As usual, I’m working on 50 things all at once.

I should be working on my SEO clients websites so I can make some extra dough…and I should be working on the Local search project I have going after paying $700 to learn how to do it better…but I’ve spent some time this week working on all those tools that post your updates to dozens or hundreds of other sites.

Of course, you know and use ping.fm, right?  That’s the grand-daddy of them all.  I’ve used that for quite some time.  I like this tool cause I can update multiple micro-blogs (twitter, identi.ca, plurk, etc) or I can also use it to post blog updates to mutiple blogs, like blogger, ning, xanga, etc.  Oh yeah, it also lets you do status updates.

Next, I use hellotxt.com for a similar function, but I don’t like that it doesn’t give you the option of choosing how you want the post to go out (ie. as a blog post, micro-blog post, or status update).  There’s a lot of extra networks here that you don’t find on ping.fm.  In fact, I even went further and signed up at all the non-English services.  When I couldn’t read the characters, I just pasted them into Google Translate.

Plus, one cool thing is that I connect these 2 sites/apps to twitterfeed.com so that when I make a blog post in my main niche, a message goes out over both services.  I might not have a ton of followers on all those sites, but who knows if all those links are getting seen, followed, and counted?  Sure, the URLs are getting shortened, but the word on the street is that Google is counting them as “mentions” nonetheless.

I did some looking around and found some misinformation among those discussing this subject, and found there are several sites that allow you to “gather” in all your networks into one place so you can read them all, but they don’t appear to allow you to send out messages.  Some of these, in case you’re interested, are:

  • http://www.retaggr.com/
  • http://www.dandyid.org
  • www.notify.me
  • http://www.profilactic.com/ which has like 300 sites you can pull from
  • and I *think* peoplebrowsr.com

But the only one I could find that appears to work like the first two sites above, is pixelpipe.com.  I’m in the process of signing up to all the new sites it has listed in it.  Man, oh man, it takes forever!!  Plus, they don’t have any links to the sites they mention, so that really sucks.  In many cases you have to Google them and hope you find the right service.  And even then, pixelpipe doesn’t give you any hints or tips on how to successfully add those sites to your profile.  No help in telling you where to get the API code, etc.  So, this one is taking hours just to add 3 or 4 sites.  And they support 108 sites.  Whew!

Lastly, what got me going on this was another service being offered by Howie Schwartz where he’s created a tool like these 3 I mention.  This tool supports more/other sites not seen in those 3 other services AND it goes a step further.  He solves the big problem with those sites.

I admit, using these services don’t really help to generate a lot of traffic for me (besides Twitter).  Right now I’m experimenting.  I’m shooting in the dark.  Only a few of those sites I post to actually have people that follow me on them.  Trees are falling in my forest but not everyone is hearing them.

Howie’s tool, SecretAutomator, not only posts to these sites, but it helps get you friends and followers by finding conversations in your niche and posts in them.  That’s a big, big thing.  Only catch, it costs $37/month (or less on a yearly plan).

So, you decide.  Either you can post for free to a bunch of services where there’s no one listening to you (hoping that the links will help out in some way), or you can auto-post for a fee, using a service that goes out and gets you friends by making posts in conversations that matter to them….

At least go read about it more: SecretAutomator

These are the things on my mind lately.