Long time no blog

Okay, this is basically just a welcome back post. It's been awhile since anything was added here so I figure it's time to start blogging again. Summer is almost here again and I am starting to travel once more after almost two years of holding down fort in Spain. I have recently been very very busy. To explain exactly what I mean, webDOMinator has now grown to a user base of over 1,000 users and an active user base of over 120. I have also in the last year, about the time I made my last post switched to doing webDOMinator full time. The community of online marketers has accepted my software with open arms and I couldn't be happier. Social Networking is growing beyond belief and so has the pre-made plugin base. Over 65 plugins have been pre-built as friend adders and the number of features and interface on webDOM has blossomed as well.

Things are looking up as far as getting some of the community stuff finished. The knowledgebase is mostly functional, as well as the shout system. Beta tests have been done on most of it, plugin upload is working as well. After the community is fully set up I will have quite a bit more time as people will become more active. There are already users with profiles just waiting to start interacting with eachother.

My idea for the webDOMinator community overall is that through the Shout/Commenting interface (i.e: micro-blogging) and through the knowledge base users will have an integrated experience in webDOM 3.0 where they can easily collaborate on plugins and scripts in a large environment, and subscribe to updates of eachother's work so that one plugin developer such as myself could easily automatically update all of the people who use my plugin as soon as I export and upload it.

More coming soon on the community. Happy DOMinating!

Friend Adder / Mass Messenger for Any Social Netwo

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Gems of Excellence

In my most recent searching and scraping, I've found a "diamond in the rough" type blog. It's not just because it has thousands of little "Gems of Excellence" but that it talks about a lot of subjects I personally have thought about and tried to explain but so far with not much luck. Here's a quote from the blog "The Viral Garden", an entry called Social Media excels at making things happen indirectly:

In most cases, marketing channels are utilized cause the direct goal is to sell more stuff. That's fine, nothing wrong with a company wanting to make a profit, in fact there's nothing wrong with trying to make as large a profit as legally possible.

The problem that most companies have with social media is this:

1 - They view social media as being a new marketing channel, when actually they are communication channels

2 - Since they view social media as a marketing channel, they attempt to push marketing messages through these channels

3 - Since they view social media as a marketing channel, and attempt to push marketing messages through these channels, they attempt to directly monetize their social media efforts.

All of these problems conspire to ensure that the company has a totally disastrous result.

This has been my big problem with trying to explain to users the best way to utilize webDOMinator. Web marketers seem to be stuck driving horse-n-buggies while the rest of the social media world has upgraded to cars. Bots are not dead by any means, but it's time to start getting more creative with how you use them. Instead of using them as a means to an end of getting lots of followers or making a big friend list, use them as a tool to enhance and accelerate your relationship building reach.

webDOM is not a means to an end... it's just one tool in your toolbox of tricks to get the advantage in any market you choose.

Twitterpated: Building friends on Twitter the Fast way

With the quick growth of the social micro-blogging site Twitter in 2008, everyone's talking about how Twitter will go mainstream in 2009. That said, there are a lot of social networks that are going to see a larger share of the market in 2009 that has, in past years, mainly been dominated by MySpace and Facebook.

Building a following in Twitter is suprisingly easy, but we at webDOM think that it's a little slow going if you aren't already a famous person. So we decided to use webDOMinator as a tool to help to kick-start our friends list quickly since it's a free program and we can use it whichever way we want. Here's what we've found is the best method for building up your friends list, and creating lasting relationships with your potential target market so that you get a good ROI:

1. First off, get your Twitter account. Sign up is easy, and you can even use Twitter on your iPhone or Blackberry. Try to come up with a witty name, people on Twitter like humor.
   
2. Secondly, download, (direct download link, to find out more, visit the site: linked above,) and install webDOMinator from the link above and then download the Twitter Profile from the webDOM website so that the bot knows how to use their site.
3. You're going to need to get two more tools that will help you quickly target and communicate with your market. These are Twellow, (to help you find your exact demographic of twitter users,) and TweetDeck, (to be up to date on your communications with your followers)
4. Open up webDOMinator and load in your Twitter webDOM profile by clicking "Load" on the top left of the form, (notice I said webDOM profile because we're talking about the "twitter.profile" file that comes inside your Twitter download from the webDOM site)... then set up your twitter login information by clicking settings under the bold "Login" button, save your settings, and then click "Login". It's always important in webDOM to save when you change something. This is the point when you should take a second and upload a picture to your actual Twitter profile, which you can do inside the browser part of webDOM.
   
5. In the webDOM browser go to twellow.com and use Twellow to find your target. Is it people who like to drink Tea? SEO gurus? whomever you want to communicate and send your messages to, you can find them easily within a couple of clicks on Twellow or you can just search for them.
6. Once you've found your target people, click on the "populate" button in your info list on webDOM and you will see their twitter user ID's show up. Go through a couple of pages of these people and do the same to get as many people as you want in your list.
7. The easiest step... click "Add All" in bold under your list.
8. webDOM will start following all of the people in twitter who show up on your list. We've pre-programmed the Twitter profile to add more people to your list from other people's profiles, so you're going to get a lot of people at the end of the list who your list people are following. This is good, cause it expands out on your target a little using your market's own preferences.
9. Now... Twitter has a 2,000 person follow limit if you do not have 2,000 people following you. This is the first hump. But don't worry, we've figured a way around this.
10. As webDOMinator is adding people, you should open up TweetDeck and start @replying to them plus posting a couple of tweets to give them something to read. This is the relationship building part. You want people to follow you back, and you're going to have to give them a better reason than just that you've followed them. You hae to communicate and show some real interest in what they're up to. More people will start popping up in your friends updates as webDOM follows people in the background. Get to tweeting. The more you tweet, the more followers you will get following you back.
11. Here's the part that a lot of people miss. Once you start to get to about 2,000 people you're following, you're going to start what some people have called "culling"... that is, un-following the people who are not following you. You want to give this about a good day or two first, to allow the people to follow you who don't come on to twitter every day. To cull your users, just open up webDOM, load up Twitter, log in, and click on the link that says ("X followers" where X is the number of followers you have.) This will take you to your followers list. Click the "automate" button to next to "Populate" and just hit "Start" on the automation form. This will add all of your followers to your list. After that's done, be sure to hit "Stop" on the automation screen, then navigate using the browser to your "Following" list, which is on your Twitter home page. Before you add them to the list... scroll to the bottom and click on the last person in the list. This will make webDOM start on the next person (those who are not following you.) Do the same automation you did with your followers. Here's the most important piece. In the Quick Actions area, click "Load" and in your profiles folder go to the "twitter" folder. There should be a folder called "scripts", in there, double-click the script "unfollow-follow.qa". This will give webDOM the information that it needs to unfollow everyone below the current person on your list.
12. Click "QA All", the bold button underneath the "PM All" button under your info list. Sit back and let webDOM do it's thing.
13. After webDOM's done, Repeat the process of finding more people on Twellow in your market, and following them.

It's important the whole time to be talking and interacting with your potential clients or friends or whomever you're doing this to reach. Effectively, within about 5 days tweeting, you should have around 500 followers, and starting to get visitors to your site who are targeted and will use your service or product. Here are some other blogs to get you in the know on Twitter and make the best ROI for your time and effort.

Twitter - The Leverage - Where ROI is found
The Big Juicy Twitter Guide
webDOM Video Tutorial #1: Getting Started

Stay tuned for more updates on webDOM and how to effectively use it with other social networks as a social media marketing tool for your toolbox.

webDOM's future

Changing the Game

Sitting in the fourth floor flat in my girlfriend's apartment in Elche Spain, I can't help to be excited. Is it the fact that it's January 5th and there are celebrations all today and tomorrow for the Three Kings of Orient? Well partly (putting my shoes in the terrace for them.) I'm not that much of a party animal either, but I am watching my webDOMbot.com site hits slowly inch their way up and more people are downloading my program.

I am contemplating what 2009 will hold for me and my clients. I have been using my own program to advertise for itself, along with the help of blogging and some good SEO on my site. What is exciting me even more is that I feel like I'm on the edge of something big... or at the foot of it. I've been reading a lot on SEOMoz's Blog and it looks like my bot has come at just the right time in the evolution of the web and social media.

"For anyone that's launched linkbait you'll know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Of course, by 'works' I'm talking about a Digg homepage, a reddit homepage or huge amounts of traffic from StumbleUpon. But actually, even for the pieces which don't go hot on one of the social news sites, there's still massive potential - after all, the content is no less appealing, right? This is still highly linkable content, you just need to go about putting some elbow grease in to get the links.

That was from Tom C.'s entry about How to get links from your link bait. Now, in today's internet there is literally a social network for just about any niche that you can think of, from video counseling to random chatter, to music, to SEO. To be truly big, you have to put a mountain of "elbow grease" in. One of the most interesting ways that the internet has changed is that nearly every website nowadays has user logins and some way for the users to communicate with eachother and add eachother as friends.

For the starting social media marketer, this can be a suprise and maybe even a little overwhelming. It used to be that you could just get a MySpace account and a YouTube account, then start using the friend adding bots to start building your friends, fans, and followers so that you could actually have your own little targeted community to post things to and communicate with. How does that transpire in todays bot market? Well there are still those myspace adders and even some new ones for twitter and squidoo, but there is not some sort of lasting solution that works for every single niche social network that you want to access. Now there are tons of new social bookmarking sites, tweet type sites, mobile sites, and the list goes on. There is really not a way that these different software companies that release these bots can keep up with it all.

I had this in mind as I have been working on webDOMinator over the last three years. It started out as a way to add friends to myspace easily cause I was tired of clicking on each user and waiting for their usually bloated pages to load so that I could just click on add friend. When I made the system, I was thinking more openly and considered that one might want to do this on other social networks too.

Today, the webDOMinator bot has the ability to do anything you want automatically. It includes it's own proprietary scripting language and the ability to quickly program the bot to use a new site within 5 minutes using forms that ask a couple of questions you need to find. It even gets past almost all of the funky security measures that are placed on web sites to try and keep bots out because to the website, it looks like your robot is an actual person using their site. That being said, I have been quickly adding and saving different site profiles to download so that you can use different popular social networks without having to program the bot.

Enough of the shameless plugging. What I really want to get at in this entry is that I am very sure that webDOM will change the game. The game of social networking security, and possibly even web standards altogether... (yes, it really is that powerful once you realize what you can do with it.) I see it being either 1. an escalating game of security patch and hack, or 2. a totally one sided complete domination of the current social media technology in any form in the favor of bots. The more utopian view on this, will be that social network sites start to add mass friend-adding and messaging to their communication tools as either a paid or free service. Ether way it goes, it will definitely be interesting, and I'm excited to see how the story of webDOM and social networks transpires.

What is Indirect Marketing?

Just what the heck is Indirect marketing anyway?

Indirect marketing is a way for a business to market their product, idea, or service without having to use the methods of SPAM or direct advertising and marketing.

The idea behind indirect marketing is instead of sending a message out to your target market directly, just send them something like a friend request, or a vote, or a digg, or anything to get their attention. Once they see who you are and go to find out more about you, they then see your advertisement, or links to places you want them to go. If you give them more incentive to interact with you, they will be more likely to do so. One thing I do to get people to click on my profile is make an interesting profile name that appeals to my target market.

One of the main ideas is that you should not appear as if you are a marketer. At the least, it should be questionable to your viewers whether or not you are marketing the things that you are providing links to. This is of course optional, but I've seen better results posting on a profile as some girl rather than posting as my actual company.

An Example of good Indirect Marketing

Let's say that you have a product, (a new iphone video game,) and a website for this product where people can easily sign up. Let's say that your target market is teenagers who are using a lot of texting products now a days, and the people who are still in their 20's and spend at least an hour playing video games per day. The most important thing with indirect marketing is to choose your niche and your target market first, and make it focused on exactly the type of people who will interact with you and possibly buy your product. For this market, you choose a couple of websites to target: myspace, twitter, mixx's gamers, and one very niched community: games.net

Good Example:
user name: gamergalore
about me: I write game reviews for iphone games as they come out.. (includes links to your blogger blog about games)
profile includes: about 5 reviews of different iphone games and at least one review of your game you're trying to market

Bad Example:
user name: bob
about me: Get the latest awesome game on the iPhone! http://www.mygameurl.com
profile includes: a web banner for your game, and nothing else referencing any other iphone games. Buy now links, etc.

People just don't respond well to the bad example. You will get little to no visitors clicking on your links to your site whereas the good example will spark people's curiosity in what you're trying to sell because you (a supposed 3rd party) has already shown interest.

What about all of the work it takes to build your market reach?

There are a couple of things you could do to solve this issue:

• Find a person who has good reach already and ask them to post up a link on one of their many online profiles
• Use an Indirect Marketing Tool to help you easily grow your reach each day on multiple fronts at the same time.
  

For the first option, you can always ask me if you could use my market reach. As of January 2009, I can reach about 20,000 people within a couple of days of running the tool I use, and make a good 32% of them come to the website over the next week.

For the second option, this is what I actually use myself to perform my indirect marketing... it's really nice because I just set it up to say add 2,000 follows on twitter, 1,000 more friends on mixx, and send out a couple hundred auto-votes on digg all simultaneously, and go out to party or have dinner, or sleep. (many more important things to do than sit all day tediously adding friends.)

Indirect Marketing and SEO go Hand-in-Hand

A good indirect marketing campaign uses good search engine optimization. It's one of the things that allows you to cash in directly on your visits. One of the main reasons this is so, is because you're going to be providing links from multiple pages that are on high pagerank sites and hence the pagerank of your website will rise in the process. If you already have a good grasp on the other SEO techniques involved in a good SEO campaign, then you're doing fine.

Conclusion

Here are some bullet points on how to start using indirect marketing to your advantage:

• Get an indirect marketing tool, like the one linked above
• Create profiles on as many social networks and social bookmarking sites as you can
• Find niche networks that are small-to-medium sized for maximum exposure
  
• Provide good links or information on those profiles that's seen as a resource to it's users
• Each day, add friends, or vote, or whatever action, as much you can on each of your social networks to draw attention to your profile
  
• Don't just use the tool, actively go on to the sites every once and awhile and interact with the people you have added as friends
• Give some good content on your profiles and update them at least once a month with more content

All in all a good campaign will start out with a lot of different social networks, and then optimize itself as time goes on, based on the response (site hits, purchases, etc.) of each network. Just remember that no marketing is free. It will always take either work or money, or both. The idea behind indirect marketing is to do as little work as possible, target to a tee, and not have to pay for someone to send visitors to your site.