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Saturday, August 2, 2008 at 1:55pm UTC+01

Gents, My apologies for the long silence since our last test (which was, let's face it, a bit of flop). We have carried on experimenting a lot here at Snagsta over the past few weeks and am glad to say we have made some real progress with our promotional efforts. I therefore thought that now would be a good time to share some of our findings with you all. We posted a blog article yesterday which attrached over 1,240 visits. This was a new record for us and was all help from a couple of websites. Nearly all our traffic came from one source: http://news.ycombinator.com/ It's a gem of a site. StumbleUpon also sent us several dozen visitors but almost nothing from Mixx or Digg (and very, very little from Facebook). The key learning from yesterday's efforts and those over the past few weeks are as follows: 1. Title: The title of the post is everything - although the title of the post we used on our blog read "Lights, camera, action (well almost)" we changed the post's page title to "Tips to survive a prison stay". On the StumbleUpon and Y Combinator sites we listed the post under the title of "8 Tips on How to Survive a Prison Stay". 2. Timing: We have found that the best time to post something on the Y Combinator site is around 1.00pm BST - this when the audience in the USA starts waking up. 3. URL: We have found that pointing people to the specific referenced page rather than our blog's main page makes a big difference (i.e. http://blog.snagsta.com/2008/08/01/tips-to-survive-a-prison-stay/ rather than http://blog.snagsta.com) Apart from our progress with Y Combinator and StumbleUpon I'm afraid we haven't made any progress with Digg. We would like to try and crack this next and therefore ask that you help us conduct another very quick test that will take but a few seconds (if you already have an account set up with Digg). To take part, please visit this link and Digg our article: http://digg.com/odd_stuff/8_tips_on_how_to_survive_a_prison_stay Once done, please send me an email to alex.moore@snagsta.com so that I can track progress. I'll send out another update in a week or so with our findings. If we can get Digg working in tandem with Y Combinator and StumpleUpon we are on to a real winner. Please feel free to send me suggestions for a link we can use for our next test. Many thanks, Alex --------------------------------------------------------- alex moore co-founder, snagsta website: http://snagsta.com blog: http://blog.snagsta.com mobile: +44 7951 242 807 skypename: alexandermoore linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmoore twitter: https://twitter.com/alexandermoore ---------------------------------------------------------

Monday, May 26, 2008 at 4:09pm UTC+01

Gents, My apologies to you all for the lack of follow up since test 2. I'm afraid to say that our actions didn't help drive any traffic to Andrew's story; this is, of course, very disappointing. Some feedback from Picnicker extraordinaire Andrew Rogoff follows: 1. "if i look in stumbleupon, there only seem to be 3 of us that have added it. maybe that’s why?" It appears only me, Phil and Andrew Stumbled his article... 2. "could it be the fact that only a small number participated with any one service? could we get better results of we all focused on one service as opposed to multiple ones? especially as they don’t seem to be connected in any way. I think Mr. Rogoff could be on to a winner here. Unless anyone has any objections, let's therefore do StumbleUpon properly for test 3. Andrew has published an excellent link on the Picnic group's posted item section. It’s all about how to get the most out of StumbleUpon and is well worth a read if you have a few minutes to spare: http://www.elance.com/p/node/2864?rid=1B8BF I have written to the author to ask him if I can Snag his list for our site! Anyway, back to test 3; would anyone like to volunteer an interesting or amusing story? Lastly, if you’re didn’t take part in test 2 and don’t plan on helping out with test 3 can you please do the honourable thing and leave the group. Yes, I know we’re all busy people but to make this thing work we need everyone involved to take part in these infrequent tests so that we can all share in the rewards later. Best, Alex

Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 11:34am UTC+01

Gentlemen, If you haven't done so already can you please add the following link to 4 of your 5 SB accounts (pick any 4 at random) before end of day today: http://www.stagsandhens.com/swedish-stag-night-prank.php As mentioned earlier, please feel free to pick your own tags but try to make sure you include the words stag and night within your mix. We will have results to share early next week.. Best, Alex

Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 11:40am UTC+01

Gents, We are looking good to schedule test 2 for this coming Thursday (8th). So far I have confirmation from the following that they will have their 5 SB accounts set up and populated with a few random links by then (i.e. Delicious, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Mixx and Digg). Alex G Phil Jeff Andrew Martin Me Karl Still waiting for confirmation from: Joost Ivan Rowen Dug David Chris Andrew has posted some stats about his article on the Picnic discussion board. A summary follows: <snip> Here are some stats from 3 April to 3 May (Google Analytics): 1,051 Pageviews 964 Unique Views So that's around 31 uniques per day. </snip> Next steps… On Thursday morning UK time can you please add the following link to 4 of your 5 SB accounts (pick any 4 at random): http://www.stagsandhens.com/swedish-stag-night-prank.php Please feel free to pick your own tags but try to make sure you include the words stag and night within your mix. I will send another reminder about the test that morning just in case you forget. We will review the results of our activities early next week. Looking forward to seeing what we can all make happen! Andrew, I hope you server will be able to handle all the extra traffic we will send it! :) Best, Alex

Friday, May 2, 2008 at 6:36pm UTC+01

Gents, Thanks to both martin Abert and Andrew Rogoff for the feedback and questions this week. Folling on from Jeff's comments, Andrew had a good suggestion about holding off book marking his page until most of us had set up accounts and added pages to our test SB sites i.e. Delicious, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Mixx and Digg. If you don't have accounts already, please therefore set them up across all sites ASAP and add a few random links to some of your favourite pages whilst you're at it. Please wite to me at alex.moore@snagsta.com when you're done. When enough of us are ready to go we can then flick the switch and I'll initiate the test 2 via another Picnic group email. Hope you are in agreement - let me know if you're not. Alex

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 11:12am UTC+01

Gentlemen of the picnic, Thanks to Martin Abert and Andrew Rogoff for both volunteering pages for us to play with during our second social bookmarking experiment. Sorry Abes, but the page from Andrew's Stags and Hens site is probably more suitable this time round so we'll move ahead with this. It's an amusing story about a Swedish stag night prank. A link follows: http://www.stagsandhens.com/swedish-stag-night-prank.php Based on feedback from our cheese eating picnicker Joost de Valk we would like to test this page out on the following sites: Delicious, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Mixx and Digg. If you haven't set up accounts on any of the above please do so before end of day tomorrow (Thursday). Our target date to post Andrew's link on these site is Friday. Andrew, in the mean time, can you please provide us all with some info regarding the page such as average daily page views, SEO performance on Google and Yahoo! etc. etc. It will be great to monitor the effects our test has on this historical data. Alex