Interview with PlugIM Creator Ryan Knowles

Luke Parker:
Today I've managed to pin down Ryan Knowles for an Interview. Ryan is the creator of an excellent Social Bookmarking tool called PlugIM, which is the only Social Bookmarking tool that is currently targeted to the Internet Marketing crowd.

Thanks for allowing this Interview, Ryan. My first question for you is simple enough: Could you please tell us exactly what PlugIM is for and who it can benefit?

Ryan Knowles:
In short, PlugIM is an internet marketing news site. The twist is that the readers make the news. As a member of PlugIM you can post links to anything internet marketing related (articles, blog posts, info products, reviews etc.) and if other PlugIM members like it, they 'plug' it and once it receives enough plugs it moves on to the front page where it receives maximum exposure and traffic from all the readers.

Anyone who's interested in internet marketing can benefit. Top marketers already in the trenches making bunches of money can benefit by posting links to reviews of their latest product releases and newbies who don't even have a site yet can benefit by reading up on tips and info posted to help get them off the ground. There are thousands upon thousands of links that have been posted since we launched. Enough to keep anyone busy learning for hours on end.

Luke:
Could you tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to create PlugIM?

Ryan:
Well I could go on and on here but I'll try to keep it short. Basically I went to school to learn how to code, which got me into software engineering when I got out. Contrary to popular belief, entry level software engineering salary wasn't all it was cracked up to be so I started trying to come up with ways to supplement my income on the side. There was this virtual online trading card game that I was heavily into for a while and my very first venture into making money online was selling my extra trading cards on ebay. That evolved into me striking a deal with the manufacturer to get discounted prices on bulk purchases and I opened my own website after teaching myself html and ASP.

I ended up making almost as much off that website as I was making during my day job, which really opened my eyes to the potential to make money online. After the game died out and I closed my site, it was time to find a new niche which is when I stumbled upon the Warrior Forum. I spent months there absorbing everything I could about SEO, and traffic generation and newsletters and list building and product generation, you name it.

From there I tried and failed half a dozen times to get something going. I got pretty discouraged and thought that I might never duplicate my previous success until I was introduced to Digg. From there it was only a matter of time before the light turned on and Digg plus internet marketing equaled PlugIM and here we are about a year after I made that commitment.

Luke:
If one of our readers today decided that he or she really wanted to create a whole social bookmarking site, perhaps on a niche other than Internet Marketing, how would you recommend going about it?

Ryan:
Oh boy well it's getting a lot more difficult now than it was a year ago when I started but I'd say there are three keys to success:

1. Stand out. If you use an open source software to run your site, don't use a default template. Pay a designer some money and get yourself a unique look and feel.

2. Customize. You've got to have a couple of features that no other bookmarking site has. PlugIM was the first social bookmarking site to support Adsense revenue sharing then we added support for embedded YouTube videos, and user supplied RSS feed support where items on user's feeds are automatically submitted. We continually try to keep adding new features so the site doesn't get stagnant and we stand out and give users reason to choose us over someone else.

3. Be committed and ready to work! Ever since I decided to build this site, I've spent a little bit of time on it every day even if it's as simple as answering some email, or building some links. You've got to do a little bit every day to keep it going, don't let it just sit there and expect it to grow on its own because it won't. Only hard work and dedication will bring the users because they can sense when a project has drive behind it and won't be afraid to get on board.

Luke:
Those are some great tips for anyone in the whole industry. Here's a good question for you; do you think the internet has too many social bookmarking sites as it is? Or will we keep adding them until there is one for every niche market?

Ryan:
I love this question because I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say "There's only one Digg!" and I just chuckle and go back to work... Here's my outlook on it. Do you think there are too many forums on the web? How about blogs? Are there too many of those?

Social bookmarking is just another form of presenting data and encouraging user interaction. If you think about it, it's not a whole lot different than a forum. A user comes along and posts a topic, other users view the topic, if they like it, they respond. The more popular threads are bumped to the top. How many successful internet marketing forums are out there? Dozens right? So why can't there be dozens of successful internet marketing bookmarking sites?

Think about the major news outlets. Are there too many of those? Fox, MSNBC, CNN etc. and yet they all seem to do just fine. It's silly to think that there's only room for one of these sites to succeed. There are so many people online interested in so many different things. So I think they're going to keep coming, and I think just like forums, you'll have some very successful ones, and you'll have some that struggle to keep 50 readers. It's all up to the people behind the project and how dedicated they are.

Luke:
That's a great point, I didn't think about it quite like that before. So what about other languages? Since I know that many bookmarking tools and even other Web 2.0 services are less sophisticated than your own, they probably won't be offering a multi-lingual version of their service anytime soon. Do you see multiple languages primarily being served by different companies? Or will it get to the point where one service offers itself to all languages and wins over the largest market share that way?

Ryan:
Good question. We've received several posts in other languages on PlugIM and I look at them and don't know if they're internet marketing stories or not. It's a tough call if we should allow them or not. Ultimately I'd love to get some moderators from other countries who can decided if a story is suitable for PlugIM or not because they understand what's been posted, but then you run into the question of should Multilanguage posts live together on the front page? Or should posts be separated into their own front pages based on language? It's something I know we're going to need to confront eventually, but for now we're just observing to see what happens and listen to what the demands of the users are.

Luke:
Some readers still aren't sure that all of the Web 2.0 tools, including Social Bookmarkers like yours are here to stay. (Of course I'm sure that some smarty-pants out there would argue that the internet isn't here to stay either, but that's beside the point...) What can you say about the future popularity of Social Bookmarking, and where you think it will be in 10 years?

Ryan:
Well 10 years is a very long time especially when you're talking about the web, but the fundamentals never change and those are news and the fact that people like to share.

News has always been around in some form or another and when people find something cool they want to share it with others and receive recognition for that. Forums have been around for more than 10 years now and they're still thriving so it's possible that social bookmarking sites will still be around in 10 years, but I think they're more likely to continue to evolve over that time. The concept of users sharing what they find interesting isn't going anywhere. What will change is the way that information is shared and presented.

Luke:
And where will PlugIM fit into that?

Ryan:
We're here to ride it out and continue to evolve. Almost every change made on PlugIM is a direct result of a request made by a user or users and we're going to continue to do that.

I try to think of PlugIM as belonging to the people and not me. It's not my site; I'm not just going to do whatever I want to do with it. I'm going to do what the people want, so essentially we'll become whatever the community wants us to become. But in true internet marketing fashion, we're never going to lose site of the number one goal, which is to drive as much traffic to the stories posted on PlugIM as possible. One day I hope the traffic from PlugIM will be capable of bringing down servers and we can nickname it "the plug effect".

Luke:
The Plug Effect! I like that. I hope to cause that to happen a few times myself...

I've heard a few of the infamous war stories about Digg bringing servers to their melting point simply from being the #1 story on their front page. You hardly ever hear that story about Google though... Isn't that odd? I sometimes hear that so-and-so's paid traffic or affiliate program made their bandwidth go over limit, but never a simple #1 listing in Google. In your opinion, does this imply that Social Bookmarking tools have the incredible ability to draw even more traffic than Google possibly can, albeit over a shorter amount of time?

Ryan:
You're exactly right... Digg gives you a huge burst of traffic all at once and then it dies off rapidly to the point where you hardly get any hits at all a month later. Getting to the #1 spot on Google for a popular search term won't bring you that kind of traffic all at once (because you don't have that many people searching for that phrase all at once) but over the long haul, Google will bring you better, longer lasting, more stable results.

And Google traffic will be more targeted because you're receiving visitors from people searching for your keywords as opposed to people who are just curious about the latest front page story.

Luke:
Before this gets too long, we'd better move on to the big question... I think that a lot of my readers picked up this report just to hear an expert opinion on how they can get the best traffic to their websites using Social Bookmarking tools like yours. Have you got any tips for them, other than just to use as many as they can?

Ryan:
I don't think using as many as they can is a good answer. The most successful people on PlugIM as far as reaching the front page multiple times and receiving the best traffic, are the ones who get involved in the community.

They know each other and make friends and plug each others stories. If you submit 1 link to 50 different websites, and get 1 click from each one, you've spent an awful lot of time signing up for each of those sites, creating an account, figuring out how to post and all that for just 50 visitors. Whereas if you had just signed up for 1 site and spent 15 minutes a day there, clicking on other peoples links, voting for other peoples stories so when the time comes for you to submit your link it makes the front page and you receive 50 visitors just from that one submission.

Not to mention that if you choose the right bookmarking site, its 50 targeted visitors as opposed to 50 random visits. That's why internet marketing types love PlugIM because the visits they get are targeted and that's what it's all about no matter what niche you're in.

Luke:
Pick the right tool and then get involved. Gotcha. Another big question I have for you is about blogs. Weblogs are obviously a very different animal than the standard website when it comes to promotion. Do you see these advantages that blogs have over websites, including the high usage of Social Bookmarking tools like yours, making their popularity grow even faster in the future?

Ryan:
Yes absolutely in fact more than 50% of the submissions on PlugIM are blog posts and the nice thing about having a blog is you can submit a link to each post instead of just submitting 1 link for the whole website. We have a couple blogs that regularly reach the front page of PlugIM that are written by some very talented people with a lot of knowledge about he industry.

Part of being a successful blogger is getting out there and getting known, which means meeting other bloggers with similar interests and reading their posts and supporting each other and what better way to find new people with similar interests than joining a community.

Luke:
Finally, I wanted to ask you about your chosen niche market, Internet Marketing. You see it from a different perspective than those of us who are in the trenches selling or affiliating products all the time. You seem more like the guy in the tower with the binoculars, who gets to see the whole battlefield.

From your point of view, would you say that the Internet Marketing "market" is still growing? Or is the fight going out of us now that such a large segment of the population has tried and failed to make money here?

Ryan:
{Laughing} What a great visual, but I'm right there in the trenches with you. Most of the people who post links on PlugIM are making far more money online than I am. It's hard to monetize a site with ads when every visitor to your site is specifically used to avoiding them.

But I know what you mean with that question and I would say that it's definitely still growing. More and more people are realizing the potential to make money online, but few and far between are the ones willing to make the commitment required to actually do so. The reason why it'll never die out is because you're always going to have two types of people: the gold diggers and the owners of the tool shops who sell the pick axes and shovels.

Who's going to make the most money? The ones looking to strike it rich immediately with as little effort as possible, or the ones who roll up their sleeves and open shop working hard each and every day?

Luke:
That's a great point and visualization, so I think we should end it here on that apt metaphor. I want to thank you for your time, Ryan, and I look forward to seeing this interview ranked as the number one article for weeks to come on PlugIM.com... Joking! Just joking... I mean I'd like to, you know, but... Nevermind.

Thanks again for this great information, and best of luck with PlugIM's growth. Keep her warmed up for me; I'll be there to post this soon!