Day 22 - Beginning of the end, with explantations

(Secret Sauce sub-series - finis)
Explantations is a good mis-spelling. Because we are creating a plantation of social fields which bring us different SEO-enabled crops. However, our field workers are willing and self-paid, so it's a congenial and profitable enterprise for everyone.

Today, we are covering more why's and wherefore's, most of which is dealing with Bookmarks and some about Social Updates. These two are the secret fuel ingredients which give this system so much boost.

That relationship is covered in a Search Engine Land article.

Now to understand the below, I'm going to give you a link which explains bookmarking, RSS, and pinging. 

I believe I've covered before how bookmarking was a bit hit when it became popular, and Google (for a time, anyway) was following these closely as an indicator of what was trusted and so had authority. Then, of course, the spammers started gaming the scene and Google moved on. (However, not completely, as there was recently a big slap they emposed on one network and all the players in it who depended on the "in-bound links" which were being artificially created. So know that Google is watching...)

Our basic model, which deserves repeating:

• The Internet is build on content sharing.
• The search engines (Google, mainly) model their rankings based on people's use of the Internet.
• People trust useful and regularly freshened content sites - and will visit these routinely, according to their own patterns of use. 
• The way to improve your rankings is to routinely create valuable content and let people know that it exists.

Note the emphasized part of that last sentence - that is what we are talking about today.

This is what online promotion has evolved into. And you have to promote in order to tell people about your valuable product or service. The search engines and social media are simply ways to prime the pump in order to find clients.

This was covered somewhat in The Online Sunshine Plan (starts about page 212 and goes through 222). You want to utilize search engines so your new clients can find your product (and old ones can find you when they lost your address). When you have established clients, they will be coming to your site for regular services and won't be utilizing search engines to do so. This also includes search engines built into social media.

And a review of the Promotion section of that book would probably be in order - especially since you know so much by now. (Pages 242 - 309.)

Priming the pump

Here's the point which spammers don't get (as well as a lot of SEO guru's):

You don't get down from an elephant, you get down from a duck.

The search engines can send you traffic, but they won't sell your product for you. Backlinks is just one of over 200 different indicators which Google uses to rank sites. If you are trying to get just backlinks from social media, you are going to get Google-slapped. It's just too obvious. That isn't what the social media are for.

We are going to avoid social networking like Facebook. To get anything from Facebook, you have to spend hours engaging with people directly. Just like an insurance agent will join every social club in town. Gain people's trust, and get invited to their home to do your pitch. You don't close any sale at the club-house.

This is the same point of getting people to opt-in to your list. Email continues to be the #1 use of the Internet. Barely half (and dropping) of the US is using Facebook. Hardly anyone uses their email. Reason? Over 70% of the US already uses email daily - and this is growing (much to the chagrin of the government monopoly called the U.S. Mail Service.)

So you simply let people know that they can get personal emails about the valuable service and product you provide by sending it directly to their email.

The social media can be incorporated into this promotion by leaving little tips here and there, with links.

Another Campbell book - freebie alert

Here's a PDF built from a scrape I did off a site he created: http://www.jigglingtheweb.com/ And he is a good study in what to do. He tells you some incredibly valuable stuff, then says - oops, the rest of this material you have to pay for... but you can sign up here. (Just wish he had an affiliate link.)

Sidebar:

The essentials of his Goobert (Affiliate Marketing) System is found on his newsletter post. With what you now know, you can actually improve this incredibly. And when you sign up for his newsletter (I just renewed it again) you get some more freebies (still wish he had an affiliate link...)

This "web-jiggling" really lays out the basics of what we are doing here.

First make a post to your blog. Second, submit a snippet of the post to social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Propeller.

Third, bookmark your social news snippets, or article submission using three or four social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Mr. Wong, Delicious, Mixx, BizSugar, Yahoo My Web, Faves, Simpy or Google Bookmarks.

(You can get a huge list from AddThis. Just beware that many of these services come and go like the wind.)

Fourth, the last step is to ping each bookmark RSS feeds, just once, using a site like Autopinger, PingMyBlog, PingKing, Pingoat or Pingomatic. Just be careful not to overdo it, as these services will ban you for over pinging. If you ping two or three of your bookmarks, that will be enough. The search engine spiders will find the rest of the links on their own.

That's how simple it is, and what we've built up to.

1. Post fresh content to your main site/hub.
2. Post link to that conent on Google+
3. Spin that content and post to remote blogs, with PDF to slideshare.net
4. Bookmark the remote blogs
5. Ping those bookmark RSS feeds.

Test this out for yourself. This last puzzle piece fits everything together. I've only confirmed this again this week, even though this was posted sometime in 2010. Not a secret, really. But since it doesn't fall under GRQ (get rich quick), lazy spammers probably haven't figured it's worth their effort.

Bookmarking and Status Updates - automated

Now there are free ways and paid ways to go about this. I only recommend one free way and only one paid way. There are others, but these work the best for me.

Onlywire will post to bookmarks and status updates. Set up an account and you'll also need to run their little program on your computer. I've had my difficulties with them in the past, but they seem to have gotten the bugs out (helps if you set it up right to begin with - that's a confession.)

The page I just linked to says you are going to have to go out and set up these accounts. But let me help you with these.

Bookmarking sites: 

Bibsonomy
Connotea
Digg
Diigo
Jumptags
Stumbleupon

Status Update sites:

Twitter
MySpace
Plaxo
Plurk
Friendfeed
Hi5
Identica

The rest aren't worth it, for one reason or another, and I won't go into them here, as I still have too much to go, plus this needs to get wrapped up.

Both bookmarking and status update sites will tell the search engines about your remote blogs, which then let them discover your main site/hub.

And the bookmarking sites above all have working RSS feeds. You are giving the ping sites (like ping-o-matic, but there are several) the RSS feed for your profile there - so you don't have to ping these more than once a week, as they'll then pick up the top few into that system.

A note on OnlyWire - if you budget this carefully, you can stay on their free plan indefinitely, which has 300 a month. However, if you go over once, you are going to have to either create a new login, or pay for their next version up (which is 10$ a month and another $3/month for the optional captcha solver.)

Drawback to Onlywire
It's only you doing this. (Priming the pump, remember?) So if you do a lot of this, it's going to look pretty spammy real quick. Another option is to also bookmark a lot of other sites, but that then uses up your Onlywire credits - or makes you do this manually. Some blogs will do posts like this. And ping.fm can do status updates to several sites like this - however, the shortener gives away the fact that you aren't doing this personally, so don't expect a lot of community support.

The solution brings up our paid version - but don't worry, they also have a free version you can also use indefinitely.

Synnd - the Syndication Revelation

Sure, that's the marketing line for it. What is does it similar to OnlyWire, but while it has a program running on your machine, it's taking that IP address along with all the other members (there's about 4700 now) and automating the process of setting bookmarks and tweets, likes across the many social media sites out there.

So you can run campaigns which will bookmark your content from all manner of international sites.  And there are numerous benefits to not being the only one to bookmark your content. Multiply this by enabling hundreds of others to do this, and you can see the advantages as Google can see that many people are interested in your site, not just one.

I could sit and talk about it for hours, but we'll let you do your own research.

• Here's 6 lessons with videos on how it works: Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine
• Here's a freebie PDF "The Syndication Revelation"
• Here's a webinar you can watch (free sign up): "Driving Traffic, Viral Exposure, Opt-ins & SEO Using Automatic Social Signals"

And did I tell you they have a free version to try out? You can only run one campaign at a time, but you'll see exactly how it works and get some immediate benefit. Try Synnd Lite.

OK - that's more than enough. This isn't a sales page for Synnd, although I could rave about it if I wanted. It's a heckuva monthly expense, so you need to be doing this professionally. The results seem slow but sure, however you'll see results for you new content if you train on how to use it (not a long training curve) and really exploit what it does.

Again, the key datum which they also have found useful is to bookmark, and then run campaigns on the incoming links to your remote blogs. You don't have to do this, but it is the secret ingredient to the secret sauce.

No extra freebies or assignments today other than the above. That's more than you get most days in this data dump, so I'm not going to add to it.

- - - -

Coming up is another week of the stuff I can now tell you, which adds to everything you've learned so far, but isn't essential to it. You will be able to further increase your income with some of these tips - provided they work for  you according to your tests.