Wordpress Plugin · Dominic Foster

Website Marketing with WP-Noteable Plugin

March 23, 2006 on 9:23 am | In Entrepreneur, Free Tools, Tools, Wordpress Plugin | 3 Comments

Today I wrote about Public Relations (PR) For Your Website as part of my Blog Boost effort as part of my activity with LinkedIn Bloggers for a blog called Conversation Blog by Philippe Borremans.

If you go off and read the post mentioned above, you will notice that points 4 and 5 discuss the use of News Content Sites and Social Bookmarking sites as a way of marketing and promoting your website.

Now, if you look at the end of this post, you will notice there are a number of buttons which link this post (or which ever you are reading here at Accidental Entrepreneur) with a number of these types of websites - and I won’t be shy in coming forward and explaining that the reason they are there is hoping that there is a statistical possibility that some of my readers will click on these buttons to bookmark posts that they like or even submit them to news websites. This in turn will influence readers of these peoples bookmarks or new submission into visiting my blog and becoming a subscriber.

The buttons themselves are placed there courtesy of the brilliant WP-Noteable Plugin by Cal Evans. This plugin comes with all the images and has full configuration via a settings page int the options tab of Wordpress.

Up until now, I had only bookmarked a couple of my posts at deli.cio.us, but they are good for at least 2-3 visits a day, which even though a small number, shows that bigger things are possible.

So this got me to paying some closer attention to each of the buttons that appeared for the Public Relations (PR) For Your Website post and I thought I would document my findings for anyone who like me (until today) are relatively clueless about these opportunities.

- deli.cio.us - Possibly the most popular social bookmarking website there is. Register as a user and add links to web pages you like (your own for instance). Tag these links so that you can see what other people are linking to in the same category - and visit the pages that they like. Each link shows how many people link to that page and popular pages can get onto the front page and get loads of visits.

-Digg - Register as a user and submit web pages that you find interesting. Other Digg users vote on the stories and popular strories will make the front page. If you are lucky, your website makes the front page and you get heaps of visits. Then, if you are unlucky, your websites server shitakes itself from visitor overload and crashes and your webhosting company threaten to shut your site down for hogging bandwidth, CPU time, ect.

- Spurl - Social bookmarking webiste. Sign up and post your bookmarks. The front page has popular and most recent bookmarks as well as ‘what was bookmarked a year ago’ section.

- Wists - Looks like you need to create a login for this one. Has facilities to view latest and most populat items as well as links to yourself.

- Simpy - Another social bookmarking site. Looks like it has a lot of features apart from the usual bookmark-tag-share. Has sections with new users, most active users, recent posts, most popular posts. Also has and API so you can build spiffy integrations with your websie.

- Newsvine - A news content site where you can ’seed’ a news story. News appears on the front page in all sorts of categories from world to sports to entertainment to odd news. Once news is ’seeded’ readers vote on the story and this determines its importance and thus its order on the list of news. Like digg, it your website gets to the front page, expect lots of visitors.

- Blinklist - Social bookmarking site with the usual suspects - bookmark-tag-share. The front page lists popular tags, recent bookmarks and hot bookmarks.

- Furl - A popular social bookmarking website that provides a personal archive of 5MB to store snapshots of pages that you bookmark. Also has a Firefox pluging.

- reddit - A news submission and voting type website. Submit stories and vote on stories to send them to the front page. Appears to be a little more light hearted than Digg and Newsvine. They say you can submit your own stories, which from what I’ve gathered, is frowned upon by Digg and Newsvine and their respective users.

-Fark - A funny news website that lists oddities and funny stuff. News stories are posted and users comment on them.

- Blogmarks - Social bookmarking site - bookmark-tag-share theme.

- MyWeb2 - Yahoo’s offering in the social bookmarking sphere. Much like the rest.

- Smarking - More social bookmarking.

I can see that the descriptions of the social bookmarking sites appear to get rather terse towards the end. Please don’t take this that I think they are no good. It’s just that I could not think of anything new to say about them that I had not said about the ones closer to the top. It’s probably a good idea to visit them for yourself and discover each ones unique features.

As and experiment I submitted my Public Relations (PR) For Your Website post to each of the above to see how it affected my traffic.

However I didn’t submit to Digg of Newsvine for fear of backlash from their users for submitting my own content. However, in the interests of experimentation, feel free to submit them yourselves.

I’ll report back in a week or two with results.

Technorati Tags: social+bookmarking, news, marketing, del.icio.us, delicious, digg, spurl, wists, simpy, newsvine, blinklist, furl, reddit, fark, blogmarks, myweb2, smarking

To Do this Year

January 26, 2006 on 3:09 pm | In Firefox Extension, Micro ISV, To Do, Wordpress Plugin | No Comments

I’ve been sorting out some things that I’d like to achieve this year. Activities that rank highly are ones that involve making my businesses a success so that I can feed, house and clothe my family.

However, there are a few other things I would also like to do - maybe just for the sake of doing them.

Wordpress Template

One thing that I would really like to do is build a decent Wordpress Template from the ground up and make it freely available for download. I have plenty of experience hacking other templates to make the layout how I like it, but I would really like to create a fresh one.

Wordpress Plugin

Staying on the Wordpress theme (yep, I love Wordpress), I would also like to develop and make freely available a useful Wordpress Plugin. I know what I want to do for this as I have already hacked something together for one of my websites, but it only works by manually editing the php code for the page - not very user friendly.

Firefox Extension

Getting harder now - This would require a bit more work, but should not be too difficult. I was thinking of something like a World Clock for the Firefox status bar.

Micro ISV (Independent Software Vendor)

I’m really keen to create a simple, effective and useful software product - and then market and sell it on the internet myself. I know that this could be classed as a money making venture, but I would like to do it as a project to learn about this business model. Maybe it could open up some really good opportunities.

So there you have it. I’m not promising that I will get these done, but I’ll have a go.

Please feel free to comment of contact me if you have any ideas for the above for me.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Firefox, Micro ISV