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Archive for category Website Marketing

Win $50.00 – theSUGGESTR.com Launch Contest

Jul 9

Posted by fmapap in Website Marketing, theSUGGESTR | No Comments

Local suggestion site theSUGGESTR.com is holding a contest as part of its re-launch that will grant $50.00 worth of Perk Points* to the user who earns the most points between now and August 17th 2008.  Points can be earned by just rating places on the site and inviting friends.  What’s even better is points earned as part of this contest also apply to theSUGGESTR’s standard Rewards Program. 

If your not familiar with theSUGGESTR.com click here to Learn More. 

*Perk Points can be redeemed for a $50 gift card at one of many excellent stores.

contest rewards program suggestion theSUGGESTR win money

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Huge directory list sorted by PageRank

Apr 19

Posted by fmapap in Website Marketing | 9 Comments

Directories SEO Websie promotion Website marketing

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MyFriendSuggests.com Joins New Rewards Program

Mar 22

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests, Website Marketing | No Comments

We are pleased to announce that MyFriendSuggests.com has joined the MyPerkPlace Perk Network.

MyPerkPlace is a brand new website that aims to allow other websites to reward it’s users for contributing and participating in the growth of a website. For us, that means you get rewarded for things like rating places, adding your comments and inviting friends. For each action you take you earn Perk Points, the Perk Points you earn at MyFriendSuggests.com are then combined with Perk Points you earn at other Perk Network members sites. You then can redeem the points for great rewards, such as gift cards to Circuit City, Amazon.com, Best Buy and many more great stores.

So what’s the catch? Well nothing really – all you do is use MyFriendSuggests.com and earn points, we then notify MyPerkPlace.com about your points and when you earn enough you redeem them! No one ever asks for your credit card and it never costs you a penny (it does cost us some money but it’s our way of saying thanks for helping to grow MyFriendSuggests.com). What’s even better is you don’t even have to sign up for anything, we handle that for you! Over the next week you will get an email with your MyPerkPlace.com login and your transfered balance based on your previous MyFriendSuggests.com activity. You can learn more about our new point program by clicking here.

A few other notes. MyFriendSuggests.com is the first member of the MyPerkPlace.com Perk Network, so at this time you can only earn points through MyFriendSuggests.com, we hope this changes very shortly. MyPerkPlace.com is currently operating under their beta program so some issues may occur during this time period. Also, in good faith we think it’s important to mention that the same people who built MyFriendSuggests.com also built MyPerkPlace.com, however we are treating the two as very seperate sites and MyFriendSuggests.com is treated as just another memer of the Perk Network. Also, per this announcement our privacy policy has been updated.

Thanks,

loyalty MyFriendSuggests rewards

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How to get the most out of My Friend Suggests.com!

Oct 20

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests, Website Marketing | No Comments

 


How to get the most out of MyFriendSuggests.com?


If you’ve found yourself to this page you’ve probably tried our site MyFriendSuggests.com, if not go try it now and come back here after.  As a new site we are encourage you to submit feedback about what you like, what you don’t like and what you want us to change.  Feel free to email us any comments at info [at] myfriendsuggests.com.

We also want to provide you with some feedback on how we think you can best enjoy MyFriendSuggests.com.  Here is our list of the top 5 things you need to do to enjoy MyFriendSuggests.com:

1)      REGISTER – I can’t stress this enough if your not registered (and logged in) you cannot take advantage of personalized recommendations, our personalized newsletter, our similarity meters and many other great features.  Without being logged in our site is just like so many other local search sites, so please register and login today.

2)      Add and Invite Friends – Once your registered you need to add some friends to your friend network.  Your friend network helps you (and us) find places you’re friends (and their friends) have enjoyed.  It also enables you to learn about where members of your friend network have tried and learn from those experience.  The more friends you add to our site the more personalized your experience will be.

3)      Rate Places – The #1 factor in our suggestion algorithm are the places you’ve rated on our site.  We use these places (along with other factors) to accurately predict how well you will like places you haven’t been.  The more places you rate the more accurate our predictions.  Remember you can rate places by just clicking the red stars on just about any screen throughout the site.  Also don’t forget to add suggestions for places that aren’t yet on our site.

4)      Add Favorite Neighborhoods – Favorite Neighborhoods allow us to know about which places you’re interested in getting suggestions for.  If you live in San Francisco with no plans on ever going to Omaha Nebraska I doubt you want restaurant suggestions there.  We recommend you add cities near your home, work and places you frequently travel to (for business or pleasure).   To add a favorite neighborhood just login and from your home page click the “Add Neighborhood” Link.

5)      Read our newsletter – Your favorite neighborhoods also generated the content to your personalized newsletter.  Learn about new places to try and get personalized suggestions sent to you.  Your newsletter should come about every 2 weeks.  Be sure to read it for other important news about our site.

We hope these tips help make using MyFriendSuggests.com easier and more enjoyable.  Don’t hesitate to give us feedback on what we can do to make the site better (send emails to info @ myfriendsuggests.com).

MyFriendSuggests Web 2.0

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Free Resources for Promoting your new website

Oct 4

Posted by fmapap in MyFriendSuggests, Website Marketing | No Comments

I am in the processing of promoting our new webiste, MyFriendSuggests.com.  I’ve been keeping track of different resources I’ve used to help promote the site and figured it was worth sharing in hopes that others would share back any sites I missed.  I’m only including sitest that are 1) Free, 2) Simple to use and 3) shown to have at least some success.  I’ll try to categorize them as well… I’d love for you to post a comment if you have addition resources, I’ll be happy to update the list with your resource and even give you and your site credit for it!

UPDATE! 

I’ve added some new sites thanks to the folks at CupidsLab.com.

If you have more great sites than send them to us and we’ll add you site to the list.

 Web 2.0 Site Listings

KillerStartups.Com  – this worked best for me.
Listio.com
SimpleSpark.com
NetWebApp.com
BuzzShout.com
Go2Web20.net
2.0websites.com
pr.odigio.us
coolsitecollection.com
wikkidapps.com

Bookmarking Sites – haven’t had much with these in way of promoting traffic.

Del.icio.us
Furl.net
Simpy.com
ma.gnolia.com

News / Blog Entry – I usually post blog entries related to changes on the site.

Digg.com
Reddit.com
Shoutwire.com
StumbleUpon.com
Blinklist.com

Posted on Message Boards (for reviews mainly, but this helps get some people on the site) 

SitePoint.com
StartupNation.com
TechCrunch.com

Other Stuff

Listible.com
CoolSiteOfTheDay.com
dmoz.org/

 I also looked into press releases, but none of the free ones seemed to help much.

Again, I look forward to your thoughts!

Marketing Promoting Web 2.0 Website

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Book Review: Founders At Work

May 13

Posted by fmapap in General Technology, Web Development, Website Marketing | No Comments

I’m not much of a reader, but I just read a book Founders At Work, by Jessica Livingston.  It’s basically a bunch of interviews done with various people who led some of the biggest startups of the past 10-20 years.  I found it to be a real interesting read especially for someone like me, a ‘techie’ who is very interested in the world of startups (especially web startups).   The book gives some great insight into the early days of some of the web’s most successful startups.  It’s real interesting to learn about how many of these sites were started by accident or started with something else in mind and then evolved into the successes they are today.  I recommend this book if you are interested in starting your own business with some friends and colleagues.

Book Review Marketing Startups Website

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Scraping Hotmail for Contacts using JScrape

May 5

Posted by fmapap in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Scraping, Website Marketing | 3 Comments

As we’ve seen in my posts for scraping AOL, GMail and Yahoo, each site has its own “tricks” that make it challenging to scrape contact information from.  The final site in this series of posts is for Hotmail.  Hotmail is one of the trickier ones.  As I did with the previous posts I’m going to outline some of the trickier parts of scraping the site.

After posting to Hotmail.com you need to parse all the hidden parameters on the form, you will need to repost those parameters along with the login and passwd for the user.  You also need to pass a parameter PwdPad which is generated by remove X chars from the end of the string “IfYouAreReadingThisYouHaveTooMuchFreeTime” where X is the length of the user’s password.   To determine the URL you need to parse out of the JavaScript the value of the JS variable, g_DO["hotmail.com"]. 

After posting to the URL you will need to parse some more JS, find the window.location.replace JS and use the URL in that parameter to post your next URL.  In the response you will find a mailbox ID, you can find that by looking for ‘_UM=’ in the response and parsing out the value.  From there you are home free… simply post to:  http://”+host+“/cgi-bin/addresses?”+mbox  (you can get the host by grabbing the attribute using the following code:  String host = get.getRequestHeader(“Host”).getValue(); ).

Well that’s about it.  Hopefully that helps some people out.  If you want to see this in action sign up for an account at MyFriendSuggests.com and use my version of the contact importer (and while your there try our site out and let us know what you think). 

java MyFriendSuggests Scraping Social Marketing Web 2.0

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Scraping GMAIL for contacts

May 3

Posted by fmapap in Java, Scraping, Website Marketing | 2 Comments

In our previous posts we’ve looked at how to scrape both Yahoo! and AOL webmail for a list of contacts given a username and password.  This technique can be critical in growing your user base by allowing your users to invite many friends in one quick and easy step.  Our next site that we supported is GMail. 

However, for GMail we did not use our JScrape API but rather just used the G4J API.  It was extremely easy to use and to incorporate into our framework.  I recommend downloading it and testing it, it should only take a few short lines of code, here is what I did:

GMConnector gm = new GMConnector(userID,passwd,1);
gm.connect();
GMContact [] data = gm.getContact(1, “”);

The last site we will cover is Hotmail which was probably the most challenging of the 4 sites. 

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Scraping AOL WebMail for contacts

Apr 30

Posted by fmapap in Java, Scraping, Website Marketing | 4 Comments

This is the 3rd post in a short series discussing how I built an API to grab contact list information from Yahoo!, AOL, GMail and Hotmail.  In our first post we reviewed the high level approach to scraping sites.  In our second post we went over how to scrape Yahoo! – which is by far the easiest of the 4 sites to scrape.  This post will discuss how to scrape AOL which is much more challenging as it requires some cookie manipulation and some javascript emulation.  The tips below aren’t necessarily the best way to do this but it worked for me.

For working with AOL you need to work with the HttpClient and PostMethod objects, from the Apache Commons HttpClient API, directly.  For all URLs you post to make sure to set User-Agent and set the cookie policy:

post.getParams().setCookiePolicy(CookiePolicy.BROWSER_COMPATIBILITY);
post.setRequestHeader(“User-Agent”,” Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”);
 

Also for each post I set the Referrer attribute to the previous URL. After you post to the first URL you’ll need to process all the hidden variables that are returned and add them to next post.  Also there was a cookie that I seemed to need to manually add, to do so I used the following snippet of code:

Cookie[] c = client.getState().getCookies();
String cStr = “”;
for (int i = 0 ; i < c.length; i++)
   cStr += c[i].getName()+“=”+c[i].getValue()+“; “;
cStr+=“s_cc=true; s_sq=aolsnssignin%2Caolsvc%3D%2526pid%253Dsso%252520%25253A%252520login%2526pidt%253D1%2526oid%253DSign%252520In%2526oidt%253D3%2526ot%253DSUBMIT%2526oi%253D97″;
post.setRequestHeader(“Cookie”,cStr); This second post should also contain the user name and password.  This is the first part of the login. In the response you’ll find that there is javascript that will forward to a new specific URL, you need to get it dynamically.  I used the following code:

int onLoad = data.indexOf(“<body onLoad”);
int http = data.indexOf(“http:”,onLoad);
int endPos = data.indexOf(‘\”,http);
String newURL = data.substring(http,endPos);

The resulting page ALSO has some JavaScript that you will be required to emulated.  I used the following code to find the new URL:

http = data.indexOf(“gInitBasePath “);
int startPos = data.indexOf(‘\”‘,http);
endPos = data.indexOf(‘\”‘,startPos+1);
newURL = “http://webmail.aol.com”+data.substring(startPos+1,endPos);
newURL = newURL.replaceAll(” “, “%20″);

Your almost there!!  In the response for that last request you need to find the uid returned in one of the cookies.  Just grab all the cookies and parse out the “uid:”.   Last but not least just post to the Address book url (you can do find this by using Fiddler) and pass in the value for the uid for user attribute.  At that point you can use JScrape to process the resulting page and parse out all the email addresses. 

Hopefully these tips help you in creating your own contact importer.

 

java Scraping Social Marketing Web 2.0

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Scraping WebMail sites for contacts using JScrape

Apr 29

Posted by fmapap in Java, Web Development, Website Marketing | 2 Comments

Many new websites, especially those that depend on social networks, are now offering ways to import contacts from various WebMail sites.  I’m not going to go into the ethics of asking a user for their user name and password to a webmail site and scraping the site but I will touch on the technical challenges.  I started by building JScrape, a Java API that makes scraping websites easier.  I then decided to try to scrape contact lists from Yahoo!, GMail, Hotmail and AOL.  I found that each of these sites had their own challenges.  The easiest by far was Yahoo!, so that is what I’ll start with.  I’m not going to provide the exact code but will give you tips that will definetly get you going.

The basic process for all of these sites is:

1) Use a tool (such as Fiddler or Ethereal) to capture the network traffic that occurs when you login to the site.
2) Each site will use different cookies and JS to make logging in more challenging (this is the hard part). 
3) Use the same session and post to the address book page for that site.
4) Use JScrape to parse out the email addresses that you want.  You may need to page through different pages depending on the number of email addresses (and how the site displays the addresses).

Sounds simple eh?  Well step #2 can be quite challengine and frustrating.  I will add a new blog entry for each of the different sites and how to “login” to them, so check back soon. 

java Scraping Social Marketing Technorati Web 2.0 Yahoo!

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