Now that StumbleUpon has been acquired by eBay for something like $75 million, I was expecting to see quite a few knock-off websites vying to be the next StumbleUpon. But for some reason, I haven’t seen much of anything. (Which is a surprise when you look at the number of Myspace and Youtube clones.)

But I did stumble upon (pun intended) a site called SiteShuffle.

The SiteShuffle homepage states:

SiteShuffle is the NEW Web application that turns your HOMEPAGE into a WEBSITE PLAYER, and gives you the ability to FF or REW through a LINKLIST of your favorite WEBSITES.

PLUS, get automated RECOMMENDATIONS for other sites, based on your similarity to other users in the SiteShuffle system.

Sounds like fun. And quite similar to StumbleUpon, if you think about the recommendation part. It even has a toolbar and a button, just like SU.

The button is just like any other button, like the ones I have in the sidebar on this blog like “Add to Technorati.” SiteShuffle says it is the only “dark and dangerous” button, but I’m not sure where they came up with that. Must be part of their branding…

As for the toolbar, it looks like you could use SiteShuffle without it, whereas StumbleUpon really requires the toolbar for it to be worthwhile. The SS toolbar will help you add URLs to your shuffle list, but mainly I see it as a way for them to keep SiteShuffle fresh in your mind. I guess the fact that you can see your own list or search for something just from the sites in your list is useful (but not totally necessary, especially if you already have 5 toolbars in your browser.)

The site looked promising enough, at least as far as promoting my site to other people, so I went ahead and signed-up.

I started by adding some of my favorite sites to my list. Now when I get to my SS homepage, I can easily FF or REW through my list (using neat buttons) just like they promised. When I get to one I like, I just click its title or the launch button.

(Click the thumbnail to see a larger version of my homepage.)

And that is what SiteShuffle boils down to. It’s not bad, but it’s not that intuitive.

For example, I still don’t know how to get my recommended sites. I keep searching their site and still can’t figure it out. All it says is “add sites to your list and we’ll give you recommendations based on what other people like.” That would be great if it gave me any recommendations!!

Perhaps no one else has listed webmaster sites like Digitalpoint and DoshDosh? Am I the only internet marketer on there?

SiteShuffle has been around well over a year now and I don’t have a clue what their user base is, but the site has a PR6 right now despite an Alexa rank of about 1,225,000. Perhaps if there were more webmasters, the Alexa rank would be better, because webmasters are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed. Anyway, back to business…

SiteShuffle does offer an API, which could be a big part of their future success. If people build add-ons or integrate it into their own sites, it will increase SS’s competitive advantage to help ward off future competitors. Kind of like how the Facebook platform is making headlines right now.

Last but not least, the affiliate program. Just what I was hoping for!

Actually, I had no clue how they could work an affiliate program into this type of service, but they did it, and they did it in a very smart way. If someone signs-up through your referral link, your site is automatically added to their SiteShuffle list! Nice and sneaky!

It looks like you don’t even have to be a member of SiteShuffle either. Hell, you could hate SiteShuffle, but display their banner just to market your website!

That’s smart because a) they are making it very simple for you to promote their website, and b) they are providing you an incentive by letting you promote your site at the same time!

Overall I think SiteShuffle is a decent site, although it leans more towards social bookmarking than website sharing (which is what made StumbleUpon so great.) Maybe SiteShuffle is actually a Del.icio.us competitor.

I bet we could call it stum.blicio.us instead!

Now go ahead and sign-up for SiteShuffle by clicking here.

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Literally. Fasterfox is a Firefox extension that sucks all of your server’s resources and your bandwidth for nothing!

It’s supposed to help its users by “prefetching” web pages that they might visit in the future. But what it really does is screw webmasters. If someone with FasterFox browses your site, it will visit every single link on your page so it can cache them, just in case the visitor decides to click one later. If they do, the page will supposedly load faster for that user.

But for that one link the user clicks, the FasterFox bot could easily waste 100 times that amount of bandwidth. So if you don’t want your bandwidth wasted, you’ll want to create a robots.txt file to block Fasterfox.

You might be thinking, “wouldn’t allowing Fasterfox enhance my user’s experience so they like my site more?” The answer could be yes, but the question is all wrong. You should be asking, “how can I make my website load as fast as possible for everyone?” You’d be better off caching your pages than allowing this bandwidth eating bot anywhere near your site.

So let’s get to that robots.txt file…

If you don’t yet have a robots.txt file, all you have to do is open up Notepad, create a blank document, and save it as robots.txt. Then upload that to the root directory of your website.

To block Fasterfox, just add these two lines of code to the robots.txt file:

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

Be sure to upload the updated file to your site.

Now you can recommend Firefox without worry that Fasterfox will affect your site!

(I first heard about this thanks to Revenue Girl.)

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If you’re not using social bookmarking buttons on your website yet, you are way behind! It’s totally the cool thing to do these days!

If you are just starting your website, then be sure to check this out so you can get in on the social bookmarking craze!

You want to allow your visitors to add your pages to whatever social bookmarking service they use. It’s not too hard to add the buttons, but it’s something you can do in one step, so you can spend more time marketing.

The trick is to give your users plenty of options without filling your site with hundreds of little buttons. You could just use a few of the most popular services like Digg and Delicious, but you’re sure to alienate people that way. And like I said, too many buttons makes your site look spammy.

Which is why I like the Socializer plugin. It offers your visitors just about every option, but it only requires one link on your site, so it’s the best of both worlds.

Go to the Socializer page (scroll down to the webmasters part) to add tons of social bookmarking buttons to your site with one link. You can use Javascript, PHP, or a Wordpress plugin.

To see the Wordpress plugin in action, just click on my “More options” link at the bottom of this post, beside the Digg, Delicious, and Reddit buttons.

Feel free to add this blog post to your bookmarks while you’re there!

Edit: Now you can use the “Bookmark or Share This Article” link at the bottom of each post.

Earlier I blogged about some software called the Web 2.0 Submitter. It’s supposed to be a way for webmasters to save time by automating the task of submitting web pages to social bookmarking sites.

Well, nice idea, but you’d be better off using the Socializer functionality on your site. It will let your site visitors do this hard work for you! Save time and money this way!

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As Bart Simpson would say to the internet marketing gurus, “Eat my shorts!”

But Brent Turner put his own spin on it and went with “Eat my frog” for his wacky internet marketing blog.

There are two reasons I wanted to throw this out there:

One, his blog is along the same lines as this one (i.e. it’s extremely fun and interesting to read!)

Two, it hasn’t been updated for almost a year! It was a good blog, WTF is going on? I want to read more!

But aside from my selfishness of wanting to read more, the lack of updates doesn’t help this guy’s reputation. See, he apparently runs a graphic design service, too. If his blog is outdated with no explanation, how would I know that he is still around and working? Maybe he’s retired or on vacation, so I’ll just move on instead of expending the effort of emailing him.

Oh wait! Just in the nick of time, he launched a new frog blog! Maybe there is hope for more posts?

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If you’re heading out to any Fourth of July picnics in the next couple weeks, feel free to use as much relish as you want. But if you’re blogging, be careful if you get into any Comment Relish.

Comment Relish is a Wordpress plugin that will send a welcome email to any new commenters.

I was considering using it myself, until it crashed John Chow’s blog for two hours!

I guess it’s pretty good for new blogs, but it could crash a blog with lots of comments.

See, it runs through all your comments to see if the current commenter has left a comment before. That way it can dispatch a welcome email to the new guys. Problem is, that query can really take a toll on your MySQL database!!

All is not lost though. The Patchlog made an edited version of Comment Relish you could try.

Hopefully there will be a new version of Comment Relish sometime without these problems.

Until then, stick with sweet relish!

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If you’ve ever been to an industry conference or trade show or at least read about them online, you’re probably familiar with “booth babes.” That’s the term for the hot girls that hang out at booths to attract the guys!

With all the hoopla around booth babe competitions and sexism, I’m wondering how long it will take before they are using a new marketing technique dubbed assvertising.

Just imagine walking by the Azoogle booth, checking out the ‘goods’ when a babe walks by you and lifts up her skirt to reveal a “follow me to the CPX Interactive booth” slogan. That would most definitely grab my attention.

Or if you can’t afford your own booth, why not just send some of these beauties to walk around the showroom floor? Then they can accidentally drop things and bend over to pick them up.

Booth babes certainly look good, so why not make the most of it and assvertise? I don’t think you can classify it as “black hat.”

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Jon from WickedFire and AOJon.com is pretty infamous in the internet marketing world. If you don’t know why, just browse his forums and read some of the link bait on his blog.

But if you check out his blog, you’ll see it doesn’t shape up to what all the SEO and blogging gurus say is the best way to do things.

For example, there is no big RSS button promoting his “full feed.” There’s really no mention of RSS other than the little Feedburner badge.

If you scroll further down, the monthly archive links get in the way of the real categories. Who cares when you wrote what?

Then if you go to a full post, the blog name comes before post name in page title. That totally screws up his SERPs!

Well, either Jon…

Doesn’t know what he’s doing is “wrong,”
Does not care what he does on his blog,
Or knows something that the gurus don’t.

Considering he has lots of money and the blog is a PR5, I think he’s doing just fine as it is!

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