Always on the lookout for new marketing tools and services I found a pretty slick tool that allows me to publish my blog posts and static web pages to all the major social networking sites.  It’s called OnlyWire (maybe you’ve heard of it) and I’ve been successfully using it for about a month now.

OnlyWire syndicates your content and articles to the web’s top social networking sites with a single button click.  OnlyWire makes it EXTREMELY easy to get your message out to the broadest possible audience in the shortest amount of time while improving readership, backlinks, search engine index speed and web-traffic.

Currently, the OnlyWire API is compatible with the following social networking sites:

ask bebo bibsonomy blinklist bookmarksync connotea delicious digg diigo facebook bluedot googlebookmarks jumptags linkatopia misterwong

mixx multiply myspace newsvine plaxo propeller reddit simpy slashdot spurl stumbleupon technorati tumblr twitter yahoobookmarks

Here's an example of the one click publishing provided by OnlyWire. Please click on the image for better resolution.

So how does this benefit you?

Obviously you’ll want to use this on your own websites but it also helps your listings on Top Affiliate.  When OnlyWire users visit your affiliate program page on the directory they’ll have the option to instantly publish your page across their selected social networking sites.  More exposure always means more traffic.

Click on image for better resolution.

The OnlyWire button is found at the bottom right of all Top Affiliate directory pages.  One click publishing!

Is OnlyWire just another social bookmarking application?

Well….yes but the problem with many conventional social bookmarking applications is the time it takes to manually publish web pages to each social network.  They can only do one at a time.  Who wants to sit there and manually bookmark web content across 20 different social networks?  Not me! This means a good portion of web pages out there are never bookmarked, it’s just too much trouble.

So how much of a hassle is it to set up?

Registering for OnlyWire and setting up an account takes a little over an hour if you’re not a member of all the social networking sites.  Registering can be a hassle with some social networking sites but it’s worth your time.

So how much does it cost?

OnlyWire offers FREE and paid services.  If you select the free service you’ll have to:

“agree to add the OnlyWire “Bookmark & Share Button” on your website or blog within 24 hours or your bookmarking ability will be temporarily disabled.  The Button will immediately drive traffic to your website by providing your users the ability to simultaneously bookmark your content across multiple bookmarking sites. The Button also allows your users to share your pages via email with their friends and collegues.” – Onlywire

I purchased a year up front to use their automated content distribution for $24.99 but you can also pay a monthly fee of $2.99.  My time is worth a little more than $24.99 or $0.07/day if you want to do the math!

Stealth marketing – also known as undercover marketing – has received a great deal of attention in recent years, but it is hardly a new phenomenon. Basically, stealth marketing refers to advertising a product or service to someone without disclosing that you are a representative of its company. A classic example of online stealth company is when the representatives of a product or service post glowing reviews and comments for that product on public boards. This can boost the product’s rating, while not actually reflecting what actual, unbiased users of the product think.

The Ethics Of Stealth Marketing

Many people believe that stealth marketing is a shady, unethical way of advertising a product or service because it basically relies on deception. The advertiser willfully deceives his audience by not disclosing his relationship to the product or service being praised. Considering the negative reactions of people who realize they’ve been marketed to in this way, it is pretty apparent that a lot of risk is involved in using this marketing technique.

Stealth marketing is most popularly used in instances when a new product or service is receiving negative word of mouth from the general public. A new cell phone, for instance, might receive a huge number of poor reviews on a popular website. Naturally, the people thinking about buying this phone will think twice about doing so if it seems to have a uniformly negative rating. In this case, a company might begin engaging in stealth marketing by posting its own, positive reviews of the phone in order to counteract the negative ones that are piling up.

In this case, stealth marketing is almost certainly unethical. After all, the phone is obviously a poorly made product if so many people feel compelled to write drastically negative reviews about it. Others who are considering purchasing it in order to make an informed decision put their trust in the premise that the reviews are made by average, every day people – not marketing personnel. Without full disclosure, a company that posts positive reviews and ratings about its own products is actively deceiving the buying public.

Social Networking And Stealth Marketing

Stealth marketing may be performed in a number of different ways. The Internet has made it far easier to engage in, but there are ways of doing it through print media and even in person as well. Each different type of product generally requires a subtly different approach in order to use stealth marketing for maximum effect. The fact that it can be done in so many different ways is certainly a big contributor to the public’s growing lack of trust in advertisers.

In addition to posting positive reviews and ratings on various websites, the Internet can be used to perform stealth marketing in countless other ways. Social networking websites can be used to great effect in such efforts. Companies can create multiple fictional characters and give them profiles on a handful of such sites. Over time, they can build up large friends’ lists or a lot of followers; gradually, they can begin sending out links to products they really enjoy using – but that are actually well camouflaged advertisements.

As with all types of stealth marketing, creating fake profiles on social networking sites creates a false sense of trust between the consumer and the fictional character. When done correctly, the people this fictional character befriends never realizes that they are entirely fabricated; they may even begin respecting their opinion, which is the jackpot in terms of stealth marketing. With that kind of trust, the character can then be used to casually mention websites, services, products – anything the company wishes to market – in order to drum up interest in them.

Other Examples Of Stealth Marketing

On many occasions, companies have hired actors to engage in stealth marketing techniques. Sony Ericsson used 60 actors in 2002 in ten different cities to market a new camera phone. These actors would approach random strangers, asking them to take their picture. In doing this, the actors could engage the strangers in the benefits of their “cool new Sony Ericsson phone”, for example. This would plant the seeds in peoples’ minds about the benefits of the phone, and in some cases may have encouraged them to buy one of their own.

Longtime bloggers who have achieved respectable followings are occasionally recruited by companies for stealth marketing campaigns. These bloggers are paid by the companies to write positive posts about their experiences with a company’s products, services or events. When done correctly, the readership of the blog never realizes that they are being advertised to; the key to this type of stealth marketing is maintaining the same tone regular readers are used to, and making a believable post about the benefits of the product in question.

Whether or not one believes stealth marketing is ethical, what’s undeniable is that it can backfire. Anyone who chooses to use this marketing technique needs to be supremely careful not to reveal the company’s identity. Consumers who discover they have been surreptitiously advertised to usually form very negative opinions about the company that pulled the wool over their eyes.

In a word….don’t do it. You’ll only ruin what you’ve worked so hard at developing…trust.

Platform-A, http://www.platform-a.com, AOL’s digital advertising division, recently announced the launch of an affiliate marketing solution that links the buy.at affiliate network to the widget-based marketing tools of wildly popular Goowy Media, Inc.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years…Goowy Media, Inc. develops innovative online products and services that provide simple, intuitive tools for managing your digital life and expressing yourself on the web.  Their most popular products are yourminus.com and goowy webtop

This progressive move by AOL enables web publishers, like you and me, to generate additional revenue from a combination of affiliate, widget and viral marketing.  It will be exciting to see how Platform-A advertisers integrate/syndicate this new capability into their customized widgets for your blog, website, and even your desktop!  Very cool stuff indeed.

For more than a little while now I haven’t had too many good things to say about these blasted Widgets!  They seemed to just take up real advertising space and bleed my hard-earned web traffic.  However, I will gladly test these viral advertiser generated widgets out on my network of blogs/sites so my visitors and customers can snatch them up and redistribute them to the far corners of the Web.  Just think about the applications…MySpace, FaceBook, etc.

Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A states, “This solution combines the best of affiliate and widget advertising in a solution that benefits publishers and advertisers alike.  Publisher revenue potential, brand exposure for the advertiser, and potential conversions grow virally each time the widget is downloaded by a consumer.”

I agree Lynda!  Now this is what we collectively mean by the moniker Web 2.0 people!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

Only a few months ago we were all promoting this widget like crazy to our fellow bloggers hoping to get tons of referral bloggers before our competition gobbled them up.  Today, the pulse of BlogRush is faint at best these on the NET.  With exceptionally low CTR’s of the social marketing widget reported by high traffic blogs such as problogger.com, doshdosh.com, etc. and general negative feedback from the marketing community this may be the death of BlogRush as we know it.

You’ll notice I’ve also removed the BlogRush widget from my page.  During the 1.5 months I had it posted, it produced less than a .01 CTR.  You don’t have to be a mathematician to know that blows. 

I placed the widget about halfway down my blog just below the fold…probably like 99% of the rest of BlogRusher’s because revenue ads will always trump widgets.  In this location your CTR will be pretty darn low already and your blog posts, when shown on other relevant blogs, will be competing with five (5) other blog posts thereby reducing your CTR by another 20%.Â

Sorry, but if you’ve placed the widget at the top of your blog you’re really just bleeding traffic and revenue.

We’d all like a fancy shmancy widget to magically bring us loads of laser targeted, high quality traffic but in “the real world” widgets are more form/fun then function.  BlogRush, SmartLinks and even MyBlogLog widgets are nothing more than ads that do not benefit the blogger.

Google just announced that starting tonight, developers can start writing applications using the social API for Orkut, MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites.  With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

This is slick…So what’s the hold up Facebook?  I bet you buckle like a belt soon under the pressure.  =)

Did I miss something?  Was there a recent "upgrade" to MyBlogLog?

I didn’t realize they now automatically add you to communities THEY feel you frequent often.  It’s kind of funny because they just added me to THEIR community.  I thought that was a little odd since I’ve probably ony visited their blog twice since I joined. 

Hmmm…are you community spamming me MyBlogLog?  I got my eye on you……

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]mybloglog[/tags]

It’s been in the making for a long time but Squidoo finally got the "Google Slap" for the plethora of black hat search spammers that have infested the social network.  When Squidoo was founded back in 2005 it was centrally focused on allowing people a common repository to share and exchange knowledge. 

Now in 2007 Squidoo has become a search spammers playground due to the favorable organic search engine positioning Black Hat marketers can obtain from manipulating the service.  According to a recent article in ClickZNews:

SEO and SEM spammers have exploited the service by funneling user links through those lenses, automating comments on lenses or redirecting viewers using iFrame technology.

And Google has now responded.  Seth Godin recently acknowledged that Google has dropped Squidoo approximately 30 percent in its rankings.  Ouch brotha….

Godin goes on to state:

There’s no question that with Google’s last shift in their algorithms and ranks we lost traffic," said Godin. "[But] it’s very easy to get superstitious about why organizations do one thing or another. Our expectation is that as our lenses get better, and our site gets traffic, our Google rankings will get back to where they were. It’s overly optimistic to think it’s going to happen in a week though.

Squidoo probably should have anticipated this with all the lessons learned from MySpace.  MySpace has been a priority target for many professional spammers and has implemented an arsenal of combative tools to clean up their social network. 

One such tool MySpace recently deployed to combat spammers is called the msplinks program.  When you input a link in MySpace it will be converted to a redirect link which looks similar to: msplinks.com/adf9sd9f.  The link will still point to the original url, but it will let MySpace monitor all the links and easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites.  This is a pretty progressive move for MySpace and has significantly cut down on comment spammers.  

IMO Squidoo is still an excellent social marketing resource for online marketers to build product awareness and branding…and should be used accordingly.  With the new spam countermeasures Squidoo is sure to implement I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they regain some of their lost ground.

*If you’re looking for a new up-and-coming social networking site for the marketing community I highly recommend taking a look at Brad Fallons http://www.FreeIQ.com.  I’ve noticed Google has been looking very favorabley on FreeIQ in regards to organic search…..just don’t tell those sheisty search spammers!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]squidoo, google slap, myspace, spammers, spam, search spammers, marketing, comment spammers, msplinks, organic search, search engine positioning, lenses, spam countermeasures, seo, sem, redirecting, social network, social networking, social marketing, black hat, online marketers[/tags]

Way back in 1989 the World Wide Web was an archaic maze the average web user could not navigate.  It was only when Mosaic, now Netscape, released the first popular Web browser in 1994 that enabled the lay (wo)man to experience the sheer power of the Internet.

Now in 2007, more than 13 years later, the Internet has over 1,114,274,426 billion users worldwide (www.internetworldstats.com) …and those users want power.  Gone are the large, proprietary, static dot com sites that dominated the 90’s and the first few years of this millennium.

The Web 2.0 movement has arrived and has re-leveled the WWW playing field.  Today’s savvy internet users want, or rather demand, to interact and have their voice heard across the internet.  In steps the social networking revolution to fill the void.

Social networking has emerged as probably the most powerful component of the Web 2.0 moniker.  With the vast leaps in technology such as cutting edge server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-based browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client-applications; it has become possible to easily create innovative web-based and rich-internet applications.

Not all social networks can or will withstand the test of time though.  As Molly Wood from CNET stated way back in 2005:

Social networking is laboring under the inescapable weight of the dot-com curse: you have to find the money. No matter how cool your idea is, it’s dead on arrival without an actual business plan.

I couldn’t agree with her more.  Just take a look at the sad state of affairs Friendster finds themselves in as of late.  Come to think of it does that site still even exist?  =) 

However, with the incredible success general social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook have received these past few years, it is clear the social networking business module does indeed work.  In my opinion though I feel that the general market has reached its saturation point.  In order for future social networking sites to become successful revenue generating communities, they must focus on highly targeted niche communities. 

As a web publisher and affiliate marketer I am more than pleased by how the online populace has embraced this paradigm shift towards social networking.  No longer must we crank out content site after content site to retain a stabilized revenue stream from an often volatile industry.  

By putting the power into your user’s hands through carefully researched and designed social networking communities you can eliminate the number one obstacle most online marketer’s and entrepreneurs face: 

Real.  Undiluted.  Content. 

With the vast array of free and moderately priced social networking software available in the open source and commercial market, you no longer have to be a Fortune 500 company to dominate your targeted niche.

As we head into this 2^nd quarter I find myself shifting gears towards a whole new marketing plan.  More to come on this soon….. 

In the meantime, here’s a brief list of some solid social networking software you may want to take a look at (in no particular order):

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

While aimlessly wandering around the web you’ll often come across something that simply dumbfounds you in its simplistic brilliance.  I just stumbled across another one.

I’ve heard Twitter.com mentioned here and there in forums but I brushed it off as just another fad site trying to ride the social network gravy train.  However, any site with a PR 8 and 2,754 ALEXA rank deserves a closer inspection.  So off I went to check it out.

A little bit of Googling and you’ll see Twitter came out in March 2006 and immediately fit an empty void in the socio-blogosphere .Yep, that term is mine.  I’m coining it!  

Twitter is probably the quintessential example of a successful microblogging platform.  So successful that the Twitter team won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award for: "Sites that revolutionize the power of publishing by providing regularly updated content of a personal or professional nature."

OK…So what exactly IS Twitter?

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

At first glance I thought…"Are you kidding me?  A site that that completely revolves around what people all over the globe are doing?  Who cares!"

Then I thought about it a little more and realized how genius it was. 

Let’s be honest…people love to talk about themselve’s, their accomplishments, what they’ve been up to and all that jazz.  It’s just human nature. 

For instance why do we (you) blog?  Because we want to provide people with information we feel is important.  So why not develop a site that allows people to say in 140 characters or less what they’re doing?  Twitter gives the masses their very own global soapbox to broadcast their feelings, ideas, passions, etc.

Twitter Marketing?

Although I do see some affiliate links posted to the blog I’m not really sure how much traffic you’ll get out of it.   Thousands of people post to it  every minute so your ad will only show up for a few seconds.  So forget PR too.

Go check it out and see what all the fuss is about.  Just don’t let it suck you in like MySpace!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]twitter, social network, microblogging, blog, publishing, MySpace, socio-blogosphere[/tags]