Earlier today the 500th PlugIM user account was created. I just wanted to say a quick thank you to all of you who’ve joined the community and contributed over these last few months. The next few months should be even more exciting as we continue to grow and implement several new features. We’re going to stay focused on the goal which is to drive as much traffic to the stories posted on PlugIM as possible.

If any of you are interested in contributing as a member of the team, please let me know. I’m looking for people with graphic design skills, php coding skills and of course marketing and promotional skills.

And as always the floor is open for comments and suggestions for future modifications and features. Most all of the features added to the site have come from the users, so if there’s something you’d like to see, just let me know.

Thanks again everyone!

So you created a PlugIM account, you entered your Adsense ID, you’ve posted several stories on the site, but how do you know how much you’ve actually earned by posting on PlugIM? I was flipping through the user accounts the other day and found out that people either aren’t using the “Adsense Channel” field, or they’re using it incorrectly. The “Adsense Channel” field on your user profile is there so you can not only track how much you’re making from your ads on PlugIM, but also to track how many impressions (views) your ads are receiving. All you need to do is create a PlugIM channel in your Adsense account and here’s how you do that:

1. Login to your Adsense account and click on the “Adsense Setup” tab then click “Channels”
2. Under “Adsense for Content” make sure “Custom channels” is selected (this should be the default)
3. Click on “+Add new custom channels”
4. Name your channel “PlugIM” then click the “Add channel” button
5. Under “Adsense Setup” click “Products” then click “Adsense for content”
6. Change your view from “Wizard” to “Single page”
7. Scroll down until you see “Choose Ad Channels”
8. Click “add »” next to your custom “PlugIM” channel
9. Scroll down and look at “Your Adsense code” look for “google_ad_channel” in the code
10. Copy the numerical value next to “google_ad_channel”
11. Login to your PlugIM profile and paste that value into the “Adsense Channel” field

It may look complicated, but it shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes and once you’ve configured it correctly, you’ll always know exactly what your PlugIM Adsense stats are. The most important part is that you use the numerical channel number, not the channel name.

By now you’ve probably noticed the bot accounts I created to automatically post content from the RSS feeds of some of the more popular blogs in the SEM/SEO industry. The original purpose for the bots was to help me work out the kinks in the new automatic RSS feed submission feature but I left them enabled after the feature development was complete because I felt they added value by providing more content for the community to read and vote for. Since I enabled them, I’ve been batting around several ideas of what to do with them because I feel they need to be removed from the general queue of user submitted stories. So many submissions come through the bots (even though there are only 4 of them) that user submitted stories tend to get buried in the queue faster than they should be and therefore don’t get the attention they deserve.

Soon I’ll be implementing whatever change we agree on as a community. I don’t want to make the decision myself; I want to hear your thoughts and ideas. I think if done correctly, the bots can add real value to PlugIM, perhaps by narrowing down the number of sites you need to visit during your daily routine. By adding some sort of aggregator section to PlugIM, not only can you read up on what users are finding and sharing, you can also read up on what you’re favorite blogs around the web have been posting. If handled correctly, hopefully we can add many more feeds to the aggregator based on your suggestions.

I invite you all to read Jason Murphy’s excellent article on bots and their place in a community and then ask that you add your thoughts and ideas in the comments section of either this blog post or Jason’s article. Help mold PlugIM into what you want it to become.

Development on the latest PlugIM feature is complete. Now you can attach an RSS feed to your user account and every item that comes through the feed will automatically be submitted as an upcoming story on PlugIM. All you need to do is login to your account (or if you don’t have an account yet, register) and go to your profile settings. There you’ll see a new section of settings for the RSS feed.

First and most importantly is the URL, make sure to include the full address to your feed. Then select the category that best describes your feed. It doesn’t need to be a perfect fit for every post, you can always individually edit posts on PlugIM after they’ve been submitted if need be. Then select how often you want your feed to be checked for new items. There are values to choose from ranging from 15 minutes up to 24 hours. Just keep in mind if you set this to 15 minutes, your feed is going to be accessed 96 times a day, however if that doesn’t bother you, that’s the best way to get your submissions posted to PlugIM as soon as they arrive on your feed. Finally you can also add tags to your feed. The tags will be applied to every PlugIM submission off your feed. Again, they don’t need to be perfect but can better narrow down the scope of your category.

The rules for adding an RSS feed to your PlugIM account are:

1. You are the owner of the feed
2. Internet marketing feeds only! Sure you can post off topic occasionally, but the overwhelming theme of your feed needs to be related to internet marketing in some way. SEO, SEM, blogging for dollars, Adwords, traffic generation, link baiting etc.

*Please note: feeds need to be activated by an administrator. This is to avoid getting bombarded with off topic spam. Most feeds will be approved or denied within 24 hours so please keep this in mind when activating this feature. Changing your feed URL will reset the approval process. To deactivate automatic feed submission, simply delete the URL.

We’re giving away a link for a month on PlugIM. For the entire month of February, every time you contribute to the PlugIM.com community you increase your odds of winning. Every post, comment or plug from February 1st through the 28th 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: 5 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 February you’ll have 45 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 and if it’s a success, this could become a monthly event.

Why are you just finding out about this half way through the month? Well the giveaway was announced in the newsletter February 1st and the subscribers were purposely given a head start. If you want to make sure not to miss out on similar newsletter-subscriber-only opportunities in the future, simply signup for the newsletter in right sidebar menu of PlugIM.com.

Now for the prize details:

• 1 Month Front and Center on 3400+ Pages of PlugIM.com
• Your Choice of Anchor Text
• Direct Link – No nofollow tag – No redirects
• Google PR 4 – Alexa Rank 28,059
• $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 March
• 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.

I’ve found a new niche for PlugIM thanks to Hittail… puberty. Go ahead, see for yourself. Google “puberty what do you do” and you’ll see PlugIM is the obvious authority on such things.

Thanks to Hittail, I have an abundant supply of under utilized keywords from the PlugIM long tail, most of which being significantly more relevant to the internet marketing related content of the site. If you haven’t heard of the long tail before, Hittail has a great explanation of the concept here.

Hittail doesn’t only track visitors coming in from the long tail, or from searches in general, it also tracks regular hits from good old fashioned links. “Big deal” you say? “There are hundreds of other services that do that.” True, but I haven’t gotten to the best part yet… The stats on Hittail are tracked in real-time! I have a couple of analytics programs built into my hosting package, but the results are only complied once a day; even Google’s Analytics is generally four hours behind. Using Hittail, I’ve been able to find out where the latest surge of PlugIM traffic is coming from as it’s happening which is part of the reason why I log into my Hittail account at least 2-4 times a day.

Here’s a great example. Just last week Divya Uttam posted a story to her blog “Blogging to Fame!” which contained a link to PlugIM. Her post was submitted to Digg and made the front page and as a result, PlugIM started getting flooded with traffic. I happened to log into my Hittail account while this was happening and saw dozens of hits coming from her post in real time. Thanks this Hittail I was able to join the discussion on her site and on Digg while the iron was hot, rather than finding out a day later after traffic had died down.

Mike Levin and crew at Connors Communications have built an invaluable service. I highly recommend you try Hittail on your site. It’s completely free and all you need to do is insert one line of code in your template. Give it a few days to let some keywords build up in your long tail before you jump to quick judgment. I think you’ll soon find yourself logging in to your account several times a day as well.

Have you heard of Social Bookmarks Manager yet? If not, now’s the time to familiarize yourself with it. It’s a freeware application developed by SoftLogica which automatically generates social bookmarking code for your website. All you need to do is enter a few pieces of information, such as the URL and title of the page, check off which social bookmarking services you want buttons for then copy and paste the code to your site. It’s that easy. From their site:

“Social Bookmarks Manager is designed to simplify the process of bookmarklets creation for your blog posts, articles and any other web pages. The program comes with 60 profiles of the most popular social bookmarking sites and generates ready-to-use HTML code. You can manage appearance by choosing between text-only, icons-only and mixed links, adding prefix and selecting separator.”

The software currently supports button creation for 60 of the most popular social bookmarking services including, most recently, PlugIM! Of course I’m honored that PlugIM was selected to be a part of this software package alongside with such heavy hitters as Digg, del.icio.us and Furl and I want to say a quick thank you to Sergey Petrov, the CEO of SoftLogica, for making it happen.

You can download your free copy of Social Bookmarks Manager right here:
http://www.socialbookmarksmanager.com

From now on, whenever you submit a story to PlugIM, the site automatically registers your vote for the story as well.  This eliminates the extra step of clicking the ‘plug’ button after submitting a story.  I noticed several people were missing this step and as a result we had quite a few stories being submitted with zero plugs.  Obviously if someone’s taking the time to submit a story, they feel it’s worthy of their vote, so we just eliminated that step altogether.  The result is a cleaner, faster and more intuitive story submission process.  Enjoy!

As some of you may know, the requirement for a story to reach the front page of PlugIM was 2 plugs within 10 days of the story being submitted.  Because of the site’s continued increase in popularity and traffic, the requirement has been adjusted to 3 plugs within 7 days.  Over the last couple of days almost every story submitted has been reaching the front page.  This not only increases the value for a story reaching the front page, but also better reflects the opinion of the community and it’s members as to what is considered to be the best stories submitted.

Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted. The holidays and last minute Christmas shopping all caught up with me and I’ve been a touch overwhelmed recently. I’ve also noticed a dramatic decrease in free time since we hooked up our new Nintendo Wii… As a result, I haven’t had much time to devote to PlugIM but fortunately the site is taking on a life of it’s own.
 
December has already broken all records for unique visitors, visits, page views, bandwidth, new member signups, you name it… I wanted to write a quick blog post to thank two of the individuals who helped make this possible: Seth Godin and Guillaume Bouchard.
 
Seth mentioned us in a recent post on his blog here:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/12/here_comes_the_.html
 
Guillaume (http://www.go-referencement.org/) mentioned us in a post on Seomoz here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1600
 
There have been many others who’ve mentioned and/or reviewed PlugIM on their blogs and I want to let you all know how much I appreciate it. The site continues to grow beyond my highest expectations and I can’t wait for 2007. It’s going to be an incredible year.