Introduction

Nowadays, the number of social bookmarking sites has grown rapidly. It is absolutely essential to submit your articles and links to various bookmarking sites as it will generate more traffic thereby improving the Alexa rank and revenues. But it will be a tedious task to manually post the submissions to each and every web site. Hence, there is a need for an automated tool which has the ability to submit links to various popular bookmarking sites.

Incansoft has developed a light-weight software product named SocialBot which has the ability to submit links to over 1200 social bookmarking web sites. The product has been developed using .NET Framework and hence you need to install .NET Framework redistributable in order to install and work with it.

Usage

In order to work with SocialBot, you need to complete a series of steps. Firstly, you need to add a company profile by providing your first name, last name, username, password, e-mail, URL and other miscellaneous details as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 - Company Profile Creation

The product will make use of these details to create accounts in social bookmarking sites, which is the next step you need to perform. But before creating accounts with bookmarking sites, you should create an account profile. The product ships with one default profile of over 1200 sites including a separate profile for top 50 popular sites and CAPTCHA sites. However, it will be sufficient if you submit your links to the sites mentioned in Popular Services profile as it will be tedious to create accounts in all the sites.

In order to create a new account profile, you should click New Profile button from the Account Profiles page. You need to provide a descriptive name and select all the sites which you need to file under the profile as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Account Profile Creation

As you can see I have only selected few bookmarking sites instead of the sites listed in Popular Services profile. I would recommend you to create accounts in batches rather than in a single phase. The screen will now look like Figure 3.

Figure 3

SocialBot supports both manual and automatic creation of accounts. However, you will be required to provide a CAPTCHA code for each site during the registration process. I believe that the vendor should integrate an automatic technique for entering the code in the next version of the product, as it will save enormous amount of time. The product automatically fills the relevant fields in each site during manual account creation. You only need to spend time for creating accounts in each site.

In order to create accounts automatically, select the profile and click Sign Up button as seen in Figure 3. A new window as shown in Figure 4 appears on the screen.

Figure 4 - Creating Automated Accounts

You can either opt to create accounts in selected sites or all sites depending upon your requirements. I noticed that the product fails to create automated accounts in several sites and it throws error messages prompting you to create accounts manually. Moreover, it also takes huge amount of time to create accounts because of the time required to feed the CAPTCHA code for each and every site.

The next step is to add the relevant website to the system by entering the URL in the Sites field as shown below

Figure 5

In order to post links to the social bookmarking site, you need to select the site that has been just added from the Site drop down box in the Pages section. Once the URL has been selected, you need to click Add New button. A new dialog with the title Advanced Page Editor pops up as shown below

Figure 6

As you can see the product automatically fetches the Title, Keywords and Description if you select Get META Tags button and the title will be displayed on the home page as shown below

Figure 7

In order to start the submission process, select the Submit icon from the top ribbon after check marking the title from the above displayed screen and select Popular Services option from the Profile drop down from the Submission Process window.

As you can observe there is an option to enter the number of threads. It means that if you select 5 then SocialBot engine will attempt to submit links to 5 sites and it will process another set of sites after finishing the first task. I would suggest you to enter more threads only if you have a system with high end CPU.

I noticed that the product successfully submits links to nearly 80% of the sites listed under the Popular Services profile but fails to submit links to certain sites and triggers error messages as you can see from the above figure.

I would suggest the vendor to provide an option to sort the sites based on Page Rank as users prefers to submit links to sites with high page ranks. I would also like to see the addition of Twitter to the list of bookmarking sites in the next version of the product. The product also generates reports after the completion of each submission process. Moreover, the cost of the product is less when compared with other competing products.

The product is flexible and can be used as per your specific requirements by enabling and disabling the bookmarking sites. I must say that the product works well for submission of links to the sites listed under Popular Services profile but doesn't work properly for other sites. However, you can pick sites based on various trial and error methods which you will learn after prolonged usage of the product.

The user interface is simple to understand and doesn't contain any complicated menus and wizards. I would recommend SocialBot if you are looking for a cheap automated software for submission of links to several social bookmarking sites.  

About the Product

Title	SocialBot V4.3
Price	US $29.95
Rating	***
URL	Buy Now

About the Author

Anand Narayanaswamy is a Microsoft MVP who works as an independent consultant based in Trivandrum, India. He is the author of Community Server Quickly (Packt Publishing) and runs www.learnxpress.com and www.dotnetalbum.com