Surf the Mind

Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

I was reading about WordPress last night, and suddenly I had a few ideas that my brain wouldn’t let go of. I wrote them down to get them out of my head, but they wouldn’t leave. I ordered them to get out of my brain space, but they persisted. In the end, I gave in and let myself become completely side-tracked.

And so, instead of working on my new site in my free time today, I began writing specs for some new software that I will get coded at RaC this month. Once the specs are done and the projects are posted my brain will be back where it needs to be.

I haven’t done anything in the field of Internet marketing since November 2006. My existing sites are still rolling, and proving the value of promoting physical and evergreen products with real, non-spammy sites, my income from those sites hasn’t diminished more than one or two percent since that date.

But now, faced with starting a new project, I feel rusty.

So, I thought I’d bone up on a bit of reading at the Warrior Forum (It seemed more helpful and interesting to me before. Not so much now. Is it just me?), pull out some old software to see if it still works, and find an interesting marketing list or two to join for ideas.

Thanks to a pointer from Belle, I downloaded Jeremy Palmer’s free High Performance Affiliate Marketing ebook, and printed it off to get me back in the ‘zone’.

Any other ideas on lists to join, software to buy, or information to scour? I’m not looking for overload, but I did notice that the keyword software and article submission software I was using two years ago no longer works, and I’m a lot behind in the web 2.0 marketing world….

It’s an interesting phenomenon. I can write lots of things quite well, but when it comes to sales copy, I tend to hire a pro to do it for me.

Why?

Sometimes it’s because I’m too close to the project. Other times I just can’t find the right combination of words. There’s a balance that needs to be created between hype and salesmanship. There are words to stress, and words to avoid. And usually, my brain is too full to remember all those things when writing a sales letter.

But, today I downloaded a fascinating application called ScribeJuice that might just change my habits.

Within an hour of installing the program, I’ve improved three of my existing sales pages immensely, and begun a complete rewrite of another.

It’s like my regular web page editor, with all the features I need to create a nice looking page, along with tools to analyze all your copy, a scrolling bar filled with power words, and a way to measure your hype and power ratios.

And then I thought… does this just work for sales letters? Would it work for articles too?

So, I started a new page and pasted in a PLR article I was planning on using.

I ran the suggestion tool on the article text, and within minutes, I had changed the article for the better, and made my signature block zing. Not only will this help avoid duplicate content penalties in the search engines, but unlike other content spinners, this will actually improve your writing, making your articles more effective, and increasing your chances of receiving links from your signature or embedded links.

I know it’s cliche to say this, but I DON’T promote a lot of products. I NEVER promote anything I don’t think will be useful six months from now.

I KNOW ScribeJuice will be useful today, six months from now, and even years down the road. I’m certain I will be using it on emails, sales letters and articles every week.

Take a look. Give it a try. It’s got a solid guarantee, and some reputable folks behind it.

And it might be the most useful product you’ll buy all year.

I admit I was slow to jump on the XSitePro bandwagon. I already know HTML, CSS, PHP, and a variety of other acronyms, so how could a website creation tool like XSitePro help?

The simple answer was that, although I can easily make sites that way, I can make the same sites FASTER with XSitePro, leaving me more time for other things.

I didn’t buy XSitePro for that reason initially. I bought it because people kept emailing me asking me whether my software, Conversionary, worked with XSitePro. Until I tried, I couldn’t give a proper answer. (The answer, incidentally, is YES! it works great with XSitePro.)

But once I started fiddling with XSitePro, I found that it’s a powerful tool for creating websites quickly, and adding to them effortlessly. All I needed was to find the content.

I’ve had an InfoGoRound subscription since the service launched, and I’m quite happy with the content, so I began there. I started by copying and pasting from the site into XSitePro… but it was very time consuming, especially when special characters and extra line breaks and other oddies crept in.

Then I discovered the Import Pages feature of XSitePro, and I realized that my own free software, InfoGoGetter, would be perfect for quickly gathering and formating articles for batch import into XSitePro. This tutorial will show you how it works.

First, you’ll need a copy of InfoGoGetter, a freeware application you can download from infogogetter.com.

Unzip the executable to your desktop for easy access.

You should also download this zip file [InfoGoGetter_and_XSitePro.zip] which includes a PDF version of this information along with a template to use for creating pages for XSitePro to import. The page should look something like this:

Once you’ve got InfoGoGetter unzipped and your template in a place you can easily find it back again, start up InfoGoGetter and sign in with your InfoGoRound username and password. Once you’ve successfully logged in, you’ll be able to enter keywords as well as the number of articles you want to retrieve that match those keywords. For this example, I’m going to build a site about Ebay selling. Hitting the Go button will generate a list of results.

Double clicking on any title will allow you to read the article, make quick changes, and save it into a template.

Click on the “Browse” button beside the Template Path field, and you’ll open a file browser window. Find the template that came with this package, and click on it. Choose your preferred file extension (I usually pick .html), and then Generate when you’re ready to save the file.

You can repeat this process for as many articles as you wish. All your articles will be saved in a folder on your desktop (or wherever you ran the InfoGoGetter executable from) that’s named with today’s date.

Once you’ve generated pages from all of the articles you want to use, open up your project and website in XSitePro. Choosing the Other tab will bring up a screen with a variety of small boxes with different options and features. The box you need is called Import Pages (Power Pack). This allows you to import your pages directly into your XSitePro website.

In the form that appears once you click, choose the folder with your InfoGoGetter generated articles, and choose whether you’d like the pages to appear under a parent page, or on a particular menu.

Once you’ve chosen your options, go ahead and import the pages. You can then see all your new pages in the “Web Pages” tab of XSitePro, where you can decide whether or not to add keywords, change the description, and add Adsense.

Your title, headline, and article will have imported flawlessly, so all that’s left after any small tweaks is to publish your new pages!

I recently found a two neat software applications I haven’t seen mentioned very often in IM circles.

The first is free. VMN Toolbox adds a tiny widget to your screen that lets you pick colors, capture the screen or parts of it, magnify anything on your screen, post sticky notes to your desktop, and measure anything on your screen in pixels. It doesn’t take much screen real estate, but it can be very handy if you’re designing websites, or trying to match colors with CSS.

The second application I’ve found is great for creating links blogs in topics I know nothing about. When I’m creating such a blog, I subscribe to Google Alerts on the topic, and whenever a good page or article comes up in IE, SenseExplore Summarizer highlights the important bits, which I then ususally excerpt or rewrite to create a keyword targeted blog post linking to the original.

It’s not free, but at under $20 it’s not expensive either. And it has allowed me to venture into some new niches that I wouldn’t have had the time to deal with before.