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.

Almost without exception Ian Kennedy, MBL Product Manager has provided detailed answers

If you are a fan of MBL you will find some interesting stats, and some things to look forward to in the near future.

Here is an extra little titbit.

Google’s Toolbar currently regards my MBL profile as more valuable content than my blog, and the same is true for my Blogcatalog profile.

Whilst the true value Google places on my site can’t be determined due to a manual tweak to what is displayed, for reputation management online profiles on social media sites can be quite powerful.
The same is true for sites such as Digg, Sphinn and Stumbleupon.

Its Not The Quality Of The Product

I have experienced some of Jacks training in the past, and it is always phenomenal, he gives so much valuable information and presents it in a way that is easy for anyone to understand.
I have absolutely no doubt that Social Power Linking will be no exception to the rule.

It Is Not Philosophical

Jack and myself currently have the same philosophical approach to building websites, and in fact I am fairly sure with his Authority Site Centre that he built and promotes with his partners he uses many of the same plugins as I do on a regular basis, only his team sets up the blogs for you on their own servers.

It Is Certainly Not Price

This is a physical product that will be shipped to your door

• 6 Hours of Video on 8 DVDs
• PDFs of the Slides
• PDF Fast Start Guide
• 3 CD of the same material to listen to in your car

Now most “online gurus”, most of which have half, or even less, of Jack’s 10 years of online experience (and often propose some shady tactics) would start off with a short term promotion of their product for $497 or more, and quickly raise the price to the best part of $1000

Now don’t get me wrong, some of those more expensive packages are worth their weight in gold, because they come from people with a similar level of experience to Jack, and honestly I am sure Jack’s latest offering is worth far more than the measly price he is charging.

Quite often these days you would be expecting to pay $67 for an ebook, with the price raising to $97 within a few days for something that might take you 1hr to read. Sometimes again that is worth it, if you already have a successful business, and one tip could make an existing traffic funnel profitable, or allow you to use a new one and make a profit.

This is a steal for only $149 plus $20 for shipping anywhere in the world… yes even to the Far east, Australia, or to me in Poland.

Take a look at Social Power Linking for yourself

I Don’t Know All Jack’s Strategies

Whilst Jack has a very similar philosophy for site building, I am sure I would pick up a few tricks that would make a total cost of $169 worthwhile.

It Not The Sales Letter

Jack has been known to have some pretty long sales letters in the past, but this one is only about 4 or 5 pages, tells you exactly what you get in Social Power Linking for such a small purchase price, and gives a quick overview of the contents of each CD.

There is not a testimonial in sight

Why? Jack honestly doesn’t need them, he has been in the business so long and is so highly respected. He is also quite sure that his offer is so compelling combined with the feedback his affiliates will give him in reviews such as this that any testimonials will just be unnecessary fluff that will scare away potential customers.

Jack knows full well that in some niches PPC is just not a viable consideration unless you have massive profit margins only suitable for those who have already learnt how to play Google’s Adword’s fiddle to perfection.
Fortunately there are ways to capture free traffic from search engines, and Jack is a master at not only gaining traffic, but teaching others how to do it in whatever niche they are in.

No Problems With Payment

There was a time that many residents of far-flung countries didn’t have the possibility to pay for products using Paypal but times are changing. Paypal makes it easy and if you haven’t got an account then there is always a credit card.

(note: in the past Jack used 2checkout for one of his programs I was a member, and I had some problems – Paypal really does make a difference for me)

Guarantee – You Had Better Believe It!

Not only do you get your money back, they will also pay you a little on top, though actually this is a little confusing.

They don’t refund the $20 shipping charge, but they do pay you $22 on top of the purchase price of the goods. You would only actually gain $2.

On top of that you would also have to pay for the goods to be shipped back, so if you do feel compelled to ask for a refund, you might actually be a few dollars poorer, but that is the same with any product you purchase mail order or over the internet.

So Why Am I Not Buying?

No it is not what you are thinking, I am not looking to get a free copy, I really would part with my cash right now.

I am an unusual rare case, and even if Jack offered it to me for free, including free shipping I would refuse.

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.

When I started my online business, one of the primary reasons was to get away from some of the mundane and sometimes highly stressful aspects of international trade.
My wife working for her father’s apparel business still goes through this almost daily and although things have greatly improved since Poland joined the European Community, I still have what I can only look on as “import phobia”

Thus I am only interested in digital products

Don’t Let My Reservations Stop You

Honestly, my phobia is my problem, not yours.

Physical products are shipped around the world daily, and if they are for personal use they most often sail straight through without having any customs paperwork or charges even here in Poland, well unless you are buying an $80,000 car, a motor cruiser or $4000 hifi system (yeah I still get requests from family friends to help with such purchases, and more often than not I avoid it, even though it would pay well just to make a few phone calls)

$169 Flat Rate (including shipping) = no brainer?

For some people yes, for others who are not making any money online and things are a little tight financially back at home, Social Power Linking is not for you. I would in that case suggest you read Jack’s Authority Black book, and Michelle’s Web 2.0 Traffic guide that I mentioned just a few hours ago.

I actually deliberately wrote about the free alternatives first so that I could link through to them in this post.

I deliberately wrote this as a separate post because just like Jack, I know a little bit about traffic generation and how well I can rank for products that I discuss that I believe are of value to my readers.

Hopefully I can persuade Jack to make a digital version on Social Linking Power available for fellow “import phobia” sufferers as I am sure I will learn something new.

Yes, I did deliberately use “Social Linking Power” instead of Social Power Linking” and I suppose I should also mention Socialpowerlinking.com – there are currently around 2000 references to this product in Google, I wonder how I will rank in the SERPs for “Social Power Linking“

For those unfamiliar with Antisocial, these are the differences

• All links have nofollow added – this might sound strange coming from someone who strongly supports the removal of nofollow from comments, but there is no logical purpose having a followable link to a social bookmark site that just points to a submission form
• TwitThis Support – for those that like Tweeting
• StumbleUpon Fix – The original has a bug in the StumbleUpon link
• New support for Sphinn – lots of people are going to use it, so I am sure it is a welcome addition

I am aware that Eyefall previously posted a modified version of the original to include Sphinn, but it doesn’t include the other necessary changes, and who really wants to use a plugin that sucks for SEO, especially the primary users of Sphinn, most likely SEOs.

Another valuable note, very few people will actually take action and use patched files, or even files presented as phps which you have to copy and paste.
If you don’t distribute plugins in an idiot proof zip file, very few people will use it.

I learnt this from experience by offering initially instructions on how to patch Sociable, and how many of my readers didn’t take action.

If you are still unsure about why you might want to use my version of Sociable, you might appreciate this “blast from the past” about how many blogs can retain as much as 50% more link juice internally.

For more information on the plugin itself, please visit the main download page.

For those that know all about it, here is a quick download link for Antisocial

Note: As always, no version number change though I have updated the notes within it – I still look on this as not being a branch of the original, just a hack for SEO minded individuals.
It still contains the sociable bug with WordPress 2.2.1 as I recently mentioned

Some things Blogcatalog currently do different to MBL

1. The front page heavily promotes and rotates bloggers, though one small section is for their supporters, most of it is free
2. They introduced tags before I had even spoken to them, though they were somewhat limited.
3. They were pulling in content snippets from blogs rather than just 3 titles before MBL
4. Blog Reviews and voting widgets that control listings, in addition to how active you are control your rating and thus your placement
5. Listings By Category
6. Listings by Country
7. Listings by User
8. Shout-to-Shout
9. OPML for Communities you join
10. Links to related blogs
11. Links to related bloggers
12. Ability to manually change the display order of your communities and friends (to show your best friends)
13. Ability to report something as spam without using email
14. Real tagging based on content linking to content (not fully implemented yet)
15. The forums…
16. The forum widgets
17. Auto thumbnail refreshes
18. XML-RPC
19. Full contact details including a toll free phone number
20. Tag based feeds
21. Related tags
22. Manual Inclusion (moderation by hand)

That doesn’t cover what Rose feels is copied, the main social features that are similar to many social networks with friends and communities, and the widgets… that is what I was referring to as being cloned in my original review of Blogcatalog.

MBL has a lot of unique features as well

1. Tracking (huge)
2. Auto join of sites you visit
3. Most popular links in your communities
4. Automatic display of your most frequently visited blogs
5. A lot more additional social networks and more control over who sees them
6. When they were just doing tracking, they used to have an affiliate program
7. Until recently having a company blog was a unique feature
8. As you have pointed out, legal documents, but so many sites don’t have it, though that isn’t an excuse – ask Techcrunch where their’s is?
9. Tell A Friend
10. New neighbors
11. Thumbnail editing (when you first subscribe)
12. Coauthors
13. WordPress.com support
14. Myspace Support
15. Owned by Yahoo and running on shiny new servers
16. User generated tagging
17. Suggestion Board
18. Yahoo Groups Mailing List
19. No advertising
20. Avatars By Comments
21. Click counters (really part of tracking)

Most of the above were present in Blogcatalog before I was giving them any help, and most of the advise was just re-emphasising things I had suggested to MBL and Bumpzee previously.

Don’t look at the number of points, as many of the MBL features are quite major differences, such as tracking, and some of the Blogcatalog features are interconnected.

Mass Broadcast

As announced a few days ago, MyBlogLog have modified their mass broadcast feature so it is possible to opt out of email messages. Previously there was almost universal concern over abuse.

There are still some differences in execution – MBL broadcasts can be public or private. BC broadcasts are all private.
BC broadcasts include a group discussion thread for the broadcast message.

Eric

Eric is off to take a well deserved rest and spend some quality time with family.

Over the last 7 or 8 months I have had some fairly intense discussions with Eric, in both good times and a few stormy interludes, including one 2 hour chat on Skype once things had calmed down a little.

I sincerely wish him all the best for the future.

My Integrity Under Question?

Rose seems to think somehow I am being in some way biased towards Blogcatalog, or looking at them with… hmm… “rose tinted glasses” seems to be a suitable expression.

This is partially to do with my open disclosure that Blogcatalog have offered to give me some financial compensation for all the ideas I have been offering them for free, most of which I had also given to the MyBlogLog team in the past.

As examples of the free information that both have had the benefit of, here is my original MyBlogLog wishlist and my forward thinking ideas of what should be possible with the MyBlogLog API.

Tim Nash a while back at Hackday in London had a chance to actually get hands on with the MBL API and it will be interesting what people create with it.

Having an API is a logical progression for Blogcatalog as well.

It is actually quite strange that my integrity is somewhat under attack at the same time as Eric, probably the person I have interacted with the most at MBL is departing.
I know that Tod, John and Steve have also spent time reading my suggestions in the past, but most of my interaction was with Eric and Rafer in the early days.

I still have some historical connection with Robyn, as I was reading her blog well before she joined the MyBlogLog team, and she was reading mine.

The fact that I have some minor financial interest with Blogcatalog has in some ways prevented being able to help MyBlogLog more interactively which is a shame as lots of things had been discussed although they may not have come to fruition.

At the same time the long term success of Blogcatalog is heavily linked to that of MyBlogLog, to the extent that if MyBlogLog is highly successful, Blogcatalog will also have more success.

If anything I am inclined to promote all 3 competing services, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog a lot more, and in equal amounts.

Just because one service has decided to give me some financial compensation doesn’t mean I am handcuffed from helping the others, and all email correspondence I have had with each site developer has remained strictly confidential.

I have deliberately not included Bumpzee in this comparison because it would just confuse things. In many ways Bumpzee is offering very similar features, but the implementation is very different.

“An incoming tide raises all ships”

Update

As is always the case, things can still be overlooked even if you try to be as comprehensive as possible. I am adding things in bold to the bottom of the lists as I spot them.

If you can think of some things that I have missed that should be included, and aren’t covered by a more global point raised, please mention it in the comments and I will be glad to add it, and give you some link credit within the post.

Specific Disclosure: I have been providing a lot of free ideas and feedback both publicly and in private to the 3 main (imho) competitors in this niche, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog, and all 3 would probably look on me as one of their largest supporters, in spirit if not in traffic (I can’t compete with Techcrunch).
With Blogcatalog I have to note that the arrangements are now slightly more formal in a consultancy capacity from which I may receive financial compensation

SEM Isn’t a Neglected Niche

PlugIM has been going reasonably well for quite a while
Bumpzee has lots of communities that are SEO / SEM / Marketing related

There are also a number of other marketing and blogging bookmarking and news sites that I have seen though didn’t seem to have quite as much traction.

Sure, SEO, SEM etc isn’t very popular on sites like Digg unless you have a very cultivated audience, and even then you have to have an insane amount of credibility in the the eyes of the general Digg population to stand a chance of not being buried.

So if it is not availability of suitable social networks for the topic maybe it is…

Sphinn is a Better Technology Platform?

Sphinn is running on Pligg

Well at least Sphinn is sometimes running on Pligg…

PlugIM is also running on Pligg, but from what I can see, other than cosmetic differences such as adding all your other social networks, and possibly “stalking” (I haven’t looked at that closely), the version of Pligg used by PlugIM is much more heavily customised.

This includes:-

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (though this isn’t collected from the content)

Categorization of content just doesn’t work – there is a big difference in SMO with the purpose of gaining links, and SMO with the aim to gather email or RSS subscribers for Direct Marketing.

Bumpzee on the other hand is a custom platform – it still has a few bugs, and quite a few features missing. If it received a similar amount of attention as Sphinn seems to be getting, I am sure the guys at Bumpzee would spend a huge amount more time on it rounding off the features.

Ultimately Bumpzee currently blows Pligg out of the water for features unless Pligg is heavily customised.

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (picked up automatically)
• Lots of Widgets
• Multiple interlinked communities

Sphinn has no technological advantage, in fact it might be looked on as inferior

Attention Wars

Lots of people in the SEM community have attacked Jason Calacanis for Mahalo his (in his own words) “viable Google co-exister”, and Guy Kawasaki for Truemors.

Danny Sullivan was one of the heavy detractors.

The only reason Sphinn might be successful is Danny Sullivan & Attention

Deja Vu anyone?

Hardly anyone in the SEM community would give a damn about Sphinn if it wasn’t launched by Danny. I have seen Pligg sites heavily criticised by many SEO/SEM specialists.

When Danny Sullivan announced Sphinn, he stated:-

By no means do we envision Sphinn as replacing general news sites like Digg. We just think the story submission model can work and be powerful in a specialized area such as search, as well.

By the way, we’re not the first to try this for search. In February 2006, The Search Engine Press was launched, then John Battelle kicked off SearchMob in September of that year. Since then, we’ve had others appear, including BUMPzee and ISEdb Scoop. We’re happy to join them!

That was actually only the second time Bumpzee had been mentioned on Search Engine Land.

I can only assume that Bumpzee wasn’t gaining exposure on influential SEO / SEM blogs because of some kind of disclosure problem, or not wanting to promote a future competitor, or a future competitor owned by a strategic business partner.

PlugIM has never been mentioned, though it does pick up Danny’s content from Search Engine Land.

At least Sphinn can’t be accused of copying some of the better features on PlugIM.

Critical Mass

Sphinn now exists, and will likely capture the attention of a large proportion of the SEM / SEO community, because ultimately most people involved in SEO / SEM in one way or another are attention and link whores.
Danny certainly has a fair amount of attention, and a lot of other people in the industry with attention are also promoting the site, at least a little.

It will continue to grow as long as Danny keeps driving traffic to it, but he is not even doing a very good job of that.
Guy Kawasaki leverages his own traffic to drive people to Truemors with an RSS feed above the fold on the front page.
Search Engine Land currently only has a link in the top right corner, and no voting buttons as standard.

I also noted that SEL has MyBlogLog removed. Does this mean they are going to try to make Sphinn more “social” with widgets as well?

Unfortunately Sphinn is a very category centric niche voting site – I don’t see it’s population growing beyond the aggregate subscriber base of Search Engine Land and SEOmoz.

Market Segmentation

With Sphinn, the guys from Search Engine Land are effectively claiming their own little kingdom in social news, unfortunately whilst it might be good for Danny to enhance his own attention, and maybe drive traffic to a number of sites that deserve some limelight (I have noticed Meg, Lyndon & Maki doing well), I am not sure this is such an ideal situation.

There are various groups of people involved in SEO / SEM who don’t even acknowledge that the others exist. The same is true of internet marketing and affiliate marketing.

Building Bridges

What was really needed was for existing services to be given some attention, which would have the effect of building bridges between communities.
A service promoted significantly by the SEO / SEM and affiliate / internet marketing community could gain critical mass for a news network that allowed content that was more commercially flavoured, and such a community would also attract casual users, linkerati, press and ultimately drive more traffic to good content.

The best option possible would have been to adopt something that already existed.

Not the Same As Blog Social Networks

In my opinion this is not the same as blog social networks, within which Bumpzee also fall, competing against Mybloglog and Blogcatalog.
In theory there are 75M bloggers, and I doubt there are many more than 200K actively interested in SEO / SEM enough to be involved with a social news site on the topics. It is only when you start merging with internet marketing, affiliate marketing and “make money online” that you start hitting the 1M+ audience that is easily possible.

Spinn Exists – Have to Use It

I am already giving Spinn as much promotion as Danny is himself, with a voting link on every page. I want the attention, but hopefully I can also divert some of that attention towards other services that are equally deserving.

The Alexa data is more for future reference as Sphinn has just plummeted after its launch and will take a while to gain traction.

Including 4 voting buttons on a page is dividing attention, although I have removed StumbleUpon because providing a button was reducing any “thumbs up” I might receive.
Ultimately, if I was to remove one of the 4, it would currently be Sphinn.

Giving Attention

It is honestly a shame that Danny and Search Engine Land took this direction. It would have been much better to promote the existing services extensively 4 months ago. By this time they would be booming, and drawing a much wider audience – such strategies have much stronger long term effects.

Of course it is not just Danny – Rand for instance didn’t even mention competing services in his post, and the first mention of the fact that it was running on Pligg rather than “the site itself has some fairly exceptional functionality” was by Carsten in the comments

When you share your audience with others, quite often you get it back in spades. Two posts in a row touching on reciprocity.

I would honestly much rather be bumping or plugging everyone’s posts than using Sphinn, because that would suggest growing cohesion within the industry, and not more splintering.

With that said, everyone interested in SEO and SEM should sign up with Sphinn, and also grab Michelle’s Sphinn plugin

The first thing I suggest you do is pop over to Blogcatalog and grab a free 7 day trial of their supporters service, so you can actually try out some of these new features (today may be the last day this is available)

Features limited to pro users (currently) include their new broadcast service, which is quite topical after the reaction to the MyBlogLog broadcast service launched a week ago.

Broadcast Messaging

Blogcatalog describes this as:-

What is a Broadcast?

Broadcasts allow you to unobtrusively send a mass message to all users who have added you to their BlogCatalog friends list.

The first thing to note is that this is based around the friends feature, and not the community feature, so if you add someone as a friend, that is giving them consent to send you broadcast messages.

Broadcast messages:-

• Don’t send an email
• Only appear on your profile
• Can only be seen by you
• Cannot (as far as I can see) contain URLs

The one thing it is missing is email notification, and possibly including the message in the email (to make it useful)

Blogcatalog does already include individual settings for every other message sent by the service.

It would be fairly easy to add one more setting to the same page, and it is quite likely that options in the code exist, though I would suggest that the default configuration would be to have the option set to off.

There are 2 reasons why it might be unavailable currently:-

• Servers – there is a big difference in server load sending out occasional messages, and broadcasting emails to 100s of people at a time. That is actually one of my reservations about using comment subscriptions on a blog, and why I use SMTP with gmail for my comment subscriptions.
• Intrusion – Daniel the lead developer of Blogcatalog, after he read my review of the MyBlogLog Messaging System, messaged me suggesting the Blogcatalog mass messaging system in development for the previous 3 weeks would be much less intrusive.

I think once Blogcatalog has some heavier duty servers, it would be nice to see some kind of selective email delivery included, and I would actually appreciate being able to include links.
Links are not stated as being allowed HTML, but maybe they can be included anyway.. I have to test it.

Shout To Shout

I could claim that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the biggest innovation so far from blogging social networks… but it isn’t, it is just common sense fairly well executed. I am sure it can be improved using ajax, tabs and threading in some way (hmm think Gmail), but for now just the fact that you can have a conversation with someone, and actually display all the conversation on the same page suddenly makes messaging on Blogcatalog useful.

I actually had a problem grabbing screenshots for this, because almost all the conversations I have are in private, so I have just picked on Daniel, and blurred it.
This is just part of one conversation…

New Design

Blogcatalog has had a general overhaul in look and feel – now is the time I wish I had kept a copy of their front page without the annotations.

Before

After

The changes are more cosmetic than anything, and feature throughout the site with minor touches, although I haven’t looked to see if all the XHTML has changed significantly.

On the front page the major difference is the addition of the “The Blog Spotlight” which highlights people who are paid supporters of Blogcatalog. The “languages” had already been replaced by the latest discussions.

What I would like to see is an increase in the amount of categories being displayed. Some of the largest categories are fairly sidelined as far as traffic and link juice are concerned.

Supporter Benefits

One pro benefit I would like to see is the ability to change blog descriptions without them having to pass through some kind of approval process. I have tweaked categories in the past, and the changes went live fairly soon, but I would much prefer as a supporter to be able to make changes on the fly.

With the new Twitter updates being displayed, it would be good to show more than one entry as a single entry can be fairly meaningless. Hopefully the other services planned will not be in the same place on the page. Adding my Diggs or Stumbles is great, but I would want them in a less prominent part of the page.

I know that an article covering the importance of good anchor text or choosing a niche would help a lot of people, but I would much prefer to just link through to other people I respect who have written about the subject as well, or in many cases better than I would do myself.

I have discussed in the past that I don’t write speed linking articles, and for some reason, despite how many hundreds or even 1000s of bloggers use speedlinking in their titles, or even have whole categories for such roundup link posts, I still rank highly for the term in Google.

Scott Jangro seems to be going through a similar dilemma to what I go through on an almost daily basis – stick to your self defined niche, or respond to the signals given to you by your traffic stats.

Vanessa Fox has saved me a whole load of time testing out lots of ways to aggregate profiles on social networks.

Whilst Diggers tend to bury security warnings as spam, they are never-the-less extremely important, well unless you want Aaron to break into your WordPress account in under 5 minutes. Upgrade Now

If you have a couple of hours to spend on your education, John Reese really knows a lot about increasing your income online, so I can’t think of anyone better to interview Shoemoney. There is a lot to be learnt, think of what it would be like to eavesdrop on a conversation between 2 top earners at a bar during a large convention.

That blog post I think is a landmark for affiliate marketing in more ways than one, as John Reese included a disclosure at the bottom for the affiliate links.

Who knows, maybe he wrote it after coming back from lunch with Ted Murphy of PayPerPost.

It is true, in John’s email newsletters he always declares affiliate links, in fact he highlights them, often asks you to clear your cookies before clicking through, and offers massive bonuses for using his links, but this is something different, and because John is so influential in affiliate marketing, I think this might might cause a lots of changes.

I even grabbed a screenshot

As it is memorial Weekend in the US, here are some charity links.

First of all Mark at Bloglyne is raising money to fight premature birth, what is on offer is a great deal.

Secondly Stephen Pierce has set a goal to feed over 1,000,000 million children
within 72 HOURS. Lots of free useful stuff on the site even if you don’t make a donation

“When You Download This Free Success Report We Will Donate A Plate Of Food To A Starving Child On Your Behalf. It’s That Simple. No Strings Attached.”

Tags: charity, disclosure, linking, niche marketing, payperpost, SEO Blog, social networking, WordPress Security
]]> http://andybeard.eu/787/letting-other-people-write-the-linkbait.html/feed 7 http://andybeard.eu/598/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html http://andybeard.eu/598/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:55:27 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html Stampede Secrets 2.0 is unlike any internet marketing report or ebook I have read…

If spending $97 on an ebook is a major financial commitment, don’t read any further

Ok, for the rest of you lets get on with the review…

Read more on In Depth Review | Traffic Strategy | Stampede Secrets 2.0 – Social Media Marketing From A Unique Perspective?…

Tags: marketing, niche marketing, niche websites, rss, RSS Sharing, smm, smo, social bookmarking, Social Bookmarks, social marketing, Social Media, social network, social networking, social networks, Social News, social proof, Social Tagging, stampede secrets, syndication, tagging, tags, tracking, traffic, traffic strategy, vre, web 2.0, web metrics, Website Promotion, website traffic
]]> Stampede Secrets 2.0 is unlike any internet marketing report or ebook I have read…

If spending $97 on an ebook is a major financial commitment, don’t read any further

Ok, for the rest of you lets get on with the review…

• There is no hype in the sales letter
• There is no hype in the ebook
• There is no hype in this review

Another Web 2.0 Social Media Ebook?

After you read the sales letter that is probably the impression you will have, and in fact you will still have that impression shortly after you start reading the ebook.

Here are some interesting facts for you

Pages 56 (+bonus guide on video, crib sheets and tables)

Subject	# of times
Mentions of Digg in the content	1
Mentions of linkbait	0
Mentions of “effect” (such as Digg effect)	0
Netscape	0
Reddit	0
Positive mentions of Del.icio.us	1

In fact those few references that were included were mainly in facts and figures like usage data.

So What is this Ebook Talking About?

Subject	# of times
References to Business	31
Community	9
Research	44
Content	56
Feedback	8
Amazon	7
Ebay	7
YouTube	7
43 Things	20
Traffic	170

Traffic Secrets

Whilst many people don’t appreciate the value of ebooks, claiming that the information is out there if you look for it, or join and participate in various forums, that isn’t strictly true.
We live in an age of information overload. Quite often different ideas and new ideas take a long time to rise to the surface, or never make it, not because the ideas are not valuable, or supported by hard evidence.

I often see “specialists” in SMO (Social Media Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Marketing) claim that their methods and expensive services can work in virtually any market place.
I am not going to dispute those claims, but that very statement tends to drown out other methods that could be equally effective for traffic generation that might be equally, or potentially more suitable for certain markets.

Traffic Strategy

The fundamental value from this ebook is that it challenges you to examine your social media marketing strategy, and optimize it for best effect.
This is nothing to do with writing better headlines, or coercing top users at Digg, Reddit or Netscape to add you as a friend and to plug your content.

Whilst Laura’s intention was to target the ebook to beginners in social media marketing, in many ways consultants in social media marketing should read it because it will place a new perspective on information and strategies you think you already know.

Professional Writing

Laura has written a lot of ebooks as a ghost writer, and this isn’t her first outing in publishing an ebook in her own name. This ebook oozes quality production with footnotes on almost every page and links to resources that back up the data and strategies she proposes.

The professional tone may also be one of its shortcomings – The Stampede Secret isn’t a light refreshing read, or suitable for people who prefer information in short 400 word chunks.

To get the most benefit you really will have to read through the ebook a couple of times taking notes – in some ways it reminds me of some of the more serious marketing reports you might receive from Marketing Sherpa.

Recommended Audience

Ideal

You are already making money, and probably think you know everything there is about SMM. You might even skim read the ebook once and think there is nothing new, but if you take the time to sit down and read it slowly a couple of times, you will pick up a new perspective.

• Marketing consultants
• Blogging consultants
• Business owners in niche markets
• Owners of Virtual Real Estate in Niche markets including blogging networks
• VCs and Angel Investors
• Researchers
• Journalists

Possible

Beginners who have tried SMM for their niche websites and blogs with little success, and who have money to invest to accelerate their learning process.

Don’t Buy It

This isn’t an ebook showing you the secret route to success and instant wealth. This isn’t something you should spend your last meal ticket on for that one chance of financial independence.

If the price of the ebook is more than you would spend on a night out, think again.

It will probably take you 3 hours to read this ebook unless you have been studying various fast reading techniques – if 3 hours of your time is worth less than $97, this ebook probably isn’t ideal.

You Can Find This Information Elsewhere

I honestly haven’t gone searching for all this information elsewhere, but I am sure somewhere among the millions of pages of content that are created on the internet every day, you would find at least 90% of this information. The value is in the way it is collated and presented.

Just as an example some of what is discussed in the ebook you could find on my blog, and potentially in more depth, especially in regards to things like tagging. Laura even quoted from one of my articles and linked through, highlighting that people should read the article, and the valuable discussion afterwards.

Unique Information

Analysis of one of Laura’s niche sites in a very competitive market (Acne Treatment) with real proof of traffic numbers from Quantcast – not just screenshots.
This isn’t a high traffic site, it is very much a simple niche website, running on WordPress that anyone could create and generate some income – I wouldn’t expect Laura to expose her most profitable sites.

Discussion of traffic strategy – some social media consultants charge $5000 per day to help you formulate a social media marketing action plan. Most of the consultants concentrate on the search engine optimization benefits, and not how to participate in social networks to find real customers.

How to Write an Ebook – whilst this isn’t one of the lessons taught, the production quality and style is something to learn from.

I am going to finish off with a few select quotes from the ebook that don’t give too much away, but at the same time highlight how much different the overall perspective of the information is.

If anything is going to hold you back in being a fore-runner in the new web, the need to measure and record every click or movement to and on your site would be the culprit. The internet is changing at such a rapid rate that controlling and metering every change you make has the potential to stall your success.

Uptight control and playing it safe is seldom the stance of a pioneer. It is the pioneer who wins in profits, fame and visitor traffic – not the followers and whiners. I am not guaranteeing success by any means, nor am I advising you to risk your life savings on some promising new start up, but I am saying that the occasional ‘play your cards or go home’ attitude is one of the keys to success.

Web 2.0 is a very creative, innovative and fluid environment. Most Web 2.0 sites cannot be put in a box and measured in any consistent and reliable fashion – they are simply too young. There is a level of intuition at launch, an element of change and growth throughout the life of the web property, and yet another level of intuition used for assessment when determining a reasonable sale value.

Conclusion

No hype, no bonus, though if I do see enough interest and sales I might write up a supplement to the ebook going into some of the topics in more depth, especially on the benefits of tagging.
I would probably make that available free to all Laura’s customers.
I may even go into some of the topics that Laura has missed – Web 2.0 grows at an alarming rate, and there is a limit to how fast you can research strategies enough to be able to offer conclusive proof.

Disclaimers are unheard of in most ebooks, but Laura takes this to a new professional level, this is just part of it.

Information within this report may be speculation and are therefore within the meaning of the securities litigation reform act of 1995 and contain verbiage such as ‘expected’, ‘anticipated’, ‘estimated’, projected’, ‘believed’ or variations of those.

I have actually been chucking a few emails backwards and forwards to Laura over the last couple of days, and I thought I would include one small excerpt.

You know you really rock! You don’t even ‘know’ me and you’ve given me so
much of your time. It’s a dying art in our world.

I am not going to include my exact reply, because it mentioned names of people that if internet marketers were actively using LinkedIn, would certainly appear between myself and Laura as shared contacts, and over the last 2 years I have certainly dropped by her blog a number of times.

This comment also shows the benefit of “paying it forward” and the value of providing information for free to eventually reach your goals.

There are quite a few expert marketers who normally charge their clients a great deal of money who I correspond with on a regular basis, simply because they have gained value from what I have offered for free.

One of the bonuses that Laura provides is some very specific email support – she states that she will answer 2 emails from her customers, and highlights the importance formulating those questions to receive maximum benefit. She is not going to exclude pleas for help, and win / win relationships can develop to extend the level of help provided.

I have always been happy to answer emails regarding the products I review both before someone makes a buying decision and afterwards, or you can just ask here in the comments.

I gained a great deal of value from Stampede Secrets. I might not realise that value immediately because I already employ many of the strategies and techniques discussed, and it is hard to quantify the effect any changes might have on my income.
Reading the ebook has certainly helped me highlight the action I should be taking to revitalise some of the niche websites I have had for a long time and hardly ever modify, because each is bringing in a small trickle of income.
Laura has helped me realise that it is possible to employ a few extra traffic strategies for these niche websites that could turn the flow of traffic into a gushing fountain.

Disclaimer:- I am one of the few people who received a free review copy of this ebook, possibly because I offered to take a look before publishing, that Laura reads my blog, and because she quoted me in the ebook. To be honest I might not have purchased the ebook just based upon the sales page. That is the value of affiliate marketing in pre-selling, or explaining the benefits of a product in an ethical manner

Tags: marketing, niche marketing, niche websites, rss, RSS Sharing, smm, smo, social bookmarking, Social Bookmarks, social marketing, Social Media, social network, social networking, social networks, Social News, social proof, Social Tagging, stampede secrets, syndication, tagging, tags, tracking, traffic, traffic strategy, vre, web 2.0, web metrics, Website Promotion, website traffic
]]> http://andybeard.eu/598/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html/feed 9 http://andybeard.eu/593/maki-from-doshdosh-on-10e20-reddit-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-it.html http://andybeard.eu/593/maki-from-doshdosh-on-10e20-reddit-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-it.html#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:14:22 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/maki-from-doshdosh-on-10e20-reddit-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-it.html Maki from DoshDosh is one of my favorite emerging bloggers and it seems that the talent is being noticed, as this post on 10e20 seems to show.

As you would expect from Maki, this article really does go into great depth on how to use Reddit effectively and ethically.

Read more on Maki From DoshDosh on 10e20 – Reddit – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About It…

Tags: 10e20, doshdosh, maki, reddit, social bookmarking, social marketing, Social Media, social network, social networking, social networks
]]> Maki from DoshDosh is one of my favorite emerging bloggers and it seems that the talent is being noticed, as this post on 10e20 seems to show.

As you would expect from Maki, this article really does go into great depth on how to use Reddit effectively and ethically.

Reddit is a service I honestly don’t have a lot of time for, though I do have an account and welcome more friends.

I listed all my Social media memberships in my post on StumbleUpon, from which I also linked through to Maki.

Maki- congrats on the new writing gig.

Tags: 10e20, doshdosh, maki, reddit, social bookmarking, social marketing, Social Media, social network, social networking, social networks
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