Archive for March, 2010

The Script and iSnare

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

I installed the article gathering script that works with the iSnare article directory service on one blog. It proceeded to download some articles. The articles are well written and add value to the blog. I liked the way that it worked so I went and registered two or three other blogs this morning. The first blog started collecting articles within a couple of hours. The additional blogs have not been sent any articles after several hours.

I may need to investigate further. All of the domains are hosted as add-on domains in my hosting account. That means that they all have the same IP address. The serving software at iSnare may not be set up to deal with a situation like mine. The information that I have been able to find is a bit limited. I did not see any notice that this was not allowed or would not work. I registered several accounts because the address is required for the script and there is no way to add additional URLs within the account. I want different subject matter for each of the blogs.

Time will tell, I guess. Has anyone else used this service? Has anyone been able to use it with multiple blogs from the same IP address? Tell me in a comment. Thanks!

Not Exactly Auto-Blogging – But . . .

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

I researched the free auto-blogging software that I had run across. The developer admits on the Warrior Forum that the software is black hat. They use scrappers to pick up their content and scrub all the links out of the posts. It does function and the Deep Link Engine does work with it as best that it can.

I also found an alternative that I like better in some ways. There is a bit more work involved but the result conforms to the article marketing terms of use. The author’s resource box is retained and the article keyword list is supplied. This is a free service of iSnare, one of the frequently mentioned article directories. There is a free script that you put into your blog folder that populates article drafts into your database. You are free to choose the articles that you use.

I had tried a similar service from ArticleUnited, but was very disappointed with the results. The iSnare service seems to be much better. I will be adding it to a couple of other sites this week. I added it to the MC Rally site this evening. That is one on which I had the other service installed. There were only three articles that the script ever pulled and they were not well targeted. The new service had pulled at least a half dozen articles when I checked this evening. They are primarily on one topic, so I may spread them out a bit.

I will test this a bit more and then provide the links, but Google knows now if you ask the right questions.

The Grand Experiment

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

I have made several posts about the Deep Link Engine. I also mentioned a free auto-blogging plug-in. I have given the Deep Link Engine enough publicity and am still not ready to publicize the auto-blogging software.

The Deep Link Engine was provided as an incentive to sign up for a mailing list on what is known as a squeeze page. The developers have their own auto-blogging plug-in that is offered in a program that went live today. I suspect that part of the reason that DLE works the way that it does is so that it will auto-populate links on the auto-blogging sites. This should improve the performance of the blogs.

The grand experiment of the title is an emulation of the new program offered by the DLE developers. It is not as fully automated as their program, but it should be a fair test of the potential in some ways. I put a blog up on a sub-domain space. Sub-domains are not as good as top level domains at drawing traffic. I picked a popular niche. While it will be harder to promote the site in the competitive environment the potential for reward is high. Clicks on ads in competitive markets return higher payouts and there are many high paying affiliate programs. If I am able to drive some targeted traffic to the site there is a chance for a payout. My only expense for this is the time involved in setting it up and overseeing the project. I already have the hosting space and a sub-domain is just a special part of an existing domain.

I have now looked at three of the initial articles that were returned. The first one has almost no content. It appears to have started life out as an affiliate text link with the affiliate link stripped out. The second was either written by a seriously non-native English speaker or was scrambled by the spin software on the article server, or perhaps a little of both. The third article is perfectly readable and of reasonably good quality.

I did have a bit of a problem getting the plug-in to work on the new blog. I jumped through a couple of hoops and was able to get it operating. I then tried to add the plug to a couple of other blogs without success. I jumped through all the same hoops but there was no joy in the end. I have some work to do on the new blog and then I may investigate the difficulties with the other instances. It may be that only one instance can operate on the server. Perhaps a reseller hosting plan would work differently.

Have you tried auto-blogging? What were your results? What software did your use? Leave a comment about your experience or thoughts on the subject.

Deep Link Engine Deactivated

Monday, March 8th, 2010

I have deactivated the Deep Link Engine plug-in on this site. I have tested the plug to some extent and have some complaints regarding the way that it operates. There appears to be no control over the blogs to which a post links. The plug-in initiates a search when you hit the publish function and actually does the full treatment at that time no matter what you have told it you wish to do. Deleting blogs in the plug-in grid does no good because the final search is carried out after you hit the publish button.

This plug-in would be fine for an auto-blogger who does not want to mess with the content at all. If you are generating original content and would like to display only relevant blog posts this is not the plug-in for you.

I peeked at the net through Google’s eyes and do not see much in the way of negative comment. There does not appear to be enough experience with the plug for glowing comments either. While looking at some commentary I ran across a free WP auto-blogging plug-in. I think that I will go and try the two of them out together. If I hit the mother load I will let you know! Off to do a little research.

Very Interesting

Monday, March 8th, 2010

I just went back to the download site for the Deep Link Engine to check if there was any comment on my post. There was another post that stated the same problems that I have noted with the plug-in. I made a rather more detailed post concerning the things that I had seen. The post showed up as the latest post last night when I posted the comment. Today it is nowhere to be found in the comment list. It would appear that at least one of the posts detailing problems are un-approved by the blog owner. This leads me to wonder how many posts have been trashed and what the percentage is.

I am very tempted to go back to the page and post a glowing report and state that I have written up my experiences on the blog. Maybe it would help others. I will be doing a bit of further research on this and let you know if I find anything of interest.

My experiment with the last post showed that the plug-in does its thing when you hit the publish button weather there is any content in the grids or not. I will do the same with this post and if you see a link list at the end of this post take that as confirmation.

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Testing, 1 – 2 – 3, Testing

Monday, March 8th, 2010

The previous post updated without changing the links after the post. That is a good thing, because I can probably  go into the HTML view  and delete links after a post is loaded. I am going to try this post without touching the Deep Link Engine. The thought occurred to me that the plug was cycling after the publish button was clicked and that was the source of  the extraneous links. If you see links after this post I will have learned something else about the plug-in.

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The Secret Sauce

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Here is something that I have come up with as a work around for the problems that I have found with the Deep Link Engine plug-in. Before I make the blog post I have a good idea of the subject. I use the add keyword/tag function to put a few keywords into the first grid. I then hit refresh on the second grid and the software goes about searching for relevant blogs. After I have initiated the blog search I begin my post. I can be writing my post while the plug searches for blogs. This is still not an ideal situation as I don’t really have control over which blogs are linked, but I am searching only with my keywords of choice. This seems to improve the quality of the links nearly to the point of usability if your choice of keywords is good.

Look over the link titles of this and the previous post and tell me if you agree. Thanks!

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Deep Link Engine Update Update

Monday, March 8th, 2010

I went back to the download page for the Deep Link Engine  and checked things out again. It does state that you can select the blogs to use with your post. I have been unable to do that in practice. I have been able to add tags, but tags that I have deleted still appear to show up in the blog search.

I read through a couple of pages of comments on the page. There were a couple of users who had noted the same problem that I see. I wrote up my experiences in a comment to add to the list. I have not yet checked back to see if the developer has replied to the comment. He has replied to a couple of comments that I have seen, but these are primarily for installation problems.

I have installed the plug on several blogs and the installation has been no problem. The plug-in does search and find blog posts with relevant tags, although that does not always mean that the post is actually relevant. If I were able to actually select the posts to which I wished to link I would think this is a great plug. I have seen some traffic as a result of the few times that I have used the software and the effect could build with further use.

I have thought of a possible work-around and am trying it with this post. If it works I will let you in on my secret sauce. If not I will hope for an update to the plug-in that will make it perform in the way the site states that it should work.

Have you checked this plug-in out yet? What has your experience been?

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Possible Show Stopper

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

I have continued to work with the Deep Link Engine. I still have complaints and will need to contact the developer, I think.

I have now tried deleting non/less relevant blogs and selecting the relevant ones in the list before I hit the publish button. The plug-in is retaining the deleted options and posting links no matter what I do. I also noted on a post that I just completed that selecting the tags for the blog search does not produce the expected results. The blog search returned blogs using the unselected tags as readily as the selected one. I did not delete the tags that I did not want to search from that list, but the way that the UI is set up it would appear that you could just select the specific tags to use.

I like the idea of linking to other blogs. I have seen traffic to all the blogs on which I have activated the plug-in, although those are probably just blog owners checking to see who it is that linked to them. I do think that the idea has merit. It does take some extra time to publish a post, but if it builds traffic the time could be well spent.

If I can’t get the Deep Link Engine to work I will try to find an alternative. There was something that appeared to do the same thing listed on my dashboard page. Are you using a blog linking plug-in? Do you know of one that works better than what I have experienced with the Deep Link Engine? Please tell me about it in a comment. Thanks!

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Observations on the Deep Link Engine

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

I have now installed the Deep Link Engine on this and several other blogs. I have used it on new posts and have updated some existing posts to add links to other blogs. The engine does find a good number of blogs with somewhat relative content.

Perhaps it is just my learning curve, but I have run into one problem using the plug-in. There will be a list of blogs generated by the plug. There is a check-box by each listing and a remove button. The remove button does remove the entries from the list, but when I publish many of those blogs that I have removed still show up in the link list. I tried refreshing the list after I had removed the less relative entries but when I published the links were still included. Unless this is a problem with my understanding of the way this should work this is a serious shortcoming of the plug-in, in my opinion.

I would like to post the links that I feel have the most relative content to my blog post. If the titles returned don’t sound relevant I would prefer that they do not show up in the link list. I also feel that there would be greater acceptance of the ping-backs if my post sounded relevant to those blogs that receive the pings.

I will continue to work with the plug and see if I can discover a method that will function as I think that it should. I may contact the author of the plug and ask if this is possible.

Have you tried the Deep Link Engine? Did you want to choose the blogs to which you link? Were you able to accomplish this with the plug-in? Please leave a comment telling of your experience or thoughts about this plug-in.  Thanks!

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