Spyble SEO Competitive Intelligence

Happy Holdays from the Spyble Team!

2008-12-22T18:09:00.000-08:00

Wishing everyone in the world has a happy and prosperous Holiday season

Referrer Detector - Quality of Links to you & competitors

2008-12-14T02:12:00.000-08:00

The next Spyble tool is the Referrer detector, which now shows QUALITY instead of QUANTITY of links.

It is the 2nd tool on the Spyble dashboard (see below) showing you a quick number of your link quality.

You can also access your referrer detector tool from the Popularity check tool, by clicking on the number of links.

how is Link Quality calculated?

The referrer detector takes the link popularity of your referring links (popularity of your incoming links) and takes the average. This average will show you how popular your referring links are and therefore the quality of your link strategy. If you are just linking to anyone on the web, then mathmatically, your link quality should be lower as the majority of sites online are of low quality. But, on the otherhand, if you only target link trading opportunities that have lots of links themselves, the quality will be higher.

The referrer detector is a good tool to gauge how quality the links you and your competitors have gathered. Weighing the popularity check tool with this tool should give you a good balace of QUANTITY of links (popularity check) and QUALITY of links (referrer detector)

Popularity Tool - Quantity of Links to you & Competitors

2008-12-04T01:29:00.000-08:00

After 2-3 days from using the configurator you will see your account has been populated with data. In the BMW account we can see Volkswagen is the most popular website.

What does most popular mean?

Most popular does not mean you're going to be at the top of google! What it means is that it has the highest QUANTITY of links to the respective website (we'll get to quality in the next tool). So, are you the most talked about on the web? Are you the cool kid in high school? Same idea, the Spyble Popularity Check will track sites link volume.

BMW is number 4 and behind number 1 Volkswagen by 45 links to become most popular.

Export the Data & Track Monthly

Export these links into a CSV file to better analyze and track your competitor's links. You can also use the drop down menu to see your progress from month to month.

The easy to use chart below also shows the most popular site, your site, and the competitor's average. Hone in on your competition and monitor their every link they add. Grow as they grow and master their link trading strategy. Build a plan, highlight the exported data and start today!

Getting Started with Spyble - Configurator

2008-11-23T04:41:00.000-08:00

Just signing up for Spyble and wondering what to do? It is very important you configure your account correctly when starting, to make sure you are properly monitoring your competitors and tracking your progress to the TOP!!!

Now I will go through a test account for the automotive industry, with BMW as the Spyble client. See below.

1: Starting the Configurator

Upon your first login into the Spyble system, you will see a welcome screen, click start to begin.

2: Inputting Known Competitors

Next I identify online competition that I am aware of. While you can leave this blank, do you best to put as many as possible, we will help you get more in a bit, so don't worry!

3: Inputting Target Keywords

Next, to better configure your account, enter keywords you are targetting and using in your online marketing strategy. These should be keywords that you want your potential customers to find you with.

4: Spyble Identifies Unknown Competitors

The Spyble system, using your prior inputs of URLs and keywords, will list potential unknown competitors. You can click on the links to see their websites, decide if you would like to monitor those sites, and check off the appropriate sites.

5: Confirm All Competitors

Taking the competitors you identified combined with new competitors Spyble recommended, this screen lists those for you to confirm before moving on.

6: Map Out Competitor Sites

Taking these competitors selected, Spyble will map out the subpages of these sites real-time for you. Select those pages you would like us to monitor and over time we'll keep you posted whenever they change the files.

7: Confirm Pages to Monitor

After selecting the pages, we just make sure you didn't miss any, confirm here.

8: You're Done!

And there you go, your new Spyble account is ready, within 2-3 days you should have a newly populated account displaying you versus your competition - links, keywords, changes, and some new Spyble Advisor's advice!

SPYBLE IS LIVE

2008-11-19T07:39:00.000-08:00

Dear All,
First of all I apologize for not sending out a progress email last weeks

We have been really busy focusing on one thing GET SPYBLE LIVE ASAP!!!!!!!!

And we have done it SPYBLE is Live!.

We all had to work very hard to get it done as we decided to add some additional functionalities to the system. Such as graphs that give a more graphical display of your popularity and referrers. This is why we are one week delayed with our go live.

After spending day and night in the office and asking Tommy and Alla to work in the weekends and evenings we are there.

In Dutch we say “De laatste lootjes wegen het zwaarst” Meaning the last tasks before something is finished are hardest and we certainly found that out. Especially Mike working on an old Laptop, trying to understand Microsoft Office 2007 and at the same time explaining in his very basic Chinese to Alla what he wants to put on his landing pages.

Picture of Mike finishing off his final tasks,

To get some extra motivation we worked out all of the tasks we had to complete before go live on the whiteboard and use different colors to track. Every time we checked off a task we realized we were getting closer to system go live and getting more and more anxious to finally start selling SPYBLE.

Here is a picture of our whiteboard with the final go live tasks,

Communicating with Marco through Skype about where we are and what we are doing was sometime not that easy. With Marco being at his day job in The Netherlands and the time difference. However we managed to work out all issues and get everything done.

Marco spend all his free hours into getting the backend of the system ready. Especially with our decision to be less dependent on search engines and changing the way we get our data from the Internet gave Marco a lot more work.

Typical Marco, Bas Chat

Tommy and Alla working on last minute interface changes, forgot password function and the SPYBLE tour pages.

We hope you will all use SPYBLE and send us feedback about the functionalities data and user interface. For all the SPYBLE stakeholders I hope you will use our system and give us feedback on functionality, data and user interfaces. If you don’t have an account yet please let me (Bas) know and I will create one for you.

As I wrote in one of my previous mails we are using Google Adwords to do a survey in the US to better find out what people’s SEO tool needs are. Mike has Switched the Adwords campaign from the survey to SPYBLE.com meaning that people clicking on our Advertisement will be directed to a landing page instead of the survey. A landing page is a page on the SPYBLE site where people can quickly find out about what SPYBLE is, what it can do for you , how to use it and what it costs.

Pics of our landing page,

We are using this week to do some more debugging, triple check our interfaces and our system data.

Our next step will be to start developing SPYBLE 2.0 our next version of SPYBLE. This includes a lot of new functions and a complete new Database system with our own spiders crawling the web.

After this we will be sending out and email again every Friday. Sorry for not keeping you guys up to date in the last two weeks....

Regards

The SPYBLE Team!

Update - Oct 22

2008-10-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

Dear All,

As usual we are working hard to get SPYBLE done and can say that we are almost there. Our deadline is Sunday 26th of October. After our setback last week with our server that broke down we postponed our beta live date for one week.

After our server broke down we were quite worried that we could not find a replacement quickly. It was not only SPYBLE that was going live last Sunday but we also www.competitor-analysis.com had to be migrated from the Proseo Server to our server. www.competitor-analaysis .com was not accessible from China because of an IP issue.

First I contacted Dell in Netherlands but they seemed not to keen to sell me a server and told me delivery time is 10 to 15 days and they do not have any express service. So after talking to Marco about how to solve this issue I remembered an old study friend, Rob, he works for an online shop these guys sell all kinds of hardware online! I contacted Rob on Skype and he told me they can deliver a server in one day. Wow this was great news of course, I sent them our needs and budget so they could select a suitable server for us.

After one hour they found a suitable HP Proliant server for us and they could deliver in 1 day so great news.

However the news got even better when the CEO and Founder of the company saw SPYBLE. He got so excited about SPYBLE that he wants to donate the server to us and invest in SPYBLE and become involved in the project. I spoke with him on Monday and he told me he has never seen a product like SPYBLE ever and he thinks every business owner in the world would want to use this system. He was impressed with how we presented ourselves and how we sell our product. He gave me a proposal on what he would like to see in return for an investment. We have a meeting on Friday with Ivan, Michael and Bas about how we will proceed with his proposal.

Right now all the functionalities are working and done. We are just making adjustments to some parts of SPYBLE and “tweaking” the system. So coming Sunday is the BIG day the SPYBLE 1.0 Beta release!

Ok back to work as we still have a lot to do before Sunday.

Regards

The SPYBLE Team.

Week of October 6, 2008

2008-10-06T04:13:00.000-07:00

Dear All,

Last week was a holiday in China. All the staff were on holiday. But Mike, Dave and Me got a lot of work done on checking all the interfaces of SPYBLE. Tommy and Alla are working hard on implementing all the changes this week.

Also Mike has started our Survey adwords campaign. With this campaign we are researching what kind of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Online Competitive Intelligence tools people are looking for. For those who do not know what adwords is add words is Google’s pay per click advertisement system. If you do a search on a keyword Google will show you two kinds of results,

- Organic which are the results on the left hand side of the screen.

- Paid results, these are the results on the right side of the screen and usually the first couple on top of the organic search results. Every time someone clicks on your add you pay Google a fee. (Pay Per Click.)

We have a long list of keywords for our add words campaign here a couple you can try in Google. The adds do not come up in China. Only in the US and Europe.

- website competition

- website competitive analysis

- website competitor analysis

- website competitors

Type them in Google and you will see our advertisement will be shown on the right side of the Google screen. Click on them and do our Survey.

You can also find the survey from this link, http://survey.spyble.com

We have two different advertisements which we use,

=====
Search Engine Services
Automatic Competitive Analysis
Start the SEO Tool Revolution!
Spyble.com

=====
Search Engine Services
Automated Competitive Analysis
Join the SEO Tool Revolution!
Spyble.com
=====

Below is a screenshot of one of our advertisements on Google,

We are working hard to meet our Deadline of the 19th of October. Up until now we are still on schedule. Most of the work is going into the updating of the backend interface of SPYBLE , the SPYBLE Dashboard. The Schedule is still the same as I sent out the previous email of last week.

Beta Testing

First Back end Beta testing 1 – 5 October

Implement Beta testing Changes 6 – 10 October

Second round of Beta Testing 10 – 14 October

Second round of Changes 15 - 18 October

Final Beta release 19 October

Operations

CA Migration 1 – 5 October

Implement SPYBLE CMS 5 – 6 October

Implement SPYBLE Helpdesk ticket system 5 – 6 October

Implement Pay Pall interface 6 – 10 October

Implement 2checkout interface 6 – 10 October

Develop Startup plan 10 – 14 October

This was it for this week. Will send out another mail next Monday.

And please send us your feedback on www.spyble.com.

Also please let me know if there is anything else you would like to see in these emails.

Best Regards,

Bas Sluitman

Progress Update - end of September

2008-10-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

Dear ALL,

Great News !!!!!

We have launched our Beta version of the www.spyble.com front end website. We hope you can all take a look at the site and send us your feedback.

Of course it is a Beta release and some parts,

- Order now
- Free trial

Are not really accessible right now. Looking forward in receiving your feedback…..

This week will be focusing on the back end of the SPYBLE system. Meaning we will go over every screen and check the functionalities, layout and text of the pages. I guess this is our first Beta test. All the screens are ready so we need to test and review them. This will be done at the end of this week.

Meanwhile Marco in the Netherlands is busy reviewing code and security of the system. Furthermore we are moving the Competitor Analysis system over to our production server. This is a big step forward for us as we can at this point not access www.competitor-analysis.com as the we are blocked in China or the Chinese IP is blocked by the current hosting. Thanks Marco for taking care of this.

To give everybody a better idea of what we are doing with SPYBLE I have included this overview of some milestones and deliverables.

Here is an overview of the milestones as they will look like right now till the 19th of October which is still our Final Beta release date.

Beta Testing

First Back end Beta testing 1 – 5 October

Implement Beta testing Changes 6 – 10 October

Second round of Beta Testing 10 – 14 October

Second round of Changes 15 - 18 October

Final Beta release 19 October

Operations

CA Migration 1 – 5 October

Implement SPYBLE CMS 5 – 6 October

Implement SPYBLE Helpdesk ticket system 5 – 6 October

Implement Pay Pall interface 6 – 10 October

Implement 2checkout interface 6 – 10 October

Develop Startup plan 10 – 14 October

We will launch a big Beta test campaign inviting all current CA users and of course all of you. We will beta test for a period of 1 month. After this month we will launch SPYBLE 1.0

So these are two exciting couple of weeks for the SPYBLE team. Everybody is working hard to get everything finished on the 19th of October.

Michael will start the SPYBLE survey campaign this week. This is a survey we do to find out what people are actually looking for in an online SEO tool. Will not get into to much details on this but we are basically doing an add words campaign to promote this survey. If people fill out the survey they can use our system for free for a certain period (still to be determined) and they get to become a beta tester.

On top of this we are already getting clients in Currently we are doing websites for 3 companies in Shenzhen

1 Chinese (don’t have the URL yet sorry)

In touch quality
Intouch Quality

Quality Wars

1 Dutch company in Shenzhen (no URL yet they still need to decide)

We are helping them with developing the site and doing the SEO. Don’t get me wrong we are not looking to sell website development as a service but we still have not found a reliable developer in Shenzhen that is willing to do these sites for us. We found one but had some issues with the technical leader of the company (not Chinese guy but western) don’t think we need to get into details but we were really not impressed. So right now we are doing it ourselves in our spare time (as we have so much spare time left anyway.)

Also it is an holiday week in China right now so our programmers are not working this means we have to do more coding ourselves (Marco.) But we are moving in the right direction and so far are on the right track.

Ok this is it for this week. Sorry for being on day late with the progress email…….

Regards

Bas Sluitman

SPYBLE

SPYBLE - COMPETE FASTER - corporate email

2008-09-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

Bas Sluitman writes our motivational internal email, pasted below:

Dear All,

A lot has happened in a very short time and will try to summarize it.

This is the first time we send out a SPYBLE progress email. We apologize for not sending any updates sooner.

The deadline for the system is October 19 2008. Currently we do not have any serious issues delaying progress.

I want to send out a weekly progress email to keep all stake holders up to date about what is going on with and around SPYBLE.

The email will contain an overview of project progress, issues and any changes that arise during final development of SPYBLE.

As this is the first progress email I would like to give you a brief introduction the core project team organization and members,

Project manager: Bas Sluitman

Assistant manager: David Ho

Lead Technology: Marco van der Laan

PHP Programmer: Tommy Tang

Interface programmer: Alla Liu

Marketing and Sales: Michael Michelini

I do not have pictures from everyone but here are some pictures so you can see what our project room looks like and how we work.

These pictures are from the office startup so we were still getting organized.

This is picture of Tommy our PHP programmer.

View of the project office with David Ho the project assistant working.

We will send some more pictures and information about who is who in following emails.

Also you can look at http://blog.michaelmichelini.com/ where Mike keeps his blog.

The office startup went very smooth.

We looked at several offices in the Hai Wang building (Neptune building.) Selected the office we all liked the first time we walked in it was love at first site.

The office layout was exactly what we were looking for and we could move right in (after some minor refurbishment)

Thank you Ivan and Sophie for dealing with all office matters so quickly and working so hard to get the office ready in such short time.

After our furniture was delivered we ordered our development hardware from Dell and a week later we were ready to install and implement all soft and hardware needed to start work.

This is also the same period we started recruitment looking for one PHP programmer and Interface programmer familiar with PHP and Ajax. It turned out this was not as easy as we initially thought.

There are not a lot of PHP programmers in Shenzhen China and the ones we found we could not afford. However I was able to talk to some of the IT companies I have worked with in the past and

Surely we found exactly the right people we were looking for.

Working on a system that has originally been designed in Netherlands built in India and enhanced in China is not easy. Especially if you have not been involved form the beginning.

It means looking through other peoples coding, database and comments. Marco who is based in the Netherlands has been analyzing the code and database for the past few months.

He has made some changes to better organize the system and create a more secure environment for our users.

Also we are using Marco’s hardware to host the live environment of www.competitor-analysis.com (current system will not say too much about this in this mail please check the site for more info)

And SPYBLE. The server is hosted in the Netherlands.

Tommy is very excited about the project and interested in SEO, SPYBLE and the technology behind it. He has been working and studying hard to get familiar with the system, code and database.

He has many years of experience developing in a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) environment. Marco and Tommy communicate daily using Skype and email. So far this has been going very well. Tommy does not speak English very well but writing and reading is no problem.

Alla Liu is our interface programmer and graphics designer she joined SPYBLE last week and is already working hard on some interface issues we really needed solved.

She is very experienced using photo shop and dream weaver also she has very good knowledge of PHP, MySQL and Linux.

The office right now houses Top Notch Technologies and SPYBLE. Top Notch Technologies is Ivan’s newly founded BPO company offering different technology and BPO services.

Right now we have about 10 people working in the office.

This is it for now. I hope you guys can send me some feedback about what you would like to see in this email every week. Hope to hear from you all and am looking forward to getting some feedback and interaction on these emails .

Best Regards

Bas Sluitman

Become facebook friends with Spyble

2008-09-15T04:42:00.000-07:00

Spyble....coming October 19. 2008

The Spyble team is very excited to go towards its Beta release in Mid October. In the meantime, please join the Spyble website on facebook!

Cheers
Mike

What is Spyble from the Spyble Girl

2008-08-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

Lets get some buzz going . Our friend Francy has volunteered to become the Spyble girl....

Spyble is an online competitive analysis tool that allows users to monitor their websites against their competition. But yea that could get boring to explain - so Francy is helping get the buzz....