GoTryTHIS News and Techniques

The moment I read about Google Buzz, my first thought was that it sucks to be Twitter. Then I realized that it is even worse to be Facebook. This is Google’s first iteration of Buzz and it has many benefits due to its design and integration with other Google products. I suspect some people will switch to Buzz from WordPress and other blogs as well.

Here is an article on Buzz versus Facebook I found. (It totally backs me up.)

Most of those arguments also apply to Twitter. Another big problem for marketers using Twitter is that you need short links, which is fine, except they are branded to someone else and do not have keywords in them for marketing. We recently added the ability to shrink GoTryTHIS links onto our twe.to domain so that you can use the same link there. Just like on your normal GoTryTHIS links, the short links are privately tracked live in detail, can be edited, can split-test traffic from Twitter to multiple affiliate programs, and can tell you which tweet to the same link sent the most traffic with campaigns.

However, with Buzz, you no longer have a 140 character space restriction, so you can use your regular GoTryTHIS links, branded to your domains, with your custom keywords in the links. While Twitter is not going anywhere soon, this aspect of Buzz is much better for marketers.

If you have not seen it yet, FastCompany wrote a great Buzz Tutorial.

Our programmers will be off on Thursday December 31st for five days, returning Tuesday January 5th and 6th, and then taking Thursday January 7th off as well.

Please refrain from doing anything to critical installations just before and during that time, just in case something requires their attention.

Happy Holidays for those of you taking them. 2010 will be the year of GoTryTHIS. The best is yet to come!

Thank you all,
John.

*** PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU UPGRADE ***

I am happy to announce you can now take the free upgrade from version 1 to version 2.

We are in late beta and most of the time everything goes smoothly, fully automatically. However, this is a brand new release with several recent updates to the installer and sometimes things may not go perfectly on an oddly configured server. No problem… if you read this first.

Don’t take chances:
If you are in the middle of something critical, please wait to upgrade.

How to upgrade:
Please read this entire post, go to the upgrade link at the bottom, and watch the video there for more details. Here are answers to most questions about upgrading.

Then login with your login information. If you forget your password, please use the forgot password feature on https://billing.gotrythis.com. After you login, please update your contact information and put through your order for the free upgrade. We are working on more brand new features and will give you an opportunity for 4 months of updates for $47. Please choose that option and submit your order so you do not miss out on some of the most requested features. Then the upgrade will be put into your account. To access the upgrade, login to http://my.gotrythis.com with the “Dashboard Installer” button.

There are two parts to the upgrade, the dashboard and the domain code. The “Install” button installs the dashboard, which needs a database and you only install once. It does not replace your existing installations! Then you login to your new dashboard and from there, the “Install” button will upgrade each domain in turn. This is the process even if you have only one install of GoTryTHIS 1.

All installs and upgrades are automatically done with SetupBOT.

What to do if something goes wrong:
If anything goes wrong, please easily revert back to version 1 yourself and inform us of the problem. Otherwise, if you took the free upgrade, please donate $20 to pay for the support time if you would like us to go in and complete the upgrade for you. In the unlikely event that reverting does not work, send a support ticket and we will take care of it at no charge.

When to upgrade:
The best time to upgrade late at night (EST) on weekdays, except Friday, or VERY early in the morning. Then if something goes wrong, we are more likely to get you up and running the next morning. Similarly, late mornings and afternoons are a bad time and the worst time to upgrade is Friday night or on the weekend.

WordPress compatibility:
This upgrade is the first availability of the new WordPress plugin. If a WordPress blog is detected, the installer will prompt you for permission to install the plugin, which should permanently eliminate the WordPress/GoTryTHIS link conflict issue. Please let us know how well it works.

Things missing that were in version 1:
The new version currently does not have hourly graphs. That is coming eventually. It also has had the feature of embedding rotating links removed. You can only embed one link now, within the terms and conditions of the affiliate program you are embedding a link for. We do not want GoTryTHIS to be known as a cookie stuffer and there are other tools for that.

Brand new features, you get free:
In part to make up for the long wait and in part to help get the word out about GoTryTHIS, we are including some new features in this free release. This includes the new co-branding bar, which gives you two extra chances to engage your audience, and the new twitter links feature, for twitter-friendly links that collect stats as if the clicks were on your normal GoTryTHIS links. The twitter links do not and will not support embedded links, but do support campaigns!

Training:
We have an install/upgrade guide and a usage guide and more support and training at http://www.gotrythis.com/help. There is a lot of information there and more coming. It is a work in progress that is in the process being organized better and being brought up to date with recent changes. (So some things might not be exactly the same in the software.)

Upgrade: Watch the upgrading video and upgrade here.
(Note: The video of the order options and support system are out-of-date currently.)

The free upgrade is now finished and technically ready to be released today, but we will wait until next week.

Why? We are stress-testing the twitter links feature, which will be included in the update. We have created a billion links, so far without a problem. Once we are done stress-testing, we will clear out all those links and release the upgrade. Then some of the documentation will need to be updated, but anyone can come in and get the upgrade while I work on updating the docs to match the software.

Thank you,
John.

For marketing purposes, the keyword-rich redirect links branded to your own domain names that GoTryTHIS creates are the way to go, but they are not so great for Twitter where your long, normal looking GoTryTHIS links need to be reduced as small as possible.

We knew we needed to create a solution to give you the best of both worlds. We first considered mirroring your GoTryTHIS links on the leading link shrinking service, bit.ly, but decided not to because:

1. On bit.ly, your stats would be exposed for the Twitter links, instead of remaining private in your GoTryTHIS dashboard.
2. On bit.ly, you cannot use dash campaigns like on the normal GoTryTHIS links, so you cannot know which Twitter message initiated the click.
3. We want to later add into the GoTryTHIS dashboard stats so you will know how many clicks are coming through the Twitter versions of your link as opposed to your normal links, which we could not calculate if we used bit.ly.

So, we created our own link shrinking service exclusively for GoTryTHIS clients on our short domains twe.to (like “tweet to”) and klk.to (like “click to”). With the update coming next week, you can click a button to instantly create short, Twitter-friendly links, which redirect to your GoTryTHIS links.

You can use these new short links interchangeably with your regular GoTryTHIS link and they support all the features of your regular GoTryTHIS links except for embedding affiliate links. We made this decision because we do not want twe.to and klk.to to become known as “unsafe” domains used for embedded links, which could cause problems for all our clients down the road.

While we do not anticipate any major problems, this is a major new feature, so please note the “beta” status.

Here is where we are at:

WordPress: The WordPress plugin is done now and will be released next week. Once released, if you are installing to a site that has a WordPress blog on the home page, it will be detected and the plugin will be automatically installed so that GoTryTHIS links work and WordPress links work, without any messing around with anything. Upgrading existing sites will apply this plugin. The programmer says it works “wonderfully”, so we are very happy about this.

Twitter: Today I tested our new Twitter links. The system itself is finished and we need to make a few updates to the installer next week to complete it. When we release this update, you will be able to quickly generate a Twitter friendly short link for any of your GoTryTHIS links. All the stats will appear as if the click was on the original GoTryTHIS link. This is a key feature that we are excited about!

Slow Link Problem: On a handful of servers, we have an issue with slow links in version 2, where the links take about 10-12 seconds to load. We are creating an alternative method for redirecting links on those domains, which will eliminate the problem, but clicks will appear in groups of three. For example, the first two clicks will not appear in the dashboard on incompatible domains until the third click happens. For now, this is a good compromise. Once this is released, you can turn this fix on in the settings for any domains suffering from slow links.

Training: I have added a number of “How To” posts into the /help blog, with more coming. I am getting them out with text and screen shots if I have them, and then going through again to create more videos. The help system will be nice and organized soon.

Version 1 Upgrade: We have been working hard on all these things and since they are all coming together at once, we are going to put them all into the next update and release that as the free upgrade for version 1 users. My guess is that this will be ready around December 7.

I have very good news! As you may know, WordPress and GoTryTHIS both redirect 404 links to themselves and are thus incompatible with each other. We have a fix that can be applied manually, but hey, we know that is a pain.

Well, soon the WordPress compatibility issue will go from an annoying manual fix to an automatically installed WordPress plugin, eliminating this problem for good and greatly reducing our support load, freeing more time up for development.

Once we release it mid next week, you will be given the option to upgrade your domains. If all goes as planned, SetupBOT will automatically install and setup the plugin for you.