I should have known this, but Fireboard has an RSS feed. If you had subscribed to the feed in our PMS Social Suite forum, you would have heard about this cool new planned feature.

You would also be able to see new features planned for our next release, which will include items 414, 409, 378, 411, 412, 408, and 358. No ETA, but 90% of this is working on our dev servers. Yes, you'll have to look through the forum to see what those are.

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.

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.

[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're taking down the downloadable list of 2,162 social bookmarking and networking sites and replacing it with an interactive analytical tool that gives you a lot more information and display control. It will let you see the heartbeat for any social bookmarking or networking site. Thus, in a fit of imagination, we called this the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™.

(Plus it is much much cooler than a google doc and you can get the list directly as a "csv" file.)

Things you can find out

We've built some controls around a grid so that you can filter the list of 2,000 plus social bookmarking and social networking sites down into the sublist you're probably most interested in. By my watch it is between 30% to 70% faster than google docs. (Attention google: my technical staff is better than yours!)

We added the kinds of controls that will help you find something specific:

• You want PR5 or better Live Sites? No problem, there are 534 of them.
• Sites that are live but between PR2 and PR4 with >1,000 pages indexed in google? 403 of them.
• Insert your question here....

But most importantly, we introduced the idea of a heartbeat for each site.

Heartbeat?

It's great to have a big list, and it's even handy to have a "Live" indicator so that you know that sometime in the last two months I was able to use the site in an appropriate fashion (create user, login, post). But we're including what we call heartbeat information:

• Pages indexed in Yahoo/MSN and what-is-their-name, oh, yeah, Google
• Backlink count for Yahoo/MSN/Google
• Load time

We'll be keeping this information on a weekly basis for each site so that you can track a site over time. And, because we really believe in making this information widely useful, you'll be able to download the performance over time.

Made for Custom Analysis

For example, Mixx is getting huge buzz right now in the SEO community and has 133K pages indexed in google. Does anyone (outside Mixx) have any idea what that was last week? You'll know in a week if you come back.

To put it even more in perspective, Digg has 9.8M pages indexed and Dogster has 134K pages. Dogster? Yep, it's exactly what you think it is. But both Dogster and Mixx are PR6 sites with similar google love. Where should you be putting your funny dog stories? (Trick question, the answer is both digg and dogster, wtih mixx in third place if you have time!)

Do you find that your stories do better on PR4 sites or PR8 sites? Do you want traffic or links? Now you have to consider.....

Tribal Knowledge vs. Experimentation

Well, we know all about long tail search and long tail e-tailing and long tail PPC campaigns, etc, etc. And there are even a few of us talking about niche sites versus huge volume general sites (ex: Digg vs. VOIPigg) but you know, it's all been logic, supposition, and educated guesses.

At Promote-My-Site we've written about getting a diversified portfolio of social bookmarking and social networking sites. So we started thinking about analyzing sites - how many backlinks, what is their PageRank, what is the change over time, etc. It's all obvious stuff to want to know, but except for traffic share changes for the "big 10" you can't really get any of that. For free anyway. And you certainly won't get that easily downloadable.

No longer. Now you can experiment using our Social Heartbeat Monitor ™. Find sites that are in your specialty, look at smaller but still high value sites (there are a ton), re-post some of your greatest hits. Once you find a combination that works and gives you good ROI, find more sites like it using our filters.

Calling All New Sites

We spend an astounding number of hours pulling lists from the internet and came up with 2,000 to look at. Yesterday I got emails about three new ones. We'll be constantly adding things to the list and we'll give you a way to find "what's new." You can also easily suggest new sites right from the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page.

Time Will Tell

We believe that a social bookmark and network heartbeat will be a valuable tool for looking at the change over time of a social networking or social bookmarking site. We think you'll enjoy it and find it useful to build a portfolio of performing social network and bookmarking sites.

Well, when I wrote about this handy utility to see if your site was really down, little did I know that I'd really need to know it right away:

Hmmm, could it be the hosting company:

Well, yes it is. I am soooo disappointed in cari.net right now - years of great service and then a very very bad week.

So I give them a call and here is my conversation:

Me: Can you give me a status?

The Guy: Not really, all the network guys are downstairs with the vendor reps so there is nobody to ask.

Me: The vendors are there?

The Guy: Yes, the outage started in one part of the network and has been rolling over our data centers for the last few hours.

Me: Great.

The Guy: Don't worry, they're calling in everyone they can find to come help.

Me: Somehow that is not so reassuring.

I have a nice long post about Google, Digg, Page Rank Penalties, and why we all need a diversification strategy away from the top few social networking and bookmarking sites. But I have to go call all our affected customers (not everything is on Cari.Net - I am professionally paranoid) and tell them what is going on.

On November 1, 2007 we launched Promote My Site and on November 8th we figured out that Google Hated Us and on February 29th 2008 we woke up to find our site was now a PR3.  How did we do that?

Tiger?

Well, ok, maybe a bear cub.  But it feels very tigerish to go from the sandbox to having almost every page on your site in google's primary index.   Like when you hit a really good 3 wood off the tee box and you feel like Tiger even though your ball is 60 yards back from where his would land.

What Kind of Difference Has It Made?

A lot in terms of search results driving traffic.  We still post daily, and we get a fair number of people who come to the main site just to read the daily post, but more and more of our traffic is coming from people searching for terms that we put up on the white board six months ago and said: we need this traffic organically.

How'd You Do It?

It was pretty straightforward:

• Fill out the google form for recosideration
• Write good content every day
• Spend 1 month laying a base of decent inbound links
• Reply to every post with an incomming link

I don't think any of that is rocket science, but ti does require daily application and attention.

Dense Content

Not as in stupid, but as in longer posts predominate.  We have an average time-on-site of over six minutes and three pages.  I think our average post is 400 words, so that is about right in terms of reading speed.

I think that adding images and diagrams to our stories has also helped our readers.  I love a good Victorian novel but I know that sometimes when I hit a blog post that is a giant field of text, I just think, "I will read that later."  As if.  So we've tried to balance quick loading times with some visual relief.  But we've also tried to make sure that the images relate to the post in a useful or humorous way.  One of my favorite SEO blogs has these great pictures all over it but they're essentially eye-candy and don't relate to the story.  Which kind of annoys me while it puzzles me - if you're going to take that long to dig up a photo, why not get one that applies to the story?

Tools

We have seen a LOT of people coming to our site to use the tools (Digg Friend Finder, Backlink Pinger, and Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer) and they tend to stay on the site even longer than the readers.  We also see a lot them come back several times a week.  This is especially true for the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer - there is a great deal of SEO functionality goodness there, plus re-doing a store is an interactive/iterative process.

Linkbait

We haven't ever set out to write linkbait.  In fact, most of our posts are pretty boring to the general public - we are aiming for SEO business people and practioners  And while they will enjoy linkbait, and may even admire its creation, it doesn't speak to our need for legitimacy in our target marketplace.  So we don't do it. 

Having said that, we have put out some things that we knew would attract a lot of attention: a downloadable list of 2,162 social networking and bookmarking sites, reviews of some popular SEO software, etc.  But the goal of these posts was never linkbait, which I think is pretty obvious from how they were written.

Future Plans

Actually, while we will still be careful to target good inbound words for our customer base, we're not going to pay much more attention to page rank because it is only valuable to us for two reasons:

• Speaks to competency in our chosen field - would you buy SEO tools from a company that can't rank?
• Provides us the ability to target new keywords and get good organic search traffic from them to drive business

All in all, I have to say, the 29th was a good leap day for us!

This is a really interesting question.  The two primary places I go to learn tips and tricks in the SEO world are the guys over at SEOMoz (disclaimer: we subscribe) and Aaron Wall of SEOBook fame.  Ok, I have a bit of a crush on John Chow's business model and I think ShoeMoney, Dosh Dosh and a buncha others are awesome too.

Tools with Content the Key

But Rand and Aaron are also tool providers.  But they're pretty clearly tool providers who are monetizing other products - exclusive content, a book, whatever.  It's not that they don't have very nice tools, but from the outside it looks to me as if SEOMoz's tools and free content drives their subscription model.  I think Aaron is pretty much upfront that he sells his SEOBook.

Opposite Way Around

We have content to bring in tool users. We have "free" tools to sell, well, tools.  Let me show you why, using SEOMoz's recently published traffic stats:

Rand was using this chart to talk about the importance of long tail, but we look at this and think: the people looking for SEO tools are exactly our target market.  I think it's great he can monetize people typing in "what is SEO" and "seo" but we think that the orange boxed "tools" queries are more to our liking.  This doesn't put us at loggerheads with SEOmoz (what is Turkish for stupid?) because our tools are aimed at very specific vertical markets.

For example, SEOMoz's page strength tool is really quite cool.  So we'd not really try to reproduce that (what would be the point, really?) but we might create a page analyzer tool for, say, mobile focused websites.

Vertical Focus Drives Actionability

One of our annoying habits is that we look at ideas and say:

So, what can you DO with it?

Take the Digg Friend Finder as an example - it's blindingly obvious what you can do with that.  Ditto the Backlink PInger.  Who do we know?  Well, as i mentioned, only around 10% of the users have bothered to read the directions for Digg Friend Finder....  If I hadn't started our my career, back in the days of punch cards, as a technical writer I suspect I'd never document anything again.

Actionable Tasks Should Provide ROI

Great, so you can DO something with these tools - what does it buy you?  Again, by focusing on a specific niche we provide that ROI.  Could we have built a Friend Finder that worked for MySpace, Facebook, Mixx, etc, etc?  Probably.  But it was not clear to us that we could provide an architecturally compliant application that provided TOS compliant ROI.  So we didn't.  Simple is good sometimes.

Bias Toward Action

It may be all the startups under our belts (and all the worthless stock options in the file cabinet!) but we're most interesting in things that do stuff.   Content is great, and we produce a bit and consume a lot.  But you have to translate content into action, either manually (horrors!) or by finding a tool or automated service.

Tools are Always Downstream of Content

Would you know to ping your backlinks if a hundred SEO bloggers hadn't talked about how important it is?  Yes, I know we talked about how All Your Backlinks are Pingworthy, but I'm not under any illusion about who gets read first if Sebastain posts something about backlinks the same day I do.

Would you know the value of more digg friends if there hadn't been a LOT of discussion by social media mavens?  Yes, I gave you our take on Efficient Friending on Digg, but....

But once you read the content you can come to us for tools.  Over and over again, we hope.

When we launched Promote My Site we had a pretty narrowly defined target market in mind - people interested in SEO tools that produce actionable reports or measurable ROI.  And we knew that we wanted to spend some time blogging about business and SEO and VC -w e wanted to introduce ourselves first, as it were.  And we knew we wanted to review some non-competitive SEO tools so that future users could better understand what we used to evaluate our go/no-go decisions.

Planning Never Survives Launch

So we did all that, and after reviewing thousands of inbound traffic referrals, reading comments, answering emails, and noting the kind of comments people were leaving around the 'net about our blog, we thought we understood the market, at least a little bit.

Then we released  Digg Friend Finder and Backlink Pinger anticipating that the people who were visiting every day would find them useful and maybe make a few more visits. Perhaps even put the blog on their RSS Feed.

Wow, we did not really anticipate people coming back several times a day, bookmarking us, sending emails about us to friends, etc. (Yes, it is amazing what you can learn from site logs!)  And suddenly our overseas reader count really ramped up.

It's all Good

But very strange.  It looks like at least half the people using the tools are coming straight to them, which was expected.  But the other half are coming to read the daily post and then going over to use the tools.

We couldn't really understand that behavior, so we did a silly post on Saturday - no real change in tool use.  Then on Sunday we didn't do a post at all.  Tool use dropped around 50%.  Fascinating.

Wait, You Said Free is Bad?

No, we said (and will continue to say) that if someone doesn't have a way to monetize what they're doing then it's just a hobby.  So why would you depend on someone's hobby site to run your business? 

Monetizing the Tool Users

We think that there are three ways to make money out of tool users

• Ad revenue.  We're currently using google, but expect to implement different models in different parts of the site.
• Affiliate programs.  We only do this for stuff we respect: iMacro, WordTracker, SEOBook.
• Paid subscriptions.  Not currently available, but when they are they will offer a huge increase in features and functionality.

We can see that, based on the current traffic and click rates, that the "free" tools will shortly pay for the hosting resources consumed while bringing in paying customers.  Which is twofer, if you think about it.  So we have a lot of incentive to maintain the tools, ensure that the server has good performance, etc, etc.  In other words, this mixed model gives you something to count on.

Why Tools Are Cool

Recall what I said earlier - people are coming back several times a day without needing new content to drive them.  Hmm.  Leverage, wot? 

We've also seen, not viral, it's not that big, but a fair number of new users coming from emails and blog comments.  And, finally, we're getting all sorts of new organic SERP traffic from regular-old-google and from a half dozen new country specific google portals.  Are SEO folks from NZ more likely to click ads than our Canadian brothers?  Who knows, but if we have both then we'll find out and can make adjustments accordingly.

As we continue to roll out new tools (we'll have another one this week too) we expect that the virtuous cycle of increased traffic, revenue, and referrals to continue.  This should put us in good shape for paid subscriptions and a cash flow positive business you can count on.

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!)