So How Can You Get uQast For Free?

uQast For Free

• Be patient – eventually a version will be launched with a reduced feature set. You won’t have a /yourname or /yourkeyword URL and someone may even be using yours if it is at all competitive – a bit like domain names
  I don’t own andybeard.com Youtube.com/andybeard myspace.com/andybeard skype:andybeard and probably quite a few more.
  I regret not grabbing hold of those when they were available
  The exact details of the reduced feature set are not decided or I haven’t details, plus the feature set is a moving target with continual innovation. uQast Pro users will remain on the leading edge.
• Join the uQast affiliate program – I know it is a little corny but as an affiliate all you have to do is refer one person to uQast as you get UQast Pro for free. I am not sure whether that covers some of the other bonuses such as the V.I.P launch seminar or the magazine subscription, but it is a very fair deal.
  If you have a number of SEO clients this is an easy way to rack up one or more valuable media profiles that they control with high quality multimedia presentations and lead capture. It could possibly pay for itself with affiliate referrals as well.
  This is just the affiliate program for the launch – after launch everyone who has a uQast account is a uQast affiliate.
• Domaining – in theory there is a “domaining like” opportunity for premium names, though be warned there isn’t an interface set up to handle transfers – not strickly free but potentially a way to offset the cost of a portfolio

Why & Who Should Sign Up As A Founding Affiliate?

I am going to avoid “forward looking” statements about features that are just on the drawing board or have yet to be implemented.
This is intended to be “no hype” – my own evaluation of the potential of uQast some of it based upon what I initially saw in the platform, and partially from my work with the uQast team.

• Amazon S3 For Free – with some caveats

  If you look on using Amazon S3 for hosting streaming video for your sales pages or members areas, uQast can currently provide a very useful service with no bandwidth charges ever for uQast Pro users. This is especially useful for anyone doing a product launch where the bandwidth costs can be significant.
  10,000 optins watching 400MB of video is 4000GB of data – that is probably at least $500 in fees with Amazon S3. With Kajabi that is $1880.
  What you can’t offset in this way are things like theme CSS files, javascript & images for which you might use a conventional CDN service.

• Reputation Management With Lead Capture

  It is my belief that uQast is going to become an unsurpassed platform for lead capture from syndicated media. I have written blog posts about how unhappy I am with current offerings.

  If you have clients with budget (my readership between them probably have 100,000 clients with budget) – now is the time to get in, secure their names and keywords and not have to pay $200/month which is what I have heard the uQast Pro will eventually be priced at.

  uQast will be a landing page of choice to push up to the top of the SERPs for your clients because they will be able to present great content, and capture leads directly.

  I should note this isn’t a “Leapfish” like pitch – there are no guaranteed search rankings or placement for buying a URL with a uQast Pro listing that I am aware of. Rankings internally are based on quality, and external are in the hands of Google & Bing.
  A URL might offer a small SEO benefit, but the biggest effect is for branding.

• Existing sellers

  If you are selling digital products already, this is another marketplace that you can leverage. You might make some extra sales. The product listings are based upon a patent pending algorithm which focuses on quality and reviews, not how much money you have to pay for advertising – oh and being listed is free.
  Some systems focus only on the newest products currently being promoted – the hope is that products on uQast will have significant longevity with an emphasis on quality not hype.

• Upsell System

  For those selling digital products the upsell system in uQast is extremely easy to implement and doesn’t have some of the restrictions of competing services.
  Of note is you can track the upsell process whilst maintaining session for Google Analytics.
  Up until relatively recently the popular solution for 1-click upsells was Infusionsoft – $300/month for the version with cart and affiliate program. Then there is the added cost of reliable integration and support – I have seen figures of $15k-$20k mentioned by multiple people though there are cheaper alternatives.
  I have tried other systems, but the technology wasn’t necessarily as straight forward as you might assume from the sales information, and they relied on having your own merchant account.
  Clickbank can do upsells but last I heard that was limited to existing high volume partners.

• No Merchant Account

  Some people don’t have a merchant account or would have great difficulty geting one for a number of reasons, yet a merchant account or the equivalent from Paypal is the only way to do an upsell chain effectively – all uQast sales are processed by uQast – they handle all transactions, product delivery, refunds, chargebacks (cross fingers very few) etc
  Don’t ask me how much the fees are – in testing they were set somewhere below that offered by competing market places.
  I also can’t say how long it takes to receive funds – likely initially it would be subject to the refund period – I am not going to speculate on longer term possibilities.

• Revenue & Actions

  You can’t currently include opt-in forms, micropayment and a shopping cart in many other competing offerings. Ooyala does some of it but at a price – I believe Slideshare can do lead generation on a video embed, but that uses their proprietary system which as far as I am aware doesn’t post directly to your autoresponder forms.
  Note: uQast does not currently support document embeds.
  Some of the players that support payment or lead generation “in the player” actually achieve this using javascript. Whilst it is technically possible to get that working for viral syndication, I have yet to see anyone do it and there are other complications.

• Free player

  The cost of players can add up depending on which you use. JW Player isn’t free for commercial use yet I often see “6 figure” & “7 figure” marketers using an unlicensed player. Flowplayer in theory you can use the GPL version as I believe is used with some Amazon S3 solutions – I have never seen any WordPress plugin or other solution that actually used all the features of these players in a user friendly way – some come close, but add other incompatibilities

  Note: Forward looking statement – There is a major issue with hosting your own player… trust – to get a player accepted for embedding in Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, Google Buzz & appearing in Google Reader the owners of those sites need to trust the code. That isn’t something that will ever happen for self hosted code for small sites.
  If your long-term media strategy is based on using your own player, no matter how well the player is coded you are guaranteed reduced virality.
  The best you can expect if you used html5 is that the html5 video would be shown, but without your custom features.

  This is a forward looking statement in that achieving trust and geting the coding right for uQast will also be a long term currently unfulfilled goal, but as an established community it is a goal that is at least achievable.

My Offer For uQast

As I have mentioned in the comments it is hard to dedicate a huge amount of time for an extended period, and I have full time obligations currently with the uQast team in various ways.
However both for work and in various communities I have experienced the immense value of being a member of private chat groups on Skype. So I am going to set up a private Skype group for all my uQast Pro referrals where they will have direct access to me, and to each other. That means there is a little bit of a self help aspect if I am not around for an extended period of time, but I generally have Skype on most of the day.
The intention isn’t as a general chat room – high signal to noise.

I expect for this founders launch that room is going to be pretty exclusive for a few months and will help people get up to speed fast. Even if it ends up one-on-one that just hopefully means it is just better signal to noise.

It is also in some ways a benefit to me to get direct feedback from customers, though my bandwidth is limited.

This won’t be a route to unannounced information or special access to features, but there are likely some methods to do things that work better than others, strategy discussions etc which would be worthwhile.
This is not intended to be a supplemental channel for support issues of various kinds, as for many of those kinds of problems I am certainly not the person to contact
It also isn’t hand holding, and would most likely suit more advanced users with some technical skill.

Here is an affiliate link again so I can track things

It is hard to place a real world value on such a group/room – one SEO membership I belong to has such a group on Skype of typically 60 people and at times that can get a little noisy as there is general chat, but the level of direct feedback from experienced people is unsurpassed. The value certainly exceeds the $30/month you might pay for that if that is the type of community you can gain a return on time invested from.

As noted in my previous post, I have been subverted/assimilated by uQast and am working for/with them full time in various ways. Thus whilst I try not to be biased I am sure in some ways I am – I am aware of future plans, whatever bugs might be lurking etc, but I am trying to portray things as neutrally as I can and avoiding any hype.

This service is in many ways the successor to FreeIQ, but retains hardly any of the old code (which was pretty good and ahead of its time) – FreeIQ & uQast were founded by Brad Fallon who also is a founder & CEO of Stompernet.
I personally look on uQast and Stompernet as different entities (and legally they are). uQast isn’t about training – it is a software-as-a-service platform that enables stuff you can’t do anywhere else.

If you are not inclined to comment publicly, and you have questions my contact form is available or you can always find me on Skype:call-andybeard .

You really don’t want your clients stuck with uQast.com/HGDFSREW/brandname or uQast.com/LJHTDRSW/keyword

I have compiled a list of the reasons I believe people should be interested in uQast (and what attracted me in the first place)
It also mentions my uQast Bonus

Just over a month ago I watched a preview presentation of a new “software as a service” application called uQast. Whilst watching the presentation I had a browser open and did a little digging around, found the development site and started poking to see what it offered.

I then dropped a friendly email to the developers who I already had extensive contact with from their current & previous ventures with some feedback. I could see a lot of promise with the site, as I had with its predecessor.

Hints were made bilaterally that some more formal feedback could be provided in some capacity, though I really wanted to avoid a drawn out negotiation period, and I could see a rough diamond that I could help polish. Just polish… not cut & shape as most of the real work in creating a massively scaleable digital delivery platform was already done.

At the time I was in the process of puting together my own tightly integrated membership site here on andybeard.eu and to play a proactive role I was going to have to at least postpone those plans for a lengthy period of time.
There was also a ton of products I wanted to promote as an affiliate, articles & commentary that really needed to be written, including formally writing about my weird Pinocchio SEO stuff in public with over 2 years of research.

Somehow things worked out and I have been busy for the last month.

What Makes uQast Different To What I Planned?

For 5 years I have had a bee in my bonnet about creating a platform that in some specific way enables both publishers to publish content and affiliates to promote it with some unique technology or “special sauce” sticking it all together and allowing me to leverage my skills & experience.

uQast isn’t it

I say that in a good way – in many ways my entrepreneurial yearning to create a specific platform, and all the preconceived feature requirements that I had built up over a period of 5 years was a double edged sword – both allowing me to come up with solutions to complex problems almost at the drop of a hat, and at the same time instilling an urge to make uQast a surrogate of what I wanted to create rather than the established mission.

So the largest barrier to overcome in my own mind and in negotiations was that uQast is something different despite whatever significant synergies exist.

uQast Is What Exactly?

uQast’s mission is to be the world leader at collecting, ordering and monetizing valuable digital media content.

You could call that the short form elevator pitch I would probably have to worry about remembering if I was talking to important people.

Digital media content is anything that can be downloaded or streamed. Video, Audio podcasts, eBooks & white papers in PDF or doc format, even software in a zip file is possible.
In theory the platform could be used for hard goods, services etc though there might be issues with delivery validation for the credit card processors that have to be carefully thought about.

There is no advertising on the site – the majority of the business model depends on users actually selling products they create.

As well as being able to use promotional content on the site itself, it is envisioned to be able to embed the content on “any website in the world” and have actions & transactions take place “in situ”.
I say “envisioned” – the player has a lot of great unique functionality but it is currently most suitable for videos, but doubles as audio.
Transactions include actually buying product, signing up to a real email list right in the video player, giving a “tip” for a free video and various sharing and embed options.

Having the content playing on “any” website is going to take a little time. A lot of time over the last few weeks has been spent on embed code improvements, and it is early days yet. The long term goal is to get the videos embeddable on Facebook & Twitter via Oembed, and even viewable in Google Reader, Buzz etc.
There are special requirements to be met and obstacles to overcome – one example is player size – whilst the 640×360 widescreen player can be resized, some of the intenal windows for shopping can’t.

There is also some special functionality I want to add that will help take things one step further and make uQast the defacto platform for video SEO, though discussions are fairly early days.

The video player is highly customizable and it is something anyone can do.

One of the big features that is hard to equate is the tip jar – I don’t know how this micropayment system for free content is going to work. Ooyala has had micropayments for a while, and recently introduced Paypal Micropayments platform.
The uQast micropayment system is their own… there are some hurdles to overcome but it is functional.
Oh, and Ooyala is extremely expensive compared to any planned uQast offering I know about.

This Is A Long Tail Play… For The Little Guys

The long tail is a big deal

In any market, there are a few big players who seem to get all the attention.
But their importance, influence and ability to positively affect consumers are dwarfed by the combined effect of all the small players.

- Brad Fallon uQast Founder

It is also about quality content and a ranking system within search results based upon quality reviews from consumers, that is resistant to gaming.

Advance Features

There are, and will continue to be added lots of advanced features with an emphasis on making them surprising easy to use.

One area I have spent a fair amount of time testing has been the upsell system.

You define a number of offsite pages which will contain your various upsell and downpage offers, and uQast provides you with the “Buy Now” and “No Thanks” buttons to place on each page.

But being able to set up an upsell chain is one thing – being able to effectively measure it is quite another.

With uQast we are most of the way there as the shopping cart is maintaining the session all the way through, and thus we can achieve quite an effective sales funnel in Google Analytics.
Ideally there are a few things which still need to be added but I know at least one shopping cart I attempted to use on a project this year where the use of javascript with iframes made it almost impossible to set up a full funnel in analytics. Lots of custom programming to the javascript that embedded the iframe that called the sales buttons was outside my budget, but without it I had to kill the project as being able to demonstrate sales data was an intrinsic part of the project.

Andy Beard Subverted & My Most Biased Review Ever

For the last month or so my “computer home” as in what has been showing predominently on the screen of various PCs has been uQast, the Jira Bug Project & Issue Tracker being used, and various test domains – also a fair chunk of very specific research.
So I have been ripping the site apart trying to make things break all that time, though not to the same intimate level of detail as the programmers working on the project.

I could just publish a list of every outstanding bug or missing feature I know about – if you have ever spent some time delving through the WordPress trac system you would know that sometimes non-security bugs take months to come to prominence, and features might take years unless you code them yourself or they become “blessed”.
But that wouldn’t be a fair evaluation compared to the months/years of work that have already been invested in the project to get it to the current stage.
Development from my perspective is pretty nimble, there is good team co-ordination and dedication to achieve the mission, and create a phenomenal useful service.

This isn’t intended to be a full review of uQast but as the launch wheels have started rolling I needed to get some words out in the ether. Most likely in the next few days I will highlight some of the additional things I personally find interesting and feel important to mention.

And I have left tons of things out that I am sure will end up being raised in the comments… and we can handle them there.

Any questions… criticisms… fire away!

The thoughts about uQast in this post are purely my own and I have liberally peppered this post with referral links mainly because I love tracking stuff, but you might enjoy the 2 tier affiliate program that pays for a year. You can sign up for the launch affiliate program here.

1. Responding rapidly to situations

Not just with a social media celebrity such as Leo, but with all users with problems. Quite often a user familiar with Buzz will just @message one of the Google Buzz Team if something needs some kind of interaction with an engineer to resolve, but quite often the Google Buzz team members get involved without being prompted.

2. Direct interaction

In many ways it reminds me of Friendfeed who were already in many ways looked on as underdogs compared to Twitter and only gained significant traction when Twitter was down. Just like Friendfeed the creators of Buzz are participating in the conversation and in many cases they are leading the conversation as well.
They are users, and creating a platform they want to use.

3. Scale & Community

Obviously Buzz isn’t yet at the same scale as Twitter – it is quite possible it is at a similar scale to Friendfeed. The funny thing is I saw lots of people writing smart comments in replies to Leo’s anguish such as “What’s Buzz?” as if it is insignificant.
There was also this comment in a post on Cnet

Only a few social-media services truly matter at the scale at which Google likes to operate, and Buzz is clearly not yet one of them.

The thing is Cnet isn’t relevant to Buzz – you will rarely see any Cnet content there. Actually you only see Techcrunch content on Buzz because people share it in a fragmented way, or syndicate tweets of Techcrunch to Buzz. Mashable has a much more focused strategy in place and you will regularly see 100+ comments to a Mashable post on Buzz, and they will often be far more interesting than the comments on the blog itself.

Ultimately with any software platform you don’t attempt to scale until you are ready for it. Buzz may not even remain within Gmail long-term, but I have a feeling it will have significant longevity, because Google are not siting on their hands.

4. Speedy of Implementation

Bugs seem to get fixed rapidly on occasion

Google Buzz Team – @Leo Laporte – Thanks for reporting this issue — and sorry we didn’t get to the bottom of it until today. You helped us uncover a very rare bug that has existed for a while, one that only someone with a ton of followers was likely to uncover.

Here’s what happened: If one of your followers deleted their Google Account (this probably happened around August 6th), Buzz failed to deliver your post to all of your followers. Your post still existed in your Buzz stream, it just wasn’t sent properly to the people who wanted to see it.

We’re in the process of fixing this bug now, and it should be resolved in the next day or two. We’re really sorry that you had this experience and really thankful that you reported it to us so we could fix it.9:00 pm

How dare Google ship a product with bugs – how dare they have bugs even 6 months later?

5. Free As In Open

This was pretty much the ethos of Friendfeed as well, but Google have a very much open approach with Buzz. This comment from DeWitt Clinton to me just typifies the approach.

DeWitt Clinton – @Andy Beard Also, we’re going out of our way to make it easy (and free) for anyone who wants to index or archive Buzz posts and comments to do so. We’re using standard Atom and ActivityStreams and PubSubHubbub — if someone wants to build a search engine around Buzz, just subscribe to the hub and off you go, no contract required:

http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/v1/using_rest.html#firehose

Stayed tuned for more features like this coming soon. This type of decentralized, open approach is central to the core values we have in mind for Buzz.

To be honest I am a little freaked out by the concept of a Google Engineer suggesting I build a search engine on top of their platform APIs and mentioned that a little thater in the conversation thread, but the concept intrigues me.

Update

Good to see that the new features in the search API have now been officially announced. (via Techmeme)

Somewhere down the list I am also going to mention money but when you do the math, and then look at the way my bonus is structured, I will effectively be creating the closest thing to a J.O.B. I have experienced for the last 8 years.

I Have Loved The Concept Of Stompernet for 3 Years

I ate up every moment of their initial launch almost 3 years ago, it was a big deal for me, and I even toyed with the idea that I would one day be on the faculty.

If you gather together enough people who have exceptional online marketing skills, who can also teach, the chances of making a significant impact on the lives of 100s of people, potentially thousands is magnified.

At the time it was a little out of my reach and would have wiped out a large chunk of my cashflow on which I depended to keep profitable Adwords campaigns running.

However I also knew that my primary reason for joining wasn’t necessarily the training – I already had my startup germinating in my brain, and it was something that could benefit Stompernet customers.

I Am A Marketing Geek

I might not be a rocket scientist like Leslie Rohde, a scientist like Andy Ed, or even my good friend Tim Nash, and I can’t dig into patents like David Harry and Bill Slawski – but I am still a geek.

If a large chunk of the people you admire are members of a certain club, it is certainly a place you would consider joining.

Whilst Stompernet isn’t a club per se, it has become an “institution of Internet Marketing” in a remarkably short time and the people there translate geeky stuff into words and video normal people can understand.

I Am Joining Stompernet… Finally

The last time I promoted the main Stompernet course I built up a significant amount of interest, and totally threw away any chance I had of signing up a few referrals by posting just as I launched a list of the reasons why I wasn’t joining.

I still have a copy of it – I believe a few people might have mistakenly read it and though that it was in some way a negative review of Stompernet. Far from it, I hold them in great esteem.

You see I have always believed that the natural extension to Stompernet was providing state-of-the-art tools – in fact when they first launched there was some kind of syndication network available. I am not sure if that is still in there, or has morphed into something bigger and greater.

Also the FreeIQ video marketing platform in some ways encroaches into areas I want to persue.

I have always placed my startup in a “protected zone” – anything that in some way could harm it, I have avoided, and that at least in my own mind has included what could be looked on as “Foreign Intellectual Property Contamination” – I really wanted to be able to claim as much as possible that what I was creating was proprietary and 100% the fruit of my own labour.

Likewise I like to blog about things other blogs don’t – if I wrote a blog post about how to optimize the title of a blog post, people would be shocked and possibly think I out-sourced it. It is not my kind of content.

If I don’t have something original to write about, I generally don’t write anything, and it is restrictive enough having access to data from the few clients I have worked with over the last few years that could surprise people.

This time around it seems like 90% of SEOs who blog about anything the least bit interesting are now members of multiple private SEO sites. You also have people releasing SEO tools after having access to other people’s proprietary SEO tools.
To be quite honest, I think a lot of that really sucks, but I doubt the new copycats are anywhere close to the competition.
Also if tools are combined with training, and you need the tools to maintain a competitive edge, it is hard to resist.

If I had access to the Stompernet archives, I would always been concerned about whether what I blog about is in some way something I learned from them that might be considered proprietary.

Synergies

I first conceived my startup plans 4 years ago, and whilst they have mutated a fair chunk and there has been massive feature creep, the synergies with what Stompernet do are so strong, you can almost taste them.

To be honest when I first heard about the new launch, and that there would be a number of new tools introduced, whilst on one hand I thought my startup had finally been killed, on the other I was straining at the bit to see what they had come up with.
You see the SAAS I want to create are because they are what I would personally want to use. Some of the features encompass things I have blogged about, and some of the things I blog about are because I would be over the moon if someone implemented them. It would remove some of the feature creep that is weighing down any chance I have of self-funding or even Angel/VC funding, as they are looking for single solutions to problems.

e.g. I am not going to go out to create a new RSS reader and I would love an email service provider to finally provide all the features I am looking for, even if it partially limits the footprint of what I want to achieve.

In many ways the synergies are stronger than ever.

So I Asked Brad… Directly

I spelled all this out in an email to Brad, and have confirmation that there wouldn’t be a problem joining

Being a member is important, as without being a member, it is hard to compete in the pending Stomper 999 bonus battle.

Hang around… there will be something about bonuses coming up, as well as some reviews rants and unique tips

I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.

These are some of the reasons why:-

• Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
  It is an external javascript file, which Google can’t really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
  Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX.
• Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that “dofollow” isn’t for everyone because of the time commitment.
• Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won’t be universal or easy to implement
• Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that emails being sent from your own domain can be a significant liability
  

  It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
  I honestly don’t know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don’t know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

• Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn’t change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn’t change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can’t cope on its own.
• Social Media Viral Effect – the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn’t trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
• Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don’t get to me (deliverability issues) – I just noticed on my Andy Beard Disqus profile that Scott Rafer responded to something important 2 months ago, and I didn’t see it.

Negative Side of Disqus

• The SEO of the site needs some major work – it is almost insulting that the link to Twitter on my Disqus profile is followed, yet the link to my blog isn’t. The anchor text from a conversation on Disqus back to a blog isn’t exactly ideal. This is how Google sees my Discus Profile
• Google is very bad at indexing content on Disqus – this is partially due to the Disqus SEO problems – certainly a conversation I took part in 4 days ago isn’t indexed.
• I have heard reports that managing spam can be an issue, though I haven’t tested it, I rarely see spam on highly popular blogs
• It isn’t suitable for private content – you would have to use alternative commenting on private posts if you are running your blog as a membership site. That is something that can be worked around.
• It is hard, maybe impossible to market to people after they have left a comment. With standard WordPress comments, after someone has left an email, you could present a page offering site membership, a one time offer, or an affiliate product – even suggest related content of interest.
• If you have lots of niche blogs, you will hardly want to include all of them on a single Disqus profile if you want to stay under the radar of your competitors. How would a blog network cope? Retain ownership? I can’t see B5 Network with a profile of 300+ blogs in Disqus and managing who can moderate comments.

The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.

I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don’t stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.

Who knows, we might even get Twitter to remove nofollows too… eventually

Disclosure:- I am recommending Disqus even though part of my startup plans would have involved an SEO, product launch and membership friendly system with refined marketing funnel. If I ever get it off the ground, there are ways to migrate back from Disqus.

Paul Graham of Y-Combinator

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

I suppose that works for a lot of situations however there can always be complications

• Google and compensated links
• Patents – not so much to defend the idea, but for barter
• Major competition from the likes of Amazon & Ebay
• Competition from other people in affiliate marketing
• I am not a programmer

I have kept things pretty much on ice for the last year, though future plans have also prevented other opportunities. It is hard to turn down ideal roles working with someone who would make a perfect partner.

Not being able to tie up knots in the business plans means that there is much higher risk in executing, which subsequently means for the same potential startup investment I might have to hand over more equity and control.

If solutions to the problems were just a formality, it is much easier (ethically) to accept investment from someone who doesn’t fully understand the risks involved.

In addition it is much easier to present a well executed beta version to promotion partners and obtain backing – why start small when you already have the leverage for a large launch?

So whilst keeping things simple is ideal for Paul Graham who might typically be looking at 2 college kids with programming smarts looking to create the next cool social site or widget, for me the issues just prevent progress.

You can start multiplying the number, or adding zeros, but that is rarely as impressive.

The One Million Link Day

One million links from separate legitimate domains owned by different people

A pretty awe inspiring concept

With the right planning and concept, I do think 10,000 is easily possible within one day, 100,000 would take extreme planning.

Counting Links

These things are hard to quantify from external sources. Yahoo reports almost all links, including those with nofollow, and multiple links per domain.

Google provides only a small sample.

As an example Yahoo currently shows 299,000 links to Pownce.com and Google only 1390 (note those numbers also include internal links)

Such reported links listings frequently list multiple items from the same domains

Ultimately the only way to prove that many links would be to monitor traffic and compile a unique reference internally, that could be verified by external sources.

Some Interesting Thoughts

• How many pages could be indexed in one day, or one week with that many incoming links? (assume plenty of deep linking)
• Would you need to maintain momentum and how quickly would any rankings potentially dissipate?
• With that many links and corresponding traffic, would a site even need to worry about search rankings?
• Hmm nofollow? The links are about as editorial as Matt Cutts linking to Google, or Robert Scoble linking to Podtech (or Microsoft in the past)
• Would you warn Google about it before hand? I suppose a bit like an advanced earthquake warning

Still Fishing For Candidates?

I have been fishing for a while now, and have certainly had a few bites. I might have “struck” too early on a few, or for commercial reasons there have been some incompatibilities for early involvement, lets call those fish of a more predatory nature, who will respond better to live bait.

I have passed on a large number of commercial opportunities over the last few months.

I am breaking a number of golden rules, such as K.I.S.S and “Don’t Run Before You Can Walk”, but ultimately I am determined to be a catalyst or driving force in what Guy Kawasaki would describe as a jump to the next curve in both SEO and Affiliate Marketing.

Hopefully soon I will have the right CTO.

What Are Other People Up To?

I am glad I am doing something totally different to Brian, I wouldn’t want to be a competitor.
I am not sure what Andy is up to, but whoever his friend is should really do those stats live using an API.
Greywolf has some good commentary on one of Rand’s videos on Wikipedia – yes Wikipedia could rank first for every top keyword, but recent studies show they already rank in the top3 for over 40%.

In fact you could do the opposite. As an example say you were having trouble ranking against one page on Wikipedia. Why not add links to the Wikipedia pages that point to it, thus diluting the link equity that the page you want to rank against receives. You have to ensure that the links are internal so they carry some weight, and that they are relevant.

Even on a self-serving post you should always try to link out a little.

I am keeping all the details pretty much under wraps, because some of the technology is likely patentable.

Also most of it, though it is based on lots of commonly used technology, only exists in theory.

I haven’t been a programmer for 17 years, though I have helped project manage a fair number of programming projects, and certainly got my hands fairly dirty whilst I was working with Techland. (Every project I worked on for Techland made a profit)
My primary focus at the moment is not finding seed investment. My ideal seed investment partner would be someone to fill the role of “Chief Technical Officer”.

Such a person would ideally be able to

1. Shape my ideas into a comprehensive design document. Familiarity with lots of development frameworks is a must. Maybe development experience with RoR, but that will be the decision of the CTO.
2. Identify suitable out-sourced development talent

3. Control the out-sourced development process

and ideally

4. Research existing patents for similar technology, and working in conjunction with patent specialists, write our own patent definitions and applications.

5. Provide the initial seed investment

I do have one Angel Investment network that I am working with on creating commerial presentations to potental investors, and possibly I will find a suitable CTO from their network of contacts.

This project has absolutely no current capital budget, but that isn’t a situation I expect to last for too long.

I should stress this project has nothing to do with WordPress, and its very essence is making money

I thought it worth mentioning here, maybe one of my readers would be an ideal candidate.

There will also be other roles that need to be filled, and I will provide updates in that regard as and when it is appropriate.