This could turn into something of epidemic proportions and is not the first barren period they have had to face, as evident by the supporting data from Feedburner.

The red lines signify days that Friendfeed hasn’t been collecting my RSS feed. There could be other days that they haven’t collected other feeds as a fair amount of my online activity should be appearing in Friendfeed.

The problem isn’t even just with Friendfeed which historically has been pretty reliable – I have seen this happen at times with Facebook as well with imported notes from my RSS feed often appearing days after a blog post is first published.

On Friendfeed I have 2856 “subscribers” – of those I regard maybe only 56 as being active humans using the service.

This also isn’t an isolated case.

As an example we have a user reporting an issue twice on the Feedburner Google Group… as you might expect without any answer.

For once this probably isn’t anything to do with Feedburner… it is almost certainly Friendfeed.. or now parent company Facebook not collecting content, and thus at the same time not preporting subscription numbers.

Facebook doesn’t report subscriber numbers that I am aware of, but that may be dependent on how you add RSS content to your profile or pages.

If this is a sign of a final death knell for Friendfeed, and with Bloglines already disappearing at the end of this month, very soon 80% of feed subscribers (of those actually reported) will be in Google Reader for this blog.
When Friendfeed was added to Feedburner reporting, it wasn’t universally accepted but in some ways it did reflect a swing in attention.
The direction of that swing is very much towards Twitter and Facebook now.

Google Buzz doesn’t seem to be aggregated into the Feedburner numbers yet.

Why Do Zombies Eat Brains? (Return of the Living Dead – probably NSFW)

Update: Within a few hours of this being posted, Friendfeed was suddenly up to date – I don’t know whether they missed anything.

WordPress Comment Solutions

Shaun almost a month ago released a modified version of Lucia’s Linky Love that removes links from comments rather than nofollow them as a partial solution to Google’s changes to PageRank distribution in regards nofollow.

Dave Naylor is also doing something similar

I also now need to take you back to a comment I left over on SEOmoz

Vladomir Prelovac has come up with what I would regard as a partial solution to this problem

I am glad someone has done this as I have been dropping hints about taking this approach for the last year in various places, back to the old Webbbs days, though it needs taking a few steps further to be truly effective.

There are however some big monster bugbears that need to be considered with this approach, just like with tag pages.
The benefits you will see on his site, with a huge amount of PageRank to play with from the release of WordPress Themes are potentially significant, whereas with a smaller site it can lead to complications, and you might for instance want to noindex the newly created comment pages ;) Vladomir doesn’t use tag pages extensively, more selectively.

For the last six months or so, my understanding of how Google ranks pages has changed significantly, in part due to studying the way Google handles huge sites such as Blogcatalog & Technorati, but it would be wrong for me to publish details without clearance from Tony at Blogcatalog because I had access to their analytics.

Whilst a lot of it would be speculative… almost like a fairy story, for some it might be more akin to a lightening strike than a light bulb moment.

Imagine you have a choice between having a tag page or a comment page in Google’s index

• A tag page you can specify the exact title tag
• A page created with SEO Super Comments you can’t, in many ways the comment is about as optimized as a Tweet on twitter.

Twitter’s upstream based on Alexa is only 10% Google.com, so maybe 20% overall – a large proportion would be navigational queries & Twitter account holder names.I am not 100% confident about Alexa upstream numbers, but they might be more accurate for Twitter than many sites.

You would get an occasional tweet ranking for very long tail terms, but it is not significant.

So if you are creating new pages for comments, you would want them in the index only under specific circumstances.

• Existing flat site architecture with all original content in primary index
• Your categories are indexed and viable landing pages
• You have your tag pages sufficiently indexed which may require various techniques to make the content more unique and useful.
• Have ways to use comment data on tag pages
• Have ways to create tag pages based purely on comments and 3rd party content ;)
• The permalink for a comment from comment feeds points to the new pages, not to an anchor/fragment/”#name” – this has been something that needed fixing anyway, because permalinks on WordPress posts with lots of comments are currently broken, because comments can move from page1 to page2 – there are lots of ways to then use this RSS feed pointing to unique URLs on your site ;)
• Rewrite rules for comment URLs
• Link to a comment should use anchor text based on the title
• Link from a name should provide all comments from that user on a single page
• Extensive use of Ajax – this gets a bit complicated, and it would be experimental, but why have the whole comment on the post permalink at all? At least from a spider perspective. A representation of the comments can be pulled in as pre-cached page fragments. Comments could also be pulled into member profiles if a person commenting is also in some way a site member, and maybe in that situation an individual commenter page should be totally replaced by a member page.
• Integration with social media – if you are pulling in tweets, friendfeed etc, give those a page as well, and then allow people to even comment on those directly from your blog, and push the data back out to whichever service.
• Pull more data from trackbacks/pingbacks – grab an excerpt and host it on your site on a unique page. If someone comments on it from your site, send a pingback

The Future Of Commenting And Aggregation

An even more radical approach would be to totally get rid of “comments” as a unique entity, and many other social sites for that matter, and have only unique personal streams of media, long or short form, video, pictures, text or a mixture, and what appears on other sites, whether on a blog as a comment, or on Twitter, Youtube or an social site would just be a syndicated copy of your original content. Just one permalink for the original content, with full ownership and privacy controls over who could see it.

In many ways Youtube is just a video feed reader where you syndicate your unique video, and you should link back to the original source, and get the original source ranking :)

What I am suggesting is a somewhat reverse approach to “Echo” recently launched in private beta or the Friendfeed aggregation.

A single source that you push out to other sites, rather than a multitude of aggregators. More like Tumblr or Posterous, but with much more control.

As a marketer however, it makes it difficult to reward comment participation without some kind of additional registration process.

The Complexities Of Syndicated Comments & Social Mentions

What really turns your mind upside-down is when you have a situation where you have a private blog post in a members area, and someone leaves a comment which is specific to the private content.

The commenter needs to maintain access controls, but at the same time the owner of the site with private content needs control as well, which can possibly be overridden. Who gets priority and ultimate control?

Who would have moderation rights? If moderated, would it be only the syndicated copy on a publishers site, or the canonical version maintained by the commenter.

Do you really want to mention in an “echo” on your blog that you cross-posted the same content to 100 social media sites?

Disqus?

I recently highlighted Disqus as a solution, it still is, but my reservations are increasing after using the service for a month – whilst the WordPress integration is clearly stated as being beta, I am going to call it a very raw beta – there are tons of problems with synchronization and comment moderation leaves a lot to be desired. My last support ticket to them was 6 days ago, with a second full comment export to try to get sync sorted out remains unanswered.

I have informed them already that I am pulling the plug – the synchronization attempts are hopefully to fix problems that might prevent others having problems in the future.

There are other issues that I don’t feel should be aired here on the blog. I am giving them some time to hopefully get them fixed.

Other WordPress Plugins?

A big shout out to 4 other plugins I have been using recently

Autooptimize – so far it is the best CSS / Javascript optimization plugin I have used (and I have used quite a few) and the author has been highly responsive with fixes to various plugins and widgets. It sets expires and gzip correctly too.

What I have also done is hacked things so Disqus uses local CSS and images, that I will eventually be able to migrate to a CDN, though the Disqus CSS brings up all kinds of horrible warnings in Yslow and Page Speed Firefox Plugins.

Wp Supercache Plus – I am currently using it with Eaccelerator – I am using the “bleeding edge” version from SVN, and am in the process of implementing fragments with thematic – I had a few problems using it with memcached WP Supercache combined with Memcached object-cache.php.
Fragment caching with comments especially will reduce server load each time a new comment is added to a blog under heavy load, such as a product launch.

Probably also long overdue is a mention of Tim’s WordPress Membership Plugin. On the surface most plugin offerings look the same, it is only when you look at the code and how they have overcome hurdles that some solutions shine – I was involved a little with the early stages over a year ago and many features have since been copied, and other offerings have leapfrogged Your Members in more obvious ways, but at its core I still believe Your Members to be the most flexible solution (oh and you can see the support in public). There are lots of useful hooks and ways you can extend the platform, relatively easily, though a little PHP knowledge goes a long way. It is also pretty secure.
The full reasons deserve a lot longer post, but other solutions get promoted extensively without extensive research into alternatives – I need to spend another $500 on alternative solutions before I can realistically write a comprehensive review.
With Your Members it is possible to control access level to comments as well as the posts themselves. If you have a private post, you also want to selectively keep the comments private.

FAQ-Tastic – Zain now has both a free light version (that is very flexible) and a pro version – it is a serious solution for anyone looking to leverage their audience to create new product or content offerings. I am frequently asked to add an “Ask Andy” section here on the blog, but I will most likely do it in a more private area.
Comments on custom areas of WordPress is something I don’t think 3rd party systems will ever handle effectively.

This post has been a little bit of a mixed bag, but hopefully you find something useful & worth sharing with others.

As an affiliate, and future product publisher, proof (that is unequivocal)  is something in which I place a great amount of emphasis.

• It allows me to recommend a product or service with reduced risk of damaging my own reputation
• I want to be sure my readers will be delivered the product or service promised, thus giving them the potential to achieve any results claimed
• Reputation is important – often proof also acts as a significant guarantee that customers will be treated well (within the boundaries of what the product or service encompasses)
• Reliable data – if I can dig holes in claims made in promotional material, so can my readers
• Real testimonials – you can pay huge fines for astroturfing
• Proof in advance during product launches by providing real substantial results in advance is a powerful concept.
• Proof increases conversions

Lets look at a few good and bad examples

Formula 5 From Stompernet

I was travelling in the UK when this launched first time around at the start of the year, and actually picked up a big heavy box from my UK address by hand rather than having it forwarded.

Stompernet have in recent times made a massive move in providing their army of affiliates with review samples in advance of a launch – not necessarily a “final” version, with all the bonuses and long-term subscription, but certainly enough for an affiliate to review a product with significant authority.

Now Formula Five is being relaunched, they went through a similar launch process, with the added benefit of genuine customer testimonials.

Following the same formula as the initial launch, providing free training that is intended to create “results in advance” – prospects take action based upon the free training, and see the benefit to their business before the product is even on sale. In many ways more effective than free samples or $1 offers for a higher ticket product.

Formula Five MBA In A Box

Case studies where students by increasing perceived value, and enhancing their product offering (additional cost 3%), increased revenue by 35% and profits by a staggering 68% – same number of sales

Increased Profit by 68%

A sales page packed with case studies and genuine testimonials

Formula Five Business Training

And of course some fast mover bonuses and strong guarantee

Be warned – whilst Paul’s teaching is extraordinary, this is business training – just like at school you really will need to take frequent breaks, and possibly “rewind” the video repeatedly until some strategies really sink in.
When Paul suggests you take action when you think something could be implemented in your business, do it, your business (and family) need you to take action based upon Paul’s teaching.

Howie Schwartz – IM Remarkable

I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of promoting Howie’s IM Remarkable unless I felt the training he was providing before asking prospects to get out their credit card was going to be exceptional.

He had more than 100 people take part in his pre-launch competition, and 1000s of people joining leaving comments on the pre-launch blog and training blog.

It also added a little variety to coverage. Howie’s SEO strategies in many ways are different to what I have experience with, and of the people I know working using those techniques, he is right up near the top of the earnings scale.

The Ugly Proof

AWStats / Webalizer

Stats based upon server logs have immense value, but they need significantly intelligent filters to weed out all the bots.

Here are some old stats from this blog (at least I think they are)

Awstats

Wow, over a million “hits” per month and look at those page views!

It is meaningless rubbish, when some bots hit you 72 times per day

It gets even more ridiculous if you host your RSS feed on your own server, though all it takes if you have a long RSS feed is a small update to mean 10s or even hundreds of media files get accessed… but possibly just the headers to see if they have changed… but that still gets counted.

Earnings Checks

No earnings shot… but just think of these factors that are rarely mentioned on sales letters.

• Traffic cost – Adwords etc
• Outsourcing costs
• Tools / Software / training costs
• JV / Affiliate cut, for many products up to 75%
• Travel (for the JV deals)
• Partners – many products are the combined efforts of a number of marketers

Earnings might still be significant, but with the FTC crawling over every form of word of mouth marketing these days, and various forms of false advertising, both product owners and affiliates have to be especially careful.

The funny thing is, from an accounting perspective paying an affiliate 75% through Clickbank is in many ways “free traffic”, as long as you don’t claim gross income as yours.

Network Effects Tactics & Automation

Lets look at claims often made by people promoting social media and Twitter products

I am not going to single anyone out specifically, but one current promotion does come to mind. This doesn’t mean anyone is being dishonest, or reflect the quality of the product which I haven’t seen, but in many ways the data seems from my slightly more critical eye to be looked at through “rose coloured glasses”.

We will take the following as fact

• Huge twitter following
• Significant email list
• Decent earnings per “twitter follower”

However we have to look at correlation, causation and add in a lot of other factors

• Partner with a list
• Created a number of products, including social media / Twitter training
• All products have been promoted by affiliates

Plus 5 tactics

• Autofollow people who follow you
• Proactive following up to your limit daily
• Unfollowing people who don’t reciprocate within set period of time
• Automation
• Lots of tweets

Lets look at how some of those factors might influence Twitter follow size

People with huge responsive lists that promote Twitter to their lists, used autofollow, and have promoted twitter on blogs and landing pages.

Rich Schefren 22793 followers 462 Tweets (only started autofollowing later on)

John Reese 24840 followers 3450 Tweets (recently stopped autofollow and cleaned list)

Andy Jenkins 12388 followers 1433 Tweets (Only started autofollow later)

Mike Filsaime 34055 followers 908 Tweets (recently stopped autofollow and cleaned list)

So being a huge list owner doesn’t get you to 100K+ twitter followers

So how about being a reasonable sized list owner, who is super helpful but doesn’t autofollow?

Lets grab a few Copywriters

Michel Fortin 6735 followers 5059 tweets

Marlon Sanders 4308 followers 3581 Tweets

Brian Clark 27933 followers 5110 Tweets

Ray Edwards 6630 followers 2044 tweets

Brian from memory was an early adopter, and is probably better known among tech and “blogging” bloggers.

None of these guys autofollow

To compare, Darren from Problogger has a very similar audience to Brian, and also has a blog on Twitter tips.

Darren Rowse 72477 followers 13185 tweets (I believe Darren autofollowed for a while)

Someone not afraid to use “tactics” in social media

Reg Saddler 93795 followers 20353 tweets

Reg certainly autofollows, possibly also used other tactics in the past

Robert Scoble 98371 followers 21817 tweets (proponent of autofollow)

I don’t think Robert uses other tactics, but he is know to be an early adopter, and his use of Twitter gained lots of coverage and links, plus his blog is popular.

Other Social Media Mavens (those who don’t grace the Twitter “blogroll”)

Coach Deb 19874 followers 18617 tweets (doesn’t autofollow)

Mari Smith 44456 followers 25273 followers (autofollows afaik)

Alternatively you could just be a bot tweeting links to Delicious popular items and have 50K followers with some smart automation or outsourcing.

The idea that you can just be a cool dude, behave like you are at a party, and gain a huge number of followers just doesn’t correlate – the highest correlation is autofollow combined with other tactics and automation.

Personality, engagement and useful content would however play a factor in monetization – maybe a good idea to use that in your email marketing.

It should be noted that Twitter has been cracking down on autofollow and various gaming tactics involving following/unfollowing. Most of the people employing such tactics in the past have slowed down to gains of just 500 followers per day, and those are not targeted.

I also want to highlight this post from John Reese
5 Reasons Why Twitter Auto-Follow Is Bad Marketing

Thus to achieve the results claimed by “Twitter” marketers:-

• Huge twitter following = automation + tactics
• Significant email list = major problems with correlation
• Decent earnings per “twitter follower” = major problems with correlation

I am not saying that building a relationship with a list or Twitter following isn’t important, and it would certainly help with monetization, but to attribute that with huge twitter followings would be naiive, or atypical – I look on @Garyvee as atypical, and from memory (before he was added to the “blogroll” on Twitter) he wasn’t touting 6 figure Twitter followers.
I don’t know anyone who engages their audience more on Twitter.

The biggest correlation on sales as an affiliate?

1. Released a product heavily promoted by JVs to build a massive list of fresh leads who trust you (even if they didn’t buy)
   
2. Offer the leads who didn’t buy that product, the product as a bonus, or something of equal or greater value in an affiliate promotion. Fresh leads and $5000 worth (real worth) of bonuses sure does have a MASSIVE effect on conversion rate.

It is nothing to do with Twitter follower count…

If I made extraordinary claims as an SEO about a certain ranking factor without evidence that I had carefully isolated as many outside factors as possible, and created a test that could be repeated, I would likely be ripped apart by my audience.

As a marketer, assume every claim you make will be put under the microscope by your customers and peers – ideally they should find more proof that supports you, not less.

Jack Spirko has knocked together an interesting site where your story can appear on the front page because it is “hated” and I feel the idea is worthy of a mention.

You can see that currently the hated stories seem to only appear in the sidebar – I would love them to be integrated with the main results by default with some CSS differentiation, with “reactions” positive or negative to qualify for the front page.

Some things with the site certainly need improvement:-

• Permalinks need to be rewritten with mod_rewrite
• I like the love and hated part of the profiles, because you can add some HTML – I think many people would appreciate a simple HTML editor to be made available, there are plenty of simple javascript ones that can be applied to any text area.
• Blogs – there wasn’t a way to list blogs on the social media profile (my profile is an example) – Jack’s is much more interesting for SEOs ;)
• Tools
  • Bookmarklet – much easier to use than visiting the site
  • Javascript vote counter
  • Inclusion on popular bookmarking plugins such as Sociable (Joost’s version)
  • Feedburner Feedflares (with vote count and comments), maybe based on what Hamlet has done for Sphinn
• More submissions – some submissions are currently fed into the site from feeds
• Very clear rules, especially on things like self-promotion

I don’t intend to write about every new social news site that comes along, but Jack is a regular reader, and I enjoyed the new “twist” that he has added with this one, plus it is more links for your social media starfish, cross-promotion or whatever you wish to call it these days.
I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of traffic, I was member 99, but it does seem to be a site with quite a few dedicated users, and very few abusers.

Jack wrote more about HatedOrLoved.com over on his blog, and you can check it out here for yourself.

Note: Jack plus his other partners are advertisers here on http://AndyBeard.eu with their Marketing Ice site, but I actually had the whole article written before I even thought about that – a visit to Jack’s blog jogged my thoughts that I should add some disclosure.

Here is a challenge: I would love this post to be the most hated ever ;) That would only take 10 haters, compared to 21 “loves”

The whole article is better than 99% of Sphinn content

I wonder how many people on Sphinn have even heard of Gary Halbert?

It seems like the Sphinn moderators were having another hissy fit – they see an article written intended to promote a product or service and just delete it in some kind of knee-jerk reaction based upon the title.

I don’t think it was some kind of collective decision based upon community desphinns, I only saw one visitor in my stats from Sphinn/Upcoming before it was removed.

I am not going to claim that the remainder of my review/promotion was amazing content, it might have sparked a few thoughts, but honestly how many SMX related posts, or book reviews, or even announcements about various products being launched by Sphinn users really contain anything insightful that the majority of Sphinn users have never read before?

Maybe I should write about Jim’s Internet Marketing Ninjas again but include an affiliate link? I guarantee such a post wouldn’t be flagged as spam, because it is Jim Boykin’s and not Alex Goad’s product.

I am not saying I would have Sphunn my post, but then I have read the works of the late Gary Halbert multiple times, but for anyone unfamiliar, his words can have a profound effect on your business.

On a personal note, I still received 3 email requests for Sphinns yesterday, and one Twitter message asking me to comment. I haven’t logged into Sphinn since I left 3 months ago.

Whoever decided to submit my article and thought it would be interesting to the Sphinn community, thanks, but it seems the moderators at Sphinn don’t like Internet Marketing submissions.

Sphinn Is Not Internet Marketing

I suppose the ultimate proof that Sphinn is not relevant to Internet Marketing is the following screenshot

Update: published with the wrong screenshot for 5 minutes

I wrote about Product Launch Formula twice because I knew people in the online marketing community could benefit from it, and that includes Jim, probably Rand, it could even help with the promotion of SMX.
The second time I wrote about it I even included a link through to someone compiling a list of links through to all the special offers available (there were some crackers) if gaining extra value was important.

Just little things, for instance how much difference in sales would it make releasing full video footage from last year’s SMX Advanced for free? I haven’t attended… are people going to be impressed with the material?

I just looked at a couple of Jim’s Internet Marketing Ninja’s demo videos.
Which ones contain some of the very best material?
You know, the golden nuggets that are going to convince me that the remainder are going to be worthwhile?

I know that people involved in Internet Marketing need to learn a lot about Social Media, and lots of crap gets submitted to Sphinn around the time of big launches within Internet Marketing circles, but at the same time Sphinn users in my opinion could benefit from even just the free content that is provided during most Internet Marketing launches.

I don’t intend to return to Sphinn, but does Sphinn really want to alienate such a huge segment of the online marketing community, and deprive their users of news about valuable products to help their online business.

Moderation sucks on Digg, in many ways it is worse on Sphinn, you can’t even see the stuff that has been autoburied or removed.

Gary Halbert & The Significance of Timing

I know Alex Goad reasonably well, and I am sure it hasn’t escaped him that Gary Halbert passed away almost exactly a year ago. Sunday April 8th 2007. I first heard about it from Michel Fortin.
I am not sure if things were planned that way, and if there will be some kind of additional tribute other than Gary’s words being immortalized as part of yet another product launch, but that in itself is tribute to the man, and his teaching.

Question 1: Had you personally heard of Gary Halbert before I mentioned him in either this article, or my previous one?
Question 2: Had you read any of his previous letters?

Any comments which don’t first of all answer those 2 questions will be deleted (unless it is painfully obvious – e.g. you commented on previous posts mentioned above)

With the recently introduced API still in closed beta, I can only imagine they are going to add a little more to the information panel in the future to expose your activities in the “social cloud”.

They have limited the widget to 7 colours, no MyBlogLog green, but you can go for Yahoo purple – I would have liked a white with black borders, but have opted for black.

The description shown is very short, so you might want to optimize your description on MyBlogLog to have a very powerful first line.

In addition only 5 of your registered blogs are show, and currently there is no way within MyBlogLog to change the order your blogs are displayed, so in my case I can’t promote my involvement at Collective Thoughts.

Apparently they will also offer the possibility to skin the widgets in the future, so that will solve the colour co-ordination problems.

Update

Kent Brewster’s new Blog Juice widget is very cool as well. You can actually browse from one community to another with it without opening a new page.

I thought it would be worth writing a few tips, just as I did for Gooruze as there are a few gotchas, and ways to increase your benefit of using and contributing to the new Fast company site.

This isn’t a site that would interest many niche bloggers, though I dare say many of my readers who blog in related niches such as social media, technology or various forms of online marketing might benefit from using it. Think of it very much as a niched LinkedIn.

Adding Your Blog

There is the opportunity to add your blog to their list of optional feeds to include in their feed reader and have listed on profile pages.

Whatever you do, take your time when creating the description, as it supports HTML, and there doesn’t seem to be a method of editing it afterwards, at least I haven’t found one.

The first 2 or 3 lines seem to show up in general feed subscription areas, so make sure there is enough information to encourage a few clicks from potential interested users.

In addition you should include an extended profile with a few links ;) This is important because a full description is displayed on the profile page of any person who decides to display it and sign up to your feed within Fastcompany.

From what I can see those links are search engine friendly, as you will see on my Andy Beard – Niche Marketing profile page.

You will also notice that feed descriptions are viral – everyone who adds you will also provide links from their profiles.

Fastcompany Bio and Profile

There is plenty of opportunity to get creative with your bios on Fastcompany and an opportunity for highly relevant links.

Links with anchor text can be added in the Bio section, a link without anchor text to a personal website, and even a link with anchor text to any company that you have worked for, using the company name.

Blogging Opportunity

Aaron Wall has just joined as well, not sure whether that was via an invite from Lee, or if Aaron invited Lee, and has taken the opportunity to test out the blogging system which uses Drupal.

Apparently there is the opportunity to have content promoted to the front page, though I am not sure whether that applies to the front page of “beta” or the front page of Fast Company itself.

Is there an opportunity in this?

Possibly – guest blogging has benefits if you are writing on a blog in the same or similar niche, and Fastcompany has a lot of subscribers if your content gets promoted to the front page and their RSS feeds. This might be worthwhile if you cover a particular topic in great depth on your own blog, and wish to also introduce the topic with a lighter post to a slightly wider audience.

Groups

Fastcompany has groups – to be honest doesn’t everywhere? Unless they provide an easy way to track group discussions, I am just going to ignore it for now, just like I generally end up not taking part in Facebook groups as much as I should… or maybe shouldn’t, again that is a time factor and opportunity cost.

The Scoble Effect

With Robert Scoble now working for Fastcompany, you can be sure that the site will attract a little more attention, though he will be concentrating on video content.

Fast Company Beta Conclusions

For me creating a FastCompany profile was worth a couple of hours work, and may bring some benefits in the future. I will probably add a few blog posts of a more general marketing or technology nature and see what benefit can be gained.

I am not sure if it is invite only, but if you want an invite, just ask in the comments and make sure you comment with an email address suitable for the invite to be received.

I would like to emphasise not abusing Fast Company with lots of spam links, I am sure they have some moderation in place and most of these tips will have little use if your blog doesn’t represent content they think the Fast Company readership will enjoy.

Update

Thanks to Jim from Seo Wrench as he has confirmed you can sign up without an invite

But that would be gaming the system based upon whatever level of popularity I have achieved within the Online Marketing community and it seems that popularity of whatever kind isn’t necessarily a good thing, because the masses or individuals start accusing you of gaming the system for your own benefit.

So I have just deleted an article I spent 2 or 3 hours writing yesterday…

Instead I am going to cover something possibly a little more controversial, that has been gnawing at me for a number of months.

I Am Hanging Up The Towel @ Sphinn

The reason I am writing this post is to inform my readers as to the reasons why a Sphinn button will no longer be on this blog, and also why even if you submit my content there, I am not going to respond to any comments that might occur on Sphinn.

Parallels will no doubt be drawn with the recent Digg fiasco

I suppose the difference is that I really am hanging up the towel rather than creating a storm in a teacup

This is between me and my readers, so I would actually prefer this not to be submitted to social media sites and for no one to link to it.

This isn’t linkbait or an attempt to make changes – the writing has been on the wall for a while already.

The Sphinn Launch

Sphinn has now been around for 6 months, so I don’t think this is too early to pass my personal judgement.

When Launched, Sphinn was described as “Sphinn: Our Social Site For Search & Internet Marketing Professionals”

I first wrote about Sphinn 6 months ago, almost to the day, and my emphasis was on attention, market segmentation and building bridges within the industry.

In my personal opinion, Sphinn has totally and utterly failed to achieve that, and in some ways it has helped widening the gap between different online marketing professionals.

I would even question the word “professional” because some of the defamatory remarks I have read and bitten my tongue over have certainly not been professional conduct.

Anti-Internet Marketing Sentiment

Whilst the Sphinn logo proclaims Sphinn as a site suitable to submit “Internet marketing” related content, and as such Internet Marketers in general, not just the audience catered for by Search Engine Land would or at least should feel welcome.

I am not going to list specific examples as I am not trying to convince anyone, but at times, in fact with increasing frequency I have felt insulted in much the same way SEOs get insulted by people claiming that they don’t like 95% of SEO Experts, or that they are all Snake Oil Salesman.

Some people might look on me as an SEO Expert, I feel I just question preconceived ideas and a lot of what I write is just writing down my thought process. At heart, I am an “Internet Marketer”, and an “Affiliate Marketer”.

I would love for the divisions in the industry to somehow be bridged, but that isn’t going to happen on Sphinn.

Social Bias

It is interesting how many articles on Sphinn proclaim the advantages of getting involved with the community, making yourself visible with an avatar for personal branding, gaining a reputation for submitting only good content and various other social media strategies.

Unfortunately, unless you have some kind of special commercial immunity, if user popularity begins to have a noticeable effect on which submissions appear on the front page, no matter how large your contribution to a particular social media site, a negative reaction can take place.

You could liken this to:-

• Don’t Make Google Look Stupid
• Don’t Make Digg Look Stupid
• Don’t Make Sphinn Look Stupid

It doesn’t matter whether you are doing anything wrong, it is the perception that something is underhand, or you are gaining some kind of edge that creates an imbalance.

The Evil Green Monkey highlighted this perfectly on Sphinn

You won’t be able to read this comment online, the story is still hidden in moderation, but the tone makes me livid

It isn’t a full comment, I happened to still have the global comments page open in a tab that hadn’t been refreshed when I noticed the post had been pulled. The comment continued on to mention something about the post being reviewed by moderators.

There is actually a bug in Sphinn, even when a post is manually moderated, it still appears on the list of posts that you have sphunn, so I was able to grab this screenshot.

Maki submitting a post to sphinn is never a guarantee that it is going to reach the front page. In fact Maki has the lowest “hot” percentage within the top 15 Sphinn users.

You can certainly draw parallels with Digg, top users do dominate the front page on Sphinn, but it is generally because they are more active and submit more content.
I have multiple screenshots where I have had 6 of the 30 front page stories being ones I have submitted, and I have seen the same from Maki – that doesn’t mean that everything we submit goes hot.

It could also be attributed to the story being from my domain – I have been promoting Sphinn fairly heavily among my readers, and I display a Sphinn button on every post by default. I have a “cultivated” Sphinn audience, and many are very active Sphinners – it is possible you now get penalised for that, unless it would in some way upset the existing social fabric of Search Engine Marketing.

The story itself wasn’t promoted through any other channels, I hadn’t been on instant messenger for a couple of weeks due to connection difficulties, I didn’t mention it on Twitter or Pownce, and as far as I am aware Maki didn’t either.

I should point out I haven’t discussed this post with Maki, and in fact the only communication I had with Maki regarding the post was on Sphinn, when I questioned the category choice – I think the last time I discussed any form of social media submission with Maki was during the October PageRank update/drama/scandal when Maki offered to submit my first “Digg Favorites” post to Digg – it got buried at 70 votes, but still received 140 Diggs that day.

At least when Digg buries a story the submission and comments are still available. You will notice on the screenshot that there are 6 comments. the comment order was me, maki, me, evilgreenmonkey

I have no idea who the remaining 2 comments were from, but I will never have a chance to read them.

I wasn’t informed about the submission being removed, but then why would I? I wasn’t the one who submitted the post to Sphinn in the first place.

Commercial Bias

The post in question was my offer to provide exclusive content for membership sites. It is commercial, but at the same time I believe it also raises some interesting questions, suggests a way to monetize your status as an “authority blogger” in a way not often discussed, and I even included a teaser at the end that I know at least one very smart person worked out.

Sphinn already had some level of commercial bias that I had recently challenged, though it seemed things had been cleared up.

Unfortunately excluding my story based upon the current Sphinn rules or even what was discussed in that thread falls down on almost every front.

1. The submitter is the top user on Sphinn
2. The article was written by a regular Sphinn contributor
3. The article had some value other than the commercial message
4. Other regular Sphinn users or “Sphinn friends” who have released products, or are promoting a new service get Sphunn all the time, reaching the front page and staying there without any negative comments. It is looked on as News which just happens to be included right next to “Internet Marketing” in the Sphinn Logo
5. The story had only 10 votes by the time I went to bed in the early hours of the morning here in Europe – it was already on the 3rd page of new submissions – 6 hours later it was on the front page – those votes probably didn’t come from Sphinn, or some kind of gaming, they came from my subscribers
6. I saw who voted for the story a while before it was pulled, when it was on about 23 or 24 votes – there were no ugly green default icons among the voters, in fact most of the votes came from very active Sphinn members including at least one moderator
7. The people who I actively talk to on instant messenger, e.g. some of the guys on Collective Thoughts, actually hadn’t voted for the story. Some had, Shana, Tad and Glen, but no votes from Tim, Brian, Marty or Mark, and Rose hasn’t been around for a while. I should note also that Shana, Tad, Marty and Glen are less frequently on IM

It is also quite possible that many people read the original post made by EvilGreenMonkey and thought they were now expected to flag every post with some level of commercial intent as spam, without following up on the remainder of the comments. A separate retraction of that statement, or a change in the rules was not made.

At the end of the day, I honestly can’t see any substantial difference between the post I have somehow had moderated, and say this one, Jim launching Internet Marketing Ninjas – one of many recent examples, but I chose it because it is the closest match being an information product launch. I voted for that one too, because I found the post entertaining, and it added a little bit to the sales letter, with some useful social proof.

Comments

I love comments on blogs, I hate when the most important discussions happen on social media and social news sites. Following comments on Sphinn isn’t an efficient use of my time, and to be honest, in many ways is harmful to the conversation as it can’t be seen by all users.

Target Audience

Having evaluated Sphinn over the last 6 months, I have come to the conclusion that Sphinn is not my target audience. In many ways it is an “unfriendly environment” for many of my target audience, thus encouraging my readers to use Sphinn isn’t proactive.

The bias is there in the moderation, quite possibly because the bias is there within the users, and moderators take action based at least partially on user requests.

I am sure that many of the people who were already reading my blog before I became active on Sphinn will continue to do so, and those who discovered my blog through Sphinn are more than welcome to hang around.

I just won’t be taking an active roll on Sphinn, and will be exploring other communities

Why I am Even Writing This?

• Readers would have asked questions
• I get requests for submissions all the time
• I have had a number of reactions such as

I did hear someone shafted you !! I fully understand..

At the end of the day, this isn’t about me being shafted – it is more about other internet marketers being shafted, and if it can happen to me, it will continue to happen to them.

Moving on

As already noted, this is my explanation to my readers. To avoid any hint of bias I have now removed myself from judging in the Semmys for what was to be a “Judges Choice Award” in each category.

Again, this isn’t an attempt at linkbait, I don’t want it promoted on social media and I have even switched off comments for the first time, and won’t be responding to emails or instant messages regarding this.

It has been a while since Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon have launched something new, Stompernet in 2006 raked in over $18M in the first 24 hours, with the help of many top name marketers working being the scenes including John Reese, Jeff Walker and Frank Kern, along with their exceptional faculty trainers.
The most important factor – despite a significant monthly fee, I have met many people who have been members since the very beginning, and are delighted to have joined at an early stage.

Stompernet has grown since then, with a relaunch in January 2007 and the introduction of many more faculty members such as Sherman Hu, Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde.

Introduction to Stompernet Smarts

Stompernet SMARTS is their new program focusing on Social Media Marketing and over the last month or so the Stomper team have been pumping out some of the most well produced videos on Social Media that I have seen:- compelling, down to earth professionally produced content that you just can’t help watching all the way to the end.

What I haven’t seen up until now are any of their affiliates making use of one of the most powerful tools they provided, which was the ability to embed all the videos in their own website or blog.

This isn’t your normal video player from YouTube, Stompernet are serving the videos using their own bandwidth (well via Amazon S3) and using a custom video player that was developed for another site they created, FreeIQ.

There are some special features of the video player, though not all are obvious

• Author Sales Message – if you click on the author button you get to read a special message from the Author of the video. Clicking it actually reveals a huge whoopsie made by the Stompernet launch team, the information listed is for their primary Stompernet University, and not for their new offering, Going Natural 2.0 and the Stompernet SMARTS program.
• Playlist – accessed via a tab, you get to see a list of other videos from the same author, thus you only need one player to show all 4 videos they have released over the last month, though there is no way as an affiliate to select which one is shown. I would actually have preferred to list 4 players in this post highlighting each of the videos, possibly along with some additional notes and observations
• Affiliate Cookies – just playing a video actually tags viewers with an affiliate cookie ;)
• Viral – whilst not available as an option for the special Stompernet Affiliate player, the standard FreeIQ video player allows video to be shared, and when it is shared, your affiliate link goes along with it – this is serious technology, and as far as I am aware, it is totally unique to FreeIQ.
• Domain Based Tracking – again, not being used for the Stompernet SMARTS promotion, possibly because of the predominant use of email promotion by many of their largest affiliates, and because it is slightly less accurate, it is possible to link through to the FreeIQ site without using a referral ID or special affiliate link – you might have noticed one of the questions I have been trying to get Google to answer over the last 12 months was regarding affiliate links that pass pagerank, well I am not worried about those that Google might identify with something akin to &aff=Andy – affiliate tracking doesn’t need junk after the URLs, it can be based upon HTTP_REFERRER, though as I say, it isn’t quite as accurate.

The videos are well worth watching, and I picked up a couple of useful tips, though I do have one huge bugbear – the amount of time it takes to get a new indented result in Google from the time an article is indexed.

If you have an authority blog that already ranks well for a particular term, you are likely to pick up an indented result in minutes or hours, and not days. I have seen this happen recently with my writeup of Social Power Linking, and it might well also happen with this post for search results about Stompernet or Stomernet SMARTS… I do have one 1st page result for Stompernet, so we will see what happens after I have posted, and I will include an update.

Stomper Scrutinizer

This is actually a very clever and useful tool, though I wish it was possible to use it within my normal browser somehow using DHTML and possibly Greesemonkey. It does however demonstrate that the technical guys at Stompernet are very up on the latest technology, being one of the few application I know of that was created using Adobe’s new “Air” web development platform.
What it allows you to do is a little like eye-tracking, in that it demonstrates the field of view that the human eye actually sees when looking at a website. Combined with the excellent videos explaining how this works, I can see some significant improvements I can make to my own blogs.
I certainly haven’t taken as much care about this on this blog, and it is something I plan to rectify.

Link to Scrutinizer update

Don Crowther’s Report

I linked through to this the other day, and that wasn’t using an affiliate link – I thought it was truly useful content and well worth reading. The opt in page had a great 50 minute video which itself was of exceptional quality, and is actually the 4th one that shows on the player above.

Crowther PDF Opt-in Page

Among what is covered is how you can multiply the value of Hubpages and why it is so much more useful for marketers than competing sites such as Squidoo which has so many limitations for lead generation these days.

Now whilst I would much rather you opted in to read the report (affiliate tracking is via cookie and email address), I know many people these days don’t like giving people their email address until some level of trust has been established. That was something discussed heavily in a post I wrote before the holidays for the launch of Rich Schefren’s program.
Because most of my subscribers haven’t given me their own email address, I haven’t broken down the trust barrier fully, and thus it is hard for me to transfer that trust to others.

So what I have done this time around is got hold of a special link that gives you direct access to the report, no email required.

Crowther PDF Download Page

Stompernet Smarts Product Breakdown

Here is the jist of what you really get with Stompernet SMARTS, in the words of Don Crowther who will be running the “Lion’s Share” of the training (with the support I am sure of other Stomper faculty members, and Brad & Andy themselves)

1. This is a 10-week coaching course

2. Each week we will cover the strategies to spike your traffic and search engine rankings using a different category of social media sites (we’ve provided a full outline in the downloadable PDF special report, right at the end)

3. I will host a live question and answer call every week giving you the chance to get all of your questions covered, plus to listen to issues that others think of that you may not have yet encountered, so you’ll learn as much listening to the answers from others as you will from getting your own questions covered.

4. We will have periodic teleseminars/webinars with major industry experts and people who are top of their class in specific strategies (very cool calls!)

5. There will be an amazing community forum, where those who are members of the SMARTS program can ask questions, get answers, weigh in on other people’s questions, share experiences, get their frustrations answered, and build relationships. This is one of the areas that I’m MOST excited about. Remember that one of the essences of social media is “WE are smarter than ME.” I’m really looking forward to not only giving you my strategies, techniques, and ideas, but building new techniques as a group. This has never been done before, and should be a key element of this powerful program.)

6. Each week you will receive a series of videos that focus on that week’s strategies, followed a few days later by the coaching call. The forum will always be open.

There – details galore! I look forward to seeing you in the course!)

In some ways this reminds me of Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge, but that was just 30 days, and Stompernet SMARTS is a 10 week program with more in-depth training and support. A lot more time has been invested in preparation, and I am sure a lot of time and money has been invested in the backend tools.

Tools?

I am a bit in the dark about what tools they will be providing. There seems to be something to help your with your promotion of content on social media sites, and also for networking with other “friends” in the program.

Social Media is very much about friends. Not only for promoting specific content, but also building up strong profiles on various social sites that attract attention.

Intended Market

Stompernet has always been a fairly exclusive program, and whilst they have created materials for beginners, I think ultimately the people who get most out of it are existing small business owners who have a little experience of running a business online and want to take it to the next level.

I also think this would be an ideal opportunity for highly experienced social marketers and consultants for 5 very good reasons.

• Building a relationship with the Stompernet team
• The possibility to use the Stompernet tools to make processes more efficient than can be achieved with generic tools
• To learn a little about how these memberships are put together and maintained.
• To potentially pick up clients who don’t have the time to carry out everything themselves and need to hire an expert
• Possibly to learn a few extra things about Social Media Marketing in various ways – I don’t know anyone who can’t benefit from learning new things – you can’t be an expert in everything – not many firms have the resources Stompernet can put into researching new marketing methods.

Stompernet SMARTS Purchase Bonus

For the last 8 months I have been emailed on a frequent basis regarding the potential to do some consulting, and generally I have declined and just offered free help if they were a regular reader or friend on various social networks. I have just been too busy with my own projects.

It is within the terms of the affiliate program to offer a bonus, and they recommend that it is something related to the product, Social Media Marketing of various kinds, and of course blogging.

However the affiliate program is based upon cookies, so you might need to clear your cookies before making a purchase, and then there is the question of email tracking… if you have already signed up to the Stompernet mailing list through someone else’s affiliate link, I can’t really offer you any advise.

What I am going to offer is some of my time, though how much will really depend on price… and the price is currently being kept a secret, and I can’t honestly give away hours of consulting time if the price is set the same as a $7 ebook ;)
I am sure that StompernetSMARTS is going to offer exceptional value, but with the offer of some additional direct support time I can make it a more useful and productive investment.

In many ways I am an example of what can be achieved with blogging and social media, having gone from totally unknown to a recognised name in 5 seemingly intertwined but polarized online markets, though I wish there wasn’t the apparent divisions that sometimes seem like chasms.

• The Internet Marketing Community, such as those who started out on the Warrior Forum
• Affiliate Marketers, such as those on Bumpzee and attend Affiliate Summit
• SEO and SEM, such as patrons to Sphinn
• Blogging
• Web2.0 and Technology

I am not going to start name dropping, but my readership in many ways is a “who’s who” in each of these categories, and that was the result of a focus on a particular type of content, and specific targeting. I actually have a list of names pinned up from over a year ago, and most of them have now heard of me, and I would estimate 70% of that target list I now have direct contact with, or would return my call promtly.
I know even the guys from Stompernet, including Brad and Andy read my blog. How? Because they have told me directly in private email.
They are both probably going to read this – Brad, Andy… you were both on that list ;)

Stompernet SMARTS goes on sale FRIDAY, JANUARY 11th – 2 PM EDT!
SMARTS Sales Letter

Stompernet SMARTS – don’t forget to check up on exactly what you will receive as a bonus if you buy through my link when the sales letter goes live, and don’t forget to watch the existing videos.

So now the big question, can I grab some serious search traffic despite leaving this post until just 4 hours before the launch of Stompernet Smarts?

Update 1: How Long Does It Take To Get A Top Ranking?

Note, this isn’t an indented listing yet on a search for “stompernet” where I already have an old first page result, but it is a listing for the current Stompernet SMARTS product.

How long did it take?

15 minutes to get a #2 listing

It will be interesting to see how long it lasts over time, and whether Google will also replace or enhance my current listing on “Stompernet”.

Update 2:

Looks like Google rejigged things a little and we are now up to #1 slot

Update: Stompernet SMARTS Purchase Bonus

You know what, I am shocked. I actually expected a higher price tag.

I really wanted my bonus to make a significant difference for a number of readers, and that requires enough time allocation to really achieve something.

I also made a New Year’s resolution not to sell myself short in 2008 and to allow more time for friends and family – 70 hour work weeks are not sustainable even if you enjoy what you do so much.

So here is what I am going to offer… even this is probably discounting my time by more than 50% of what I could easily be charging, and probably a lot more.

Everyone who purchases Stompernet SMARTS though my link (remember about the cookie and email tracking), who is verified as a sale to me will be entitled to 4 Support instances each of which is 1 hour long +- 30 minutes. Thus you will get approximately 4 hours of dedicated support on any topic I can help you with, be it blogging or social media related. You can use those support sessions any way you like, all in one go on a major project, or spread out over a few months, though I feel using them during the time of the course would be preferable.
Obviously things like submitting quality content on a specific social media site occasionally isn’t going to use up any credit.

You will have direct access by email and/or IM, and if necessary we can arrange telephone support.

I am using this as a potential loss leader if I ever decide to do some full time consulting, and it will make an interesting change of pace. I love challenges and sometimes the best ones are the ones other people come up with that need to be solved.

Here is the link again

SMARTS Sales Letter

p.s. oh and one last thing, there are only so many hours in the day, so this will have to be a limited offer. I don’t think I can cope with more than 20 people so make sure you grab a slot quickly if it is of interest.

I claim it as a review, even though I hadn’t actually seen the product. I had one major problem with it which wouldn’t have worried many of my readers, but was a significant problem for me – it was a physical product.

Part of my old job in the computer games and software industry here in Poland used to be import/export. I have been through living hell with Polish customs so many times the very thought of having to handle what is now minor import paperwork, and then only sometimes, just gives me the shivers.

For a physical product it was damn cheap, $169 Flat Rate (including shipping) = no brainer?

Social Power Linking Membership Site

Social Power Linking is now a membership site, and as such Jack has the ability to continually add new content. A huge amount of new content has been added since it was first launch with tons of new strategy guides, tools and an awesome buzz network to help you promote your content ethically.

It is now EVEN CHEAPER

Jack is really going for the mass market with this site, $29.95 per month, which compared to most training membership sites in the niche is an absolute steal.

Despite my internet connectivity problems with are an ongoing thorn in my productivity, I have already downloaded most of the course material, along with Jack’s Web2.0 Submitter software.

If you are struggling to get traffic, or want to pick up a few extra tips, or just increase your leverage using the buzz group of 500+ social media marketers, Social Power Linking offers tremendous value.

p.s. as Jack noted in the comments on my last review I have been ranking first in Google for Social Power Linking since it launched, with Jack currently holding a solid 2nd and 3rd slot.
We have used many of the same strategies for ranking websites over the last 2 years, and both Jack and Peter are excellent at teaching marketing to others, having done so extensively with their other membership sites such as Content Desk and Authority Site Centre.