I’ve expressed the importance of Social Bookmarking in Step Two of my Guide, How to Build Traffic After You’ve Posted to Your Blog, and let’s be honest – the process is very time consuming. In my own personal quest to streamline the social bookmarking process I stumbled upon a piece of software by Icansoft called [...]
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I’ve expressed the importance of Social Bookmarking in Step Two of my Guide, How to Build Traffic After You’ve Posted to Your Blog, and let’s be honest – the process is very time consuming. In my own personal quest to streamline the social bookmarking process I stumbled upon a piece of software by Icansoft called SocialBot. Now I know there are plenty of other tools out on the Internet, Bookmarking Demon 5, but not everyone has $147 to purchase the software and SocialBot is always on sale or even when it’s not you are only out $24.95. So I figured let’s go ahead and spend the money and give SocialBot v4.1 a chance.
Setting Up SocialBot
When you first load SocialBot v4.1 you will see a series of icons across the top for Account Profile / Default Filters / Company Profiles. This is the starting ground for the process of submitting to Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Fark, Mixx, Delicious and more. Before you begin your Social Bookmarking you must start by clicking the Company Profiles button and entering in the information for all the fields – this information will be used when SocialBot semi-automates the registration process for your accounts. If you plan on doing multiple campaigns with SocialBot you will need to create a Company Profile for each website you intend to promote. Once you’ve completed this step its time to jump into Account Profiles. Within Account Profiles the default profile for SocialBot has 94 services to choose from – there are also lists for Popular Services (50), CAPTCHA Sites (7) and Scuttle Sites (37). If you are not too keen on using the pre-made lists you can do what I did and create your own list (my personal lists consists of 39 services, 5 of which require CAPTCHA).
The Catch
Now here’s the catch with SocialBot v4.1 – you must create accounts for all the Social Bookmarking sites and verify the emails. The bottom line is that unlike Bookmarking Demon 5 which automates this process, you will need to go to eat sign up page: create the account, verify the account via email and then enter in your login/password details in SocialBot v4.1. For my personal Account Profile of 39 Services I spent about 90 minutes setting up these accounts. The good news is that this process is not half as bad as it sounds because SocialBot does semi-automate the process. For each service on the list a window to the right appears with a sign up link. When you click the sign up link an internal browser will appear and most of the fields for creating the account will be filled with the information entered in our Company Profile. Since website registration pages are always changing you can also right click in any of the fields and a pop-up window will appear which gives you one-click access to any of your Company Profile data. Although you have to be present to register for the Social Bookmarking sites – you will never have to type on the keyboard during the process.
Now that you’ve created your Company Profile and completed setting up your Account Profile you are ready to jump into the Web Sites buttons: Sites / Pages. Sites is exactly what it sounds like, you add your website to the list and either spider or create a sitemap. I skipped both of those options and headed straight for Pages where you can select the site name and also click the Spider button. For my Wordpress blog I was able to spider my entire site, but by default you will return many results for tags, categories, and comments pages that you do not need in your bookmarking project. This is the time when you want to use the Default Filters button on the toolbar. I ended up using the Bulk Insert option in the Pages section and copy and pasted the URLs for the pages I was hoping to promote. Once you have the URL you would like to promote on the list in Pages simply check the box next to the name and click the Submit button on the Toolbar. A new window will appear and ask you which Account Profile you would like to use – this is when you’ll select from either the Default / Popular Services / CAPTCHA Sites / Scuttle Sites or from your own list you’ve created.
How Long Does It Take?
The process of submitting my 39 Social Bookmarking sites takes approximately 5 minutes per URL. Since SocialBot v4.1 does not support multi-threading (multiple simultaneous submissions) like some other Bookmarking Software the process is a bit longer. There is also no way of verifying the submissions since you only have a Status column in the Submission Process Window and once the process completes this window disappears. Of course you can verify the results in the page details window, but this only alerts you if there were any errors and for which particular site. It does not link you to the actual submission and this is a major problem. From my testing the Status is only accurate about 70% of the time. After manually verifying my submissions I’ve found that only 27 out of my 39 sites worked properly even though every item on my list showed Completed without any Errors. On the plus side at least I did not have to manually submit my article to 27 sites, but since I paid for the product I expect it to work as advertised.
Summary
SocialBot v4.1 is a decent product, but it is not without its flaws. The lack of multi-threading, adding new Social Bookmarking services, submission verification, automated account creation and email verification really leave a lot to be desired for the user. At a price point of $24.95 or less, the product performs about as good as one could expect with the price – the bottom line is that you get what you pay for with SocialBot. If you are hoping that you can get around buying Bookmarking Demon 5 or BookmarkWiz for a fraction of the price I’m sorry to say that this is probably not the case. For someone looking to mass submit to a couple dozen Social Bookmarking sites, SocialBot, does the job. For your major services such as Twitter and Facebook I recommend manually submitting and then leaving the rest up to SocialBot v4.1. If you are worried about being able to verify which sites submit successfully I can tell you that Digg, Fark, Furl, Mister-wong, Reddit, Slashdot and del.icio.us all work well with SocialBot v4.1.
