Review of social bookmarking tool, Bookmarking Demon

Another update from Edwin, and still more delays. According to Edwin, the one feature that’s holding up the new release of Bookmarking Demon 4 is the new pinging feature. However, there should be a beta release of BMD4 coming out very soon that we should be able to play with. Although I was looking forward to the new pinging feature, I still would love to test drive the beta release to see how well it works.

In his last email, Edwin also released a couple of screenshots of the upcoming BMD4. As you can see, Bookmarking Demon 4 has undergone a complete rewrite and now has a completely new look and feel.

BMD 4 Beginner Mode

BMD 4 Expert Mode

In my last post, I stated that Bookmarking Demon 4 was set to come up the 2nd week of August. Well, it’s the end of August, and still no BMD4. However, Edwin did send out an email to all customers apologizing for the delay and he also gave us a preview of what’s going to be in this new version. So here’s a taste of what’s coming up.

• Bookmark to 100+ Social Bookmarking Sites
  Bookmarking Demon 4 will now work with 20 Main Sites + Scuttle Sites + Scuttle Plus Sites + Pligg Sites
• New Randomize Description Syntax
  Along with the current #break# syntax, you can now use the new ‘{|}’ syntax to do something like this:
  Bookmarking Demon is the {best | greatest | cheapest} Bookmarking {tool | software | program} available.
• Bookmark random accounts
  Now you can select a random number of accounts to use for bookmarking.
• Ping feature
  After creating your bookmarking account, you will now have access to the rss feed of that account. This allows you to ping your profile’s feed from within BMD4.
• Grab random sites to hide your bookmarks
  Bookmarking Demon 4 will now take random urls from the internet and mix them in with your own urls.
• Beginner and Expert Modes
• Multithreaded for faster bookmarking

All in all, this sounds like an exciting looking release. The new bookmark random accounts and pinging feature sound especially cool. Bookmarking Demon 4 will retail for $147, but if you buy now, you can still lock in at the $97 price.

A couple of people have ask me when the next version of BookmarkingDemon is coming out. According to the website, BMD v4 is scheduled for released during the second week of August. BMD4 is supposed to be a major upgrade and will be sold at a higher price then the current $97. However, existing members can buy version 3.6.1 now, and get the upgrade for free when it comes out. So if you’re on the fence about picking up a copy of Bookmarking Demon, I would suggest you jump in now. The 2nd week of August is coming upon us very soon. I’m very anxious to see what the new features will be in this new version.

The latest version of Bookmarking Demon (version 3.6.1), supports 13 different social networking sites.  I’ve compiled the list of supported sites, including its page rank and whether the site is nofollow or dofollow.

del.icio.us PR 9 nofollow
furl.net PR 7 nofollow
bibsonomy.org PR 6 dofollow
bmaccess.net PR 4 dofollow
faves.com PR 5 nofollow
getboo.com PR 4
linkagogo.com PR 6 dofollow
mister-wong.com PR 7 dofollow
netrocket.com PR 5 dofollow
netvouz.com PR 6 nofollow
simpy.com PR 6
spotback.com PR 5 dofollow
spurl.net PR 6 dofollow
taggly.com PR 5

Update Sept 27, 2008
For those checking at this time, this site no longer appears in Google’s index for the terms described below. That’s because, for some reason, my webhost (Dreamhost) “accidently” deleted this site from their server. I’ve been getting things back up and hopefully the site gets re-indexed in a little bit.

I’ve now been using Bookmarking Demon for 10 days and I wanted to give an updated review on my experiences so far. One of the advantages cited by the program is that it will help your sites get indexed by Google faster. Well, if you are expecting BookmarkingDemon to get your site indexed in 1 or 2 days, you will probably be disappointed. As a test, I performed a couple of Bookmarking Demon runs on this site, which was only a couple of days old and previously unindexed. I did this on the 5th of June, and I did not see this site indexed until June 9th. Four days is not too bad, but you can probably get indexed faster by getting links from a PR4 or PR5 site.

What I am happy with are my search results. As I check at this moment, I now rank #1 for the term bookmarkingdemon review and #2 for the term bookmarking demon review. I also rank #13 for bookmarking demon and #16 for bookmarkingdemon. I’m sure I’m helped quite a bit by my domain name, but I’m quite impressed by the results.

After 10 days of usage though, what I love the most about BookmarkingDemon is the amount of time I’m saving. I have around 20 sites in my portfolio and I have one of my computers dedicated to using BookmarkingDemon and continually submitting my sites. Doing this by hand would be near impossible and this is what makes this program great. If anyone has any questions about the program, feel free to ask in the comments.

Ok, I’ve been doing some more research and playing around, and here are 4 tips for using Bookmarking Demon.

1) Add as many keywords (at least 8-10) as you can to your url submissions. Each keyword you include becomes a new page and backlink to your site. 20 social bookmarking sites * 10 tags = 200 links per Bookmarking Demon run.

2) Remember to check the email you used to create your accounts and activate the accounts. This is kind of obvious, but I’ve already forgotten a couple of times after creating new accounts.

3) When using the regular bookmarking sites (not the scuttle ones), make sure and mask your links. When submitting your own sites, make sure and mix in other urls from other sites as well. Add pages from sites like Techcrunch, Mashable, Engadget, etc or you can use Stumbleupon to give you some suggestions.

4) Scuttle away. While you need to be careful using regular bookmarking sites, go wild and submit your URLs to the scuttle sites. I didn’t know what these were previously, but scuttle sites are basically unknown, low traffic social bookmarking sites created by a scuttle script. Now, don’t expect much traffic from them, but hey, enjoy the many backlinks!

The next couple of tabs in BookmarkingDemon are labeled Multiscuttle and Search for Scuttles. At this time, I have no idea what these do, but anyway, I just want to bookmark my site. The site I am going to test with is a Sudoku related site that I had created awhile back. According to Google Webmaster Tools, it currently is at position 27 for the term ‘free sudoku’ and position 325 for ’sudoku’. Lets see if BookmarkingDemon can help a bit with its ranking.

The Bookmark URL tab is pretty simple. To add a site to bookmark, you first need to click on the Add URL button.

A dialog pops up where you enter your site’s url. To fill out the rest of the form (title, keywords, and description), Bookmarker Demon has a handy shortcut you can invoke by pressing the Load from meta tags button. This pings your site and fills out the rest of the form by using your site’s meta data. When you’re finished, you end up back in the Bookmark URL tab with your site added to the list and the title, keywords, and description fields filled out. Here again, you’ll be able to utilize BookmarkingDemon’s sweet randomizing function. This works with all three fields and lets you change up the content on each bookmarking site your site gets submitted to. When you’re ready to go, just click the BOOKMARK! and your site gets added to each bookmarking site. The whole process takes a couple of minutes and this time there are no captchas to enter. When Bookmarking Demon is complete, it pops up a dialog showing which bookmarking sites it was able to add your site to. All in all, it was quite a painless process. Basically in under 15 minutes I was able to create my accounts and submit a site. Up next, I will take a look at some of the other options of BookmarkingDemon that I have yet to explore.

Purchasing BookmarkingDemon was quite straightforward. I immediately received my download link and I had to enter my name and email address so I could receive my password. One bad thing is that my main system is a Mac and Bookmarking Demon is for Windows only - so I had to go grab my Windows laptop to install the software on. The site says it works with Windows XP, but I was able to get things working on Vista. The download link I got was for the May 24th version of BookmarkingDemon and from reading the help, the software gets updated quite often.

When you first start BookmarkingDemon, you are first asked to input your password which you should have received in your email. Once that’s in you are dropped into the Drivers screen.

A driver is basically a single bookmarking site and this first page allows you to create your accounts at all sites currently supported by BookmarkingDemon. The first thing I did was click on the Create accounts for all drivers button. This pops up a dialog that lets you input your users’ First name, Last name, Login, Password, and email. Now here’s the first cool part. If you enter a bunch of login names separated by commas, BookmarkingDemon will randomly pick from the list of names to create an account with. Think about it, that’s a great feature. After you enter the user account info, Bookmarking Demon will start doing its thing and create the accounts for you. Unfortunately, you can’t walk away at this point as you have to enter in a bunch of CAPTCHAS as they pop up. The process takes several minutes, but when it’s complete you’ll see a list of what sites Bookmarking Demon was able to create accounts for. As bookmarking sites are always changing, so is BookmarkingDemon, but it looks like it will never reach 100% a success rate. Still, in my limited experience, account creation works well enough.

Up Next: Bookmarking my site

I saw a post on BloggerUnleashed the other day about an interesting program called BookmarkingDemon by Edwin Brian. BookmarkingDemon is a simple little application that automates the process of submitting links to Social Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, faves.com, spurl.net and many more. I know I’ve tried submitting my sites to some of these sites and its a big pain in the butt. Even using a free service like SocialMarker.com can still be quite tedious to use. After hearing about BookmarkingDemon I went to the homepage and watched some of the videos and I was quite impressed. Everything was automated, and you could do some cool things like randomizing your account user names and your bookmark titles to make things appear less spammy. Once this whole process is done, I could see it would bring my sites more targeted traffic (via tags), faster search engine indexing, higher search engine ranking and probably even better Page Rank. Although the price tag of $97 is a little steep, the benefits were compelling, and I decided to take the plunge and purchase it. In this blog, I will be reviewing BookmarkingDemon as I take the program through its paces.