I’ve been having fantastic results with a bookmarking tool I’ve had my programmer build.

Fantastic isn’t the right word for it. Superlative. Awesome. Really cool?

Anyway, my original plan was to sell it, but it seems that the social bookmarking websites change their registration and posting information a little too regularly, and selling it would mean keeping up on a much tighter schedule than I had hoped.

For my use alone, it really doesn’t bother me if one or two of the 22 services are not working for a week. But I’m quite sure people who have paid me for the software wouldnt be so care-free.

So, either I scrap plans to release it, or consider releasing it as a subscription, cuz I’ve got to keep my programmer in style. I hate it when this stuff happens.
 

I’ve spent the last few days experimenting with John Reel’s new product, GoTryThis. I’m playing with the BlackHat version, which is stunningly easy to use, and works great, and which isn’t so blackhat that white hat marketers won’t want to use its features.

I have to admit I’ve never used link cloaking software before, so I wasn’t sure how it would work, but I am very, very impressed at this point.

First of all, the install was just plain cool. It’s a php script that is installed on your server, but rather than giving you a script to download and leaving you stuck with the task of trying to install and configure it yourself, GoTryThis can install itself on your server with a few bits of information about your FTP and Database logins. Very slick, and very easy for technophobes to deal with.

Once the program is installed, you can head straight to your own site and log in to start creating links. You’ve got a number of choices:

If you just fill out the first two lines, you get a basic cloaked link from YOURSITE.COM/DIR that redirects to your affiliate URL.

If you add a Title, Keywords and Description, you’ll get a cloaked link that puts the affiliate url in a Frame. If you’ve checked the Viral checkbox, that frame will have an icon and ad text for GoTryThis that includes your affiliate URL, so you can earn commission from either your affiliate link OR from GoTryThis if you so choose.

And, if you want to link to pages other than the main affiliate page, there’s an option to embed cookies from the affiliate link while redirecting to a different page.

You can track your links in even more detail by adding a suffix to your tracking link when you paste it into your website or newsletter. So, if you create a link from yoursite.com/test you can test the response from your mailing list and your website simply by adding something like -web or -mail at the end of that url, so in your newsletter your affiliate link would be yoursite.com/test-mail/ and your website link would be yoursite.com/test-web and GoTryThis will track each differently.

The last cool feature that GoTryThis has when creating cloaked links is more for organization than anything else. If the affiliate program you’re linking to has a login for the stats, you can add the login url, username and password to the link, which will give you one-click access to your affiliate stats while checking your GoTryThis stats.

From the link managment area, you can see stats on your link referrers and number of clicks for each link, and from the Stats menu, you can see general statistics for all your cloaked links to see which are performing best and total clicks on all your links.

The graphs are live, generated by Flash, so you don’t need any special PHP modules to see them, and your stats can be exported to Excel format with a click of a button.

As I said, I’ve never used a link cloaker before, so I can’t compare features with other packages on the market, but based on my experience, the ease of installation, ease of use, and great functionality of this software makes it something I know I will get much use out of, and something I won’t hesitate to recommend.

You can check it out at GoTryThis.com

PS. I’m bumping this up today because GoTryThis is now available for purchase. I’ve been using it more and I still heartily recommend it. If you can afford it, get the Black Hat version, but if you’re strapped for cash, the White Hat version is extremely affordable and well priced for all the functionality it will give you. There’s a limited number being sold, so don’t miss out!

I’ve changed WordPress themes six times so far today. John Delavera’s WordPress Themerator is eating up my weekend in a most unproductive way. But man, is it ever fun.

I hope in future updates he allows for three column layouts, and some tighter control over the header, link, and text font colors, but for a version 1.0, I can’t believe how easy it is to use.

EDIT

WOW! I just noticed that you can drag and drop the menu contents categories to change the order to suit your needs. That’s even cooler!

I usually don’t explicitly throw my endorsements at products. Usually I’m terribly sceptical about everything overpriced and IM related, but this really is cool.

If you use WordPress to power your blogs, but don’t know a whole lot about coding or css, you’ve probably got a pretty standard template for your blog. And, the more standard your blog looks, the more likely it gets mistaken for a splog by your visitors, and by splog hunters.

But customizing a WP theme isn’t exactly a job for an html/css newbie.

But now it actually might be. As long as you can customize a header graphic that’s 800X200, you can create your own theme, with your choice of left or right hand menu layouts, in no time at all.

John Delavera’s WP Themerator is an application for Windows that makes the process of creating a theme as easy as clicking a few buttons and choosing an image. It really is spectacular. In about an hour, including image creating, I created a new theme for Ian for father’s day.

Seeing that I’ve seen generic WordPress templates for sale for over $50, you could even use this software to start your own custom blog template creation service. Or just make all your blogs look niche-tastic. Ug. I can’t believe I used that word.
And again, I’ll try to avoid the hype, but there is a limited time special this weekend if you can use Paypal to purchase.

So… here is what you need to do:

1. Click here to visit the intro video page to see how easy it is to create your own blog theme for WordPress.

2. Click the link: “Download Themerator today!”

3. Fill in your email address.

4. Insert the following coupon in the next page where it is asking for the coupon:

weekend

…then click the “Update form” button. Verify the change in the price.

5. Select “Paypal” from the list and proceed with.

That’s it!

Tag and Ping Fallout
It didn’t take long for the first tag and ping spammers to hit the ground running after the release of Tag and Ping. In fact, the very next morning Charles Heflin in his SEO20/20 blog caught screenshots of an overloaded Jots page.

Just this morning, I went to Jots.com and noticed that one user has taken up the entire 1st page of results…..The user “Richiz” has hit Jots so hard that (at the time of this writing) Jots had to shut down temporarily.

And Splork from Lost Ball in High Weeds noticed the spam affecting Technorati too:

Now granted I haven’t been paying much attention to tag and ping until recently, but a couple of tags that are currently popular in the last hour are nothing more than spam. They can’t even spell correctly. “Loose Weight” or “Lose Weight”. You decide. The Adsense tag is also popular this particular hour and interesting in that if you go to one of the weblogs it is simply an ad for a clickbank product on Adsense. Actually if you go to the top 5 they are all ads for something.

Technorati seemed to be working on the problem by Sunday afternoon, and as I write this the hot tags seem to have returned to normal. Jots is currently “down for maintenance”, which can be loosely interpreted as “we’re shutting off the spam till we get a fix in place”

I didn’t track closely, but I didn’t even notice a blip in the results of del.icio.us and blinklist. Presumably they already had some pretty good systems in place to keep the junk from hitting the front page.

It’s sad to see marketers taking the low road with tag and ping, but it seems as though most of the bookmarking sites have gotten the problem under control already.

RSS Revenues
This weekend I was introduced to a new feed aggregator called FeedShow. Feedshow is a web-based aggregator that lets feed publishers participate in revenue generation through the display of AdSense ads running in the feeds. The adsense ads only appear in the feeds of participating publishers, and they’ll rotate between FeedShow’s and the feed publisher’s accounts.

The method to sign up as a blog publisher is particularly easy. Simply post an entry to your blog that looks like this:

--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]
provider=[Google]
uid=[pub-8870932556899172]
option=[8411175611]
--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]

where uid is your Google Publisher Id and Option is your channel code.

The feedreader is pretty slick, with the added advantage of being available to you wherever you are, as long as you can find some access to the Web.

It doesn’t seem to have a lot of users yet, and much of the navigation of the main site is in french, but it’s worth taking a look at in any case. It costs nothing to sign up, and if you’re already using AdSense, it’s an easy matter to plug in your codes and give it a whirl.

This particular site may not be the future of RSS, but it might spawn some ideas for the “next big thing.”

Web 2.0 Idea Management

Another site I stumbled across this weekend is Wridea.com. Wridea is an Idea Management application based on Getting Things Done that’s pretty slick. It’s got a nice interface, and a lot of flexibility.

There are five core principles in GTD. Collect, create ideas in wridea, Process, move them to another categories and pages or delete them, Organize, create pages or categories for next actions, projects, waiting for and someday/maybe, Review, browse your ideas easily and finally Do, this is your thing.

It’s free, and worth giving it a run-through to see if it’ll work for you.