Day 14: A Slight Hitch in the Road

Well talk about from one extreme to the next! First of all I haven’t posted in three days because I came down with the flu on Friday so I have been having a bit of a break from the computer, not the best timing as the 30 day challenge was just starting to reach full throttle. But it doesn’t stop there…

On Thursday last week I posted about how we were using Tumblr blogs to post our content to and then using social bookmarking to get them indexed and ranked extremely quickly. Due to the thousands of people in the 30 day challenge this caused an abnormal spike in activity at Tumblr and various social bookmarking sites causing an adverse reaction. Unfortunately thousands of accounts were deleted leaving everyone a little demoralized and wondering why even though they had followed Ed to the very letter were getting penalized. This has probably led a lot of people to question the ethics of Ed’s methods.

I can assure you everything Ed has been teaching is ethical if done the correct way. In regards to Tumblr’s mass deletion of accounts this was probably due to a number of reasons. First of all when they saw the spike of accounts being created they would have thought someone was using software to automatically create the accounts as I doubt very much that Tumblr would have been aware of what was about to happen. Perhaps Ed should have contacted Tumblr to let them know beforehand but hindsight is a wonderful thing. To top it all off a few of the 30 Day challenge members were posting spammy content which would not have helped the situation either.

In regards to the social bookmarking sites it’s a very similar situation, they all noticed a huge spike in Tumblr blogs being submitted and acted on the pretense that someone was using software to spam their sites. So you may have done absolutely nothing wrong but still had your blogs and social bookmarking accounts wiped out and on the verge of quitting.

There is a fine line between spamming Web 2.0 sites and acceptable self promotion. Usually it’ a good idea to let your blog establish itself before adding any monetization via affiliate links or adsense or at the very least be extremely subtle, don’t put big banners or sales letter type posts on your blog. When using social bookmarking make sure you bookmark sites other than your own, at least one other site to every one of your’s. If everyone just bookmarked their own sites then the whole system wouldn’t work so it is crucial for the social bookmarking sites to be strict on this.

Tomorrow Ed is going to release his damage control report to try and help everyone pick up the pieces and get everything back on track. I would say this time he will offer a list of possible Tumblr alternatives and let people choose which one they are going to use. HubPages will probably be my number 1 alternative at this stage but I will wait and see what Ed has to say first before taking further action.