Paul Kleinmeulman has a site offering 200 private label content articles each month in various niches. The first month for PRA2 offers 50 each articles in the following niches:

• Dog Care
• VoIP
• Landscaping
• Fitness for Busy Professionals
• Sports Cars

It sounded like a good deal, so I signed up.

After joining, I thought I might have to make an application that combines text files in order to make use of Conversionary to convert these articles into Web-ready pages.

But, as it turns out, the latest version of Conversionary should work just fine with the packages as-is.

So, if you’re a Conversionary user who also has a subscription to one of  Paul Kleinmeulman’s private label article sites, head over to your Conversionary download page, pick up the newest version of the software, and follow along.

First, unpack one of the article zip files to an empty directory and open the article RTF file in Microsoft Word or Open Office (you can ignore all the .txt files, we won’t need them). You’ll see that all the articles are there, separated by lots of spaces and a line of asterisks.  All you need to do is replace (Ctrl -H) the asterisks with nothing, then save the file and close off the word processor.

Next, set up your template for Conversionary output. In the case of articles, I would elect to NOT use the NEXT and PREVIOUS tags, and just have a “return to article list” link somewhere on the page.. either in breadcrumbs, page bottom or side bar.

Then, in Conversionary, browse for a “Single File”, using the drop down box to choose RTF as the file type.

Select “New Page at the start of each section/chapter”, and make the Page length 600 words or maybe more if there are some longer articles.

Fill in the rest of the relevant blanks, and let the application rip. You should get a directory full of HTML, plus an RSS feed, sitemap XML and a table of contents in just a few seconds.

Flock is a web browser that appears to be built on Mozilla code that is the be all and end all of browsers for fanatical bloggers.

I mean, where else can you post to your multiple blogs within your browser… just by right clicking on the text you want to blog about, no less…, and have your browser bookmarks completely integrated with del.icio.us, and show a flickr top bar right in your browser window.

Then there’s the built in history search engine:

Flock comes with the open source Clucene search engine built in. Each time you visit a web page, it indexes all the content on that page so you can easily retrace your steps later. Pages you’ve starred as Favorites float to the top when you do a History Search. History Search is stored locally for privacy. For more privacy, you can wipe it out using the Clear Private Data command.

And this super awesome thing called Shelf that lets you store urls, pictures or text for future reference or blogging.

Seriously cool stuff.

Can you tell I’m excited?

Get flock now and you get a free WordPress.com blog… no invite needed.

I have to admit, I used to do this manually…. go through the articles collected in my Gmail account and cut and paste them into templates.  There has been software available that automates the task, but it has all been in the $200+  range, or not keyword specific.  For $200 I could have my own software built… maybe not very pretty software, but it would work however I specified, so it would work for me.

So I never spent the bucks on someone elses solutions. I even had my coder look into building a similar product.

But then I found something at a REASONABLE price ($47) that kept me from following up. And after buying and testing Article Site Developer, I’m quite pleased with the results.

ASD allows you to gather content from a number of article directories, as well as a press release repository and a Wiki News.

I usually run ASD in two sessions for each site: The first collects articles from the article directories. Those go in an article section. Then I collect Press Releases and News for a “News” section of the site.

It’s pretty simple to use. First, you log in (yeah, it’s got a weird log in thing that actually logs you in to a web site), then you can move along the various tabs at the top of the application. Once you’ve chosen the sites you want to retrieve articles from, you head to the Keywords tab and enter your first keyword or phrase. Clicking the “Retrieve Keywords” button will bring up a list of other related keyphrases. Enter a second key phrase and do the same with it. The application will keep existing key phrases and add new ones as you proceed.

I pretty much leave the collection options at the default settings, except I choose 20 articles from each source.

The templates for ASD are really easy to deal with. There are just a few tags to add to your template to get it working, and there are several sample templates in the ASD program directory to get you started. The only flaw is that the Index and the Articles require different templates.

Once Article Site Developer finishes collecting articles, you can remove any irrelevant or off topic articles it found, then output to your specified directory. And when it’s all done, the application can even FTP the whole thing to your directory if you choose.

I must point out that once you hit the “Collect” button, you may as well move on to something else, since the process of collecting the articles can take a LONG time. I generally have ASD running on my laptop, while I work on my desktop computer. If you don’t have a second computer, you might want to set an ASD project to run at night before you go to bed. That way you won’t be using up needed CPU and bandwidth while you’re doing other things.

The one thing I dislike about ASD is that the file names are automatically named with a .html extension. Since I use PHP includes to add headers and footers, this is a pain.  I use 1-4a Rename, a freeware Windows application, to rename all the files to .php, then use the search and replace function in my web editor to change all the links inside the files to .php from .html.  It’s an extra step I wouldn’t have to go through if Article Site Developer allowed me to specify my own extension.

On the whole, though, you WON’T find a better deal for article content generation on the Web, and for $47 it does a fantastic job.

Since I purchased the application last month, it has been updated twice, so it is well supported and not abandoned by its creator.

Go get it now!

Never heard of this software  before today. This is a test post.
First impressions:

• looks slick
• slows down my old computer significantly, so it must use a lot of cpu juice
• the side panel doohickies are awesome.

Haven’t figured out the scheduling bit yet, but I think I might just buy this one. It’s one heck of a lot cheaper than the ‘made for marketer’ type blog automators out there.
Link: http://www.bingobangosoftware.com/

I just looked out my window and saw big flakes floating down. The grass is white. The trees are covered in snow.

Winter is here.