How to get Tumblr working again for embedded IE browsers

Some of you may have noticed over the past couple weeks that Tumblr is not working inside of webDOM. You may have also noticed that Tumblr has stopped working in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. Whenever you click on a link to go to your dashboard or another page, all of the sudden webDOM crashes.

The first thing you need to verify is that you're using Windows 7. There is a different fix for WinXP but it includes using a proxy server that can mask the User-Agent string of the browser and will be covered in a different tutorial. The Windows 7 fix includes using Internet explorer 9. If you do not have IE9, download and install it now before continuing. To check your version of internet explorer, open it up, then click on the "Help" button in the toolbar and click "About".

After you have the proper version of IE for Windows 7, you can follow the next steps to get Tumblr working on your computer:

1. Make sure that webDOM is shut down and that no instances of the program are running
2. Click the Windows Start button
3. Type in "regedit" in the start search bar, then hit enter
4. Click on "Edit" then on "Find"... or just hit "Ctrl + F"
5. Enter into the search box "FEATURE_BROWSER" and hit enter, then wait for the search to find the proper key
6. On the right side, right-click and then under "New" choose, new DWORD. (DWORD is 32-bit)
7. Name the new DWORD "webDOM.exe" capitals matter.
8. Right click on your new DWORD and click "Modify"
9. In the value enter "1F40" (one F four zero) ... that's a hexidecimal value... then hit enter
10. Open webDOM as usual

It's important that you follow these steps exactly as they are written. This means that on step 7 when you are entering webDOM.exe as your new DWORD, you must have "DOM" in capital letters or the fix will not work. This is the same for any application which uses the same method to automate on Tumblr. Just replace "webDOM.exe" with the name of your application.

Tumblr has been working on their new interface and it has caused issues with older versions of internet explorer. However, the fact that you can simply change your user agent to above MSIE 7 or a whole other accepted browser points to a possible "security" based reason to do this. Most automation systems that are running on tumblr use the embedded (ActiveX) version of internet explorer and it seems Tumblr has targeted this directly. Even if internet explorer 9 is installed, the user agent for webDOM will show up as version 7.

Despite their attempts to block out undesirable users by using a generalized filter, Tumblr needs a bit more effort to reach their goal of a "no-automation" social network. Unfortunately they are growing, and we all know that the more things are resisted, the more they persist. They have entered into the never-ending arms race of anti-automation. Surely there will be new limits placed on following, commenting, and the like soon.

SoundCloud down, Tumblr up to bat

Since working on soundcloud and reaching my goal of getting hits from the site on a more consistent basis. There was a brief dip in my hits from sc simply because during this month I traveled for a bit. Also, one major thing that happened is that they contacted me to tell me that my account was red flagged by their automation sensors based off of my high comment count and my high unfollow count. I slowed it down to just sharing my track with my 850 followers and actually running superfollow very rarely. I probably will do a little unfollowing in the future, but from slowing it down I haven't got any other notice, so I'm pretty sure it's working. I did at max about 600 - 800 actions per day that past 5 days or so. This is what Google has to say:



261 hits from Soundcloud this month is pretty nice, and there's room to grow since I didn't give it 100%. They actually got me more hits than anyone. Facebook is high up there in the list of traffic sources, but I've realized I need to make the download button more prominent on my site so that people know they can dl the tracks. I'm working on that. You'll also notice that first hump, that was when I was going full blast for a day or two on "SuperFollow", but after I got red flagged, I took it easy for a bit. The next two humps come from releasing new tracks, doing just a little bit of superfollow (about 200 follows) and then sharing my tracks with a couple thousand people over a couple days.

In other news, I've been working on getting my tumblr following geared up. I've been working on embelishing the tumblr plugin like I did with the soundcloud plugin and already have a "Mutuality" script. I am working on figuring out the external hits formula for them as I did on soundcloud. The first thing I noticed is that you can post not only soundcloud songs, but you can post any type of media with tumblr posts: Audio/video/text and everything in between. The other nice thing is that you can have a "click-through" link on your images for instance, so I made a "Post Image" script/button in webDOM that will take keywords and a URL and then search through google images, pick a random large image and post it in tumblr with a link back to whatever I want. So I am scheduling that to run throughout the day as to start filling my blog with viral content.

The main function that I notice about tumblr that's really cool is their reblog button. It really makes their content viral because people can so easily share the same exact blog post on their blog. They can also "like" a blog by clicking on the little heart and favoriting things. In the end, I can automate all of this along with friend adding and from my previous experience playing with tumblr, it's not that hard to get 100 - 150 followers per day and there are no follow limits nor any other limits that I've found so far. As far as click throughs to my site, I've gotten about 14 in the last couple days, which can obviously be better. It seems what works best on tumblr are things that are funny or quirky. There also seems to be a much younger crowd on there, but yes, young people are eating up dubstep like nobody's business.

So I'm excited about starting tumblr and figuring out the equation to get people to my site, and I'm continuing automation on SoundCloud as I move on. One site down, 10 more to go, lol!

The SoundCloud Formula

As most of you return readers know, I have been working on figuring out a way to get visitors to my site from SoundCloud. I've been working with low numbers of actions using webDOMinator friend adder and some customizations I made in it, to achieve this result.

Each website has a formula of actions that are necessary in order to get visitors from that site to your site. This formula consists of the target, content, message, and call to action which are chosen. The details of your target market, the content of your profile, the message that you portray, and the way that you make your call to action all depend on the community that you're dealing with. Each social network is it's own community. I believe I have now cracked the SoundCloud formula on how to get a large number of visits to any music based website. This blog entry is an attempt to cover so far what was needed to do this.

To Summarize what I did:

Target: Since my music is a mix of electronica I could say all people who like electronic music, but I wanted to focus on a specific niche in soundcloud specifically which was the dubstep fans and other dubstep artists. This allows me to easily craft my message so that it calls to everyone who I'm targeting.

Content: A small selection of my own original music. The profile description, and the song descriptions and tags were all set up and targeted toward my chosen target market (dubstep fans)

Message: Because of my target market and because of the site, my message is based on artists and based on the way soundcloud works. I used the SuperFollow custom action which will comment on other artist's tracks. In the comment I give them a compliment on the music. I know, as an artist, that I love getting compliments. It fills me with the want to create more music.

Call to action: I drop my link and ask them to check out my stuff too. This comment can be seen by anyone, thus giving my link better exposure than if I was to simply send a message to this person. This uses the idea that giving a compliment and then dropping my own link and asking them to check out my music (from an artist to artist point of view), will have them more inclined to click on my link because artists love compliments and because there's a natural sort of mutuality effect that happens in human psychology.

As for how I did all this, I just ran SuperFollow on 1,000 ID's at the beginning of the day. I then run the new "Mutualize" custom action I made that allows me to unfollow all that are not following me mutually. Yesterday, I also ran a new custom action I added called "Share to Followers" which shares my latest track with everyone who's following me.

The Results

The resulting visits to my site so far from the last two days is way above what any other method I've tried has gotten me:

A total of 49 hits in the last two days just from soundcloud. Each day I've had 2 or more downloads, thus causing the viral aspect of the site to kick into gear and asking the user to share the track link on a social network in order to get the download. It's either that, or they give me their email address. I've now got 21 email addresses that my site can automatically send new tracks to.

Quite a few plays: my soundcloud stats show 98 plays / 15 comments / 4 favoritings this week, and that counter reset this morning at 12:00am Soundcloud time. In total I'm now over 3,000 plays on soundcloud. I also have over 600 followers from that site.

My site stats show 86 plays yesterday with 15 full plays and 2 downloads. The two downloads were also tracks that were up on my SoundCloud account so I'm quite sure that these two downloads were from people who listened and would have converted to a download on soundcloud, but instead I got that download juice for myself and thus caused the link to those songs to be spread more to other people who will possibly like it.

Google Shows this for soundcloud referrals:



It's been a good couple of days on soundcloud.

Back on the Game

This Morning...

It's been awhile since my last blog post. For awhile, I let SoundCloud just go by itself without doing any more SuperFollowing. This allowed me to see the natural "after-flow" of last month's campaign. So far I've gotten a total of 2,391 plays

Today I'm dropping comments on superfollow with a link back to my site directly to see if people will click on the link and maybe I can get more than one hit out of the link, whereas with messages I only get one hit per message. So far Superfollow has worked wonderfully because of the mutuality of it I'm assuming. The down side of it is that I've been makinng comments that just gave a compliment and basically waited for people to come back and click on my website link. That's too much extra work.

Later this evening...

What I did today has already proven to work more efficiently than sending messages. I've gotten 17 visits from soundcloud and 72 plays today so far. The idea of leaving the link in my comments has worked and caused people to come to my site off of different tracks, etc. Tomorrow I'll be able to see the final outcome. I only ran 1,000 and my return ratio doubled the prior one.

I'm also working on another new track so we'll see if it turns out being liked by my target market. I'm up to 990 plays this week, about 300 of those being today. I also have got about 586 subscribers in total and I've run through about 14.5k user Id's from the dub-step category of soundcloud users. I've dabbled with just sharing tracks on some of those, but the SuperFollow custom action on webDOM seems to be the way to go. That mixed with a good spun comment message allows for a very nice result so far and it's looking more promising. I'm going to run another 1,000 while I sleep.

In the next entry I'm going to cover how I will automate the webDOM soundcloud plugin fully by selecting a schedule for unfollowing and following. I've also created a new action in the newest soundcloud update to unfollow people who are not following back. It's called Mutualize.

Big day for Soundcloud

Yesterday I followed the new strategy on Soundcloud. The results were quite good; My conversion rate from follows/invites to actual profile views went up. My song plays and comments went up as well. This is what I did.

I created two new custom actions in webDOM. One that writes a comment on someone's profile, and the other shares my newest track with any user from my list. I combined these two scripts into a main custom action I called "SuperFollow". I have updated the soundcloud plugin, so for those of you using it, you can enjoy these new features as well. The SuperFollow action only follows a person who has tracks placed on their profile page. If it notices there are tracks, it will also comment on one of the tracks using the message body I have set up in my message settings. If SuperFollow notices that there are no tracks (i.e: a music fan rather than a musician) it then chooses to share a track with that person, just selecting my latest track as the one to share. Since my message is spun using DynamicPhrases, webDOM won't drop the same comment twice, or it will, but very rarely.

I ended up running this on about 2,000 user ID's because I forgot to stop it at 1,000... but no problems, because though it could not follow, it still shared tracks and wrote comments. Here's what I got from yesterday's run so far:

354 profile views
333 plays
62 comments
11 favoritings
4 visits to my site

Now... I took a look at my google analytics for this and I noticed that those 4 visits from yesterday came from my profile page on soundcloud... In total, soundcloud has sent me 36 visits since April 3rd... and on one day it sent me 12. The other 32 visits from them came from the read message page. This allows me to make a couple observations:

1. Soundcloud allows links in messages
2. People respond more to a direct message, though some respond badly if they think it's spam
3. Most people who you do not ask to go to your site will not click your website link on the right side of your profile
4. Commenting and following and sharing tracks really helps the ratio between the number of profile views and the number of plays I'm getting

Also, take into account that this is only one day after my campaign, so there's going to be more people coming in all day as well as over the next few days. The biggest problem is my conversion rate. It seems that I really do have to ask people to come visit my site. So I'm going to wait a day or two, let yesterday's run finish it's job, and then my new policy is going to be dropping links on comments. The links are clickable in comments. It might be a bit shady as far as people seeing it as spam or something, so I'm weary to do it... but hey, one's got to do what one's got to do.

In other news, I was looking at google analytics and my results from last.fm. I'm going to run a last.fm campaign again today and see what I can do as far as that goes. I didn't run much automation on it, and it is up there right after soundcloud in top referrers.

That being said... Facebook remains my top referrer simply due to the viral aspect. The day before yesterday I posted up a new song on my site and shared it on facebook. I got about 180 plays / 112 full plays / 2 downloads. This is pretty good and at least there's people listening and downloading my music. On the 18th though, only about 2 people came from facebook (most of my facebook visitors came from april 3rd to april 12th.) In direct traffic, I had 12 direct visitors on the 18th so it's showing that people are coming back and listening to my music.

It seems I need to make the download aspect a little bit more noticeable or visible. Perhaps I'll make the download button into a gif that slowly pulsates from that dark red color to a yellowish or green color. I'll play with it to see if I can get my download ratio up. Tomorrow we'll see the full aftermath of this. Now it's on to Last.fm for the night.

More Soundcloud automation

I'm just now starting to get how to use SoundCloud properly thanks to another suggestion from a friend. In my previous blog entry about Soundcloud I mentioned my target "dubstep" and it's different sub-genres. Now what I have found is that the night I started doing PM's even though they were spun, I got results from people on other suggestions, but I missed one major point. I needed to do that message from a different account than my music account. Not that anything happened with SoundCloud or banning, just that the message was set up to mention my artist account without actually myself; the artist, being the person to be mentioning myself. Nonetheless. People overall responded well.

Yesterday I started actually letting the soundcloud plugin work on adding. I had previously set up the Add script in webDOM to "gather" to my list of soundcloud users while adding, so I now have a list of 30,000+ users, and because of the way commenting works on the site, all of those users are within the target market still. That being said, I let it run and it seems my follow count stopped at 979. This seems to be a limit imposed by SoundCloud.

So to get around the limit this is what I did...

1. Created a new list called "scratch"
2. Navigated to the page on soundcloud showing those who follow me
3. Auto-Gathered everyone from that list
4. In the list, I clicked on the very last list item so that webDOM starts after that item
5. Navigated to the page on soundcloud showing those who I'm following
6. Auto-Gathered the people from those who I'm following - because the list system only allows uniques it will not add those who are following me back because they're already there
7. I then ran the Unfollow custom action in the soundcloud plugin

So now I ran through all of the people toward the end of the list. At the moment I have a webDOM bot going through the latter 940 people who I was following and is now unfollowing them. This will give me more room to follow another 940 different people. At the end of the weekend (I didn't work on any campaigning this weekend) I was able to get 38 followers, 226 profile views, 128 song plays, 2 downloads, 31 visits to wiseeyesmusic.com and 22 comments.

Like all good marketers, I like to look at conversions and see the conversion ratios. This way I can figure out how much work it will take to reach my goals. I want to generate at least 100 visits to my site from each of the social networks I'm working with. So right now, the conversion flow works like this...

979 friend requests > 226 profile view > 31 site visits

So respectively if 979 were 100% then I would be converting:

1. 23% of requests to profile views
2. 13% of page views to site visits

So 13% of the people who view my soundcloud profile visit my web site, which means that in order to get 100 visits a day, I need to get 729 profile views. In order to get 729 profile views (23% of invites) then I need to send out 3,157 friend requests per day. Right now I can only invite 979 in one run, and I'm not sure how that's going to work since I need to give people at least a day or two before I unfollow them, because there are people who don't use soundcloud every day. I guess I need to use a new strategy then to reach my goal.

New stragegy - Commenting

I'm going to try doing this action with everyone. When I follow I'm going to also add a comment automatically on a track, if they have one. Then I'm going to also send them a message telling them that I followed them and asking to please follow me back. I do not know if this will work or not, but my hypothesis is that people will be more receptive to come visit my page if they see that I'm following them and that I also sent them a message. I could even, based on the condition that the person has songs uploaded, auto-favorite random songs and change the message to say something about how I like their music in the message. As soon as I'm done unfollowing, this is what I'm going to do.

As for the other strategy of creating a "fan" account and suggesting myself from that account, I'm going to try that as well.

Tomorrow we'll see how it's worked out.

Marketing: Results from Last.FM and viral marketing

Yesterday I talked about my Last.fm strategy. I did not mention the customizations I did on the Auto-Shout script. I added a couple lines to get the username of the user into a variable and then used that variable in my message. I then made use of DynamicPhrases (text spinning in webDOM) in order to really get the most of out my comment posts. Also so that no two comment posts would be the same. This is the full message as a dynamic phrase...

Hey ^global.name|global.tname^!|.| -^ ^I see you like|been listenin to^ ^Kode 9^?| i see.^ ^People who like him usually get along with my music well.|I think you would like my music too.|you might like my stuff as well!|I know you'd like my tracks too.^ ^If you'd be so kind please|^ ^drop over to|go to|hit up|check out^ my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. ^I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.||I'll bet you love it :)|thanks :)|Leave a comment and tell me if I was right or not.^

If you want downloads of my ^tracks|music|songs^, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so ^head over there|check it out|head on over|you can go^ and get all the downloads you ^want|need|desire^ (new tracks every couple days)|^. Thanks for ^taking the time time to read this|reading this|supporting independent music|supporting me^ ^:)|:D|=)|;)|:o)|=o)^

When webDOM parses this out, it can come up with some pretty different messages, but still carry the same meaning. Here are some examples of how it works out...

Example Output 1:

Hey Amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? People who like him usually get along with my music well. If you'd be so kind please go to my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so check it out and get all the downloads you want (new tracks every couple days). Thanks for reading this :)

Example Output 2:

Hey amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? you might like my stuff as well! check out my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so you can go and get all the downloads you want. Thanks for supporting me :)

So I just went about Auto-Shouting this using a 90 second wait counter (at least 90 seconds between each comment sent). I was able to pull 7 people from last.fm directly since yesterday. I checked my last.fm account and I got 1 play yesterday. A comment, and some people tagged my account and added my music to their last.fm library. This is modest so far, so I'll see if it's just the fact that not everyone's on last.fm every day. I'll give last.fm a rest for a couple days and see if any of the effort from yesterday has some continuing payoffs.

As far as the viral part of the site goes... I'm delighted to see that facebook is sending me a nice constant stream of people. I looked at my stats on the site this morning and I've already had 30 full plays and 5 downloads (which means 5 shares of my tracks, most likely somewhere on facebook) Only about 8 people per day on average, but return visitors and new people alike. Here's my google analytics output on that...



Overall as well, here's a view of my GA dashboard. Visitors are going up, so that's awesome. Direct traffic being the biggest contributor, followed by facebook.


Onward and upward! Today I'm going to try out Mixcloud plugin and see where it takes me