SEO Content Rewriter

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The quest for creating unique content has taken people down many different avenues over the last few years. There are dozens of spinning tools and software out on the market now, and they each work well to varying degrees.

One of the best ways I have seen to create quality spinnable content is to rewrite content based on sentences rather than words. This makes your article much more readable and human friendly.

Most of the services out there are independant software apps or membership websites. When I was searching for tools and software for content spinning I came across SEO Wordspinner by Zack Katz, which is a wordpress plugin that allows you to show different sentence combinations each time your page is refreshed. It works by putting brackets around each sentence and then the pipe character between multiple versions of that sentence. I thought this plugin was a great idea since most people will be putting content and articles on their wordpress blog.

One thing lacking in this plugin was the ability to easily create rewritten sentences. I had been using a very popular service called Article Ranks which has a fantastic editor for rewriting sentences. So, I thought why not create a simple visual editor plugin for wordpress that gives users an easy way to rewrite their articles just like this service and make it compatible with Zack’s SEO Wordspinner plugin.

So, here it is… 100% free for you.

Click Here To Download SEO Content Rewriter

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Making Money Through Google Chrome Extensions

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One of the best things about Google Chrome extensions is that they are so easy to develop. All you need to include in your build is an easy to configure manifest file that details how the extension should operate. Then you simply use the chrome browser to pack your extension into a .xpi file and you’re good to go.

You can either serve the extension from your own server or you can distribute it through the Chrome marketplace.

Google has not yet implemented a solution to sell extensions. The only reference to being able to sell extensions is through a thread found on the Chrome help forum.

One person “Blair” who seems to be a Google employee, has commented on that thread saying that “Google is very interested in enabling web developers to earn income from developing extensions, but they’re still investigating the best way to make this happen”. The last post from Blair was the 8th of May, 2010, so it doesn’t seem to be a top priority for Google to make this happen at the moment.

At present, only free extensions are included in the Chrome marketplace, but is there still opportunity to create an income from creating a free chrome extension?

You will have no doubt caught on to the fact that the “free” online business model can be quite profitable. Just take a look at sites like facebook or even google. If you can get the eyeballs, you can get a lot of advertising deals and the online world opens up to you.

So, let’s look at some of the most popular extensions in the marketplace and their stats. AdBlock, which is currently the most popular extension shows stats of 1,799,503 current users and 143,952 new weekly installs. These are pretty phenomenal numbers but what’s interesting is the developer says in his product description that he is relying on paypal donations to generate an income from this app. This suggest either that Google is not allowing monetization, or that users are going for apps without monetization ads, or simply that the developer has no idea how to monetize his extension.

What’s encouraging is the developer is obviously just a single person and not a huge company, which suggests there is room for the little guy in this marketplace and he must obviously be getting a decent amount in paypal donations as he says he has quit his full time job just to focus on it.

The question is, how much traction can a new app get on the marketplace?

It would seem there is some delay in google’s stats because I am finding quite a few apps with reviews and comments but no indication of number of users or download stats. I’ve found over 20 new extensions released just today in the “Most Recent” category and some of them have up to 15 ratings which indicates that there is some good activity possible for newly released extensions and quite a few new extensions being created everyday for Chrome.

I’m going to be looking further into Google Chrome extensions in the next few blog posts, so keep your eyes peeled for updates as I explore if it’s possible to make a decent income from Google Chrome extensions.

If you want to chime in about anything I have discussed or just to express your interest, please feel free to leave a comment below.

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Here’s How Autoblogging Software Could Be Better

It seems that auto blogging software is in huge demand. I’ve had it mentioned to me that WP Mage did around 5 million dollars in sales last year, which was a total shock to me. I had no idea that a wordpress plugin could generate that kind of moolah.

I’m a little behind in the wordpress scene. I used it a few years back but got sick of comment spam, managing multiple installations and upgrades, and then having my sites hacked. It really turned me off using wordpress but… I’m coming back around, especially now with multisite support (which is awesome!).

The idea of automating something with software appeals to me big time because I’m a techie. Now, I need to be careful where I go with this, because my last post was all about building a real sustainable business etc. and autoblogging kinda flies in the face of that.

It’s not something that Google encourages at all, but I can’t deny the techie side of me is fascinated at the thought of easily being able to push out hundreds of sites that make easy money through adsense etc. especially now since there is such a big emphasis in the community on domaining and flipping. I’ve been listening to Kenny Goodman and James Schramko talk about building a portfolio of domains.

I think ideally, you want a blog that encourages user feedback and builds a natural community. That’s a site that Google values and will not de-index. Autoblogging typically doesn’t do that. I’m thinking a good way to use autoblogging software is to have a real person (freelancer/outsourcer) make edits and add real content to existing auto generated text, images, and videos. Content that encourages user feedback.

Here’s a big improvement I see that could be made to autoblogging software…

You’ll notice that every autoblogging software (everyone that I’ve seen anyway) is setup to gather a bunch of information right now and populate your blog with future dated posts.

Here’s a novel idea. What if your blog created new posts on the fly, in real time, as visitors interacted with your site?

So, your site grows naturally as you get more visitors browsing and clicking stuff. You don’t have to manually pick and choose content. You start with one page, and one keyword. The content on that page is generated through rss feeds based around your specified keyword. Youtube videos, flickr images, google news updates, amazon products, etc.

New pages are created from the front-end as opposed to the back-end, and as people click content, a new page is created with more content they can click on.

So, instead of populating your site with pre-defined content that is old by the time it’s posted, have your site created naturally over time by your site visitors.

I did develop a custom cms that does this, but I’m now developing it as a plugin for wordpress.

I think this could be a good solution for creating content on domains you are buying, because that was my biggest question when hearing about domaining… What content do you put on all these domains. Buying 100 domains is one thing, but putting content on those 100 sites is such a bigger deal.

I’m interested to know your thoughts on this approach to autoblogging and content creation?

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Developing Cross Platform Applications

Gone are the days when you could whack together a quick windows app and call the job done. Back when Microsoft had over 85% market share on the home desktop pc you didn’t really need to worry about mac OSX, or linux. It was only the hardcore programmers that would play around with grep and regex etc. commands on linux.

Nowadays, the situation is quite different. Almost everyone I know is moving to an iMac or Macbook. One of the main reasons I moved over was because I could still run windows on a macbook. That made the decision so easy. Such a smart move on apple’s part to integrate Intel processors into their systems. Now I run Windows and OSX at the same time using vmware fusion and it works great.

Linux still doesn’t seem to be a major player in the desktop operating system scene, but there’s always rumours of linux making big moves to compete in this space. Generally I find that most cross platform development applications that support mac and windows will also support linux so there’s usually no need to setup a linux box to create and test applications. I only ever bother testing on mac and windows. That’s probably not a die hard developers ideal point of view… but it gets me by.

You can still develop windows apps, and do quite good sales volume. I have noticed that quite a few internet marketers are still developing windows only apps, but I think those marketers will need to adapt to cross platform apps very soon as more and more people are using OSX and are demanding a compatible solution. Specifically I’m thinking of Alex Goad’s Rank Builder app which I bought when it was released. A very good app and lucky for me I could run it on windows using vmware fusion. It looks like it’s built as a windows form application in Visual Studio. Quite a complicated application using multiple dll library files and xml files for data storage. I would be interested to know the stats on how well that application sold and what the support requests we’re like. I am thinking he may have had a lot of people refund because they couldn’t get it to work on their mac.

So, what’s the options when creating applications for end users?

Well, not only do you have to think about multiple operating systems but you also have to think about whether the app is going to be web based or a hybrid desktop/web application. Adobe’s AIR environment is quite a good option as it is cross platform and there are a lot of tools around to develop AIR applications. The popular Market Samurai software uses AIR.

I was right into Adobe flex builder a few years ago before I got more involved in business and marketing. That was when Adobe just released AIR. I remember getting quite bogged down with MVC design architecture and cairngorm but I managed to develop some simple applications including a graphical analytics application that I still use today to check my traffic stats across all my sites. That app uses Adobe charts and Midnight Coders Weborb for php to connect to my mysql database using AMF remoting. I haven’t touched AIR in quite a while but my current programmer is developing an application for me that utilizes AIR, and he’s developing it in javascript using Aptana IDE. A totally different approach to how I was inclined to developing AIR apps.

The other option is leveraging existing tools that are already cross platform. It seems every major software has support for plugins and addons developed by third party users nowadays. A good example of this is my most recent tool, Domain Digger Pro which leverages a web browser to gather and compile data from different sites. Initially I created this as a windows software just like Alex’s Rank Builder. I was being very “old school” and created a simple vbs script that opened internet explorer (as that is the only option when developing with Microsoft) and used the DOM model to collect data from pages, and javascript injection to fill and submit forms. I then created a wrapper with Visual Studio so I could have a simple UI where the user could input data and click a button to run the vbs script. Worked great on my windows xp vm, but when I released it to the public I had heaps of people experiencing problems with Internet Explorer, errors on Windows 7, etc. which overall meant it wasn’t a good solution for a basic user. Not to mention that I was ignoring half the market who run OSX. After consulting a few of my techie friends, the obvious solution was to make it a Google Chrome extension. Chrome is already cross platform, and I could simply modify my app to have a simple html UI that opened when the icon was clicked in the toolbar. Perfect!

The other option for cross platform desktop apps is java, but I haven’t played with that yet. At the moment I’m satisfied with AIR for desktop applications or hybrid web/desktop apps, and developing extensions or addons for widespread applications like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and possibly in the future mobile devices like the iPhone.

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