I finally did it…

After many months of asking clients to use text based template I finally bit the bullet and installed a swish new order form for ordering automated blogs. To use it all that is needed is to copy/paste the information that we need to share into the form. When the ‘Submit’ button is pressed all the data is uploaded to a server and I get an immediate notification that the order has been placed.

Because I am using a trusted 3rd party server to host the form there is no worry about spam or hijacking of the form. I am aware that some people prefer to be ultra-cautious about data and so it is still possible to send hosting account info to me by email, but, in my opinion, this system is more than secure enough for our needs.

If there are any questions about this improved system please just send me an email.

Andrew Wilson.

As automated blogs users know we use socialbookmarking on all the sites we build. The purpose is to get the newsites and as many pages as possible spidered and indexed by the search engines. We use just one tool for this job: RssBookmarker although quite a few users also have AutoSocialPoster running on their WordPress blogs.

One issue that I have seen cropping up a few times is this:
What is the difference between RssBookmarker and AutoSocialPoster and the free services such as OnlyWire? This article attempts to cover the important differences and explain why I use bookmarking and in particular RssBookmarker so much.

I must give full credit to Anthony Ellis of Mass-Automation the source of ASP and RssBookmarker for much of the following as I freely adapted his comparisons between OnlyWire and ASP from a forum post he wrote. Thanks Anthony.

Differences between OnlyWire and ASP/RssBookmarker

Difference 1: The most obvious difference is that these free services are not fully automated. They require some manual interaction.

Here’s the process to bookmark accounts using Onlywire:
1. Create your blog post
2. Go to your blog post permalink
3. Click the onlywire submit button on your toolbar
4. Enter/confirm your blog post data including tags and URL
5. Select the sites you want to submit the bookmark to
6. Submit them
7. No confirmation is sent so you don’t know if the submission was successful or not.

If you have more than one blog (which most of us do), then you must repeat this process for each blog and post!

Here’s the process using ASP:
1. Create your blog post
2. Post is bookmarked, and email report is sent.

If you have more than one blog, just repeat step 1. If your blog is posted to automatically, as with all automated blogs or with an auto blogging tool like RSS to BLOG then using ASP you don’t have to do anything. The blog will be posted to and the post will be bookmarked automatically.

In fairness, Onlywire does have an API that allows you to add posts remotely, BUT they limit how many posts you can submit and they scrutinize the content of the posts. They can disable your ability to bookmark your posts at any time. It is a free service after all. Possibly most importantly you need to be able to program your application - not viable for most of us.

Difference 2: The next big difference is that ASP bookmarks to more bookmarking accounts and allows you to submit to random number of bookmarking accounts and multiple instances of the same type of bookmarking account automatically.

* OnlyWire: 22 Accounts. Several are actually no longer working (eg. Shadows and Spurl)
* OnlyWire: Only allows one account per bookmarking service per user.
* OnlyWire: You can either submit to all accounts you have or select specific accounts manually.

* ASP: 34 sites supported
* ASP: Supports an unlimited number of Scuttle and Scuttleplus accounts.
* ASP: Supports Multiple accounts from same bookmarking site (So you can have 10 Magnolia accounts, 12 Simpy accounts, etc.)
* ASP: Can automatically choose from X number of random accounts or any number of selected accounts.

This in effect means you can have hundreds and hundreds of social bookmarking accounts from a single install of AutoSocialPoster.

Sure you can create multiple OnlyWire accounts to try and match the ASP features, but the point here is time-saving automation. If you have all the time in the world, then you don’t need any of this. Just bookmark your posts by hand.

Difference 3: OnlyWire is a middleman. You add your blog post to your blog, then you need their server to add your post to the bookmarking sites. If their site goes down (and it does) what happens? If their service stops, what happens?

There is no middleman with ASP. Your blog bookmarks its own posts. Fewer points of failure and allows you total control over what is happening with your business.

Pretty much all the benefits of AutoSocialPoster also apply to RssBookmarker but there are some important differences between the two and so one would probably chose one over the other according to one’s own circumstances.

RssBookmarker, unlike ASP works with any site that has an Rss feed and even comes with an application to make an Rss feed for sites that do not already have one. So, if you have a mixture of types of site then RssBookmarker might be a better choice.

RssBookmarker is a server based script. It lives on your webhost and must be installed, not a difficult task but a little more involved than ASP. (However, anybody buying RssBookmarker through me will be entitled to a free install on their hosting, just contact me and we can sort it out!)

RssBookmarker bookmarks everything in the Rss feed. ASP has a filter to avoid posting very short posts, this helps to reduce spam posting. This means that if your site is primarily composed of short posts then ASP is a good bet as only the longer, more valuable content will be bookmarked.

If you have loads of sites, many tens or even hundreds of WordPress blogs then ASP may become cumbersome to administer. There is a tool to help with managing bookmarking accounts but version upgrades to hundreds of sites… …eeek! RssBookmarker is a single install no matter how many sites you have. We have hundreds of sites running off a single shared server with many, many bookmarking accounts.

In my opinion, if one is running websites as a business then one can not afford to bookmark pages/posts by hand. Both ASP and RssBookmarker are very reliable, well supported and valuable tools and I would not want to lose either of them. The choice as to which to buy is, I hope, made a little easier by the foregoing!

Andrew Wilson

I know, I said I would not be doing this too often, but please forgive me.

If you read this during the 24th October 2007 please look at the DealDotCom banner to the left of this post.

For those who have a network of WordPress blogs, or automated blogs this is a tool that you should have!

automated blogs clients already know that we bookmark the posts on their websites from the day the site is built for at least another month. We do it because it is the best way to automatically get search engines to come and spider new posts and because we know that a decent post will attract traffic from ‘real’ people.

The tool that we use for bookmarking is called RssBookmarker and it is from Anthony Ellis at Mass Automation. It is a great tool.

Before RssBookmarker came out there was AutoSocialPoster, in my opinion everyone with a network of blogs should be using ASP. Today you can buy it for half price: $98.50. You can bookmark in a ‘polite’ and sensible way to over 30 bookmark sites, the software has been around for a while and is reliable and Anthony updates it as necessary.

Can you tell I am a fan?

Well, so are some of my clients. Now ALL of you can be ASP fans.

Run, don’t walk to DealDotCom and buy this fab WordPress plugin.

And for those who miss out, well, you should still buy it, but the cost will be higher. Here is a link that will get you to the AutoSocialPoster sales page at any time

http://www.dealdotcom.com/blog/2007/10/24/auto-social-poster/#comment-1905

When we receive files for building blogs sometimes clients want to have anchor text links embedded into their articles. Occasionally things do not go according to plan and the links we receive do not work.

In order to make sure that articles with anchor text links in work correctly when inserted into WordPress two things are needed:
1) The files should always be sent as .txt files. Any other format allows characters that may interfere with the appearance of the article when it appears in the blog.

2) The links should be ‘fully formed’ in the following format:
<A HREF="http://littleautomaticmoneymaker.com/order-form"> The text you want on the page </A>
This format gives you the following appearance:
The text you want on the page

Now all your links will work properly.

Until using links in this way becomes second nature it might be worthwhile to copy/paste from the example above. After a few times it’ll all fit together and writing links will be just a normal thing to do.

As a standard tool in all our blog installations we use a plugin that automatically turns ordinary text such as knowhow-now.com or www.armyofexperts.com into live links. This is a very useful function and can be a big time saver when writing posts with lots of web addresses.

I hope this helps!

Andrew.

We have, as a bonus feature, been offering keyword based datafeeds from ClickBank and Amazon. As those who have been with us for a while know the service has not been entirely without problems.

Recently, once again, the service stopped working. For me, this was the last straw so sadly we are going to cease the use of these two feeds.

I have an idea for using ClickBank but it will have a small monthly cost. The good thing is that I have been using the service for about 6 months without a hitch and the on-page results are, I think, better than we had been offering.

I will sort out the details and set up a template for the automated blogs and then post back here with information.

You might well ask ‘well Andrew, why did you not offer this to us before?’ A good point, but the problem is that whilst we can set the thing up for you on the page each user must pay an individual subscription of $9.99 for ALL their sites be they automated blogs or anything else and do a small configuration on each site. The previous provider enabled us to do everything for you and no extra payments.

Andrew.

You won’t see many of these posts from me, after all, I have a DealDotCom.com banner in the sidebar.

But, WP Cloner is a really good piece of software. It does what it says it does and reliably. If you are managing a network of blogs then WP Cloner will quickly become indispensable. If you are planning a network of blogs then buy WP Cloner and use it to help you grow your network. It is a real timesaver.

NB. WPCloner does not install WordPress, it’ll install plugins and configure the sites you have set up already. To be honest, installing takes only seconds per site the time is taken up in uploading plugins and configuring your options.

PS. I forgot to include a ‘real’ link because this post will be around long after the DealDotCom promotion is over: WP Cloner, clones Wordpress blogs.

I just saw a post on the Warrior forum about SocialBot. This was the first automated socialbookmarking tool that I used. It was great because it spidered my sites and allowed me to edit the data it collected and then to choose which pages were going to be bookmarked. It was also affordable at just under $100. I used it for a long time but sadly it was never updated after the developer’s first rush of enthusiasm.

Even after I stopped using Socialbot for bookmarking I still used it for spidering my sites and then exporting the data into another tool.

Anyway, Mike at Incansoft has re-released his little tool. It has been speeded up, has new sites to post to and a commitment that one new site per week will be added to the database.

If you are not yet using socialbookmarking tools as part of your site promtion strategy then I would run, not walk, to this URL: http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=190615 and buy SocialBot 2.0 for its current silly price of just $7 (that’s right Seven dollars!).
Even if you have another bookmarking tool this might be worth a look if you ever want to spider your sites and make your own RSS feeds or to export data to another bookmarking program.

In all honesty, there are better easier programs to use with WordPress for bookmarking but they all cost anything up to $190 more!

Tell Mike that Andrew sent you!

Andrew Wilson.

I always want to know what my site visitors are here for. Sometimes folks tell me by leaving comments sometimes I have to remove them.
Sometimes people send an email.

But what is it worth to know what people come to your site for?
Do they come for information?
Do they come to buy stuff?

Basically, for most of us we want to know if they have commercial intent - are their wallets open or not.
Been playing with a new toy, actually a bunch of them, from Microsoft.

So, now I can see the intent of visitors, whether it is to buy stuff or simply seek info. I guess this is based upon the search tems used:
http://adlab.microsoft.com/OCI/oci.aspx

For now this is a demo tool but can you imagine writing content that provoked people to visit your site with the intent to buy stuff? Yummy!

Then there is another, the demographics prediction tool, also a very useful thing:
http://adlab.microsoft.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx
Now you can see the age and gender of your visitors, again a demo not yet a full on tool. But imagine that you want to appeal to men aged 24-35 and the tool says you got girls under 18. Now you just KNOW you gonna rewrite some copy, yes?

And I am very interested in Ads Delivery on Social Network, but that ain’t out yet.

There are some nice toys in there.

The interface of the tools is quite neat too.

If you find something interesting or see a neat application for these new tools, please share them through the comments box.

G’nite,
Andrew.

A while back Jason Katzenback of PortalFeeder pointed me at Google best Practices by Jerry West, he told me to take on board what was in the book because it was as he put it ‘the real deal’.

Jerry has been consulting on internet issues since 1996 and the edition of Google Best Practices that I read was the latest edition updated in August 2007. Jerry is a big tester, taking little at face value and in his book what he shares is the result of his testing.

Purpose of the ebook.
Jerry wanted to produce a guide that was based upon building organic traffic to websites using Google. The goal being to produce long term sustainable businesses built upon a base of tested ‘best practice’.
His premise is that we should not be too concerned about getting a number one Google ranking, or even traffic. The real story is getting people to the site who take the actions that we want them to do. This is a fundamental insight and one that is usually overlooked by SEO experts and other gurus but is very familiar to businesspeople in the offline and online world!

Topics Covered in Google Best Practices
Among others Jerry covers the following subjects:
1) Is SEO Dead?
2) The Title Tag
3) The Supplemental Index
4) Good Linking Structure
5) Page Rank, its real importance
6) Meeting Google’s Criteria in site development

How Well Does Google Best Practices Perform?
Jerry West starts off by discussing domain names and he has some good reasons for choosing brandable domains over keyword domains. He goes on to cover buying domains and points to watch out for,including PageRank fraud. Follow his suggestions and I think you would be unlikely to buy a duff domain and, even if you did, you would know that you had done all you could.

I liked his suggestion for ensuring that domains are ‘clean’ but especialy that the same technique allows me to check up on what my competitors are up to.

Later he covers issues such as page loading speed and the size of pages. At first glance these may not seem too relevant to SEO, but they are and my eyes were opened when I read the reasons why.

There are some interesting points about niche sites and their management. No surprises here for automated blogs site owners, we already cover that ground in a Google Best Practices manner!

Of course there is a big section on keywords and their use. All the information is recently tested by Jerry. Some of what he writes runs counter to practice as suggested by many armchair gurus.

His linking advice is sound and I appreciated his suggestions in repsect of sharing traffic, both internally and to external sites.

There is detailed advice about redirects including the code needed to ensure that redirects are done properly.

An area that concerns many webmasters is the Supplemental Index and Google Best Practices has a whole section on the topic. He makes the point that a few pages in supplemental is not a bad thing but there are pages that one really does not want there and these should be identified and promoted out, of course Jerry shows us how!

There is a comprehensive section of resources - this is up to date and useful to webmasters and DIY SEOers.

Conclusion.
This ebook costs just $47. It has informational value to justify a much higher price. There is no wasted space and readers will be avoiding a lot of misinformation. Jerry even provides commentary for some of these assertions so that we can understand where some people are going wrong AND see how to do better.

I liked this ebook and printed it out for further reading. This is not one of those that stays on my hard drive waiting for me to find it from my desktop search tool.

By the way, Google Best Practices is available for just one day from Dealdotcom at a special price. Normally $47 from GooglebestPractices.com

Andrew.

When we build out your blog we use content from a database of over a quarter of a million articles and we always search based upon the keywords that you provide. Sometimes though we can only retrieve content based upon the higher level keywords, or the keyword density is not very high.

As the articles are syndicated it is not possible to edit them. There are two relatively easy ways to increase the relevancy of your syndicated content posts and today I am going to run through them.

The first really only applies to automated blogs or sites that use content from ArticleBuilder.net; the other is relevant to any site where syndicated content from article directories is used.

Rewrite Article ‘Tips’.
The content that we use from Articlebuilder incorporates small boxes with keyword relevant text called ‘Tips’, this content is pulled from the same article database as the full articles and is designed to produce content on the page that is unique, as far as the search engines go.
Problem is that sometimes it is not as relevant as we might like.

The solution is simple.

Go to the article post and edit it. In the edit page you will see the text of the article. As you scroll down you will see the tips in the page. All you need to do is to rewrite the tips with keywords that are appropriate to your chosen niche. Of course, if the tip already has relevant content then there is no need to change anything and you simply scroll down and check the next one.
When you have finished with the tips simply save the article and move onto the next.
One extra thought. Usually when we do the article research we need to keep the articles in a single category in order to avoid duplication. When you are editing your ‘Tips’ you can also select additional/different categories for your article without worrying about duplicating the article. This will tend to have a slight increase in the relevancy of the theming of the pages.

Adding a Commentary to Posts
Search engines love unique content and they will rapidly reward a well marketed blog or website that provides it. A method recommended by Google is to offer a commentary to existing, syndicated content from article directories. All this means is that you add a paragraph or two to an article that adds your own thoughts and context to an article that has been used elsewhere. This gives you a chance to make the page absolutely unique as it is now about what YOU think about the content provided by somebody else. You can reinforce the theme using appropriate keywords and phrases, you can be critical, or supportive of the piece it does not matter, although readers seem to enjoy a little controversy.

The commentary can go above or below the main article, from an SEO perspective it might be better above the article but if you are seeking additional comments from readers then a postscript under the article may be more productive as readers can then reply to your position.

The process of adding a commentary is the same as above - open the post to be edited, insert the new words and save. As before, it may be worth looking at the categorisation of the post. You may want to add or change categories.

Thanks for reading, I hope this helps.

Andrew Wilson.