Sometimes your Digg friends just don't know when to quit.

We've all seen the person that seems to have just discovered the shout button and sends us 20 spams, er shouts, a day. We've been smart enough to turn off the email notfication for new shouts, but it's still clogging up our shout pages.

We don't want to lose them as a friend, because frankly they send good stuff once in a while and they digg our stuff, but there's just no way in Digg to get them to cut it out. It's either receive every shout or stop being friends.

A Script to Block Those Bothersome Shouts

Now there's a solution. If you haven't already, go install Greasemonkey. Really. Go do it right now. Then install our new Greasemonkey Script to Block Digg Shouts. After you have Greasemonkey installed you just click on the link and the script will install itself. You can make things more efficient by right clicking on the Greasemonkey icon, selecting Manage User Scripts, and then moving the Digg Shout Blocker to the top of the list -- that will make it get executed first. Note that Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, so you'll have to install Firefox if you haven't already done that.

We have both Freemium (free to registered users) and Premium (paid) versions of our software. You'll need to be at least a registered user of Promote-My-Site to use this tool, because you'll need to set up an account on the PMS Social Suite. The freemium version will do everything you need. You'll want to follow the installation instructions. You don't actually have to install Imacros in order to use the shout block capabilities, but there are so many other features that you're going to want to install it as well. We have to require registration because we need to maintain a database record of who you're trying to ignore.

Once you've registered, go to the tool and click on the Profiles tab. Click the Add button and enter your Digg Username and Password, then click the Add button at the bottom. Now go to the Manage Friends tab. Your Digg Username should be filled in already, so click the Refresh From Digg button. The API calls will run and you'll get your grid populated with your current friends.

Let's say we're getting a lot of unwanted shouts from Oliver Taco. We can enter his name in the Friend Name field then click Query and we'll see this:

Now we just click the Toggle Block button and then Query again and we'll see that OliverTaco now has a status of Yes for Blocked. We've now marked him in our database as someone that we don't want to see their shouts.

How it Works

The Promote My Site server maintains a database of which friends you've decided to block. The Greasemonkey script checks that database each time you view your shout pages in Digg. If it sees someone on the blocked list, it runs a bit of code that mimics pressing the delete button on the shout. Viola, that user can no longer shout to you!

The script runs entirely in your Firefox browser. Other than the fact that you're able to delete shouts fairly quickly, there's no way for the Digg server to tell what you're doing. It does the same thing as if you had kept a spreadsheet of digg friends you want to ignore and delete each shout from them every time you load a shout page. Except it's a lot easier.

Blocking shouts is permanent. When the page loads, the delete code is run and they'll really be gone. But you can always just go back to the PMS Social Suite and toggle the Blocked status of a user back again.

Of course, if you block everybody that's shouting eventualy you'll just get back a blank page from Digg. You can see how many shouts were deleted by looking at the Shouts Received tab on your Digg page. The script adds (n Ignored) in italics right next to it to show you how many were ignored.

BTW, while I used OliverTaco as an example, I wouldn't suggest blocking his shouts. The rumor is that he's pretty good about using the PMS Social Suite and if you send him good stuff and reciprocate, he's very likely to Digg your shouts. So is LtDraper.

Other free Greasemonkey scripts we suggest to enhance your digging experience are Help Digg Your Incoming Shouts and Quickly Delete Your Shouts. They're part of the install process for the PMS Social Suite anway.

You're going to want to install the PMS Digg Shouts Greasemonkey Script right away.

As we've said many times before, if you want to be effective on Digg, you need a large friend network. But more importantly, your friends need to be the type of friends that will be receptive to your shouts and Digg your articles if they like them. And the best way to have good friends is to be a good friend.

That means that you need to actively evaluate and Digg your incoming shouts. People notice when you Digg their submissions. There's nothing more attractive than someone else that finds you attractive.

Penny Pinching with your Diggs

The way some people act, you'd think Digg charges by the vote. They're very stingy about what stories they'll vote for. I'd like to think that's an altruistic "betterment of the community" approach, but in reality they're still just voting for yet another Bush bashing article or lolcats picture. The real reason people pinch pennies with their Diggs is that Digging stories takes time, and time and attention is the ultimate currency in Web 2.0

The only way to increase your "Digg Revenue" is to spend more time doing it, or create more time by being more efficient. Frankly, I'll always go with being more efficient.

Print Your Own Money

So let's print some money! We've already published the painfully simple Greasemonkey Script to Quickly Delete Your Shouts on Digg. Now here's something that really saves time.

Each time you'd like to vote for a friend's shout, you need to click the header to their story. Then wait for the page to load, which provides no more information than what you had before. The you get to click the url that leads to the actual story. Sure, Digg gets the benefit of another page refresh, but you get to spend your precious time waiting for their server.

The PMS Digg Shouts Greasemonkey Script solves that. This is what your incoming shouts screen will look like after you install the Greasemonkey script:

The script replaces the URL that would normally just point to the Digg summary page to the the story with the actual story url. Plus, it adds a "Digg" link to each story. Just click that link to Digg the story.

Your incoming shouts page takes the form htpp://digg.com/users/yourname/friends/shoutsin. Or you can get to it via Profile->Friends Activity and then clicking the "Shouts Received by [your name]" in the right column.

If you're a premium user of our PMS Social Suite you'll need to install this script in order to use the Auto shout feature. The suite now relies upon this script since it dramatically speeds up how fast you can process shouts. But if you're not a premium user (you should be!), you can still use it to dramatically improve your processing of your friends shouts. Combined with the "Delete Your Shouts on Digg" script, you can be about as efficient on a manual basis as possible.

Sometimes you just slap your head because a very hard problem has such a simple answer.

If you use Digg, you're well aware how painful it is to delete your incoming shouts if you have a large number of friends. And of course, if you're serious about promoting anything on Digg, you'll have a lot of friends. After a week of vacation over the 4th of July, I recently came back to 50 pages of incoming shouts. That's a lot of clicking on the delete button and the "Are You Sure you want to delete this shout?" dialog that Digg so graciously offers.

PMS Social Suite Clears out your Digg Shouts Easy as Pie

If you're a user of our PMS Social Suite you're already aware of how easy it is to clear out your shout queue. Just use the "Manage Shouts" tab to dispose of everything. Click a button, go out for coffee, and when you come back you've cleared out everything in your queue and Dugg everything your friends have sent you.

Except that something broke last week. Digg evidently made a change that invalidates the Imacro "ONDIALOG" command, so the script was getting the "Are you sure?" dialog and waiting for the user to click Ok to delete each shout. Not much fun. Debugging from the Imacro side seems to be impossible. I even tried tricking Digg into thinking that our Imacro script had just sent the Ajax code to delete the shout. Nothing seemed to work.

Forehead Slap

The answer is really easy. All we really needed was a Greasemonkey script that would tell Digg that the confirm button had already been clicked. The script is only 1 line long. It's a little tricky because we have to tell Greasemonkey to run the script in the context of the page and not the browser since if we run it in the browser context we can't overload the "confirm" function the way we want to.

If you don't have Greasemonkey installed, drop everything and go install it right now. Have you been living under a rock or something?

So here's a gift to the Digg Community: The PMS Digg Confirm Ignore Script. Just click the link and Greasemonkey will install the script for you. If you're a PMS Social Suite User, your "Manage Shouts" scripts will now fly through all 50 pages of your backlog. And if you're not using our tool, you can avoid having to click twice for every shout that you want to delete.

Have you ever found a utility that you know you'll only need every month or so but that you never knew you needed until you found it?

Here you go: Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

Like google's old home page, it needs little or no explanation:

And the answer is:

How handy dandy is that?  That would have saved me a ton of anxiety when I was on my last business trip and our hosting company had problems.

It is a truism that "you have to have the right traffic" to convert.  Convert people to what? Well, it depends:

• RSS readers
• Subscibers
• Ad clicker-throughers
• eBook downloads
• And so on....

At the end of the day it is about converting people to a vaulable asset.

And I don't disagree with any of that because we have been experimenting with traffic a bit ourselves.

First You Need A Goal

When we started this division of company the goal was to build a good base of regular readers by offering targeted and high quality blog articles (*cough*) and unusually useful free tools.  We would then convert some percentage of this group to paid subscription members interested in advanced SEO tools.  We estimated that with 1,000 unique readers a month we could flip the switch on our subscription service and have the business go profitable due to natural conversion.

Getting Started

We did the obvious stuff - we identified where our target market (SEO'ers, e-commerce store owners, etc) congreated and started, politely, building a presence.  This was designed to complement our market research and help us trim and adjust our rollout schedule.  It has also helped us identify some additional places where we can deliver tools and automation.

And so a trickle of really high quality traffic starting coming in, with little increases here and there and no drops.  Reassuring!

Moving Stepwise

In the early days we got a few Stumbles and a bit of a Digg rush, but the base of our readers didn't really increase very much.  Duh, no tools and not much content.  So we decided to keep up our social authority efforts at the SEO watering holes and ignore traffic for a while.  This let us concentrate on building out the initial SEO tools and making modest announcements about our intentions.

For example, our Free Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer is an extremely poweful, Yahoo store specific SEO tool.  This brought in a lot of Yahoo merchants and got a lot of attention from the SEO community focused on that market.

And several thousand people have used our Digg Friend Finder to increase and improve their Digg friend network.  Presumably a fair portion of these folks are people using social media for SEO fashion.

Each of these tools bumped up our regular visitors, as we expected.  We suddenly had both content and tools, and people were responding to it.  I discussed how powerful this was in my post on SEO Tools vs. SEO Content.  Basically tools deliver a lot of repeat traffic and to the extent that they are unique they provide stickiness.

Time to Get Some Bulk Traffic?

People love lists, so we released lists in the last two weeks:

• 117 SEO RSS Feeds Worth Reading
• Downloadable List of 2,162 Social Bookmarking and Networking Sites

BAM! as Emeril would say (sold to Omnimedia for $45M, BAM indeed!), thousands of new people show up.  And keep showing up in a reducing curve over the next week.  Which is exactly what happened before, so we were curious to see if the outcome would be different.

What's New Pussycat?

Our RSS readers took a big jump.  And the number of people navigating to our site directly from bookmarks (that is so 2001!) jumped considerably too.  We're watching the waves of Digg and Stumble traffic subside, but unlike in the early days, we're seeing more readers washed up on shore: there is enough here to keep them coming back.

Google SERP Inflection Point

I know we all live in the google matrix and so we have to try to deduce causes from the visible effects, but there is no question that our google traffic started jumping as well for the keywords we're most interested in.  We notice that, right before we released the list that we'd gone from pariah to PR3 in three months.  And we had been seeing some additional google traffic so that change didn't totally surprise us, but it was really almost a week after the first list that we saw the dramatic increase in google search traffic.  So clearly there was some confluence of events going on in google-land and it was some aspect of the traffic/linkfest that tipped us over.  We'll probably do a few more Stumble/Digg things in the next month or so and see if the google traffic increases after that - after all, it might be a mighty coincidence.

Monetizing

We've reviewed other tools and criticized them for not having a clear monetization strategy, terms of service, or a privacy policy. We've had several people tell us that we could be doing a much better job of monetizing rather than using Adsense (horrible) and Amazon Affiliate links. They're completely right, and we're going to be experimenting with some other monetization strategies on our free and freemium tools. But we've been very clear that our real goal is to build up a community that will be receptive to paying for a subscription for our premium tools when we roll them out. We figure that if we offer free and freemium tools that are a cut above other free tools ( i.e. they actually work and produce actionable results) and we offer some things for free that other sites require payment for, when we launch our premium service people will see the dramatic increase in value and will sign up.

As Time Goes By

And obviously that sticky effect should continue to improve as we have more tools online and more content.  If we kept, say, half a percent of the Digg/Stumble traffic as regular readers in this wave, maybe we can get that up to one percent in a few months with some of the new tools we've got in test.  Since we're building SEO tools and not MySpace widgets I wouldn't expect that the upper end of capturing readers will ever be very high, but that is ok - if you're running a gossip site you need 40K readers/month, but our targeted sales community is much smaller and more cohesive.

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I ran across that Buck Converter circuit graphic quite some time ago while I was looking at table saws and I have been looking for an excuse to use it!

Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer

What if there was a free tool for your Yahoo Store that:

• Suggests better keywords you could be using in each page in your store?
• Shows your PageRank for every product in your store?
• Shows your backlink counts for every product in your store?
• Shows how well you're using meta tags for every product in your store?

Wouldn't you jump all over that?

Yahoo Stores are a powerful and relatively simple to use ecommerce solution but they certainly don't go out of their way to help merchants improve store and product Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The only SEO tools that come with the store are the new Search Engines section and the new Keyword Finder. The search engines section allows you to turn on sitemaps and provides a link to Yahoo Site Explorer -- not exactly the pinnacle of SEO analysis for your store.

The Keyword Finder is interesting, but the limitation is that it only shows keywords that people used to come to your site. It can only show you the keywords that you've already been successful with. Wouldn't it be a lot more useful to find out the keywords that you should be using?

With Promote My Site's new Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer there is a solution to help you work through any page or product on your Yahoo Store. You can get an immediate feel for how well each of your pages are doing, and a deep insight into the keywords that are actually present on your page and perhaps some keywords that you could add in order to increase your traffic. At the same time you can see how your individual products are doing with backlink popularity.

In our next article we'll go into the operational details on how to use the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer but let's start with a high-level first....

How Does it Work?

It all starts with telling the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer where to find your exported page information (objinfo.xml). If you haven't make your objinfo.xml file public, go ahead and do that right now by going to the Search Engines link in your Yahoo Store manager and clicking "enabled" for objinfo.xml.

Unless, of course, you're trying to keep your store a secret from the search and shopping engines, in which case keep it unpublished. By the way, you really ought to have your sitemap.xml turned on too.

Depending upon the size of your store, it may takea while to load your store into our system. After it is loaded, you'll see your complete product catalog in a scrollable grid. You can sort the grid by clicking on the header fields, and there is a set of filters to allow you to focus on specific parts of your store.

Drill Down Process

For each product in your store, you'll be able to see this data:

• Pagerank
• Count of Yahoo backlinks
• Count Google backlinks
• AltaVista index status
• All The Web status
• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords

Just select the row with the product you're interested in and click "Get Data" and it will load the statistics for that record.

How do you know what pages to look at?

You Know Your Products And Competitors!

Well, of course you do.  You can scroll through your products and examine those which:

• Have strong or weak PR
• Have many or few backlinks
• Have strong titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords

Yes, there are a million reasons to look at a page - you might want to play offence and go after a juicy niche or play defense and strengthen your core money maker. You could also spot product pages with strong PR that you might want to cross link to products with less PR.

Of course this is super-cool, but what can you do with it?

Review, Improve, Rinse, Repeat

Dive into a page and do some keyword work for any one, two, or three word phrase:

• Google traffic estimator
• Google SERP location
• Yahoo SERP location
• MSN SERP location

One of my favorite features is the ability to click through any keyword or keyphrase and go over to Wordtracker and find out alternative phrases to place on the page for more potential google love.

We had one beta tester notice that they had "rolex watch" (266 google searches max/day) well represented, but when they hit the free keyword search on Wordtracker the found out that "rolex watches" was even better, wtih 847 searches day/max.  That's a five minute change that could triple the traffic on a $5K item.

They also noticed that one of their best moneymaking pages was very effective for "rolex watch repair" (28 hits/day/max) but didn't have the keyphrase "repair rolex watch" (15 hits/day/max).  Again, that may not look like a big deal, but it was potentially 50% greater traffic on an important page for them.

Start With Baby Steps

Go on over to the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer, plug in your URL, and give it a whirl.  Drill down into your highest traffic and most powerful pages.  Find one thing you can improve on each page and make the changes.  Observe the traffic.  See the effect on the bottom line.

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.

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 .

This is a big weekend here at Promote My Site because we're moving servers, shuffling software around, changing DNS, upgrading this and that. Oh, and putting two free SEO Tools out. Phew. I'd be nervous but the technical guys threw me out at 5pm and locked the door behind me. All they'd say was: Don't Panic.

Free SEO Tools?

Well, not really free because they are on pages containing ads and, based on past experience, we figure the clicks will pay for the service.

But also not free because these SEO Tools (and the upcoming ones) are designed to get people used to our name, our architectural solutions, and our services. At which point they'll be more likely to buy our to-be-announced SEO tools.

So not really free, just an investment in ya'll.

What Tools?

We'll announce them early next week. Stay tuned.

Why new Servers?

Yeah, well, I have a list of 100+ SEO Tools from various people and I would say that at least 20% of them are not working properly at any given time. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a major contributor is that they produce server centric solutions and put too much stuff on one server. Our solution is to create web based client-server applications and host the server bit on a biiiiig hosted box at the end of a wide pipe.

So upgrading servers before go-live is experience talking. It is also the advantage of having a professional development and deployment organization - we tend to avoid a lot of mistakes or at least only make them once.

Best Under Construction Page on the Internet

I tried to get the guys to put up my favorite ever Under Construction page but they refused.

Check it out here and please to notice the page rank. This page is at least 7 years old, unchanged, and still funny as can be.

I thought it might be useful to compare the sites that the minor productivity enhancers we've discussed and reviewed actually claim to support.

Social Site Overlap

I thought there was more overlap - very interesting.

Your Own Copy Of This List

And because I HATE it when people put tables up on the web and don't provide an easy to get the farking data, here it is on Google Documents.

Reviews Of These Programs

I recently did five in-depth reviews of what I felt were the top lightweight social network posting automation solutions:

• Post Toaster
• Social Poster
• Social Marker
• Only Wire
• EkStreme Socializer

Conclusion

Well, really the same as in the reviews - there is a lot of potential power in there, if only someone would build a scalable, supported system with plenty of workflow and reporting.