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!