Chasing the dream… and finding out exactly what that means
Archive for February, 2006
Sitemap Equalizer
Feb 23rd
Jeff Alderson has done it again with yet another product for affiliate marketers! He’s just released Sitemap Equalizer.
If you have a website and you want it to be listed in Google, you have to get yourself links from other websites; if you find a website with a high PageRank as shown by Google’s Toolbar, this will get your connected page listed. What happens then?
If you have a well-connected website, your pages will be crawled by the Googlebot as it is affectionately known, but that will be a haphazard process, occurring somewhat at random, and your most important pages may be overlooked as the spider goes about its business. Googlebot sees everything as text, and it has limited capabilities to tell how important the links are on your site.
In a bid to correct this unfortunate state of affairs, Google started a service called Google Sitemaps. You provide Google with a special file on your website; the Googlebot reads it periodically to find out where to go on your site to find the most important content, and how often the content is predicted to change, so therefore how often Googlebot should visit that page. You also get to tell Google when you have something new for it, by pinging! This can either be done manually, or automatically by a Sitemaps tool. An accurate Sitemap can get you into Google’s free listings more quickly.
If you run a WordPress site, you’re very lucky; you can get a Google Sitemap generator for free as a plugin from the following site: Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress. It’s a great plugin that automates the production of the sitemap and the pinging. Some other content management systems also provide sitemap generators, and if they do, then it’s a good idea to use one!
What if your content management system doesn’t support Google Sitemaps, or you write your web pages by hand? You can still benefit from Google Sitemaps. It’s difficult to find tools that will do it well, though; there are some tools that will provide you with the sitemap.xml file that you upload to your web site, but it’s difficult to find one that really works well. You could even write it by hand, but you’d be using up a great deal of your time if you did that!
Sitemap Equalizer will do the job for you! Not only will it create a sitemap compliant with Google’s standards, but also you get one that you can feed to Yahoo, and a conventional HTML sitemap for the use of your readers! It’s got to be worth a look.
You also get a free bonus that will check how your website is ranking in the free listings for keywords that you value. Just tell it which keywords to check, and it will tell you where they are, and whether they are going up or down in the listings!
If you have tried the product, please comment with your opinions on the software, whether good or bad.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Butterfly Marketing
Feb 20th
You’ve probably heard all the hype by now, especially if you’re signed up to some of the major affiliate marketer’s lists. Butterfly Marketing is the in-phrase; it’s the must-have tool of the century. Is it worth having?
When I tried to market butterflies, I found it very difficult indeed! First of all, they are notoriously difficult to catch, and the effort spent in this regard is very time-consuming. I got it down to 3 hours 47 minutes per butterfly, averaged over a catch of one butterfly.
As supply is not great for these beautiful creatures, each one would have to be sold at quite a high price. My market research showed me that it would be very difficult indeed to market butterflies; people would not be prepared to pay the extremely high price I wanted to charge to sell my butterflies!
It was unbelievable! Butterflies are extremely difficult to get hold of, yet everybody was telling me that they were extremely common! How could I market something like this? It would just be impossible!
I decided that my efforts would be better spent elsewhere!
Just in case you don’t know what this is all about, it’s a parody of a recent product release. Have a look at this site: butterflymarketing.com. I have no idea whether the product is any good, but it is rather expensive at just over US$1000!
Free Randomizer for Private Label Rights Articles
Feb 9th
I’ve just added a free download for Windows; the Private Label Randomizer, that automates the random adding of paragraphs into Private Label Rights articles. This Windows program adds a random header and footer paragraph into the article, and also one in the middle at any particular point that you specify, if you wish, by adding a single paragraph containing ‘##’.
Then, at the click of just one button, the article is copied in either ASCII text or HTML format. HTTP hyperlinks are automatically activated in the HTML version for you!
To get your copy, all you need to do is to subscribe to the DJT Net Marketing ezine by using the opt-in form at the top of this page. I have some exciting information coming your way in the future, so I promise you’ll be glad you subscribed!
Please post any comments about it here. I’m prepared to be flexible, and I’ll accept feature requests within reason!
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer