Traffic Android Blog

The user interface is bordering on completely finished for first release. I just finished up the account profiles screen which lets you add account profiles that will be used for bookmarking and video uploading.

Basically what happens is when a task goes to execute, it chooses a profile at random and uses the credentials from that profile for the task in question. If I get time before release I’ll make it so you can control which profile to use, otherwise it will come in a later update.

Now all I have to do is the following:

• Finish up the tasks list so each task will execute at the specific time
• Put in the license key system to prevent piracy
• Support an acceptable number of services
• Release to my beta testers

Not far off now!

I have a lot planned for Traffic Android, but the very first goal is to get version 1.0 to market. It needs to have enough to be super useful but not so much that I miss the release date by a month. A balance needs to be struck, you understand?

So, as of right now, here’s what I plan to release on August 14:

• Automatic posting to social bookmarking services
• Controllable randomised time delays between posting to spread the posting out over time to avoid being slapped by Google
• Store multiple bookmarking account profiles to keep things varied and allow a single bookmarking campaign to choose credentials at random from the different profiles you’ve created
• Support for a reasonable number of social bookmarking services
• Support for some number of video sharing services
• Auto-updating so that you’ll automatically get new services and features as they are completed

Things that will trickle in via the auto-updater after release:

• Support for more social bookmarking services as they are completed
• Support for more video sharing services as they are completed
• Completely automatic account signups with account activation (you’d normally have to do this via email) – CAPTCHAs will be handled with a near 100% success rate via a service i’ll be plugging into. You’ll be able to literally create all of your social bookmarking and video sharing accounts in a matter of minutes and have them automatically verified as the confirmation emails are sent.

Things planned after that (planned, not guaranteed in exactly the described way – but i’ll do my best)

• Support for content uploading; i.e. adding blog posts as part of your campaign, as well as to places like hubspot, squidoo, etc. I’ll be investigating each one of these to see what is possible
• The ability to join your bookmarking events and other tasks together into “dependent” chains. What this means is you could set it so that it automatically adds a blog post after a period of time in the campaign and then starts to automatically bookmark that once it has been posted, which means you’d get an outward-flowing inbound link network growing automatically. This is just an idea right now and I’ll have to investigate how it would be implemented.

Other ideas I have:

• Adwords management and support? I don’t know how feasible/worthwhile this is, but I’ll be looking into it in any case
• Support for other PPC services?
• Following along with the posting of blog posts, hub pages etc automatically, I wonder if I could plug this automatically into an outsourcing system where preselected high quality inexpensive writers are waiting on the other end as needed?

If you have any ideas for other things I could automate, I’m all ears.

Another project I’ve helped out on here and there (http://www.freedomsway.net) has a talented designer who whipped up this little 3D interpretation of the Traffic Android logo. How awesome is it?

It is coming along at breakneck speed actually. I’ve been very careful to build an extremely extensible codebase. What these means to the non-technical, is that I can keep updating and adding to it until doomsday and it won’t start to break and die after I try to do too many things. And that means a solid long-lived application for you to enjoy using.

As of right now, I’m just in the process of finishing up the part of the user interface that allows you to add tasks and make them run. A task is basically a single action (such as posting a link to Del.icio.us or a video to YouTube). You can run the action straight away or schedule it to occur after a period of time as part of an automated linking campaign.

Here’s a screenshot for you:

Also, yesterday I finished building a nice minimalistic auto-updater for the application so that you’ll always have the latest version without having to go and manually download updates.

Today I also put up this blog and created the affiliate program! If you’re the affiliate marketing type, you’ll want to see the Traffic Android Affiliates page.

There are many ways to build your website traffic and nearly all of them involve acquiring some measure of inbound links from a variety of sources. The biggest question everyone seems to have after they realise that the way to get traffic is to get links, is “how do I get people to link to me?”.

Well, there’s no magic bullet here. Provide value and people will link to you. Of course you can still get the ball rolling by building that initial stream of traffic yourself. Depending on your niche, sometimes this will be largely all you need. In other cases your proactive efforts can increase the traffic you already have.

In all cases, it’s helpful to know what proactive inbound linking strategies you can employ. A very popular method of building those links yourself is to use social media marketing, which is a big field of study all by itself, but a good chunk of which can be boiled down to contributing content and value to large collaborative networks (such as Digg, niche-related forums, etc.) and posting “open” bookmarks to worthwhile sites, using social bookmarking websites such as Del.icio.us, Linkatopia, Simpy and so forth.

It’s simple, but oh my god is it time consuming. Not only do you get to spend time creating accounts at every one of the sites you might want to post articles, content, posts, replies and bookmarks to (and there are well over one hundred of these), but then you get to spend time logging into every single one of them and going through what is usually a multi-step process to build those inbound links to your website.

And let’s not forget that this is for just one page. Want to promote ten worthwhile pages on your site? Wash, rinse, repeat, ten times.

What’s more, the grand poo-bahs at Google are very smart. They know what natural link development looks like and what artifical link development looks like. To an extent, anyway. Basically when someone puts up a new website, unless it’s providing something of significant value or cultural interest, it will not be linked to by regular people at anything more than a steady trickle. Google knows this, so watch how quickly your new rankings drop when their algorithm catches up and sees a hundred or more links suddenly pointing at your website.

And so, in order to do your social media link building, you have to do it slowly, which means (a) committing yourself to a lot of very boring work and (b) motivating yourself to be consistent and stick to a daily routine of doing so.

Honestly, I can’t be bothered. Seeing as I’m a software developer, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. I’d create an application that can automate both the work and the routine and I’d have a great product to sell to others who might get some use out of it.

So here we have Traffic Android, which has taken all my days and nights since I started it several weeks ago. It’s a good thing I’m single right now and not being relied on by anyone for anything, because it means I can get this out to market much more quickly than many of my fellow developers would be able to do.

Take a look at the Traffic Android website for information and a screenshot.

As the wise and already-very-successful Kevin Mesiab told me today, “get a blog”. Actually I knew I should already, but I’ve always had this feeling that blogging is somewhat of a job. However the advice is sound when the blog is designed as an interface between you and your customers.

Seeing as I like to tell people what I’m up to, and you, my valuable customer, potential customer, colleague, affiliate, curious party or just regular passer-by would like to know what’s going on with Traffic Android, a blog is the perfect way to keep you up to date.

So here we go! Welcome aboard the Traffic Android blogging train. Your first stop will be what I’m doing with Traffic Android. The next stop will be something similar. The third stop will relate to Traffic Android. The fourth stop will… you get the picture. Yeah, pretty much all the stops are going to relate to Traffic Android.

If you ever have any questions, I encourage you to ask! My links are do-follow, but please no abuse or I’ll have to take drastic measures and then everybody will suffer! And now onto writing my first proper post. Thanks for stopping by!