Is Social Monkee Worth the Time and Effort? Let's face it, when it comes to something that's for *Free* most of us tend to be a bit skeptical, and who can blame us? Many people know by now that freebies come with a catch, and Social Monkee is no different. So before you jump on the bandwagon and get the Social Monkee T-Shirt, I am going to save you some time (and possibly money) here by covering the positives as well as the negatives when it comes to this social bookmarking service.
What does Social Monkee do? First, the good.
This is a free backlinking service that posts information which you supply on one form to up to 25 social bookmarking sites per day, every day, and yes, it is absolutely free. For those who are looking for ways to find an easy backlinking strategy, this couldn't be easier! In addition, their service has recently been upgraded to allow for spinnable content. This keeps your information from being duplicated across thousands of social bookmarking accounts and possible penalties from the search engines to the websites you've put so much work into. I would have to say that in this regard, Social Monkee gets a thumbs up from me.
Click HERE to watch the video and get a Free Social Monkee account.
You do have to submit the content yourself via one input form each day to get the backlinks. But for something that is free, that's not such a bad thing, and it is quite easy. Just save your content on your desktop to keep it safe, and tweak it a bit before submitting daily. Be sure to spin the title, description and tags for the best possible results. Do the math to see how much time Social Monkee can save you each day. If you add up the amount of time it would take to go to 25 separate social bookmarking sites, create a profile for each one and submit your descriptions, tags, etc. it would easily take a couple of hours, and that is if you were not interrupted and working fast as lightning. Again, Social Monkee saves you a TON of time and because of this gets another thumbs up.
What's the Catch? Remember I said that most free offers have a catch? Social Monkee is no different, and who can blame them? Most services must find a way to stay in business or they would not offer their services. With each submission they kindly give you a couple of 'upgrade' options. First, to submit your website to 100 social bookmarking pages (instead of 25), simply pay a one time fee of $47 (this price may go up); that is up to 9000 backlink postings to your site per month! In addition, you also receive in-depth video on how to make the most of your backlinks. You'll also get a report listing the sites where your links are located (not available with the free account) AND an RSS feed of all of your backlinks to get them indexed faster! If you would like to get 100 backlinks for one day (with report and RSS feed), the cost is $2.99. That's not a bad price for 100 backlinks to trial as a test run before making a decision on upgrading to the lifetime service. GET THE PREMIUM ACCOUNT WITHOUT SPENDING A DIME! This is where I show you how to get the premium account without spending a dime. Social Monkee will give you a free PREMIUM account if you refer 12 other people to them, and those people sign up for a free account. This is a savings of $47 or more! As of this writing, those referrals need not purchase the upgrade or spend any money. They only have to sign up for the free service. To get your 12 signups faster, go to any forum and put the Social Monkee affiliate link in your signature line. Look for threads that talk about backlinking or other off page SEO tactics and post your idea of this free service. Be sure to understand and follow the rules of the forum or risk getting banned. When done right, this should be easy enough to do. You can also use other sources, such as Twitter or Facebook to get the word out with your affiliate link and try to get sign ups that way. Click HERE to watch the video and get a Free Social Monkee account.
Okay, now the not so good. It would be nice if we lived in a perfect world, but until then it's helpful to get the 'heads up' on the downside of things to save ourselves time, money and headaches in the long run. Here's some things to consider before signing up for Social Monkee. Many of the bookmarking sites are of low quality (at least so far they are). Most of the Google page ranks for these sites are 0 or 1 (though these page ranks could potentially go up in the future). Why does this make a difference? Most gurus will tell you that the best backlinks
to your site are those with a higher page rank and with relevancy (similar to your site). Therefore, if your site is about blue widgets, and the site your link is on is called www.allwidgets.com (and with a page rank of 6), then there is a good chance the search engines will give your site a boost because of the higher ranked site pointing to yours. When it comes to lower ranked sites, you need a LOT more links to get your site up in the search engines and seen by more viewers.
You can only submit to one URL per day. If your website is bluewidgets.com, then you can post to that URL on day one, but the next day you will have to post to bluewidgets.com/rolling-widgets, and the next day bluewidgets.com/flying-widgets, etc. For those of you who only have one site with few pages, this might not be for you, especially since the backlinks are of such low quality. However, if you have a lot of niche websites or a website with many pages/subpages, then you could still submit backlinks, they would just be to different pages on your site.
It's All About Reputation Take a look at the banner to the upper right. They list some of the sites they use to post your backlinks to. If you have the webrank toolbar on your browser (in Firefox), you can go to those sites and see for yourself the rankings they get. On the plus side, the folks at Social Monkee are showing they have nothing to hide by giving you a sampling of the sites they post to. In addition, because they are fairly new, they have to work harder (and probably will) to build up their reputation, so only time will tell if their service is a winner. Some people prefer to wait until a service is 'seasoned' or 'aged' a bit before making a decision. I don't personally see a reason to wait. Since only 25 backlinks are getting posted per day, I see no threat to your website, as there are no mega blasts of backlinks to make the search engines suspicious. Then there is the time you are saved. It takes me 2 minutes to get the form set up, tweaked and submitted (after the first time, which is a bit more time to set up). As I said, it would take a couple of hours to post to those sites individually on your own anyway, so it wouldn't hurt to sign up for the free service and see where it goes from there.
I think Social Monkee has the potential of a winning service here. They may undergo growing pains as more and more people jump on the *free* bandwagon, but again, only time will tell how they will work through those issues if they even become an issue. So if you feel good about it, click on the banner and sign up to give it a whirl. Do give it a week
or two before checking your backlinks (I use backlinkwatch.com) to see how it is working out for you.
Social Monkee also has an FAQ section and support, so my recommendation would be to pay that section a visit first for any questions or problems you have before getting frustrated and/or giving them a bad review online. I say be fair and give them a chance to prove what they are made of and reward them (with good reviews) or not, depending on how they respond to you or how their service pans out. Every new service deserves a fair chance to show what they are made of.
Thanks for reading this in-depth review. I hope it has helped you in your decision. Feel free to add your thoughts below. If you sign up, I will get points toward the premium upgrade for free, just so you know. I will also try to give an update once I have used the service for one month to let everyone know what I think of the service at that time. Cheers!