Knowem.com and Fiverr.com

Knowem.com has a huge list of Web2.0 sites and a service that costs a pretty penny. For essentially a dollar a site, you can have them initialize sign up, thus reserving your username.

This is helpful for branding, and most profiles give you a place to mention your website. This is helpful for building incoming links and possibly driving traffic if you are honestly active on the sites.

In the partnership forums (which are still down, by the way), someone linked to a site called fiverr.com. It's an amusing idea: Buy and Sell services for $5. In the forums someone pointed out that you can get article writing for $5 (which is a tad expensive if you are planning on paying for a lot of them, there are cheaper ways). But there are other services offered like commenting on your blogs, inviting 3,000 Facebook friends to your fan page, and such.

I didn't see one for doing Web2.0 signups, but there is a box in the far right hand column for "wishlist" gigs that you might like to see. So I put in a wishlist request for 10 Web2.0 signups for $5. Two sellers replied to my fiverr.com inbox (I had to sign up to post in the wishlist box)!

Hey, for $10 I could try this out and get 20 sign ups. 100 signups would then cos me $50, a savings of $49 over Knowem.com. I decided not to request them finishing the profiles for several reasons. One is that I wanted to check out the sites myself, since maybe something would be interesting (like kiva.org!). The other is that I wanted to change the password before entering more data. Hiring out someone to sign up was already enough information for them to have in their unknown to me hands!

One seller immediately sent me a gmail address to contact him/her. When I replied that I was new and didn't understand how to set it up so I could pay for the gig (that's what they call these at fiverr.com), s/he replied that it was no problem and I could pay directly to his/her PayPal account.  My radar went up.

The other seller tried a sample sign up, messaged me at fiverr.com to check if it worked and if I was still interested s/he would set up a gig so I could purchase it and s/he would do the other 9 sites. Now that was good marketing, and all according to the rules. So I approved setting up the gig, purchased it (your payment is through Paypal to fiverr.com), and s/he quickly, efficiently, and with good communication when more info was needed, did the job. So I immediately hired him/her for another 10 sign ups. I gave him/her good reviews for both gigs.

I also hired someone to read my Squidoo lenses, comment, and rate them. She left relevant comments that showed she really had read them, and I gave her positive feedback. Fun!

And that first seller? I reported him/her to fiverr.com and the account was closed within hours. I didn't mean to get someone booted, but that kind of behavior is what could ruin the investment that fiverr.com put into the site.

Another thing about Knowem.com. So they have data on all the sites and for the 100 site fee, you get the 100 most trafficked sites. Some Web2.0 sites just never take off and dwindle, so what's the point of a sign up. Okay, so I figured we had the skills from the niche selection unit to get an idea of a site worth a sign up. I didn't end up having to do all that work, though Knowem lists on their site the Alexa ranking, Compete.com ranking, Yahoo incoming links, etc.., so you can see for yourself pretty quickly which are worth a sign up.

And don't forget to sign up for Knowem.com itself!