Marketingfan -

Links for 2008-05-08 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Links for 2008-05-07 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

IPv6 Day - Windows Vista

Links for 2008-05-06 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

FunScripts - Javascript Widgets

Links for 2008-05-05 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

XimantiX - PDF Faktura Desktop
digitally signed invoices (EU law based)

Links for 2008-05-03 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

What is a Top Google Ranking Worth?

Links for 2008-04-30 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Links for 2008-04-29 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

SES New York 2008 - Greg Boser on PR sculpting
Yes, Virginia, your contact page DOES need 500 links - SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog
Martinez CONTRA pr sculpting
SEO Nonsense - Sculpting PageRank Builds Muscle - SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog
Martinez was CONTRA pr sculpting last year as well
20 Invoicing Tools for Web Designers | Six Revisions
... and NOT A SINGLE ONE capable of doing euro invoices :(

DataFeed Import the easy way

Marketing Fan — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:14:44 +0200

Last week Stefan Everaet, the owner of Niche Content Packages (a top quality PLR content provider), released a new site building tool called DataFeedR which promises the painless creation

of datafeed driven sites based on Wordpress.

Well – thin affiliates sites – (as Matt Cutts calles them), driven from a database that was replicated 1000s of times over the whole web were killed years ago by Google’s duplicate content filter – back in 2005 or so. The idea of DataFeedR is bascially the same – import a generally available database into your wordpress, and manage it from there… but…

DataFeed Sites a’la 2008

The improved concept of filling up Google’s index with product descriptions and images from big vendors here is the augmentation with content written by yourself, your writer or maybe your users (i.e. blog comments). Of course the fine line between success and failure here is HOW you do that job… imported the datafeed and leaving it as is would probably be just a waste of money…

DataFeed Pre Processing

One major feature of DataFeedR is the possibility of creating a selective mix of products from multiple merchants and even affiliate networks (big ones like CJ, LinkShare and ShareAsale are supported). One word on the datafeeds: it IS required that a datafeed is PRE-processed by DataFeedR before you can actually blend and download it for you own use. That means whenever you come across some niche, you have to tell Stefan first. This means two things – first they check if that feed is really (technically and semantically) usable. This might take some time, but in the end you save some work for yourself. But second this means that you expose this feed to other users, and if that is very narrow niche that you just discovered or want to test with, that might be something you do not want to do.

But at least you get Stefan to sort our and clean up the merchant’s datafeed mess for you and provide you a quality download. And judging from the quality of his content packages those feeds must be killer quality.

And on the other hand, assuming that you have some funky programmer’s inhouse, you could still builld your own converter tools for feeding into this plugin and then use it “only” as a data management tool and forget about Stefan’s feed processing service at DataFeedR.

I mailed Stefan about the selection of merchants supported currently and got confirmed that not all CJ and Shareasale and Linkshare merchants are yet available but several times a week they add more merchants to Datafeedr. As Commission Junction (CJ) has around 1000 merchants with datafeeds at this moment they focus only on those with good network earnings (EPC) and which are already several years in the network (and this is another pre-processing work done for you).

Unfortunately there is no converter tool available to use datafeeds other than the ones included in Datafeedr. But if you want specific merchants just let Stefan as mentioned above. I guess a full documentation of the DataFeedR import format is the missing link we need here and will ask Stefan about it.

Merchant’s supported so far

Stefan made some quick screenshots of merchants supported currently here and here and here

DataFeedR’s price

The price tag of $97 monthly recurring for DataFeedR is not cheap.

In fact it’s a pretty hefty price for a word press plugin.

But what you get for this is a rock-solid data feed management solution with attached data pre-processing services I’ve yet to find. And it supports Wordpress 2.2-2.3 AS WELL AS the new 2.5.x

Other features

Support Forum – the young forum is there – it’s up to Stefan and his team how he lives up to our expectations

Update only parts of products – obviously you need to rewrite and optimize the product descriptions, so when you update your product list, the following values are updated with new product information: Affiliate Link (URL to the network), Price, Image URL, Thumbnail URL – This means that when you have changed product descriptions and product names these changes will NOT be overwritten by uploading a new datafeed version. But you can customize that behavious as explained in the forum

Embed products within your blog posts – you can add multiple products to your WordPress Posts or Pages – check this out

I’ll keep you posted about DataFeedR and comparable products (which all seem to suck compared to DataFeedR) and my experiences with them. Some impressive features that are announced to be here soon are

Meanwhile you can go check it out yourself

AdsSpy - competitor profiling made easy

Marketing Fan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:22:31 +0200

So there’s yet another competitive intelligence tool our there – AdsSpy.com – made to easily find site network relations on the push of a button.

It does this by finding all sites running under one Adsense-Account that is the same Adsense-Account of a site you specify.

Well, this is nothing special to do, and after getting the idea from Stefan last October I’m capturing GAS,YPN,AMZN and other affiliate ids as specified by AdsSpy myself in my historical SEO database…

The big advantage of this top-pay service is their HUGE index which is said to be fed from the SeoDigger database. A promising big index of 60 million pages or so… enough to capture all the average MFA sites…

It’s a nice service to reveal your competitor’s sites… and if you’re into MI6 work on a daily basis, that fee probably pays for itself… For myself I’m happy to watch all those dozens of sites a competitor APPEARS to have and let my own tool tell me their related in the next second… and – I might still increase my “own” index to capture five times more also to get from 12 million pages to 60 million pages that SeoDigger has :)

PS: something bit sneaky – they modify the domaintools WHOIS output with a “buy link” to their AdsSpy site if they discover a whois lookup

for a site they find to have competitive information about themselves :) hehe – domaintools watch out – those Russian’s are at least as smart as you are…

Google Update Dewey

Marketing Fan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:52:23 +0200

Google somewhat confirmed an algo update,

and I can confirm this myselves…

Google changed the way the return results for some queries.

Google changed the way they filter results for some queries.

Google changed the SERPs for some queries.

Seeing some clients rocket up the SERPs … good thing, eh?

Have a good weekend!

LinkVana - the other blog announce network

Marketing Fan — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:42:58 +0100

As you might know (or not know) some of the private label content clubs provide "announce blog networks" that allow you to post some content including your links to your sites for a relative low fee (or included)... and there your links are - among the neighbourhood of the other 500 members trying to power their thin adsense site with links from even thinner announce blog network links... well - as you can tell, I haven't been impressed with those offers ...

in fact you'd better NOT put your links up there as the negative effect of bad links became evident in the past 6 months... Yes, I've seen sites tank because of bad links!

And thanks to you own ad network detection tools that I wrote about here as well, it didn't take long for me to spot that several of those blogs are not only available to members of the network (ie ArticleUnderground's network) but are also member sites of Text-Link-Ads, PayPerPost and other big scale, WAY ABOVE THE RADAR ad networks that are all being cracked down ... hand's off!

...and then there's LinkVana - the below-the-radar blog link network

One "blog network" I recently tested is called LinkVana which is run by the "famous SEO Dave Kelly"

Well, LOL, did you ever hear of this guy? I'm not even close to recognizing this name, and googling him brought me to a stoneage actor, some singer from the late 70's, and even a gonzo speaker (wtf? :) ... sounds like he picked that fake name to stay below the Google radar :-)

Anyway, regardless of the name issue, what caught my attention are some pretty familiar, for clients not so comfy business rules he set up for this network

blog post urls will NOT be revealed - not even after placement

wow - how cool is that? You buy links and NEVER get to see them - not even after placement...

Additionally they

control the timing of blog posts (even those YOU wrote) is done by their system
- so they try to vary link placement speed, avoid people overdoing it etc
- you still have a way to decide if you want max 1-3 posts per day or less or more ...
offer outsourcing of the annoying blog post writing can be outsourced at $2 per 100 words blog post...
- that's a quite ok rate, given that you hardly find freelance writers doing 100 word posts for you at that rate...
- the problem with the content outsourcing service is
  - boring talk - it's averlage to low quality content
  - copy cats - which means many phrases are just copied from other places on the web...
  - production time - and they took almost 2 weeks to complete around 20 posts of 100 words each.. better write your own posts - I can write that in two hours!
promise to never reveal all the sites to a single user, so merely cycling a percentage of their sites thru for their users... need yet to see that

So while I wouldn't endorse blog link networks in general,
I'm giving LinkVana a try with some test sites ...

The "we don't show off our stuff" (aka not revealing the placement urls) is what I've been practicing for over 2,5 years now, and clients value it as well.

So I'm in there now, been testing for some weeks.

The posts are getting indexed, and of course you can google them with their post text, which is a good thing, as it means the pages are juicy.

I suggest to give LinkVana a try, too - I'll update you on it's progress and mail Dave about the content quality issue now.