Promote My Site

Ok, not really, but a few days ago I noted that we'd learned a lot of things the first few days after we launched Digg Friend Finder, and that one of them was that there were a lot more mentions of hamsters than gerbils in digg.

So several hundred people have run the exact same experiment.

I have only one thing to say... Our paypal address is

paypal-payments@promote-my-site.com

I'm just saying.

(Actually, that would be a cool configuration for a home office!) 

Phone number portability has been a boon to consumers and the mobile industry, so why will OpenID be a total disaster for social networking and social bookmarking if anyone is stupid enough to use it?

This Woke Me Up

We got a LOT of hits on an article via this Russian scuttle-based bookmarking site. So I was poking around to see if there were any smart ideas we could use and I ran across their registration page.

Tell me, and nothing against the folks running this site, because I wouldn't know them from Adam's housecat, but if you thought about it for 10 seconds, would you use your OpenID there?

Controls

When you switch your phone number from Verizon to Sprint there are elaborate checks and balances. Plus you know that the call center person isn't writing down your phone number so they can call the Maldives or something.

And if you use OpenID to move between your MyYahoo and Gmail accounts, that is probably ok. Because those guys have lots of corporate controls in place.

You can read this excellent Wikipedia Article to understand the types of technology controls built into OpenID (geek warning!).

Trust

At the end of the day you can really only use a site if you trust it. On Amazon many of us have our credit cards stored and one-click buying turned on. I use Overstock a lot, but I don't keep a credit card on file there. When I buy stuff from some smaller retailers I go get a one-use credit card number from my bank.

And you can only use OpenID as a single signon across sites if you trust it.

Single Signon Works in Corporations

Yes, we have it in our office too. But that is a trusted environment. How many of the websites that you regularly use are ones you would really trust? I say that because....

Accidents and Theft Will Happen

What happens when one of the issuing authorities has an, er, well, minor problem?

Like losing the tax records for the UK last November:

Britain's Revenue and Customs department is scrambling to find two discs that contained data on 25 million people.

How about if someone in a trusted position just steals it all. Never happen? Let me remind you of a story from a few years ago:

An engineer working for America Online was arrested yesterday and charged with stealing 92 million e-mail addresses of AOL customers and selling them to spammers that were peddling penis enlargement pills and online gambling sites.

Let's all remember that AOL lost all that before you could buy an 8G memory stick for $40 at Office-Stuff-R-Us.

Phishing is Easy

I get those so-called MasterCard or eBay emails all the time. Sometimes, if they look really good, I go visit to see what I can see. I got one from Malaysia the other day and their site had more than 100 pages that looked EXACTLY like the ones at Citibank.

Wow.

They do, and if you google around a bit you'll find excellent articles like Radar's. And I think that the idea of putting lots of pieces of security (a picture you should see every time, etc) is good. It's like airport security - a hundred little barriers and places to make a mistake and get caught.

Some differences:

• You have to, as a user, be paying attention to see and use the security measures.
• The guy caught sneaking onto a plane with box cutters last week was risking physical detention. How you going to catch some guy living in his mom's basement stealing OpenID's via a phony soccer survey site?

What Would Your Momma Do?

Let's say your mom uses OpenId on LOLCats (it is embarassing but true!) and one day she clicks on a banner ad for some site importing French cheese. They ask her to login using her OpenId so she can fill out a "short" five minute survey and earn a free pound of brie. While there they ask her to "update" some of her OpenID details.

Did she notice and use the security features? Or did she just help someone order a dozen Garmin GPS units from Amazon using her one-click account?

Remember what I said above, OpenID's security only works if you're paying attention. And if nobody steals or loses the information at a trusted center.

I am obviously going to give this a "pass" and I think you should too. I don't share passwords across sites so that I'm insulated from just the kind of problems that are bound to occur with a system like OpenID.

I'm just wondering how long until the first big security breach happens.

Well, Digg Friend Finder has really made a lot of people happy and has taught us quite a bit about launching SEO/SEM Tools.

Of course it had to go into a top 10 list.....

1: People Don't Read Directions

The ratio of people using the tool to reading the directions is around 15:1. Or vice versa, I couldn't get that right in 5th grade either.

2: Free Products Need Support

Not surprising, but at least the questions are easy to answer.

3: Half the Traffic is SEO

At least judging by the queries. I'm not sure if I expected more or less.

4: Threads Are Confusing

Digg Friend Finder uses our distributed SEO architecture to run the queries against Yahoo and Digg in an Ajax app running in your browser. And because of technical limitations and API functionality we can't really know how many digg friend we can find until a bunch of threaded processes finish running against the digg api. So after you hit "find" it take 10 seconds or two minutes to have the friends come back.

People find this very confusing.

5: Everything is Black Hat

Sigh. No, man, this is about being efficient in your digg friending. It's not black hat - we're within the API, the TOS, and, I wouldn't be ashamed to have my mom find out.

6: NO MAN YOU ARE A #$**&^^%% SPAMMER!!!!!

Well, gee, all caps, I'll take that seriously.

7: Users Click on Ads Even When They're Clumsy

Frankly we did not prioritize ad layout (we stink at that anyway) because we decided that we had other priorities during launch. But a lot of people clicked ads. A lot.

8: People Like Working Tools

We got a fair number of emails saying, in effect, "Thanks for making something that works." Yeah, well, we have a very large list of SEO tools we've looked at and a fair number of them simply don't work reliably. Which is very frustrating.

9: You Can Watch The World Wake Up

If you set the sitemeter geographic display on a refreshing page on Mozilla then you watch people in India, Oz, China and other strange countries (ex: San Francisco!) wake up and bookmark over to your site. Pretty neat.

10: You Learn Something New Every Day

There are 384 posters in digg with HAMSTER and there are 213 with GERBIL. I'd have thought that hamsters were a lot more popular, but then I'd have never thought to look for either. Digg is a biiiiig community.

I do not normally just point at an article and say: read this article on How to Choose a Popular Niche for Your Blog. But not because it's well written (all his stuff is) and not because we need more bloggers (we don't!) but because it is a very well written example of how to do keyword research.

Hitting Homeruns With Keyword Chains

I'm not going to repeat what was in the article, just note that the process is a lot like the more formal brainstorming techniques (if that isn't an oxymoron!) where you take an idea and do the permutations and combinations.

And what results is called a etiological keychain. And now you know why he didn't use that term - I think I just heard 100 people groan and leave.

But what you have is a primary cause (keyword) and all the phrases and keywords associated with it and their probability (search frequency).

The value of this sort of graph is that you can determine which words you need to use around your content in order to get the right kind of SERP love.

Actionable

It all sounds very intellectual and theoretical, but it is very actionable information. If you have the phrase "driving technique" as a key phrase and the suggestion comes back that "snow driving" has 1K searches a day, well, you can do something about that to capture traffic.

Product Keywords

The only problem with the above examples is that you have to create content around them. Which is expensive and time consuming. But if you are selling products then this is a pretty quick exercise, even if you have a LOT of products.

And, of course, you can get a LOT of leverage from this quickly if you use google base to make sure your products are powerfully searched and displayed .

Unfortunately Manual

Here's the problem: you need to keep up with this stuff. And you need to refresh it regularly because search terms do change. And this is a manual process, which means that it is:

• Expensive to execute
• Tedious

.

Google Matrix

We all know that product listings show up in google, but did you ever stop to look at what shows up? And who is NOT playing in that space?

I'll give you a hint: Amazon and Overstock aren't there. Circuit City and Best Buy are.

Did Jeff Bezos bite the red pill or something? (I'm not even going to ask that question about Byrne!)

Huge Opportunity for E-Commerce Friendly Merchants

This is great news for everyone because, god bless the ding dongs at CC/BB, but have you ever tried to actually buy something through their website? As my teenager would say: OMG, WTH?

So this means that if you have an eBay Marketplace or a Yahoo!Store or any non-stinky website then you have a great opportunity to compete against mid-tier e-merchants for a change.

Gunfight On Equal Terms

If you can't beat Amazon or Overstock or any big e-merchant in a heads up fight for Organic SERPS or for buying adwords then you need to go someplace where you're equal. It looks like the big guys are just ignoring Google Products ... for now at least. So suddently you're competing against other merchants without a household name. Other merchants with limited budgets. Other merchants with the same margin and shipping costs.

How cool is that?

Best of All .. It is Free

Well, maybe not free since you have to get your products up into the google database and you have to renew them every 30 days. But after a small initial effort to do your mapping and work through some issues it should take just a few minutes per month. Which is close enough to free for me.

We've talked a lot about SEO Tools and I have been fairly critical of their ROI. You'll notice that most of them are not in the sweet part of the grid (hint: upper right is better!):

You can see that we liked iMacro (which is why we coded the Ping utility in that on the client side.

What Makes ROI?

I think you have to consider the value of what you get from your labor inputs. In this case you've got both sunk investment and ongoing costs in Digg because you

• Craft stories (linkbait)
• Friend other diggers
• Vote
• Shout

Now, the question is, can you do something that increases the value of your assets and spend? That leverage comes from Digg Friend Finder. As you increase your use of Digg Friend Finder you get more and more friends for the specific content you create or submit. And it gets more popular, etc, etc.

Simple - high return.

What Makes it Actionable?

This is even simpler: you get a list of targeted potential friends in seconds and you just have to click and analyze. That is actionable. And easy.

Latest SEO Capability Grid

Hey, we're not neutral, but I think it is undeniable that the Digg Friend Finder gives you capability you can't find anywhere else and it is high value. So we put it into the juicy quadrant.

Honestly, there are people who would yell at a Scout for helping a little old lady cross the street. We built the free social networking tool, Digg Friend Finder, to help people use digg more effectively. We used Digg's API. We followed their TOS. Heck, they could build this functionality into the product if they wanted to, though I am sure they won't.

Black Hat? Who, us?

The very first email (of many) that we received asked us to help them use PHP and curl to pull the results off the page and auto-friend everyone listed.

Uh, dude, if we wanted to help people do that we we would - it is technically very feasable. Simple even. But it would violate Digg's TOS, so we don't do that.

Later in the day we saw a bunch of huge queries running from one IP. Some guy was trying to get large lists of digg users (we think) around unrelated keywords.

Ok, so no TOS violation there, but, silly rabbit, too many friends do not help you use Digg better. If you're reading this, go to my article on Promoting Your Site Through Efficient Friending.

User Your Powers for Good Not Evil

We're happy that so many people are using and liking our Digg Friend Finder, and it looks like most of them are using it with well targeted keywords. So they'll get some great ROI from using our tools.

We all know that efficient and wide ranging friending on Digg is a critical success factor (CSF) for digg story promotion. Yes, yes, I know, first you have to write the worlds most awesome link bait. But you still have to be able to get enough people to vote in the beginning to get it above the crowd.

I was gonna write something clever, but that picture just makes me clench, so let's go straight into.....

Finding People Who Post Your Kind of Story

You could go into digg, search, poke around, and try to find people who post stories about "SEO TOOLS." Or you could do it the easy way and just go to Promote My Site and click on the link for the Digg Friend Finder.

Once again, screen grabs and annotations are via Fireshot - awesome and free.

When you get to the Digg Friend Finder page you'll see some explanatory text and some ads (this is ad supported freeware after all), but most of us, let's face it, do not read directions, so your attention will be drawn to:

It's simple enough - just add in some keywords and hit the Search button:

What you can see is that 100 different articles were found with BOTH the keywords "SEO" and "Tools" and that part is 100% complete. This is all through the Digg API so parts are fast and other parts are not so fast. In fact, what you'd see if you kept watching would be:

You'll notice that it continues to find friends - it went from 9 to 78. This is because the actual part of finding the people via the Digg API is very slow. Go figure.

At any point in this process you can click the Show Friends button and get a display of your potential friends:

Neat. So, if you're an SEO and you're posting to digg on SEO topics, why aren't those people your friends?

One last feature: the radio button toggle between profile pages and submissions

just changes the links so that they either go to the person's profile page or the page with all their submissions. A minor feature, true, but if you want to look at all 78 people above then it will definitely save you some time.

What Happens When They Block This?

They can't. Well, they could, by changing their API and TOS, but they won't do that. You can read all about Architecting SEO Apps for Digg if you want more info.

Closing Comments

This service went sailing through our beta/QA process - people just seemed to get it. If you have any questions just contact us at help@promote-my-site.com, leave a blog comment, or you can also find/PM us at SEOMoz and Sphinn .

We all know that some backlinks never make it to technorati and therefore are less likely to be "discovered" by google.  And all your backlinks are important for SERPS, high quality technorati traffic, etc, etc.  So we built a tool that will automatically generate pings to technorati and pingomatic for all your backlinks.  And it is free.  (Well, it's ad-supported, but that is close enough to the same thing.)

How and Why

If you'd like an architectural explanation of how it work, you can read All Your Links are Pingworthy.  Here is how to download and install iMacro and why we chose iMacro as a SEO automation framework.

Operations - Getting There

It's quite simple, really.  You can go to our website, Promote-My-Site and click on the left hand side toolbar link for Promote-My-Site Ping.

Note: The really cool screen grab above is from FireShot, which saves me five minutes a day, easy.  Get it if you do a lot of screen shots!

 

Using the Promote-My-Site Pinger

Once you get to the right page you'll see some explanatory text and:

Which is not so useful, so put in your URL and click PingBacklinks.  Go ahead and click through the dialog box telling you that this might take a while - it's actually very very fast but testing feedback said that we needed something like that.  You'll see:

This means that Yahoo had 5,087 backlinks and we are 50% of the way turning those Yahoo API'd backlink records into technorati pings for an iMacro script.  (Now is a good time to download iMacro if you haven't already done it!)

When the process is complete you will see this button:

One of the tricky things here is that Yahoo's API will only let us get 1,000 records, so you may want to split up your website into a set of strong pages, or take each RSS feed and run it through.

Trouble Shooting

Honestly, we have had a great limited beta (aka QA sucker) round and haven't found any problems we can't fix.  If you start to get 0 results for things that you know have backlinks you may have hit Yahoo's query limit for the day.  But the cool thing is that, because this runs out of an Ajax app on your browser, you can just grab a new IP and you're off.

Drop us an email (help@promote-my-site.com) if you have any issues and we'll help.  You can also find us on Sphinn and SEOMoz, so if PM works better for you then you can reach us there pretty easily.  We'd also be delighted to hear any suggestions for improvements and additions.

If you want your content to do well (link juice, readers, fame and fortune- whatever) you either have exactly three options:

• World Class Link Bait
• Pounding Out A Thousand Singles
• Don’t Be A Friend To Mankind

Baiting a Dull Hook

I know, I know, there are lots of articles about how to create popular content for so-called boring industries. Some of the better ones are:

• Is Your Industry Too Boring for Linkbait?
• SeoMoz’s Most Excellent Jane Presentation
• SeoBook’s Digg is for Dweebs

But you know, mostly that is simply not going to work. It’s not that this isn’t good advice, it’s just that you can’t really operationalize it. Some of your content has to be more prosaic to get keywords, concepts, and basic communications out to the reading public. So none of that can be linkbait.

And, some days, well, even the most talented writer is going to look at this headline:

• Top 100 Reasons Japonata Front Loaders Rock

And go to Red Robin and get drunk at lunch.

So then you’ve got to play:

Paycheck Baseball

When I was on the baseball team in high school my coach told me that you have to pound out every single hit to convert them to singles. There is no “trick” here – you just have to turn out content every day, post it to social networking and bookmarking services every day.

Pounding out the singles on the social networking sites has to be the keystone of your overall strategy, and is why I keep saying that you have to look past Digg, Reddit, Propeller, etc and start efficiently using smaller sites (Rambling Irishman - http://www.the-ri.com/pligg/, etc). Some other people have started mentioning their top 18 or 20 sites, and that is useful to expand your horizon.

Go ahead, write the linkbait when you can (and it’s going to be a very small percentage of your content, realistically) but until then, get your content out and

Practice Retail Politics

If you want your very articulate article on why

• Japonata Front Loaders with NEW Silicone Impregnated Hoses Save You Valuable Maintenance Dollars

to get read, then you’re going to have to find “friends” online who are interested in stuff like that. Yes, they exist.

In other words, you have to go find people who have written or voted on articles on heavy equipment, maintenance, etc, etc. Not every one on these sites is only voting on Ron Paul and pictures of cats in the loo.

You need to find those people with similar interests, friend them, vote on their stories, “shout” to them when you post something in their strike zone, etc. Duh, I know, But go back to my baseball analogy – you have to pound it out over time to get a statistical advantage so you can win more than you lose.
How about next time you submit a story you go find one similar story, vote on it, and friend the author? Then you can shout them on your next post. Over time you’ll get a good network. You don’t really want to be a friend to the entire population of any site – it’s borderline abusive and it simply doesn’t work.

Remember, don't friend everyone in the world, make sure they submit or vote on stories that are in your strike zone. And you should expect many of them not to friend you back. Plus you have to respond to their shouts, not just shout to them. You learned all that in first grade.

So Now What?

Well, it’s not rocket science

• Create the best content you can, regularly if not every day
• Use a lot of social sites in an efficient way
• Utilize and contribute to friend networks for visibility

It’s not a Fast Food strategy, but over time you’ll outrun your competitors, especially the ones quick out of the gate with flash success and no long term focus.

Free SEO Tool To Help

So how can we help? Well, we've built a tool, Digg Friend Finder, that will help you search out and friend people on digg who have similar interests. We'll explain how it all works in the next post.