I did not make much fuss blogging, or talking about Netscape turning into Propeller when it all went down a week or so ago. I know so many were talking about how this will be the end for the popular Netscape program, and predicting all kind of bad things. I just laughed them all off, just like everyone saying Digg was going to die about a year or so ago.

I think its a good time now, to talk about why I will continue to use Propeller. REASON ONE: If you keep a close eye on your SERPs and brand management you will notice how Propeller is already helping out with that. That alone should be reason enough to even just have an account with Propeller, right?

If you need more convincing, then how about this - REASON TWO: I had a client call me today and talk about how much they love the traffic they are getting from the new Propeller. Out of only hundreds of visits, they had received several qualified leads, and two of them have closed down for large amounts, making my client very, very, very happy. Most of my clients had enjoyed traffic from Netscape, and thought they were receiving new love from a “new” traffic source. They were surprised to learn of the switch!

These two reasons are good enough for me, even though I will continue to use Propeller for so many others. What are your thoughts about the new Netscape social network?

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A while ago when Pownce first came out I tried (for a second) to get an invite, but never got one, so I lost interest and forgot about it until today. Today, a buddy of mine, Brandon Buttars hooked me up with an invite, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to ask if anyone else wanted a Pownce invite? I got 6 of them, so I will give them to the first 6 commenters that ask nicely.

This is also going to be a good test to find out if anyone even cares? Do you already have a Pownce account, and do you use it? What do you use it for? Has it been useful, or a waste of time? I guess the main test will be if I am able to give away all 6 invites. If you care and want to add me, here is my Pownce - http://pownce.com/Matt_Siltala/

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My new best friend Pierre Far brought to my attention via a post last night that there may be some problems with our new Firefox extension Social Media for Firefox. He stated that there were somethings being sent to a Data Base that looked concerning to say the least. Dazzling Donna also covered it and the story is on Sphinn right now.

I am thankful for them posting this and I would of done the same if I noticed something fishy regarding a new tool I just installed that a lot of people were exited about.

Immediately after Pierre posted on his blog, I replied and emailed him directly giving him full access to our Data Base reports so he could help me recognize any wrongful data that was being stored. We did set up a data base and the reason was to watch for problems in the vote reporting especially for SU and Reddit as they do not have API’s and we have always had issues with them. Pierre noticed that there was some problems particularly with less protected sites that was leading to the recording of things that we had no idea of. Things like URL strings having the user name in them etc..

Upon this info we immediately deactivated the reporting and we now have a new version available that has no ties whatsoever to any reporting or database.

You can access the new version 1.0.12 by going to tools in FF and selecting “add ons” and then “find updates”

or you can delete it through add ons as well and install a new version here.

I will be the first to admit to this Folly I take full responsibility. I do not know how to program, nor do I plan to learn. I sent the tool in beta to a programming friend he was too busy to check it out, and I should of waited until he did.

This was not intentional I apologize to the SEO community, we created this tool to help us build better SM accounts and it definitely helped us, we wanted nothing but to share it with everyone else so they could do the same. Mat and I have built 97th Floor from the ground up, it is our source of income, and our passion. We would never intentionally do anything that would jeopardize users of our product.

Again I apologize know now that you can build those power accounts without the 97th Floor Big Brother Watching Over you. Everything that was recorded has been destroyed and deleted.

Again this was an innocent mistake that I will not back away from.

On a positive note we have had some people report that they are already experiencing very positive results with reaching first page glory on the different social sites.

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Over the summer we have been building some sweet tools to help us save time while finding good content to submit to social sites. It can take a lot of time out of your day to find really good content that would be suitable for the audiences of Digg, Reddit, SU and others. So we developed a tool that does just that for you.

It is called Social Media for Firefox it is a status bar extension and you can read the FULL DETAILS HERE.

After downloading it and testing it out please comeback to this post and leave us feedback or comments.

Thanks to Cameron Olthuis for testing it with us and Modern Blue Web Design for programming and design

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If you are not adapting social media into your marketing strategies you need to be. I still talk to so many people that either don’t understand the potential of a popular social media campaign or think they work in an industry that is not viral. All you need is one first page Digg, or one successful Stumble and you will be hooked for life. Traffic, subscribers, links and mind share they all spring from a successful social media campaign and any business can benefit from it. This post Mat did last week on some simple tweaks with Craigslist, has brought over 4k visitors and a whole bunch of subscribers in about 3 days. A digg and a bigger Stumble will bring much more, but when social media can bring 4k new visitors in 3 days on a post that wasn’t planned to go big at all you can see the importance.

We still hear from very large companies and individuals that they don’t see how Social Media can be leveraged to help their business and that there is no content that would make their business sexy. I wanted to take some specific industries that we have come across or been asked about and give some ideas for viral content. Especially since the Google algo is currently heavily favored on any viral campaign even if it is non related. You get a first page digg for something not related to your site you will see your rankings go up across the board. It is still better to come up with a related story though, as that will bring correct anchor text, subscribers and all the other benefits aside from links and traffic.

Trade Shows
The Trade Show and Display industry is full of old school ugly sites, with old school buyers and clientèle. Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t see a trade show blog flooding feed readers world wide. However there are a lot of things you can do with this industry in order to generate some buzz and get some links. If there is a big event that you provide a large amount of displays and product for, or that you would like to sell a large amount of displays and product for, create a post about that show with maybe some of these ideas, “Sexiest Booths Babes from Such and Such Convention” stole that from Shoemoney, or twist it and make it “Ugliest “Booth Babes from Such and Such Convention.” You could do, “17 Trade Show Displays that will Hurt Your Sales” and show all kinds of stupid displays with crazy lights or colors, or just plan idiotic designs. Or do, “Best Booths of Such and Such Convention 2007.” If done right these articles can be spread throughout the social sites and will generate links around the convention that you are targeting and you will rank for it and become a trusted brand for companies looking to represent themselves at that trade show or any other show for that matter. If you really wanted to get in front of the the elite “Linkerati” make those posts about SES, SMX or Pubcon as seo’s will pass the link love all day long.

Student Loans or Continuing Ed
If you are offering college type services like, school loans, continuing ed, or skill set training play off of the success of “High School Musical” and create a Youtube video called “College Musical” or “Drop Out Musical“, about partying, frats, dropouts etc… It would need to be no more than a couple minutes, maybe you make it a series to keep the links coming and release a new video every so often. If you made the songs and dancing really well, but covered funny college topics it could be very funny and generate a lot of buzz. You might think this would be more work than it is worth, but when you compare it to a weeks fees in ppc in the College Loan industry it may be money well spent. If you do a video make sure you watermark your url in the video and put it in the intro and credits, and launch it from your site to try and get the links to your site and not the Youtube URL. Also try to work some keywords in the the Youtube title, in case it does get a lot of direct links. This way you will get an extra position in the search results.
*If I was a college and I wanted to attract a lot of new students from throughout the US via the internet, I would be marching down to the drama department with some tunes humming in my head.

Weddings and Bridal Services
This industry would actually not be too difficult to create viral content for, there is a lot of newsworthy info out there and a very large online audience. I still want to cover it because there are so many people trying to compete in this industry online and for the most part they have very little budgets. Somedays we will turn away more than a handful wedding vendors because they want to rank for a decent word, but have no money for it. I always end up talking to them about viral and social media, at least now I will have a post to send them too. Create an article on, “The Ugliest Wedding Dresses of 2007,” or “The 20 Worst Songs Your DJ Could Play at Your Reception.” My mom is a self employed Harpist in San Diego, I could do a study on how there are actually more male Harpists then female and show some disturbing pictures of guys plucking away at the harp (Im sorry you can play whatever you want (maybe it is because I grew up with a mother that played Harp, but I will never hire a male harpist.)

I hope this helps to tweak your thinking, so you can look at your industry and see how easy it is to twist into something “Diggable.” Social media is a good path to defensible traffic, it can also be the secret weapon that your competitor can’t duplicate solidifying your position as number 1. It is easy for a competitor to copy your backlinks if they are all from link brokers and directories, it is impossible if they are coming from the natural growth of a viral idea. If anyone has an industry that they think cannot “Go Viral” please email me chris AT 97thfloor.com and tell me your industry and I will help you. I think it is possible for any site. I used to disagree with that, but I have become a convert from first hand experience.

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I am not a Craigslist master by any means, but after testing a few things out (and failing miserably a couple times), trying to get rid of stuff I no longer wanted, I think I finally figured out some methods of listing that could help those struggling with making heads or tails out of selling on CraigsList. I guess you don’t have to be literally selling products for these techniques to work, you could be offering services or anything else that CraigsList allows. My case study was based on selling a personal product of mine though!

To answer the question that I know you are thinking right now; YES, I really did make $500 bucks this morning on CraigsList in about 10 minutes. I will get into how in just a minute, but I want to give a little more background.

The last two weeks I have been testing and testing on CraigsList, I have been playing around with pricing, images, content - all with the exact same product. I wanted to come up with the best techniques possible to get the most money with the quickest time frame. I can better illustrate some of my findings with screen shots I took of my various listings. There are two that stand out that I think make the point better then anything.

Here is the very first listing that I made:

I made the ad very straight to the point with exact descriptions of what the product was including model numbers and everything. There was no personal touch at all. People are scared enough to buy electronics on places like CraigsList, so this ad might have scared some people off since I got NO emails, or calls for a week with this ad.

The listing that changed it all -

I want to point out the title on this photo compared to the other one. I have done a few things to make it stick out. I only included the things that people are searching for like “60 inch big screen” or “hd tv”. People could care less (from what I found out) about the brand name when doing initial searches. They may ask later on, but the point is to be found so they will ask you questions.

With the second example listing I showed you I got a call in 10 minutes (from time of listing), and it was a guy offering me full price (thus, making $500 bucks in 10 minutes). I probably got 30 calls before I finally took it off (I just wanted to test it out) and 40 emails all ready to buy the tv from me.

What were the main differences in the ad? First ad was not very personal. It was just giving you the specs of the tv and thats about it. The title was doing the same. There was nothing in the title that made it stand out, or made people want to click. Notice on the second ad how I have used symbols *** and wording like “NEED TO SELL” and only keywords that people are using to search.

When going through all the listings at CraigsList there are so many people have to choose from, you need to make yours stand out.

Look at the screen shot below and you will see what I am talking about.

You will see the arrow pointing to my ad, and you will notice a few others that stand out. Do you see the difference? These are the ads that will be clicked on, and these are the people who will make money quickly selling their items.

All the other ads will be skimmed through and not have as high of a click through rate, even if they have the same exact product at a better price. The point is to get them to click on the listing! People remember things like "Need to sell" so they get the idea they are getting a good deal, because "I need to sell", and that is why they click!

Hints -

• Use symbols to stand out such as ******* OR @@@@@@@@
• Use ALL CAPS when appropriate.
• Write the ad as if you were talking to a person that could care less about the model number (or brand)
• Use keywords that people would actually use when searching for a big screen tv.
• Use real pictures that you take yourself, and not from the manufacturer.

I had a pretty fun time testing out CraigsList as I have not been a huge user in past, but will be from now on. Just think about this. I probably could have sold the TV for the same price on eBay, but then I would have eBay and paypal fees cutting into my bottom line. I love CraigsList and this post just explained why!

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If you haven’t realized already Social Sites that allow for “Search Engine Friendly” Urls have a relatively easy time ranking in Google. This is due to Google’s over trusting nature on old and large sites. It is true that Google lets old sites get a way with Murder while new sites can’t steal a stick of gum. Don’t believe me? Start to watch how many times Wikipedia, Technorati and Squidoo show up in your every day search results. If you know how to leverage these sites you can get some pretty good rankings in a short amount of time for decent keywords. This method is nothing new in fact it has been overly exploited to the use of Social Media Squatting. Just like buying domains that have your competitors names or products in them you can register those pages at social media sites. I own a squidoo page for one of my old competitors names, I have never done anything with it and never will as we are in different leagues now and I don’t care, but the fact of the matter is I own their name on a large social site. I could rank that page for their brand name and have it filled with all of my companies information. But I digress, social squatting is not the point of this post.

The point is if you notice someone leveraging a social site to rank for a word that you are actively seeking you can poach the work that they have done to rank that page and sneak in right underneath them utilizing Google’s indented rank feature.

If there is a social site ranking in the top 20 for your keyword phrase, go and create a profile on that site with a slightly different URL and similar title tags. Then optimize the text to coincide with the keyword phrase and throw some good links to the page. If you do it right you will see the page show up as an indented rank just below your competitors already existing page.

For example go to Google and Type in Online Reputation Management you will see a squidoo lens on the second page. This used to be on the first page, but it is being re-done and they have lost their title tag and it is now on the second.
I know because our site 97th Floor ranks for Reputation Management words and I have been watching. The lens is labeled with the URL of /onlinereputationmanagement, so when they created their profile they chose their URL to be the main keyword without any spaces. What you would want to do is create your lens and choose your URL to say the same thing but with dashes. If that is taken then say the same with dashes and add a number or something else to make it slightly different like, /online-reputation-management-1 or /reputation-management-online. Then create your profile talking about your services or company linking it to your site and then publish it. Then link to it from your site, your blog or anywhere you can get some good links and you will see it jump through the hoops to an indent rank just below the existing site.

Now if you know what you are doing and don’t mind getting into a little battle you can optimize your social profile better then the first ranked page by passing more authority links to it with varied anchor text and you can replace that pages rank. If you are really good you can actually optimize your profile so well that it will separate you and the indent rank pushing the indent rank to the second page while keeping you on the first. At SMX Seattle one of the best takeaways from the Give it Up Session was explaining,

“Stephan Spencer has 7 tips in 7 minutes:
Secret #1 - Grouped results: Google groups results from the same site together. To find the true position of an indented (grouped) result, you can add a &num=9 to the domain search to see if indented listing drops off.”

This explains that the indented group result is not really the next in line it is most likely number 9 or 8 and Google chooses to move it up next to the other result since it is from the same domain in order to simplify their results.

So you can use that knowledge to steal your competitors rank by creating the profile, grabbing the group indent result, optimizing better and then pushing them to the second page.

This can also be done on Directories or any site that allows for business profiles. If you see a large site with a profile page of one of your competitors ranking you can most likely take advantage of that.

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With so many amazing social networks and communities to choose from, there is one main golden rule I think people should follow, and that is to be a good neighbor. Think about your real community where you live. How would you like it if your neighbor spammed you with flyers everyday about ring tones, or viagra?

However; if you built up a relationship with your neighbors, and they started to “trust” you they will probably be more willing to check out the things you like (or are offering) and you will build up more friends this way. Social communities can be a powerful source of traffic when done right. The traffic can even be a higher converting traffic source then the normal SERPs.

It really does not matter what social network you fancy more - MySpace, Facebook or some other one, you just need to become the type of “neighbor” that everybody loves talking about, and not in a bad way. If you spend some time recommending good things, proving good information, linking out to people that you have met (and like), the love will be returned.

If you need me to spell it out for you - make sure that you are not just saving your own articles, or web pages to sites like Del.icio.us or Digg. Share other peoples “stuff” in the community that you like (they will notice) and other things you like related to what you are doing. Make friends, ask people to be your friend, give people reasons to come back to your profile and most importantly, do everything you can to get your face out in the community!

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Hey My Blog Log - You got one week to apologise to all of the social marketers out there you snubbed this week (calling “SchMOes”), or you are gone from all my sites - for good, and I am tagging myself as a Spammer. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. I forgave you once already, but it will not happen again. If it wasn’t bad enough for your business (and user credibility) banning ShoeMoney, calling the very people who use your service “spammers” was the most stupid move of all.

I missed this at first to be honest, I rarely use My Blog Log since the whole incident with ShoeMoney anyway (other then the cool statistical tracking ability they offer). I saw this week that they had introduced a new tagging feature which at first glance I thought was a cool idea.

For those of you that are not familiar with what My Blog Log did this last week, here it is in a nutshell - they created a new tagging system (as mentioned above) but went into to much detail about how to use tags (see below)

“Spam - If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer). Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe.�

I will not go into all of the backlash, but you can read it here, here, here and here. The most amazing social media idea has been created by my partner and friend Chris Bennett over at (the other blog I co-author) 97th Floor. We already removed the My Blog Log widget from the 97th Floor blog.

My Blog Log has one week to apolgise to all of us “SchMOes” or “Spammers” who created them, or I am taking them off for the last and final time. I will tag all of my blogs as “SchMOes” and never look back. I know I am just one person, but I am one person deeply inter-twined with the search and social media industry, and if I get even one more person to stop using My Blog Log for calling us Spammers, then I am fine with that.

My prediction - I will have to stick a fork in them too, and call them done:

Who cares anyway? I survived life after Digg died. Did I mention how much I love Stumble Upon and Twitter?

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Before I continue to mislead you, two things:

1.) MyBlogLog is dead (as far as I’m concerned) put a fork in them!

2.) I do not know if Technorati is doing anything called “Teamorati” I made it up, but I will explain why they should.

Both Mybloglog and Technorati had major changes over the last week, neither of which I am particularly excited about. As you all know MyBlogLog’s in house Social Media made a retarded expert decision to create a new spam tagging system where a fellow MyBlogLog user can tag another if they feel they are spamming them.

I’m not going to recap the MyBlogLog Revolt you can find good info from Andy, Andy again, Cameron, SEL and Andy Beard.

Technorati completed another redesign and I have to say I didn’t really care too much. It didn’t do anything to make me want to use them more than the five minutes a month I use them now. No one uses WTF, no one uses really anything on there except to see where their blog is ranking, and blog search. They need to tie their unbeliavably big community together to form a team or a “Teamorati.”

Technorati has had multiple rounds of fund raising for millions upon millions of dollars, yet there still doesn’t seem to be a clear path to profitability or an exit strategy even. They have over 15 million blogs in their database and a huge presence they just aren’t leveraging it.

I think they should create a mybloglog competitor that networks all their users into more of a community, I thought the visitor widget was a great idea by mybloglog, but they have messed up 10 too many times for me to use them anymore. There is a gap that Technorati could jump in by connecting all of their users and getting everyone to switch from MyBlogLog to them. They have a stronger brand and bigger following and I am sure that the “SchMoes” would have no problem telling the world about them and adapting them right away.

It seems that MyBlogLog forgot that the “SchMoes” are the ones that pushed their product, they were around for a while with a relatively small user base, then Nov, Dec 06 every SEO, SMO, Marketer you name it was putting it on their blogs and telling their friends and clients to do the same. The next thing you know Techcrunch and every other respectable blog added the widget to their site.

“TEAMORATI” may be Technorati’s big chance to make some headway, they could even offer analytics and make a little dough.

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