WEB BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

Received this from the Stompernet guys recently:

“Pure Evil: 10 More Devious Ranking Tips for Video + Social Marketing”

I’ve learn’t a lot from Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon. Their original “Stomping the Search Engines” course was a good guide to the fundamentals of SEO and despite being very successful at their own online businesses they maintained an ethical standard which I respected. I never joined their Stompernet membership site because of the high cost but as a subscriber I have taken in a lot of their tips and free videos. Up until now, it’s all been good.

But, I was very disappointed to read this latest mailing, which is all about getting links from social bookmarking sites. Actually, the article is to promote a coaching program from a guy called Jeff Johnson, who Stompernet are now apparently affiliated with.

Now, creating links via social bookmarking sites is quite legitimate as long you do it the right way. But here’s what Stompernet say:

“Register multiple accounts for each of the Social Bookmarking sites listed at SocialMarker.com. We suggest starting out with at least 10 unique accounts for each Social Bookmarking (SB) site.”

Wrong, wrong, WRONG! Creating multiple accounts is abuse, pure and simple.

They go on…

“For example, you should have made 10 propeller.com accounts in the last step.  For any given item you are bookmarking, randomly choose 3 of those accounts to submit your item to. The next time you bookmark an item, randomly choose 3 more”

For starters, this is not social marketing as the title of this mailing suggests. It’s black-hat link building. It also shows a complete misunderstanding of what a “bookmarking” site is. Propeller is not a bookmarking site in the same manner as del.iciou.us or Furl. It is a social media site where users submit stories such as blog posts (not just bookmarks) which are then voted on by the community.

Users of sites like Propeller are very sensitive to spam and they can spot it a mile off. If you create an account at Propeller for no other reason than to promote your own content the users will sooner or later sniff you out and mark you as a spammer. To avoid that you HAVE to become a trusted member of the community by active participation - submitting, voting and commenting on other user’s submissions. Done correctly, i.e. not trying to game them but rather use them in the manner they were intended, you will be flat out maintaining one account.

And the Stompernet guys want you to create 10 accounts or more?

It’s abuse, it’s spam, and it’s why social media sites HATE marketers and SEOs. It puts their defences up and makes it harder for legitimate social marketers who do the right thing and play by the rules. Creating multiple accounts is AGAINST the rules and if you take the trouble to learn how social media sites work, and work WITH them and not against them, you can still reap the benefits.

And this…

“If you’re promoting a page/post/video about Jessica Alba (for example) - you should ALSO Social Bookmark items you find about her from various other sites as well (YouTube, MySpace, Digg, etc.) that are NOT the pages you’re promoting. This will help create that “natural” appearance we are striving for.”

Instead of creating a phoney “natural appearance”, why not just BE natural? Create a great blog post about Jessica Alba. Make it controversial or confronting and people will want to link to it. You won’t need multiple accounts.

And this…

“If you are not natural when you do this, it’s going to look like spam - because, it IS spam if you abuse it. Please understand that there is a fine line between power techniques like this and outright abuse - don’t abuse this tip! Do it the right way.”

Sorry Andy, these aren’t “power techniques”. They’re abuse. They’re deception. And that’s never a good long term strategy. You crossed that “fine line” ages ago. You mightn’t see it that way, or other marketers mightn’t see it that way, but just ask the creators and users of the social media sites you’ve party-crashed into. And once you’ve been banned it’s extremely hard to get back in, unless you go skulking around with proxy IPs and the like. Who wants to be bothered with that? When you’re banned it isn’t just your throw away email address that gets banned, it’s your IP address.

Andy Jenkins is a smart guy. I’ve watched his videos and learnt a lot. If you believe his claims, and I have no reason not to, he runs multi-million dollar online business. But if you’re a Stompernet subscriber, please, don’t follow this advice. It’s yet another example of what happens when big-time Internet Marketers/SEOs discover social media/bookmarking. They just screw it up for the rest of us!

If you want to learn how to do it the right way, Jack Humphrey’s Social Power Linking is where you’ll find the answers.

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A recent post on LED Digest raised the issue of organised voting up of content on social media sites. One subscriber had suggested that LED readers might be able to devise a system where each subscriber could submit and vote on other subscriber’s content. So in response to that, another subscriber designed and put up a page which he named SICoop (The Slightly Inappropriate Co-op for Shilling Social Media Sites.)

This concept of organised voting up of social content isn’t new but you need to be very cautious about how you execute it and participate in it. Most social media sites track your participation. The sites you submit and vote on, comments you make, groups you join and friends you make, are clearly visible to the entire community.

The first site listed to be “shilled” was the SICoop page itself. So, if you were to submit this “Shilling Social Media Sites” page to social media sites, what would that say about you as a member of that community? Once you’re marked as a spammer the damage is done and there’s no turning back. Take the second URL I saw listed on SICoop. What is that? Seems to be nothing more than a copyright notice and legal mumbo-jumbo. Trust me, NO genuine social media user is going to submit that to StumbleUpon, Propeller or any other social site. Submit it to Digg and you’ll likely get banned. Or worse, your domain will be banned and no one else will be able to submit any of your content.

There’s no shortcut to success on social media sites. You have to gain an understanding of how they work and become a trusted member of the community. These guys aren’t stupid. They can spot spammers and attempts to manipulate them a mile off. If you vote up a page which exists for no other reason than to game their system then you’re just asking for trouble. A StumbleUpon “I like it” click is very powerful. It truly is a personal recommendation, unlike a link in the eyes of search engine. When a SU user checks out your recommendation, and they like it, they’ll check out other stuff you’ve voted for. If they like what they see they’ll check out your profile (with links to your site) and become your “fan”. They’ll start to trust you. But submit a site for “shilling social media sites” or a copyright notice, that trust will evaporate. They’ll start clicking the thumbs-down button and before you know it you’ll be shown the door.

It’s quite OK to network with other members of a community such as LED Digest. LED is one of the best old-style email discussion lists out there and I read every issue. But I’m not going to risk my reputation on SU by voting on a page just because it was written by another LEDer, and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to do the same for me. However if that member were to post a good article on their blog – whether it be about web hosting, SEO, marketing or any aspect of doing business online (which is what LED is all about) and I’ll gladly vote for it. The concept of LED users helping each other is fine, but you have to be smart about how you go about it. Simply putting up a page where you add your URL to the voting list isn’t the best way to achieve the desired results and could do more harm than good.

I recently joined a membership site called Social Power Linking where I’ve learned an awful lot about social marketing. Part of that membership is a “buzz” group where they are setting out to achieve the same thing as SICoop. I haven’t actually participated in it yet (not sure if I really want to yet), but there are very strict rules on how it operates and ethical standards are maintained for the good of the community. The guys who run it have been doing this for years, successfully, and really understand social marketing. One thing I have learned from SPL is you do NOT want to shill social media sites.

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Blogger is no more. After creating several new blogs with WordPress I realised just how much better a blogging platform it is than Blogger. Easier to manage. Easier to configure. Easier to customise. And most importantly, WP outperforms Blogger in the search engines by a country mile. So it’s out with Blogger and in with WordPress.

Using WP’s “widgets” it was a simple matter to add links to my previous Blogger posts (under Web Development and Marketing Strategies in the right panel) by using an RSS Feed widget. I’ve also added a feed for my Affiliate Sales Programs blog, created with WP as well.

Web Business Solutions - the Blog, is an extension of my Web Business Solutions website. I’ll be blogging about site building, web design software, SEO, web marketing, link building, web 2.0 and social marketing.

Come along for the ride. Should be fun!

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