Our #1 goal is (and always will be) to send you guys as much traffic as possible. So with that in mind we’ve made a couple of small changes that will have a huge impact.

RSS Feed Modifications - The links in the RSS feed now point directly to the source of the story! If you submit a link from your site and it reaches the front page on PlugIM, anyone who reads our feed and clicks on the headline will go directly to your site. We’ve taken ourselves out as the middle man. Yes this will mean PlugIM suffers a hit to our own traffic, but again our #1 priority is sending traffic to you. We also added two new links in the feed under each story. The first one shows the current number of plugs the story has and links to the story’s page on PlugIM so you can easily go and vote if it’s a story you like. The second link shows the how many comments have been posted and links to the comment section of the story.

Another nice side effect from changing the feed to link directly to the story is if the same story has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, submitted to Digg or reviewed at SumbleUpon, you’ll see the current stats for each in our dynamic FeedFlares under each story. It also makes it easy for you to bookmark, Digg or Stumble the stories directly.

If you like the changes we made to the RSS feed we ask that you show us your appreciation by subscribing to it: http://www.plugim.com/rss2/

Social Bookmarking Buttons Modification - Under each story on PlugIM there’s a section of social bookmarking buttons so you can easily submit the story to your favorite social bookmarking and news sites. In the past, clicking these buttons always submitted links to the story page on PlugIM which we thought was a little selfish of us. So we changed the buttons to submit links to the original story instead. So now when you submit your link to PlugIM, you can just click each button under the newly submitted story and submit your link to all the other social bookmarking and news sites as well.

If you like the change we made to the social bookmarking buttons we ask that you show us your appreciation by bookmarking us.

UPDATE JULY 2ND: Congratulations to bigtaurus (Big John - The Online Info Guy) who won the June link giveaway.

Would you like to have a text link to your site on PlugIM for a month? All you need to do is participate in the PlugIM community during the month of June and then at the end of the month we will have a drawing to pick the winner. The winner’s text link will be displayed on PlugIM for the entire month of July. The more you participate, the more entries you get in the drawing which increases your odds of winning. Here’s how to get entries in the drawing:

• Every comment posted: 1 entry

So if you comment once on 10 different stories in June you’ll have 10 entries in the drawing. Note: these are comments posted in response to stories on PlugIM. Not story submissions.

Why are comments the only way to receive entries? Two reasons: most importantly I’m trying to encourage you all to communicate more. PlugIM isn’t only for posting links, it’s also for discussion around the stories that are submitted. The second reason is help break in the new story subscription mod that we just finished implementing earlier this month. Using this mod, it will be a lot easier to know when someone comments on one of your stories which will make it easier to have ongoing conversations. My personal request: please don’t post junk comments on every story such as “Wow, that’s really cool” or “Awesome info, thanks for sharing!” While these comments may in fact be true, the goal of this giveaway isn’t to encourage spamming, it’s to encourage constructive participation. I have no easy way of policing this, so I ask that everyone play responsibly.

Prize details:

• 1 Month Front and Center on 20,000+ Pages of PlugIM.com
• Your Choice of Anchor Text
• Direct Link – No nofollow tag – No redirects
• Google PR 5 – Alexa Rank 16,691
• $72 Value! (Current package price through Text-Link-Ads)

Giveaway guidelines:

• No entries will be awarded for comments that are deleted
• The winner’s text link will be displayed during the month of July
• Text links may not promote gambling, alcohol or tobacco, firearms, adult sites, gambling sites, etc.

If you don’t win, or don’t want to wait to get your link on PlugIM, you can purchase one through Text-Link-Ads. If you’ve never used Text-Link-Ads before, clicking on this link will get you $100 off. (Sorry, currently sold out.)

One thing that’s always bothered me about posting stories to sites like Digg is that there’s no easy way to keep track of who’s commenting on your posts. Often times when I post something, I’ll end up leaving the story open in a browser window and refresh it periodically throughout the day to see if there are any new comments. Usually I’ll check it a couple times the day I post it and then rarely ever go back to see if anyone’s posted anything new.

One of the most popular plugins for WordPress is the subscription plugin where you can subscribe to a post and automatically receive email notifications any time someone comments on the post. I use it all the time and it saves me a ton of time. It’s great for when you ask the author a question and don’t want to keep checking back to see if they’ve posted a response yet.

To me it seemed like a no-brainer to add subscription capability to PlugIM and I’m happy to announce it has finally arrived! Earlier this week we wrapped up our testing round and now the PlugIM subscription notification system is in place. You can easily subscribe to any story on PlugIM and you’ll receive an email any time anyone comments on the stories you’ve subscribed to.

There are a couple different ways to subscribe to stories. Every story has a new ‘subscribe’ button under the comment box. Simply click the button to subscribe to the story, you don’t even need to submit a comment. The button uses AJAX to change from a subscribe button to an unsubscribe button so just click it again later if you wish to unsubscribe from the story. The other way to subscribe to stories is to use the automatic story subscription options located in your profile. You can choose to automatically subscribe to every story you post on PlugIM which is a nice easy way to keep track of your own stories. Also you can choose to automatically subscribe to all stories you comment on. Both options are on by default.

I hope you all find this modification useful and I hope it encourages you all to comment more than you do now because that was the driving force behind making the modification. If you have any questions, find any issues or have any suggestions, just post a comment here to let me know.

UPDATE JUNE 1ST: Congratulations to jratliff (Jamie Ratliff) who won the May link giveaway.

Would you like to have a text link to your site on PlugIM for a month? All you need to do is participate in the PlugIM community during the month of May and then at the end of the month will have a drawing to pick the winner. The winner’s text link will be displayed on PlugIM for the entire month of June. The more you participate, the more entries you get in the drawing which increases your odds of winning. Here’s how to get entries in the drawing:

• Every news post: 2 entries
• Every vote (plug): 1 entries
• Every comment: 20 entries!
• Mention PlugIM in a blog post: 100 entries!*

*To receive your 100 entries you must reply to this post with a link to the post where you mentioned PlugIM.

So if you make 5 comments and post 10 stories in May you’ll have 120 entries in the drawing.

Why are comments worth so much more? Simple, the goal is to get more conversation going on the stories that are submitted. My personal request: please don’t just post every internet marketing related story you can find on the web. Don’t plug every story that’s submitted. And don’t make comments on every story such as “Wow, that’s really cool” or “Awesome info, thanks for sharing!” While these comments may in fact be true, the goal of this giveaway isn’t to encourage spamming, it’s to encourage constructive participation. I have no easy way of policing this, so I ask that everyone play responsibly.

Prize details:

• 1 Month Front and Center on 10,000+ Pages of PlugIM.com
• Your Choice of Anchor Text
• Direct Link – No nofollow tag – No redirects
• Google PR 5 – Alexa Rank 19,212
• $72 Value! (Current package price through Text-Link-Ads)

Giveaway guidelines:

• No points will be awarded for comments or stories that are deleted
• The winner’s text link will be displayed during the month of June
• Text links may not promote gambling, alcohol or tobacco, firearms, adult sites, gambling sites, etc.

If you don’t win, or don’t want to wait to get your link on PlugIM, you can purchase one through Text-Link-Ads. If you’ve never used Text-Link-Ads before, clicking on this link will get you $100 off.

It took over 6 months to for us to reach 500 members. From there it only took another 2 months to hit 1000. That’s how fast our community is growing thanks to all of you. It’s really starting to feel like a collective effort to increase awareness of our community. Members are chipping in and writing WordPress plugins and creating buttons. Others are mentioning us in forums, bookmarking us on Del.icio.us, and joining our MyBlogLog community. Dozens of you have written blog posts and reviews of PlugIM to spread the word and most recently many members are using the new PlugIM widget on their sites.

It really has become a group effort and I can’t say thank you enough. Everyone seems to be realizing the more we all pitch in and promote the site, the more everyone benefits because those front page stories are going to get more and more traffic. Another way you can pitch in is to continue to provide me with as much feedback as you can. As I’ve said before, most of the modifications made to PlugIM are from suggestions made by the members. I don’t want to call all the shots; I want you guys to tell me what you want. Feel free to leave your ideas in a comment on this post or email me.

I’d like to wrap this post up by personally thanking a few people who’ve gone the extra mile to help PlugIM grow. Thank you to Jack Humphrey, Michelle MacPhearson, Mark Blair and Matt Ellsworth. Hopefully in another couple of months I’ll be thanking you all again when we hit 2000 members.

If you use the Google toolbar and PlugIM then you’ve got to check this out. A fellow PlugIM member, Mark Blair of www.smoblog.com, developed a PlugIM button for the Google toolbar and it’s packed with functionality.

You may be familiar with the PlugIM bookmarklet which creates a button (in Firefox) or a favorites shortcut (in Internet Explorer) that allows you to submit the current page in your browser to PlugIM with a click. One thing that always bugged me about the bookmarklet was that there was no way to make it a button in Internet Explorer, it had to be a shortcut. Mark’s Google toolbar button gets around this dilemma because it’s installed directly into the Google toolbar itself rather than the browser. So now IE users can have a submit to PlugIM button which is so much easier than searching for a shortcut in your favorites menu.

But Mark’s PlugIM button does much more than just submitting the current page you’re viewing to PlugIM. Here’s a list of the features this little button can do:

• Submit to PlugIM: Click the button and you’re forwarded on to the submit page of PlugIM where the URL of the story you were just reading is automatically pre-populated so all you need to do is fill in the description and pick a category.
• Search PlugIM: Enter a search phrase in the Google toolbar and click the PlugIM button and instead of searching Google, it’ll search PlugIM.
• Recent Front Page PlugIM Stories: There’s a drop down on the button that displays a list of links to the most recent front page PlugIM stories by using PlugIM’s RSS feed.

Another great thing about the button is it’s a one click install and literally takes seconds to do.

Download: You can find the download for this little wonder on Mark’s blog here:
http://www.smoblog.com/plugim-toolbar-button/

If you like it as much as I do, please be sure to give Mark a big thank you! Thanks Mark!

Now you can install the new PlugIM widget on your WordPress blog with this awesome plugin provided by Michelle MacPhearson. If you’re not comfortable editing WordPress template code then this plugin is for you because this is as simple as it gets. Just download it from Michelle’s site, upload it to your WordPress plugins directory, and then activate the plugin. That’s it! Then every one of your blog posts will have the PlugIM vote box ready for your readers to plug your posts. They don’t even need a PlugIM user account to vote.

Download the plugin from Michelle’s site here:

http://blog.michellemacphearson.com/wordpress-plugin-plugim-votebox/

Be sure to give her a HUGE thank you! Thanks Michelle!

Go ahead, try it out. The PlugIM vote box widget has been integrated and is in use with the PlugIM blog. Click the plug box to the left to see how it works.

The number one request I’ve had from the community is for a PlugIM vote box widget and after weeks in development, it has finally arrived. But this isn’t your typical vote box widget that you’re used to seeing around the web… This widget is AJAX powered. It automatically casts a vote and updates the vote count right there on your site so your visitor never needs to leave! I’m sure you’ve noticed most vote boxes require your visitor to not only leave your site, but also create an account on the bookmarking site just to be able to vote. Well not the PlugIM widget, your users don’t even need to have a PlugIM account to vote for your story! They can just click ‘plug’ and keep on browsing your site without ever leaving to go to PlugIM.

Here’s how it works. Once you’ve installed the code, the PlugIM vote box will be displayed on your site. The very first person to click it, will be directed to the submit story page on PlugIM where the URL and story title will be automatically populated. The user finishes up the submission process by setting the tags, writing a short description and selecting a category. (Note that if you use our automatic RSS feed submission feature, your stories will already be submitted and ready for voting.) Once the story has been submitted, everyone else who clicks the button will simply be casing a vote for your story. If they’re logged into PlugIM from a previous visit, the vote will be cast in their name. If they aren’t logged in, or don’t have a PlugIM account, the vote will still count and measures are in place to prevent voting abuse, so they still only get one vote.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the code snippets below, be sure to change occurrences of “xsrc” to “src”. This was done for security reasons.

Support for 1 PlugIM button on a page:

Simply insert the following code where you want the button:

<script xsrc="http://www.plugim.com/tools/plugthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

This creates a button that when clicked, uses the URL and Title of the page it’s on to submit the story. If you’re page title is extremely long, and you want to change it (for example, maybe the default page title on your site includes the domain name and a subtitle before the actual story title) you can do so by including the title variable like this:

Support for changing the story title:

<script type="text/javascript">
plugim_title = 'Title of Your Story';
</script>
<script xsrc="http://www.plugim.com/tools/plugthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

(Note: once a story has been submitted, changing the title variable will not change the title of the story on PlugIM.)

Support for multiple buttons on the same page:

If you need multiple PlugIM buttons on the same webpage (on the homepage of a blog for example, where you want to have one PlugIM button for each story) you can do so by including the PlugIM URL and Title variables:

<script type="text/javascript">
plugim_url = 'http://www.YourStoryURL.com';
plugim_title = 'Title of Your Story';
</script>
<script xsrc="http://www.plugim.com/tools/plugthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Note in this example, the URL and Title variables are required. Otherwise every button on your page will point to the same story on PlugIM. In the example of a blog, simply use the permalink URL for each post.

WordPress Plugin

We realize the widget requires some technical knowledge to install, which is why we also have a WordPress plugin available developed by Michelle MacPhearson. If you have a WordPress blog, simply download the plugin from her site, upload it to your blog and activate it. Then all your posts will automatically have the PlugIM vote box ready for your readers to vote. You can download the plugin here:

http://blog.michellemacphearson.com/wordpress-plugin-plugim-votebox/

The widget has been tested with IE6, IE7 and Firefox 1.5. If you find any issues, please reply to this post so we can clear them up.

UPDATE MAY 1ST: Congratulations to mjesales (Matt Ellsworth) who won the April link giveaway.

Once again we’re giving away a link for a month on PlugIM. For the entire month of April, every time you contribute to the PlugIM.com community you increase your odds of winning. Every post, comment or plug from April 1st through the 30th counts. At the end of the month, we’ll tally everyone’s points, and for each point you have, you’ll receive 1 entry in the drawing (which will be done electronically). Here are the point values:

• Every news post: 2 points
• Every vote (plug): 1 point
• Every comment: 10 points!
• Mention PlugIM in a blog post: 50 points! (Must post a link to the blog entry in the comments of this post.)

So if you make 5 comments and post 10 news stories in April you’ll have 70 entries in the drawing.

Why are comments worth so much more? Simple, the goal is to get more conversation going on the stories that are submitted. My personal request: please don’t just post every internet marketing related story you can find on the web. Don’t plug every story that’s submitted. And don’t make comments on every story such as “Wow, that’s really cool” or “Awesome info, thanks for sharing!” While these comments may in fact be true, the goal of this giveaway isn’t to encourage spamming, it’s to encourage constructive participation. I have no easy way of policing this, so I ask that everyone play responsibly.

Now for the prize details:

• 1 Month Front and Center on 8000+ Pages of PlugIM.com
• Your Choice of Anchor Text
• Direct Link – No nofollow tag – No redirects
• Google PR 4 – Alexa Rank 22,294
• $60 Value! (Current package price through Text-Link-Ads)

A few key points of interest:

• No points will be awarded for comments or stories that are deleted
• The winner’s text link will be displayed during the month of May
• Text links may not promote gambling, alcohol or tobacco, firearms, adult sites, gambling sites, etc.

If you don’t win, or don’t want to wait to get your link on PlugIM, just go to Text-Link-Ads and search for PlugIM. If you’ve never used Text-Link-Ads before, clicking on this link will get you $100 off.

Congratulations to Jason Murphy, winner of last months drawing for a free link for a month on PlugIM.  My apologies for not making the annoucement earlier.  I announced it in the newsletter that went out on March 1st and then mentioning it in the blog kind of slipped my mind.  All the more reason for you guys to sign up for the newsletter!  If you didn’t sign up when you created your account, you can sign up using the sidebar on the front page of PlugIM.  I won’t spam you, maybe 2 or 3 emails a month or so along with the newsletter once a month.

Jason is promoting his www.shareadsense.com project with the link he won.

I might run the contest again this month if you guys give me enough positive feedback.  Let me know, did you enjoy it? Does the prize motivate you enough to participate more? Let me know what you think.