ROMlet - Boast Your Content's Popularity

Once you have written great content and have gotten the initial exposure, social proof is on your side. ROMlet is another way to use use social proof to your advantage and capitalize on your existing exposure to further propel your content.

Social proof is the idea that because a certain number of people say a particular article is interesting and informative, more and more people will read it, link to it, and share it because of the approval from the initial bunch. For example, if I'm looking for commentary on a particular theme and your article is the first one on Google, I immediately think that you have the best, most relevant, and most linked to content and therefore am compelled to reference it and link to it. This is not only to learn from what you have written but to also give my article more credibility simply because it relies on the number one Google search result for that query.

ROMlet provides a widget that I would actually use. I came up with an idea and shared it with a developer a while back who then developed a Wordpress plugin based on it called Social Traffic Monitor. The plugin would monitor your incoming traffic and then would display a color coded graph of the referring sources. The underlying concept at ROMlet is incredibly similar.

The service provides a widget which when you put on your site, displays the top referring traffic to your site.

By doing this you are creating two effects. First, by displaying how much traffic you are getting from all the various sources you are showing to your audience and your prospective subscribers that your content is appreciated all over the web and that they should become regulars. Secondly, because you are displaying your referrers, you encourage more people to refer to you because they get to be displayed prominently on your site and might even get some traffic from you as your readers' curiosity with respect to what the referrers are saying gets the best of them

ROMlet also works on the same principle as MyBlogLog, who's.amung.us, and even RSS feed chicklets. By displaying how many people read your blog (MyBlogLog), how many concurrent readers you have (who's.amung.us) and how many people regularly visit your site (RSS readers) you accomplish much of the same by further perpetuating your content's social proof.

ROMlet is currently in beta and we will have more news as it becomes available to us.

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BeachBum, July 16, 2007

Great post, I will have to check out ROMlet. I agree 100% about social proof. One day last week CNN wrote an article and linked to my BLOG. I'm still getting traffic from it.

BeachBum

Wayne Smallman, July 16, 2007

Hi Muhammad, it's certainly an interesting concept, if only a tad conceited, if you're a 'blogger that is!

Additionally, there's going to be a lower threshold; those who have little or no traffic from known social portals won't be as likely to have something display how unpopular they are.

However, similar options already exist, like with FeedBurner, for example.

Their post footer lets you choose the social bookmarking services you prefer and the popularity of your article is listed alongside the name...

Matt Ellsworth, July 16, 2007

Looks good - I will have to check this out. Someone from weburbanist.com told me about it and I found this post from the romlet home page.

Urbanist, July 16, 2007

There are two beta versions of ROMlet up on a co-authored blog: http://weburbanist.com It's also important to mention that ROMlet is a dynamic bookmarking tool. Those favicons you see on the widget are not just for show - they are actually active links back to the referring source.

This makes it easy for people to vote or bookmark a blog where it counts (e.g. if it is getting traffic from Digg, people will know and can go vote for that traffic source).

Because this is self-updating the widget will always show up-to-the-second information that is new each time people visit a site, or whenever site owners want to see their own traffic sources. One of the things we've noticed using it on WebUrbanist is that we find new sites that having 'voting' systems for our site and can encourage our readers to vote us up on these sites as soon as they start sending traffic.

Urbanist, July 16, 2007

To Wayne: part of what is neat about ROMlet is that you can set how far back your referers display for. So, for example, newer bloggers with less traffic can display the last month of referer traffic, while high-traffic blogs might brag what they get in a day. Users can also (as the second widget on our site shows) do away with stats altogether if they choose, and just show the popular referers in order of traffic sent.

Snoop, July 16, 2007

Sounds like a pretty neat widget. I didn't realize it was also for social bookmarking. I don't get a lot of hits on my Share and Enjoy buttons, probably because there are too many to choose from.

Quinton, July 16, 2007

This seems like another one of those ideas that could catch on pretty well. We will have to wait and see!

Rose DesRochers, July 22, 2007

I will have to check out ROMlet when it becomes available.

Nowsourcing, July 25, 2007

Looks to be in direct competition with Addthis, and should have no trouble building up steam.

Addthis kind of bothers me in the sense that you get a popup window and then you need to choose which social media to choose. Even with their new dropdown button version.

Nice post!

Urbanist, August 10, 2007

Romlet is now available at http://romlet.com for beta users. Registrant numbers may be limited, so interested bloggers and site owners should sign up soon.

@NowSourcing: it definitely takes that two-step process of AddThis out of the equation. Also, since it displays top cuurent referers, it helps site owners by voting them up on sites where they are building up steam - rather than casting a stand-alone vote on a random site.

bxwklo bwpmrxlts, 3 weeks, 4 days ago