Matt over at Mass Automation, the guy behind the really good AutoSocialPoster and RssBookmarker social bookmarking tools has been doing a little refresh to the product lineup and it all looks good to me!

Here’s the lowdown:

* A new Joomla installer, JL Auto Installer, is now available. This is their first software focusing on the Joomla! platform. JL Auto Installer is to Joomla! what WP Auto Installer is to Wordpress: a one-click auto-installer. This looks good to me as Joomal users ahve been somewhat ignored in this market niche. I think this will go really well! The pricing is pretty competitive too!

* Matt’s second offering on the Joomla! platform is now released as well! A Joomla! version of Virtual Silo, their new WordPress SEO plugin. As a result, Virtual Silo is now available for both the Wordpress and the Joomla! platforms - very cool!

*As can be expected a new version for RSS Bookmarker: v2.4 has been released. Minor bugs were corrected and there was an update to the list of bookmarking sites.
The BIG news on the Rss Bookmarker front is that you may now purchase RSS Bookmarker either on a one-off basis or -and this is new- on a monthly subscription basis. This will bring RssBookmarker to a much wider audience who could not go for the high one-off price but who can see the benefit in their businesses.

REALLY GOOD NEWS: Mass Automation are offering a coupon worth $20 off Virtual Silo or JL Auto Installer during August.
You can use the voucher when purchasing Virtual Silo or JL Auto Installer for $37 instead of the listed $57 price. When you use the coupon, please remember to enter it twice: once in our shopping cart and once more before paying on Google Checkout.
The coupon is WPNEW

Internet Marketing Video: Business In A Box

It is not as easy as we sometimes think to get into the field of internet marketing. That’s where Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos will help you.

Internet marketing is not easy and every month the field changes. We need to learn about new products to offer, learn about new SEO techniques, sometimes Google change algorithms and our pages get lower rankings.

For a long time I have been building websites for internet marketers, the sites work well and are very popular but I, and my clients always faced the same problem…

How could I provide the training they needed at a price they could afford whilst still keeping the quality at a level that made ME happy to share it.

In the end there was only one way. I needed to set up a membership system that enabled my clients to learn about internet marketing from A to Z and where the content could be updated every month to enable members to keep up with the latest developments.

So, that is exactly what I did. Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos is a monthly membership that each and every month brings new videos, a selection of ebooks and software all on the same topic - this month, for example, we are concentrating upon SEO (search engine optimization).

In fact we have gone one step further and every month all the members of Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos will receive a complete ‘business in a box’ complete to the last detail with the tools that you will need to start to make money using the training provided that month.

Please pop on over and take a look!

Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos

Getting Adsense bans is not the end of the world when you know there are another 84 alternatives to work your way through!

http://justtraffic.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_justtraffic_archive.html

We know that setting up a WordPress blog is going to take 30 minutes or more, unless you have a fancy schmancy mass installer. Not everyone wants to pay the money for such a thing and only a very few such as the WP-Installer and WP-Cloner combination from Mass-Automation work!
Unless you have such a wonderful tool I think you may be interested in a way to save a little time.

Here is what I have so far…
1) Put all the themes and Plugins you are going to use into folders with the same name as they have on your host. Instead of uploading plugins and themes one at a time, now you can keep a standard pair of folders and when you have installed WP, just FTP up the two folders and overwrite whatever is already there.

2) Use a single page to do most of the settings for your blog. For example, set names, titles, default category, numbers of posts, length of RSS feed, moderation - you name it and one hidden page has all this and more:

http://myblog.com/wp-admin/options.php?option_group_id=all&updated=true

(Be careful with this page, along with the power for good comes equal power for harm!)

3) There is a free plugin/script that activates all installed plugins at once, you can get it here: http://www.wppluginpro.com/ It’ll cost you an email address though.

The reason that you want to use this plugin is to save the time that you’d otherwise spend clicking buttons to make the plugins work. Not an issue with just two or three, but with 15 or 20 it gets a tad boring.

I have been thinking about and working with keywords for quite a while but I have never been really big on keyword lists per se, they always seem too limiting because they, too often, do not reflect what people actually do.
Anyway the following post is about a way I found to develop keyword lists that were a reflection of the use and thoughts of ‘real people’.

We are moving away from simple keywords as being the definition of our sites and content. To be honest I have always felt that humans are much more intelligent than a simple keyword list gives credit for.

So we are seeking a way of associating what people are thinking with the language they use to express those thoughts when they are using the internet as an interface to our websites -yes?

And we are learning that the systems are mightily more complex than we frst thought, but even now we try to distill that complexity into simple systems - themes, silos etc.

Anyway, I was playing with my the plugin I have been using for my automated WordPress blogs - the automated blogs.
At the same time I was looking at a coupleof my original autoblogging experiments that led to the automated blogs format - I had built some sites that I called ‘meta search sites’ and then monetised with Adsense.

One of the sources for content that I experimented with was rss feeds from social bookmarking sites such as Del.ico.us and Furl where I made a custom rss feed from searches on keyword pairs.
The script did its thing and I then got a whole load of links, most of which did not contain the keyword pair in them. But all were on the theme of the keyword pair.

Hmmmm…..???? Thinks Andrew.
All of these links are here because people thought that they had an association with my keyword pair - and in the search, but not the feed, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of the buggers. How can I use this. You see almsot all the tags that are used to identify posts are done by humans, of course there is a little noise from automated bookmarking systems but it seems to be quite small and the larger social sites work to keep the noise level down.

It seemed to me that if I could take these RSS feeds and do some (as yet unspecified or considered) analysis on the words coming out I could get a picture of the concepts people connect with my keyword and the words/phrases they use to describe the concepts.
Does this make any sense?
For now I simply do analysis by hand, item by item. It opens up one’s eyes to see the strange ways in which folks’ minds work.

So, now I have a basic, free and simple tool that gives me lists of keywords that people associate with my initial keywords - lists of word synonyms and more importantly THOUGHT synonyms.

To get the same effect one simply makes the custom rss feed and put the URL into one’s rss reader. The nice thing is that the output consists of little more than the title of the post and the link itself saving a laod of work of reading.

It seems to me to be very neat to be seeing how real people see the conncetions between my search terms and the greater themes.

Another sleepless night, too warm and sticky.
Please make the autumn come soon!
(Note to self - next year air conditioning- do it, don’t just promise it!)

Anyway, I rolled out of bed to do my ‘first thing’ checks - always my email:

Any fires overnight that I need to put out?
Who has paid me and how much?
New business requests?
Check Adsense revenue - I always love that one these days!

Then, kinda like reading the front page of my newspaper I check out the headlines of the emails I have received from the umpty ump lists I am on. I probably wastebasket a hundred or so messages every morning.
One email had the headline “blogging for influence - money.power.wisdom’
I was going to bin it but blogging is what I do, kinda so, I was pretty much forced to look.

I am glad I did. I just saw today’s ‘Most Beautiful Thing’. Now, let me just say, I live in Tallinn, Estonia. This is the home of the most beautiful women in the world - if you don’t agree with me come pay a visit and then you can at least disagree with some authority!
When I leave here to go for a coffee, I will see 10 ‘beautiful things’ before I even get to my favourite coffee place, over the road from my apartment.

So, if I already saw ‘today’s most beautiful thing’ then, it must be pretty damn beautiful.

OK, already Andrew; we all have ADHD here, don’t waste our time…

Four words.
Promoting, Your, Music, Online

Come on Andrew, what is that, how does that compare with the beauty that is Eve, or Larisa, or Gertti?

OK, here it is. Mark Joyner, a guy known for his Simplology online training for making folks into internet marketers has hit upon a blindingly obvious and yet totally invisible concept.

He has identified a non-Internet Marketing niche and figured out how to apply his Simpleology training to the market - and it makes perfect sense.
He is selling a viral marketing package to MUSICIANS!

Wow!

Damme!

Stuff like that, but all too obscene to write here!

It is masterful. Just look at the copy: http://www.simpleology.com/training/musicpromotion/ (no affiliate link)

I love his story. It is plausible, credible, has a perfect tempo and builds in a lovely way to its crescendo.

But he goes further. He is like a drug dealer. First hit is cheap, but the regular supply, well, that’s gonna cost…

He is selling the course for $69, with so many testimonials it was getting hard to see the rest of the words - was that done on purpose?

Actually, I might just buy the course myself.

But, Andrew, I hear you say, that is fun and all, but just look at Eve’s legs, they go all the way to the ground. What makes this Mark’s course SOOOOO beautiful?

OK, mea culpa…
The point, the inspiration, the CRUX of the matter. The thing that made me sit and spend 30 minutes typing away before I even have a shower. (yuck horrid image - waytago Andrew) Is this: Mark has succeeded in taking an online product and making it relevant to the ‘real world’.
How much competition is there in the ‘real world’ for this product?
I dunno, but let’s try ZIP, ZERO, NADA, NUTTIN’.

Almost certainly NOBODY sent a similar email to the thousands of aspiring musos who all want to give up their day job and sell enough downloads to enable them to live like I live.

How much EXTRA money can we make just by opening our product up and making it relevant to people who may use a PC for email but who have NO idea about selling anything online, no intention of being ‘internet marketers’ but who can see a way to meeting their own goals through our products.

This is, of course, not a sales letter. But, please go take a look at this link and understand why Larisa’s long blonde hair was not a distraction this morning.
http://www.simpleology.com/training/musicpromotion/

When ever I get a project done by a freelancer whether it be articles on Elance or coding on Scriptlance I always get the contractor to sign and send me a ‘Work For Hire’ agreement by post. I wait for it to arrive before making any payment is made.
I tell freelancers that if the agreement is taking a long time to arrive and they complete the project before the agreement arrives (has never happened this way yet) that they can have the option of scanning in an image of the signed agreement and emailing it for a quicker payment. Even so I still require a posted version of the Work For Hire agreement.

Nowadays I use a free legal agreement that can be seen in the link below which was recommended by Frank Kern, he says he has used the same document for his own ebook projects on Elance.

http://www.copylaw.com/forms/Workhire.html

I’ve only just relatively recently started getting into hiring freelancers for writing and even though the costs can mount up it is really worth it. I have used some ok and some pretty poor writers along the way but have now found a couple of sources who I use regularly and are great.
In my opnion, if you just keep trying new people you will eventually find someone that works well for you.

It helps to be very descriptive and precise in your project descriptions and also mention that, depending on the quality of work, there may be repeat business - this can add an incentive for them to do a better job and just possibly make them bid a tad lower than they might otherwise have done.

Make it very apparent you want to build a relationship with them, make the process more personal and less cold/distant, especially if you are talking to one individual and not a group of writers.

At the start I was tempted into going with one of the very cheap bids from a non-English speaking country, took a bit of a gamble, and well, it didn’t pay off. They got the job done in the end but you could definitely tell the articles were written by either someone in a big hurry or whose English was most not their native or daily spoken language! Go for writers who speak English as their primary language, it well may cost a little more but you can expect more natural writing. That said, there ARE writers who are from places where you would not expect to find top quality English but it is much harder work tracking them down and that should be reflected in the price that you pay.

A task I often have is to uncompress (UnZip, unRAR or whatever) loads of files. At one time this meant an endless chore of sitting and clicking.

A couple of years ago I came across the solution to my problem and like all my favourite solutions it is free of charge.

The solution is a small program called ‘UnZipThemAll’ and it does what it says!
To unzip a folder of files you simply select the folder through the program interface, the application will identify the compressed files, you then confirm the operation and the location of the uncompressed files and then click the GO button. Quickly and efficiently the software will uncompress your files where you want them to be.

I love this little application and apologise for not having mentioned it before.
You can read more and download from this location: UnzipThemAll Download

BTW, if you like the thing, donate a few dollars to the writer, it is worth it!

As serious internet marketers all know traffic is the bedrock of our businesses. Without traffic nothing happens.

The problem is that we get pretty good at making websites, we do good research, we add appropriate offers for our readers and then it kinda stops.
What happens next?

Well, what should happen next is that hundreds, if not thousands, of folks should find your web pages and offers and some of those visitors should click on your ads or buy your offers.

Yup, that SHOULD happen.
But getting traffic to your websites is not so easy - and it is getting harder.

Every day there are more websites, every day more competing offers and every day more noise in the market place.

Well, what’s an internet marketer going to do?
Actually he does the same as he always did! He asks his friends for their help. He asks them to tell other people about his great website. He asks them to post articles on their blogs about his new offers. He might even ask his friends to say nice things about his articles on his websites and blogs.
This kind of activity has worked in every market since man invented money and markets.

But, I hear you say, ‘how do we find friends’ and maybe more particularly, given the global nature of our businesses ‘how do I find enough friends to make a difference?’

Well, I think I can offer some help here!
I have been working with friends in my business for quite a while. We work together to help each other to do the tasks that need to be done. I have a network of friends with over 1,500 members!
Yup, that’s right. Over 1,500 people all of whom are willing to work with me, and I with them, to get our pages noticed by search engines and real people.
To make a big noise every time we do something interesting.
To help me write content for my sites.
To tell social networking and bookmarking sites about what we are up to.

Well, as a person can always use a few more friends I’d like to suggest that you take a look at how I manage my network of friends. See how we work together to make our businesses stronger. Traffic Kahuna have re-opened the doors to accept another 200 members. Together we are making a big noise about our businesses and people all over the world really do notice when friends help friends to spread the word!

This is a cool opportunity for anyone who wants to get more people to visit their site and make more money from their business!
Join our network of traffic building friends!