Onlywire Article Submission

In my last post I listed 72 social websites by usefulness for traffic or search engine optimization. The more sites you submit your articles to the better. The problem is that submitting articles to many social networking sites takes a lot of time, however there are many mass submission services that offer to make article submission easier for you. One of these services is Onlywire. In this post I describe my experiences with the onlywire semi-automatic mass submission service.

Semi-Automatic Social Network Aggregation

You have this great article and you want to submit it to a social bookmark aggregator to promote it. By social bookmark aggregator I mean any popular website that allows public sharing of bookmarks (called social bookmarking sites or social networking sites), b) promotes article by collective voting (social news aggregators). Examples for social bookmark aggregators are facebook, delicious, and digg.

To submit your article to a social bookmark aggregator you can use buttons for individual services or a social bookmarking toolbar, which integrates many networks. However with so many choices of social websites it is great to get some help from social network automation services, or mass submission services. Mass submission services can make the task of submitting to social networks much easier. You have to prepare most of the information only once: url (page address), post title, tags, and description. This information is then transmitted to each social networking service.

There are two kinds of mass submission services: mostly-manual or semi-automatic ones. With a mostly-manual submission service you connect with each social website as usual and manually complete the submission process. The submission automation services fills out some form fields for you but you are required to complete and review fields and press the submit button.

With a semi-automatic mass submission service, you are spared the completion step. The submission service automatically enters your url, post title, tags into forms at different social websites. This means your article is submitted to different social websites at the press of a single button.

Mostly-manual services include socialposter, socializer, and getbookmark. I tried out socialposter which offers submission help for 72 popular bookmark aggregators and which works great, but still requires many manual steps.

As for semi-automatic submission, apart from several commercial software products there is the onlywire automatic social mass submission service. In the following I will write about my experience with onlywire.

Onlywire

To use onlywire, you first need to get a free account at onlywire and then provide usernames and passwords for up to 32 different social networking sites. I don't like to give away my passwords to third-parties but I went along with it anyway. It took me some time to create new accounts at several of these networks. Some logins work at first try others didn't (e.g. delicious). Annoyingly, onlywire sends spam by default any time you change accounts as a way of self-promotion.

After this setup, you are ready to go and enter the specifics of your submissions, i.e., again: url, post title, description, and tags. I didn't like about the tags that they are space-separated which prevented me from entering more complex terms such as "search engine optimization."

After a pressing a submit button, you might have to wait up to 5 to 10 minutes to get a list with feedback for the submission. For each social network you see one of three values: success, failure, or finalization. Finalization means that a manual step is required.

I submitted about 45 articles using onlywire. This table sums up my experiences:

Social Networking Service	Onlywire Report	Remarks
Digg	SUCCESS	works. Finalization step only requires choosing of category and entering a capcha.
Stumbleupon	SUCCESS	works
Simpy	SUCCESS	works
Propeller	FAILURE	Most submissions work, however the article description is not entered correctly.
Plaxo	FAILURE
Newsvine	FAILURE	account disabled
Fark	FAILURE	works partly
BookmarkSync	SUCCESS	links are private by default (not visible to others). How make them public?
Bibsonomy	SUCCESS	works
Spurl	SUCCESS	works
Reddit	FINALIZE	Finalization doesn't work. Returns some javascript feed error.
Plurk	SUCCESS	works
Multiply	SUCCESS	Doesn't work at all, not submitted
Mixx	FINALIZE	requires insertion of all data again
Mister Wong	SUCCESS	works
LinkaGoGo	SUCCESS	works
Jumptags	FAILURE	works
Hi5	SUCCESS	not submitted
Faves	SUCCESS	works for around a third, you have to vote your own article to get to 2 votes
Diigo	SUCCESS	works half of the time, submitted as private, marking as public requires editing of each post entry
Delicious	FAILURE	login doesn't work
Connotea	FINALIZE	requires entry of all data again
Blinklist	SUCCESS	doesn't work
Bebo	SUCCESS	works (social network)

"Works partly" means that only some of the submissions show up in the network. "Not submitted" means that article submissions do not appear in the network. This means that either submission didn't work or they could have been deleted.

Note that some social news sites have declared war on onlywire and will treat onlywire submissions as spam. This could mean that if you have used onlywire your article submissions could be treated as spam and be deleted right away. At netvibes my account was terminated because of violations of codes of conduct.

My new delicious login, which uses a yahoo cookie, didn't work with onlywire.

My jumptags account was confirmed by jumptags admins after 3 days much later as all other services, so I only submitted very few articles.

Conclusions

Submissions are very fast, however do not work reliably for all networks. In such cases you could use a mostly-manual submission service, such as socialposter, or to visit important social networks individually.

The success of article submissions was very variable. From the automatic submissions I have gotten several visitors from propeller, and no visitors from other sites. From stumbleupon I got from today around 3800 visitors within the last 7 days for mostly two articles, Firefox in Parallel - A Pre-Release Version and Can the Second Law of Thermodynamics be Violated?.

I think this kind of traffic is a great success and I hope the created links will help the blog to further increase from now (since December 31st) pagerank 3.

Enjoy. What are your experiences with social network submission or submission automation?