty darn easy. That's a big investment in development that you would make and it would be gone.
• It's from the same people. Unless you also maintained a huge stable of fake accounts on each of these sites (which would also have the same IP problem), your submissions would all be coming from the same people and could be easily banned.
• These sites change. There are several "auto-posters" that have been defeated merely by adding a little bit of javascript to the login. The bot's Curl script can't deal with that, so they cough. Just moving things around the page or changing the names of input fields is enough to make maintenance of your huge catalog of bot scripts impossible. You'd need a full time staff just to keep up with it.
• Captchas. Most of these sites are moving to some sort of Captcha on their submission, so unless you're an elite hacker it's not going to work. If Captcha's aren't a problem for you, then you don't need to be reading this.
• It Would Violate the TOS. Not that the bot spammers care, but most of these sites say you can't use a bot on them.

So What's the Solution?

The solution is the same one that worked the first time someone started a business: leverage the work of other people. All you have to do is get other people to post your stuff.

How to get them to do that and still maintain profitability is a lot less obvious. But you'll have to wait for tomorrow's post to find that out.

You remember that scene in Monty Python where the guy explainst that the parrot is not dead, it's just "pinin for the Fijords!"

Well, we went from posting daily (or twice/daily) to a few times a week to ... silence for a week at a time.

Well, two products in beta, a couple of unexpected PO extensions from existing clients (thanks guys!) and a nasty flu that someone brought in from a second grade hot lunch and some tasks had to get put on pause. 

But we're back now, thankfully, and it all looks under control.  Look for more posting goodness! 

I heard a story from a friend the other day that I've seen played out on the Internet dozens of times. A blogger who writes about restaurants wrote a post that was critical of the restaurant.

The restaurant owner's lawyer sent a cease and desist letter, claiming libel. In this case the blogger just folded and took down the post, but put up a copy of the lawyer letter with the offending lines redacted.

So the restaurant gets an article in the SERPs below the fold that indicates somebody was really unhappy, but they don't know why. That would be enough to keep me away...

Follow the Rules of Business

The restaurant owner, in this case, completely blew it. They violated several important rules of business:

• Never Take Business Advice From Your Lawyer. Your lawyer knows absolutely nothing about how to run a business. They went to law school and work in a law firm. That's about as far away from the business world as you can get. If you need advice on how to overcharge clients for working more hours than are in a day, then perhaps your lawyer is where to go. But for a PR situation, a lawyer is exactly the wrong person to call. The lawyer doesn't get to bill your hundreds of hours if you decide to just ignore something. Your lawyer wants you to outspend the other side with a big lawsuit. In the end, the only people that ever come out ahead in these situations are the lawyers. If you're fortunate enough to find a great lawyer like we have that understands the needs of a business, then you're fortunate. But most businesses are not, and they tend to defer to them.
• Make Love Not War. An angry customer is an opportunity, not a call to war. Some of your most fiercely loyal customers will be those people that started out with a complaint that you made right. Yes, there are some customers that are complete jerks that you just can't make happy, but you should at least give every customer a few chances.
• It Never Pays to Threaten Someone with a Megaphone. In this case the blogger just had a small following. But the lawyer didn't know that. It could have just as easily been a blogger with 40K+ subscribers. That simple cease and desist letter could have been plastered everywhere across the internet. As it is, the blog post is now below the fold when you Google for the restaurant's name. But if they had gotten someone who knew a little about SEO angry at them they could have ended up with a negative blog post outranking their city search listing (they don't have a site of their own).

A Better and Less Expensive Outcome

So this restaurant owner, who probably doesn't understand anything about Web 2.0 or that whole intarweb thing, probably spent $300 to have a big name law firm bully a blogger into taking down a negative post. Worse yet, the lawyer probably found the post by "policing their trademark". That's when you pay your lawyer $300/hour to Google your company name and send nastygrams to anyone that dares talk about you in a negative light. My guess is they lost several hundred customers because this guy has a pretty good local following.

Here's how it could have been done differently in a Web 2.0 approach. Instead of launching the sharks at the blogger, the restaurant owner could have engaged his customer and called or emailed him and said "I see that we didn't live up to your expectations. How about giving us another try, lunch is on us?" At the very least the blogger would now have a real human face to associate with the restaurant rather than an institution. He might very well have written another post along the lines of "Well, this food isn't my cup of tea, but the owners sure are nice people and a lot of people like this restaurant." Or better yet, the blogger might have had some valid criticisms that the restaurant could have addressed. That could easily have turned things around and they might have gotten good PR out of the situation. Instead of alienating several hundred people, they might have gained many new customers.

Whatever he did, using the lawyers wasn't the right move. It would have been much less expensive and effective to go comment on the blog and tell their own side of the story. They probably could have found a few dozen customers that would have done the same thing. If the blogger wouldn't move, the story could have become about how the blogger totally missed the point. Instead of a negative, they could have generated a big buzz for themselves.

Old and Busted or New Hotness

Their way cost them $300 lawyers fees and probably thousands in lost revenue. It's a very 1980s approach to business. It's like having your secretary print out your email so you can read it. The Web 2.0 way would have cost about $10 for the free lunch, and might have gained them several thousand in revenue from new customers.

Is your customer retention strategy Old and Busted or New Hotness? Your choice.

[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.