This is the latest piece of software that I’ve had to request a refund for.

It has promise, don’t get me wrong.  There’s just too many bugs for me to handle.

SocialBot (version 4.0 was the one I tried) was created by a company called IncanSoft. I’m not entirely sure but I think they’re based out of Greece, from reading about them on WarriorForum.

The purpose of this software is to quickly submit pages from your websites to up to 54 social bookmarking services.    This list includes many of the popular ones like Digg, Technorati, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google, etc.

Here’s how it works (supposedly):

• Setup a company (could be yourself, could be a client if you’re submitting someone else’s website)
• Setup a website that you want to submit social bookmarks for
• Setup a profile (a list of social bookmarking services you want to submit to)
• Let SocialBot spider your website and find all the pages, or manually setup the pages yourself
• Modify the keywords or descriptions for each page being submitted (or leave as is)
• Click “GO” and everything should work like a charm

Well, let me just say that I really, really, really was hoping it would work as advertised.  I launched SocialBot all wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to let all my social bookmarking dreams become reality.

Unfortunately it was just not meant to be.

Here’s what went wrong:

• First I tried the “spider” functionality which is supposed to traverse through your domain and find all the unique pages.  Unfortunately it had trouble with link-loops (ie. page A links to page B which links back to page A).  One of my sites with about 30 pages, somehow had over 1000 pages according to SocialBot, until I killed the “spider” process.
• I tested it out by just submitting to a single service, Delicious.  The submission “failed” and I went into the Submission Review field but it was completely blank.  I managed to figure out by myself that the password I had entered was incorrect, but gee, thanks for being so helpful SocialBot!  Sigh.
• After I made a successful submission to Delicious, I manually loaded up the site in FireFox and checked to see what my submitted page looked like.  To my utter disgust the tags were all fuxored.  I had entered comma-separated tags in SocialBot, but apparently multiple-word tags aren’t possible, because all of my multiple-word tags in Delicious were broken up into single words.  (if you’re familiar with my posts you may remember that I’m sort of a tag-Nazi)
• I emailed all three above problems to IncanSoft “support”, which was really just the email address of “Big Mike”, the CEO/president/janitor.  His trusty sidekick Diego replied saying,

Thanks for your feedback; We are releasing an upgrade at the end of the month, and I’m going to test the bugs you found if they are a real problem.

• I thought, ok, no big deal, I can live with the above three issues.  So I then created a profile which contained maybe 20 of my favorite social bookmarking services. I queued up 10 or so pages from one of my sites that I wanted to submit to all of them.  Then I clicked “Go”.  And waited.  And waited some more.  And had a beer.  And came back and noticed that only a single page had been submitted to a whopping 2 services.  In about an hour.  This was the final straw.

So after all that fun stuff, I requested a refund, which I was given quite quickly so that was nice.  Now I’m not sure if SocialBot is just buggy on 64 bit Windows XP, because I occasionally have issues with software that don’t exist on other operating systems.  But…even the bugs aside…the speed is what really irked me…

I can honestly submit my sites faster manually to those social bookmarking services than automatically using SocialBot.

So, two thumbs down from me.  Sorry “Big Mike”.

I’ve been using this app for about a month now.  Actually, it was the very first piece of commercial software I started using for internet marketing. After reading a bunch of good reviews on WarriorForum, I took a leap and bought it.

These are steps that I used to do manually, for each potential keyword phrase, one-by-one:

1. Google External Keyword Tool (# of monthly searches)
2. Microsoft Online Commercial Intention Tool (commercial intention)
3. Google.com (# of competition)
4. Yahoo Site Explorer (strength of competition)

I would then use these metrics to calculate the potential profitability of a new “niche” (keyword phrase).

Well now I do all that in Micro Niche Finder.   Those 4 steps are done automatically through MNF in mere seconds.   It even suggests related keywords and calculates their metrics at the same time.

Here’s a screenshot of the “meat & potatoes” of the app:

Note: I chose “fat loss” as my search phrase purely for this review.  I don’t actually think this is a good market to approach, as you can see by the numbers…the competition is insane!

And a quick description of what each column means:

• Phrase – these are related keywords that are automatically generated by MNF.  By default it shows results for the EXACT phrase (ie. a search in Google with “quotes”) but you can also choose BROAD (without quotes) or PHRASE (words out of order)

• Search Count - the total number of searches each month for this phrase on Google (ie. the DEMAND).  I usually only look at phrases with > 2000.

• Exact Phrase Count – these are the number of results for the phrase in Google (you can verify yourself by going to Google.com and typing in the phrase with “quotes”).  This is the COMPETITION.  I usually aim for phrases with < 20,000, but the COMPETITION / DEMAND ratio is also important.  If it’s, say 4, and the COMPETITION is 100,000, those are darn good numbers.

• Ad Cost – how much Google charges advertisers per click they receive on their AdWords ads based on this phrase.  This is usually relative to a combination of the Commercial Intent and Strength of Competition.

• Commercial Intent - how likely it is that a person searching this phrase on Google will end up buying something.  Anything less than 50% usually isn’t worth your time.

• Strength of Competition (SOC) – how strong the competition’s websites are.  This calculation considers things like PageRank, number of one-way backlinks, etc.  The lower the better!  That red X image turns into yellow (medium) or green (good) depending on how low the SOC values get.

Micro Niche Finder. Very. Useful. Tool.

Here’s more information on it if you’re interested…