For the last couple months I’ve been working on this new Web 2.0 social bookmarking services community.

What is it all about?

• Rather than submitting merely your own bookmarks to the many services available (like Digg, BlinkList, Delicious, etc.), members submit each others’ bookmarks
• This makes it less likely that you’ll be considered a “spammer” for constantly promoting only your own sites
• This also gives your pages potential to be bookmarked many times with each service, rather than only once like you would do for yourself
• The bookmark submission process happens behind the scenes and is fully automated. You only need to enter your account details once.
• Members are encouraged to only submit quality pages; we don’t want to promote garbage
• The functionality is easy-to-use…it literally takes seconds to add your own bookmarks or to share other members’ bookmarks.
• No more messing around with different tag formats!  SocialAdr takes care of all that craziness for ya.

What prompted me to create this website was a few things:

• Even though SocialMarker is a very useful tool, it can be extremely time consuming because it still involves a lot of manual dragging-and-dropping.  Just to submit a single webpage to 20 services usually takes half an hour!
• I thought about “link sharing” networks which are (as far as I can tell) getting to be pretty outdated in the ever-evolving interweb.  I wanted to come up with a way to combine that philosophy with Web 2.0 social networks and social bookmarking.
• I’m a member of Traffic Drill, a forum in which members can request other members to bookmark their webpages.  But since the bookmarking process is manual and unable to be controlled in a “fair” manner, it’s entirely possible for a member to contribute WAY more to the community than they receive (I was a perfect example of this).  I think it’s a great idea, but I saw room for improvement.
• There’s many software packages out there that do social bookmarking submissions, but for each webpage you have, it’ll only be submitted once to every service.  With SocialAdr, you can potentially have your webpage submitted tens or hundreds of times to each service!  Instead of merely 1 backlink, you’ll get 10, 20, 30…50…etc.  And this all happens on auto-pilot.

I’ve had beta testers in the system for about two weeks now and they’ve been great!  Lots of bugs have been fixed and new features added.

Hopefully in a few more weeks I’ll be able to open it up to the public!

If you’re interested in helping beta test (it’s really not that difficult and you’ll get free backlinks and traffic while doing it), you can either read this WarriorForum thread, or contact me for more info.

 

Edit [Sep 12, 2009] – It’s now open to the public, so go get your FREE account now!

Lately I’ve been wondering what Google favors more – fresh, unique content or quality (PR 4 or higher) backlinks.

There’s oceans of people that are on either side of the argument.  Some say it’s best to have lots of one-way backlinks from respected, authority sites.  Others say it’s best to be constantly adding new, unique content.

Personally I think both are useful in their own way.  But the nerd inside of me wants to figure out the “magic formula”.  Should I spend 50% of my time on each, or 80% on content and 20% on backlinks?  It’s quite the quandary.

So I’ve decided to perform a test.  The parameters and execution of the test won’t be perfect, as there’s only one of me and I’m not a robot.  But nevertheless, I’m hoping it can provide some useful insight into this problem.

Here’s what I aim to do:

• Site A (CONTENT)
  
  • Niche topic to be determined
  • A subdomain of an existing generically-named domain that I own (primary keyword subdomain name, with “A” on the end)
  • WordPress template with all SEO-related plugins activated
  • Initial content will be 2 or 3 posts, keyword-rich, appropriately tagged
  • After indexed by Google, I’ll add one new article a day for a month
  • Each article will use the keywords that I’m targeting
• Site B (BACKLINKS)
  • Same subdomain setup as Site A, but with “B” on the end
  • Same WordPress setup
  • Same initial content, but each post rewritten to be unique
  • After indexed by Google, I’ll add one high-PR backlink a day for a month
  • No new posts

Sounds like fun, eh?   Does anyone have a prediction on which site will rank higher with Google at the end of the month?

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SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
   • 
9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
   • 

So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking

This is what I use for submitting my sites to website directories.  I know there’s a debate about how useful “directories” are for improving search engine ranking, but it’s hard to argue with the benefits of getting a bunch of 1-way backlinks for free.

Some people complain that directories are a waste of time because “they’re sooooo 1999″ (ie. Web 1.0) and not hip and trendy like social bookmarking sites.  I don’t subscribe to that jazz.

Here’s the features that I like about Directory Submitter:

• Ability to see and sort by Google PageRank in the list of available directories (there’s 350!).  I only choose the ones with PR of 4 or higher.
• Can create a “project” for each of your sites and submit them all
• Tracking of which directory you’ve submitted each site to

This is the shit that annoys me:

• When you delete a directory it re-appears in the list the next time the app opens
• No way to just sit back and let the submissions happen automatically; you have to manually change between directories and projects

The complaints above may simply be because I’m too much of a cheap-ass to buy the full version so I’m stuck with limited functionality.  Anyways, I haven’t found anything better yet, but if you have let me know!