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.

[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. :-)

Well, not wrong in the sense that they are writing silly stuff (lord knows there is plenty of that in the SEO blogosphere!) but that they get the wrong end of the handle, as it were.

Article the first: Real People Don't Have Time For Social Media.

B: The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg.

Go read them both as they are frightfully well written and insightful, but ultimately not to the point I'd have made.

Here it is in a nutshell, though: People have to spend too much time on Digg and there is less tech news there.

Yes, yes, I know these articles aren't a pair, but they have a lot of similarities in their outlook on Digg/Social Media

Jumping to What?

 Ok, I think people often spend a lot of time "working" on things that don't have ROI. But even worse, they simply don't consider ROI or even measuring it. I might say they act in a tactical fasion with no linkage to a strategy.

Which brings me to the second part about Digg not being so tech friendly. I am not so sure this is true in the sense that it's permanent. We are in an election cycle and it's been quite a while since Steve Jobs came out of his hole, saw his shadow, and dropped a raft of fanboy flavored iPods on us.

But say it is so. So what? Does that mean that the tech readers aren't there anymore? Or that they are actually more interested or less?

Which brings me around to the "too much time" argument, which I still think is bad ROI focus and lack of testing.

So, while the articles are good, I would encourage people interested in social media to keep examining their overall strategies of readers, links, subscribers, etc, etc and not jump to any conclusions.

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.

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

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.

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.