Entries Tagged 'Review' ↓

Bookmarking Demon is a really useful social bookmarking tool, and it’s still a daily part of my link building process. It’s both fast and simple to use. Still, I’m always looking for an extra edge when building links on social bookmarking sites and I’ve come across a cool tool called Synnd. Instead of you bookmarking your own sites using Bookmarking Demon, Synnd leverages the power of it’s 800 plus members and has them build backlinks on social bookmarking sites for you. Everything is mostly automated, and after a few months now as a member, I’ve found I’m getting some really nice results with it. In this Synnd review, I’m going to share with you exactly how Synnd works and how to use it.

The Synnd system is based on the idea of credits. To obtain credits, you need to need to build links for other Synnd member’s campaigns. Everything is done through the Synnd dashboard, which is a really slick looking web application. To start, you first need to create or add your accounts on the social bookmarking sites that Synnd currently supports. The list of sites changes frequently, but at the time of this review, Synnd currently supports the following sites:

• Bibsonomy
• BlinkList
• Delicious
• Diigo
• Faves
• Folkd
• Jumptags
• Mister-Wong
• MyLinkVault
• Url.org
• Digg
• Mixx
• Reddit
• Twitter

Instead of manually logging in to each site and adding people’s bookmarks, Synnd makes this simple by semi-automating the process. When you first start, you need to install a program (Windows only) called the Remote Automator (RA). Then in the Synnd dashboard, you can get a list of outstanding campaigns that need bookmarking and you can bookmark their links directly in the interface. Behind the scenes, the Synnd system will connect to your Remote Automator to complete the tasks, although the bookmarking process themselves are run on the Synnd servers. You also get a free 500 credits as part of the basic membership, which is even distributed to you throughout the month. If you need more credits, you can also signup for more expensive membership options.

To build backlinks to your own sites, you need to setup campaigns in Synnd. All campaigns must be manually approved before going live. Synnd currently separates its sites into three different types of campaigns: Syndication Campaigns, Bookmarking Campaigns, and Twitter campaigns. Syndication campaigns are for non-promotional content that you want to promote on Digg, Mixx, or Reddit. Each of these three sites have some sort of voting mechanism to indicate the popularity of user submissions. Since these sites are pretty strict about the content submitted, the Synnd reviewers are also very strict about approving syndication campaigns. Don’t bother wasting time submitting posts that have obvious affiliate links as they won’t get approved. However, if you have some great content that you think could get spread virally with a little help, you definitely want to give a syndication campaign a try.

Bookmarking and Twitter campaigns are a lot less strict and easier to get approved, and the two I normally use to build backlinks and get traffic with. For bookmarking campaigns, you need to submit a spun title, description and tags, so that each submission to the system will be unique. Twitter campaigns are even simpler to submit to, as no spinning is required at all. You also need to specify the max number of credits to spend on each campaign, and how many credits per day each campaign will receive.

There’s a bit of a learning curve to getting started with Synnd, but once you are up and running you shouldn’t have too many issues. There’s an excellent Synnd user guide which I recommend you read through before getting started. Like I mentioned, the dashboard is very slick and simple to use. You can see the status of all your campaigns at a glance, and see how many credits you have spent and earned.

The only problem I have with Synnd, is that campaigns only seem to be approved like once per day. So if you campaign gets rejected for whatever reason, you normally to wait a whole day to get it re approved. Another issue I have, is that even if you have a ton of credits, there’s still some built in throttling so you can’t spend too many credits a day, no matter how many campaigns you have.

Still, I am quite pleased with my results with Synnd so far. Used in conjunction with Bookmarking Demon, I am able to build links to my sites on social bookmarking sites very easily. Plus, since my urls are getting bookmarked on the same site multiple times by different users, I definitely see some traffic from these sites as well. I love how everything is basically automated, and it makes building links super simple. A Synnd membership is $67 a month, but you can sign up for a Synnd trial to get 14 days of access for only $1. That’s more then enough time to see if the system works for you.

Synnd definitely has the potential to become a great social bookmarking system. There’s some really cool new features coming up in the next month or so, including article submissions and automated content spinning. When those things go live, Synnd could become the ultimate SEO link building tool. Anyway, try it out for yourself, and let me know what you think.

Try the Synnd 14 day trial

I was very excited today to receive an email from Edwin announcing the new Bookmarking Demon 5 release. I quickly downloaded BMD5 and after playing with it for a couple of hours this morning, I am quite impressed with the new features that were added. Although the look is still similar to BMD4, the layout has been completely revamped and is much better organized. Anyway, in the rest of this post, let me give you guys an overview of the new changes of Bookmarking Demon 5.

The first big change of BMD5 is the new project management interface. This gives you a way to create a project for your different bookmarking campaigns and organize them more effectively. For example, I can now have one project for my Affiliit Review blog and another one for my Affiliate Marketing tips site. If you don’t want to create a project, you can always use the Default Project that comes with BMD5. Some people use Bookmarking Demon as part of their automated social bookmarking backlink services and this is a great way to organize and track your bookmarking submissions for each client.

Bookmarking Demon has always been really easy to create new social bookmarking accounts with, but BMD5 makes this even simpler with the new email verification function. As you know, when you create accounts on social bookmarking sites, many of them require you to login to your email and click on a link to verify your account. With BMD5, you don’t have to do this anymore. Now you just add in your email accounts, and the software will perform the account verification for you with a click of the ‘Process Emails’ button. There is default support for the gmail account settings, although you do have to login to your gmail and manually enable POP access so BMD can properly retrieve your emails.

Of course any automated social bookmarking tool is nothing without social bookmarking sites to bookmark to. Bookmarking Demon 5 comes with support for 29 main bookmarking sites and 100 sites overall. This includes some big ones like Digg, Mixx, Delicious, Blinklist and Propeller. BMD has always included Scuttle, Scuttle Plus and Pligg sites, but BMD5 also adds support for PHPDug sites as well.

The other noticeable feature you will see when creating accounts and bookmarking your sites is the new browser mode. Previously, Bookmarking Demon was sort of a black box and you couldn’t really see what was going on while it was operating. The new Bookmarking Demon 5 browser mode interface basically opens up an internal browser window and you can see everything that BMD5 is doing, from logging in, to submitting your bookmarks. You will also be entering in any captchas if necessary through this browser. Also, everything is now multi-threaded which means that the software can submit to mutiple sites simultaneously. This significantly shortens the time it takes for BMD to complete all of its submissions.

The last cool feature I want to highlight is the new scheduling feature. I know from the comments on this blog, that many people have been looking for a way to space out their submissions instead of doing them all at once. Now with Bookmarking Demon 5, you can. The software includes its own scheduler interface where you can specify exactly what sites you want to bookmark and when. Once you set it all up, BMD5 will run in the background and submit your sites at the time and date you’ve specified. Of course, this only works with the bookmarking sites that don’t require a captcha.

I do have a couple of issues with BMD5 that I have encountered so far. For one, the list of social bookmarking accounts that say they require a captcha isn’t very accurate. In my tests, I had to enter in several captchas even though I had selected only accounts that BMD said didn’t require one. The other thing to note is that BMD5 still seems to have some stability issues, as the program did hang on me once. However, as a longtime BMD owner, I know that Edwin is really fast with the updates, so I am sure all these issues will be addressed in due time.

If you are an existing BMD owner, then Bookmarking Demon 5 is a free update, and you should have received an email from Edwin telling you where to download it. Otherwise, you can purchase the software for $147. The amount of time you will save with Bookmarking Demon is amazing, and it really is a must have program if you have a ton of sites you need to bookmark. After you grab your copy, make sure to check out my social bookmarking strategy for utilizing BMD to further dominate the search engine rankings for your sites.

Visit the Bookmarking Demon sales page

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.