It never ceases to amaze me how much i always seem to have to dumb down my applications for people. Now i dont want to be rude here, but…. its holding the rest of us back.

Think about my biggest free application, Phoenix Twitter Desktop. I could certainly add a bunch more options for adding friends, including probably a location finder which Twitter caters for. The fact that twitter offers a Geo IP so you can target people right down to the city they live in is amazing. But there is alot of options that go along with it, and also a few options for longitude and latitude. But lets be honest, if i stuck longitude and latitude in their as options, i would be inundated with emails asking me how it works, or maybe even people who dont know what longitude even is. And thus, im sorry to say, you wont get it. And its a shame because i know plenty of people that could utilise this sort of thing, but i just dont have the time, nor the will, to sit at my laptop answering questions via email.

Dont think im the only software developer facing this, i mean, look at Microsoft/Windows. If we take the Control Panel for instance. From XP onwards, there was a “Category” view. Which in my mind (And every other intermediate+ computer user on the planet), was a complete balls up and you couldnt find anything. Luckily there was an option to switch back to classic view, which i think the majority did. But, there is still users out there, infact a large chunk of users that use the Category view.

There is a bunch of other things within XP and up, especially Vista and 7, that try and make the life easier for the user. But just annoy the hell out of anyone who has used a computer for more then checking email via outlook express. I should know, when i worked for an ISP years back. It was absolute hell trying to navigate away from Windows o-so-helpful wizards, and trying to just do things the old fashioned way.

So for advanced users, you have the beginners moaning to thank

As much as im a huge MMA fan, and would love to blog about my favourite fighters in the MMA world, this is something totally different. The other day i was looking for “SEO Contests”. Just for a bit of a laugh, i thought i might try my hand at something like this to truly test my skills against other SEO’s. I think it would be a much better test then just going out and SEO’ing a random page for a keyword. And thats two reasons :

1. It’s Harder. In a sense, some keywords are damn easy to rank for if you really wanted. But when you are up against others who are spamming every link possible onto their own page, it becomes alot more competitive.

2. It’s Easier. Ha, well it goes like this.  Some keywords (Especially product keywords), are so locked down by the big players like Amazon, BestBuy etc without even trying. Thats because these domains are super authoritative, and it becomes an uphill battle right from the beginning. They certainly arent unbeatable, but there is so much effort put into beating them, when there really shouldn’t be.

So with that being said, i went out on the hunt. And to be honest, i really didn’t find much. It seems there isnt actually that many contests being held, and certainly the big ones are all over. Its almost like you only hear about the contest until after its finished. Which is pretty smart i guess, less competition.

The one i could find, that was still up for grabs was the MMA Pound For Pound SEO Contest. Rules seem simple enough, and they don’t seem too bothered about tactic’s being used. So im in!

I havnt really thought it through how im going to tackle it yet, (Hell i might get lazy and just use this blog post as my ranking page). I like blogs because new content gets picked up uber fast by google, but with that being said. Static pages also have a certain factor that i like about them. In anycase, ill probably blog down the road how im going to go about it!

O btw, If you came here actually looking for the best MMA Pound For Pound fighter, then check out here MMA Forum

A couple of days ago i wrote about how i had removed all my twitter friends. And i thought pretty much, that that would be the end of my days sifting through the spam on my twitter account. But it seems like Twitter may have a few bugs.

For example, for some reason everytime i log into my Twitter account in the morning, im following 2 or 3 extra people then what i was the day before. These people are people i have never ever heard of before, and often they are showing down below the people i have added manually.

Whats the significance of them being below those that i added manually? Well the fact is that twitter orders your followers in the order that you added them. Because these are below my manual followers, Twitter is trying to tell me i have had these guys added since basically the dawn of time. Even when i delete everyone and start all over again, the next day a few more random Twitterers end up on my list.

Not only that, but there is some bugs within the display of twitter. Like such :

Notice how it says i have 1 follower, and yet the pictures show i have 2….

I mean all of this is tiny tiny things that really dont matter. I just find it interesting that a service that merely saves 140 character messages into a database has so many issues still. Twitter arent rolling out updates like Facebook, and it certainly isnt as packed with features. And yet there is little oddities that never seem to get fixed.

As long as i have known about SENuke, it has had a “Niche Research Module”. For the most part i found this module kinda boring, and it didn’t tell you anything you couldn’t just open the web page manually and look at. It certainly didn’t automate anything.

But one interesting point of it, was that it gave you a difficulty factor for a particular keyword. So for example if we typed in “Pyrogenic Media”, it would tell me how easy it would be to dominate that keyword on google. Its never been any secret as to how the keywords are rated. The application simply does a check for how many results there are for a google search like “Allintitle:YourKeyword”. For for those who need some visual help :

http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle:pyrogenic+media

All this does is tell you how many pages have that  phrase in their HTML title. Although do note, while all the words have to be in the Title. They don’t have to be in any particular order. So it will show me sites that have “media hello bye mum pyrogenic”. Even with words in between it still shows. But in anycase, that’s not the point.

So we know how they gauge the difficulty, but what are the exact numbers? Recently someone came out and posted the exact numbers that SENuke uses :

Extremely easy – <200
Easy – <700
Doable – <1500
Not the easiest – <3000
Could be Tought – <5000
Difficult – <10000
Don’t Waste Your Time -  >10000

To be 100% honest. I think Areeb (SENuke creator), probably just thought up these off the top of his head. I doubt there was an extreme amount of effort into dragging up these numbers. But just at a glance, I would think they are pretty close to what you should be aiming for.

Remember though, that even if the AllInTitle count is low, you should always analyse the competition for the broad keyword aswell (Typing the keyword into google with no quotes, no extra modifiers). It doesn’t matter if the AllInTitle competition is low if the whole front page for the broad is owned by Amazon and other high authority sites.

Actually, i stopped following everyone, but i couldnt find a way to write that title that still sounded like proper english. But anyway, two days ago i stopped following every single follower @pyrogenicmedia. Why? Well for the most part it was all spam anyway. Ive never really taken twitter that seriously, and it doesnt drive all too much traffic to this site.

If anything, i really wanted to see how much of a drop i would get if i stopped following everyone. Alot of people nowadays use bots/websites that remove all followers who arent following you back (Reciprocal followers i guess?). This actually used to be built into Twitter but they removed it sometime last year. So if i stopped following everyone, everyone who is a bot (Or atleast using an app to track who is following them), will stop following me.

The result? :

So a drop of almost 2k followers. Seems pretty bad, but in actual fact i was expecting it to drop far more then this. And today it kind of levelled out and i didnt lose too many. But i expect the number to keep falling till i get to about 2k.

How did i remove everyone at once? Well i sure as hell didn’t sit there unfollowing 6000 people. I used John Chow’s service UnfollowAll. Although it did take me several goes to get it all the way through. Apparently CURL (Php Web calls for non tech folk), has a timeout of 30 seconds. So it would unfollow everyone it could in 30 seconds, then crash, and i would have to restart it and get it going again. Definitely reccomend the service if you need to clear out a Twitter Account.

O and if you want me to follow you again, send me a DM or something. Actually thats another upside, not following everyone on twitter means you dont get a million spam messages clogging up your twitter DM box.

Ok so for a long time now. People have been saying that links from .gov, .edu, .ac and other protected domains hold more “link” weight then normal .com links. By protected domains I mean domains that you cant just roll over to godaddy.com and buy straight off the shelf. And for the most part, i think it makes more sense. If Google is so caught up in making sure that “important” pages link to your site, then tracking these sorts of links would make sense. I mean PageRank is just googles way of assigning a number to how important your page is on the web, but holding a .gov implies importance just from the TLD.

But ofcourse, that shit never flies with google :

There is a bunch of stuff about Facebook + Twitter in there as well. But lets just focus on the EDU and GOV links part for the moment. Essentially he says that if you get a link from a .com PR5 page, it is exactly the same as a link from a .gov PR5 page. I have my suspicions about Cutts talking the truth on this one. And infact i wasn’t the only one. Here is a quote from the forum where the conversation started :

I think people are forgetting that Matt Cutts is the head of web spam team, of course he is going to say crap like we treat links equally etc, so that people stop spamming them. Imagine the guy said yes we do give so much power to Twitter links and Facebook links and we do give credit to nofollow, the spam on these sites would get ridicuous and the SERPs would turn to muck.

I think this is spot on. Cant say i thought about it like this before this guy showed up and threw in his 2cents. But it rings true incredibly well.

Just imagine if Matt Cutts came out and said, “Hell yeah we still track nofollow links, and yeah we give more weight to a link from .edu/.gov and even more weight from sites such as Twitter.com even if they are nofollow“. People would go bat shit crazy and just start spamming links left, right and center.

In a way, its Cutts job to throw people off spamming. Google doesn’t want it, but they also don’t want to punish webmasters that do get links from places like Facebook and Twitter. The logic is all there why a popular domain should hold weight, its just Google throwing everyone off the track. Gotta remember, if you ask Google what the best way to build links is : “Content Is King”.

pfft

Rarely do I bust my balls in an internet argument. Mostly because its hard to portray my weird sense of sarcasm in ASCII text. But unfortunately, I feel compelled to. Not because I’m being ripped off, but I feel so sorry for so many people being ripped off by “traffic sellers”.

Now lets get one thing straight, if a someone is selling you traffic. It is always shit traffic. I don’t care how many reviews the seller has, or how well other people say the service is. Its shit traffic. If it was good, buying traffic, or even traffic that would enter their email into something. The seller would be directing this traffic to his own sites, or a CPA email submit. Not selling it to you for half a cent a visit.

Some people have taking their BS’ing to another level. Telling me its “Expired Domain” traffic. For one, they are passing out hundreds of thousands of visits from these “Expired Domains”. If i had a domain, that was getting thousands of hits as soon as i registered it. I would have thought i hit a goldmine. And i sure as hell wouldn’t be selling those hits for peanuts! What’s worse is that this “Expired Domain” traffic comes with some catches :

• Url(s) may not contain any popup ads of any type.
• Url(s) may not play any sounds upon page load.
• Url(s) may not contain adult content, Hate, Warez
• Url(s) may not break out of frames.
• Url(s) may not use site rotation, redirection, or forwarding.
• Url(s) may not load virus or force any downloads.
• Url(s) may not take more than 5 seconds to load.
• Url(s) may not disrupt the traffic delivery process.

Without even going through them individually, there is something wrong here. The last one pretty much sums up the lot, “Url(s) may not disrupt the traffic delivery process”. This to me seems extremely strange. What is the traffic delivery process? Shouldn’t the traffic just be forward to our domains? Or is it iframed to us? In either case what should it matter what the content, forwarding or redirecting are on the site. Because if the traffic is pure expired domain traffic, the traffic that went to that domain are probably completely lost. And don’t know what they are looking for.

“Url(s) may not break out of frames”. Heh, well isn’t that a surprise. Doesnt every Pay To Click/Traffic Exchange website in existance have this rule? *hint hint*

A few months ago i wrote about the introduction to the ShoeMoney System. In that post i said i didnt know what the price would be, but i was hoping it was cheap. I guess my head was up in the clouds when i said that. The price for the Shoemoney Course is :

$197

Gah. There goes my thought of trying it out and giving a review for you guys. Im not really interested in the course itself, but just wanted to take a look, and give out my thoughts. Instead, ill give my thoughts about about the pricing.

To me $197 is too much. We already know that this course has been dumbed down so a complete dumbass can understand it. But complete dumbasses usually dont have a spare $200 to spare. I seriously think, that shoemoney has gone over-priced for the market he is supposed to be going for. Will he sell a gazillion memberships? Hell yeah he will. But they will be people who are already in the game, and are more interested in getting a few inside tips, then wanting a complete walkthrough of how to create a facebook account.

Did i forget to mention that its actually $197 per month! I mean as i say, people do have this money. But not the people who the course is aimed at.

Interestingly enough, the course is limited to 500 seats. Which i find kinda low, mind you, 200 * 500 = $100,000 per month. I honestly think that half those seats are going to be snapped up by Bloggers/Reviewers who just want to take a look into the system, but arent going to be following it. Only time will tell. Maybe next week Shoemoney posting a blog post about “Only 400 seats left”.

An interesting topic came up the other day in a conversation between myself and a few of my friends about some of my applications that i have in development. The main focus was, providing a service with those products, instead of selling them outright.

Personally, I’ve taken both roads. Ive had Pyrogenius Commenter where I have sold the application outright (Or atleast “copies”). And then I’ve had Lynxlinks, where ive developed an application to do all the work, but decided instead to provide the service the application gives. So which is better?  Well, i think they definitely both have pro’s and cons.

A service, I found, is much harder to get off the ground, and you get alot less “customers”. Especially at the beginning. Alot of this is to do if there is a product, an actual piece of software, that provides the same functionality for a similar price. So for example, at lynxlinks we charge on average $30 per pack, the only real comparison product out there at the moment is Xrumer. But there is quite alot of difference between the two, and ofcourse, the biggest being the price range. However if there was a product that was say even $100, it becomes much less viable to use our service.

Alot of people will be thinking to themselves, “But your still providing a service, your charging for your time right?”. While yes that is true, Aswell as charging out our time as a service, we are charging that little bit extra almost covering the the cost of the application running in the back end (Even though i develop it).And so i cant imagine too many people still hiring us, if there is a software to do it within a cheap enough range. Although, i could be wrong because people who OWN SENuke, still pay people to do the work for them.

Another thing to remember with a service, is that you get the repeat customers. With a product, unless your doing a membership type system, they pay once, and only once. And you have to support that for the rest of your life. With a service, we do the work, and thats it. There is no ongoing commitment to a customer. And so if he wants more work done, he pays once again. This means, atleast for me, there is definitive boundaries on where our service starts and stops.

Onto the Pro’s of a Product. Take my PyrogeniusCommenter for instance. While yes, i develop new features, it is nothing like the time taken to process orders of a service. And alot of that work is done in my own time, not when a customer orders. And its more when i feel “inspired” ill lock myself away in my office and program away for 10 hours straight.

At times, i actually felt a bit sorry for the kids wanting to do a service of blog commenting. And then i come in with Pyrogenius, demolish that dream for them. While there is still a market for high quality dofollow comments, Automation software at times is demolishing the services.

If that’s all a bit confusing …

Service Pro’s

• Repeat customers
• Definitive start and end of customer support. Once the service is done, its done.

Service Con’s

• Hard to get off the ground.
• You have to spend alot of time doing work, when the customer needs it, not when it suits you.
• If someone releases a product that does essentially the same work as your service. Your stuffed.

Product Pro’s

• Initial development, then easy going
• Develop new features when you feel inspired. Not when the customer does (Or atleast, not all the time).

Product Con’s

• Ongoing support if not a membership scheme.
• One off purchase, no “repeat” customers.

Looking back on the list. I guess the simple way to fix it all would be to provide a membership scheme. That atleast carries with it a “repeat” purchase. But it comes bundled with its own set of issues.

PeerFly have always had this thing called TrustScore. Which was basically a system where they rated the “CR” and “EPC” stats, on how trustworthy they are. Basically, if one person has run a rebill offer in the network, and got a conversion in 2 clicks. Then the CR would be 50% and the EPC be something like $15. Which obviously is not entirely correct and can lead alot of people astray. If you want to read a little more on PeerFly’s trust score, I wrote a small review about them a while ago.

Today I login, and i see they have removed the Trust Score ratings (boo!), but they have replaced them with their number equivalent. It now shows how many conversions (Or leads) network wide their have been :

Once again, i find this incredibly useful. Although i can see where some people are coming from when they say it will just mean affiliates work off others split testing. Which is kinda true, but cant we all just get along ?

Wondering why your network cant add this feature? Well that would be because they are using the default script from HasOffers or DirectTrack. Peerfly is build custom from the ground up. So if you want in on this amazing feature, you will only find it at Peerfly.