I was reading this Using Google Alerts to Build Links article and about halfway down it mentioned a great way of using alerts to keep track of who is using your articles.

By setting up a Google Alert for each of your articles you will be alerted every time Google finds a site using your article.

For the alert you could use either:

• - Your article name – if it’s unique enough.
• - Some distinctive text from your article.
• - You site name to capture all articles being used such as
    site:yoursite.com 
• - Or maybe the web address of your article such as
    www.yoursite.com/articlename.html

This could help you find out

• - not only who is using your articles
• - but how often your article is being used

which is a good way of seeing if your efforts are paying off.

Also as an added bonus

You can check out the site that is using your article.
Then if you think it may help bring you more traffic, offer them more articles or links to your website pages that may be of interest to their readers.

You can read the full set of linking strategies here Using Google Alerts to Build Links

I’ve been using Google Alerts for ages now as a great way of keeping in touch with the latest goings on in whatever I’m interested in.

They allow you to pre-filter the deluge of information that’s out there on the net and at least give you a head start on fighting the information overload we all face.

I also use them to keep track of my products and name, such as I’ve got an alert out for Ray Harvard, which allows me to keep track of whenever my name crops up in Google, such as in Blog posts.

However I’ve now just found another use for them…

With this great tip on John Jantsch’s – Duct Tape Marketing Blog.

By using the search term -

link:http://www.yourblogurl.com

where www.yourblogurl.com is the address of your blog.

It will send you an alert when Google detects someone linking to your blog.
(You can choose how often from the options when you create the alert.)

As John explains, one use could be to network with those linking to your blog if you wished.

I’ve just put it into practice and I’m looking forward to seeing what results it produces.

Read John’s Full Article here Google Alerts Hack

How have you used Google Alerts ?

Today I stumbled across PerformancingAds, which was launched the other day after their final quality sharpening BETA phase.

Out of the Performancing, “helping bloggers succeed” stable, PerformancingAds is owned and operated by SplashPress Media, who in their own words:

“has quickly evolved into a significant new media company focusing primarily on ways to help the modern blogger succeed”

It didn’t take me long to register with PerformancingAds.

When you register that quickly it makes you think – “How Come ?”

I think the following helped me come to a such a quick decision.

Simple to Navigate

The site is simple to navigate so that its easy to understand what’s on offer.

Whether you are an Advertiser looking to place ads on sites or a Publisher looking to offer ad slots on your blog or website you can easily see which path to follow from the home page.

Simple to Register

If you are an Advertiser or Publisher, registration is easy, with the same simple form for both being a nice touch.

All you need to enter is:

1. First Name
2. Last Name
3. Email Address
4. Are you a Publisher or Advertiser
5. PayPal Email Address

Once you register you are emailed your account password and you’re good to go.

After you log in Setting Up is just as easy.

Simple to Add your site to the list of Publishers

Again just a few quick boxes to fill in.

Its also a chance to give your sales pitch for your blog or site to potential advertisers looking to place adverts on your site.

It also helps thru categories and tags to help make sure that you get targeted advertisers looking at your site.

Simple to Create Your Advert Regions

This is where you setup where the advert slots will be on your site.

At present it appears that only 125×125 regions are on offer, but as these seem to be a pretty popular size, you may not find this much of a restriction.

One thing worth noting here is that they say that:

“Advertisers will pay more for regions that are located closer to the top of the page.”

Simple to use their Exchange Ads System

Their Exchange Ads system is a credit based system where you earn credits for allowing other sites to place their ads in your vacant slots.

When you’ve then got enough credits in your pot, your advert(s) then be placed on other sites.

Again this is easily setup by filling in just a few simple boxes.

I can see this as being a good way of promoting your own products or affiliate products and may be a good alternative to using Pay-Per-Click.

So if you’re a Publisher or Advertiser you can get over to PerformancingAds right away by clicking on one of the images.

The new free XsitePro2 brochure did just that for me.

I can’t believe that its Free

They should be charging for it as a lesson on how sales brochures should be done.

Its a stunning piece of work, with vibrant photos and a style that even if you know the product, makes you want to enjoy it like a good book.

To me it highlighted that even the World’s Best Content, will not be read if its not sat in a quality medium.

When you’ve put all that effort into generating great content, then your blog or website needs to match its quality.

The trouble is, Creating Quality Websites is Not Easy

We usually need all the help we can get and XSitePro 2 wants to help you, by making it as easy as possible to create stunning websites.

We’re usually tempted by all those free website templates out there and usually pretty disappointed when we get to them.

At the end of the day, your blog or website is your store front and even if you’re the world’s authority on a subject, all your hard work generating that excellent content, will be wasted if most people just walk on by because you’re store front looks like its made out of bits of string and cardboard.

We’re all told not to “Judge a Book by its Cover”

But we all know “First Impressions Count”.

So if you want your visitors to want to come in and browse your site and read all that great content that you’ve probably sweated over for hours if not days, then you’ll need to invest surprisingly little these days, to get your hands on one of the world’s best design tool’s.

Sit down and take a read of this delectable and surprisingly free XSitePro 2 Brochure and let it inspire you into producing equally stunning websites for your content.

And this Book’s Got a Happy Ending

Which I won’t spoil by giving it away.

Just in case this free XsitePro 2 Brochure doesn’t make you dream of crowd pulling sites for your content, then take a look at their

“Reasons Why XSitePro 2 Hits the Mark“

on the features page of their XSitePro 2 Demo Video page.

What do you think about their new brochure ?
What are your thoughts on using XSitePro 2 ?
What’s your favourite Web Design Software ?

I always thought though that it was never going to be easy.

Even though I’ve always wanted one, putting one on my Blog has been gradually falling down the To-Do list until today, when I discovered Yahoo Pipes.

I couldn’t resist diving into using them today or at least trying to find out what they were all about and more importantly if I’d be able to fathom out how to use them.

I should have held off

I really did have better things to do today, but fools rush in where angles fear to tread as they say.

I got sucked in because at face value they seem to be fairly simple to use, and to be fair, its like a lot of things like this, once you’ve got past its quirkiness it is fairly easy to operate and plug things together.

The main thing of course is how to make the modules you’re plugging together do something useful.

Putting a simple pipe together is Easy

As is converting the pipe into what they call a Yahoo Pipe Badge, which is basically giving you the code to embed the feed on your site or blog.

This appears to be pretty much a plug and play approach for embedding it as a Widget in a Blogger blog or a Gadget in iGoogle.

Its not often that us WordPress bloggers miss out when it comes to automation, but at present we have to cut and paste the code, though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there hasn’t created a plug-in to help, if I go looking.

Making the pipe deliver what you really want less so

Here’s a snapshot of my first attempt:

I thought I’d fossilise it in this image rather than try and embed the real one at this stage, as I’m not sure if this early one will be around that long.

With any luck it will be because I’ve got a better grip on the pipes, (that sounds funny for some reason) so the later ones will be better and not because its all gone horribly wrong since this post.

I found it takes some working out to get close to the output that you want.

OK, I didn’t help myself by only dipping lightly into the documentation, training videos and example, when I got stuck.

So to be fair to Yahoo, I’m to blame for a lot of the wasted time.

However, that is one of the pros and cons of this interface

It looks so relatively simple to use, you dive in before you really know how to use it.

For example most of the effort went into removing the descriptions beneath the titles of each returned item.

As you can see, I wanted it to be just a list of related Article Titles, pretty much what you get back from Google, but with the descriptions stripped out.

But I couldn’t find any easy way to do it, even though by that stage I was looking around more for help and documentation.

So in the end I simply used a filter which blanked the description text, but I couldn’t get it to remove the line, which is the reason for the gaps between the titles.

It’s what I call a feature for now.

Time to wrap up this post

It was only supposed to be a quickie.

I’ve not gone into too much detail in this post as frankly having spent so long on Yahoo Pipes today and having got something that at least works and does a half decent job, I’ve pretty much run out of time.

It was really just to give my first thoughts and impressions on Yahoo Pipes as I came to the end of putting together my first Pipes Badge.

Things I still want to do

1. Make the Yahoo Pipes Badge look a bit better, probably by putting a decent frame around it.
2. Get rid of the gaps between the titles of each article.
3. Work out where I’m going to put it on this blog.
   I fell across the usual display differences between IE and Firefox, so gave up trying to embed it today.
4. Play with Yahoo Pipes more to see what it can deliver.
   I’ve a sneaky suspicion there’s a lot more go with this.

At some stage I’ll try and put together a few videos on what I’ve been able to to with Yahoo Pipes and any Tips & Tricks that I’ve learned along the way.

Meanwhile, I’d be really grateful if you could:

1. Give me an idea how to strip the descriptions without leaving a gap.
2. Provide some Tips and Examples on more exotic pipes.
3. Provide any CSS tips on how to layout the Yahoo Pipes Badge.
   So that it fits it in either of the two side columns.

If like me you’ve been tinkering with the idea of building your own search engine (sounds absurd doesn’t it), then Yahoo may have come to your rescue.

They’ve now released what they call Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Engine).

How is BOSS different from the other Search Engine API’s ?

For those of us who have struggled to fathom out how to use Google’s gData API, then that’s probably our first question.

According to the Yahoo BOSS FAQ page

For the first time developers can tap into our search infrastructure and build applications for commercial use without restrictions around presentation or ordering of results.
You can take BOSS results, blend in your own secret sauce, and build a search engine of your own design, all without required brand attribution.

Here’s an overview from the Yahoo BOSS page

	Previously Available with Yahoo! Search API	Available with BOSS
Queries Per Day	5,000	Unlimited*
No Restrictions on Presentation
Re-Ordering Allowed
Blending of Proprietary and Yahoo! Search Content Allowed
Monetization		Coming Soon!
White-Label	Attribution Required

* BOSS offers developers unlimited daily queries, though Yahoo! reserves the right to limit unintended usage, such as automated querying by bots.

What search content can you find through BOSS ?

With this first release of BOSS you can fetch search content for Web, News and Images, and it includes Spelling Suggestions.

What about Future Plans ?

They want BOSS to grow and evolve with a focus on providing additional functionality and tools.

The Downside ?

I’m not sure if it is a downside but they say that eventually

it will be a requirement to publish Yahoo! Sponsored Search ads as part of search applications that exceed a set QPD (Queries Per Day) level

To me that says, sometime in the future, if you want to get Unlimited Queries Per Day, you will need to host Yahoo’s ads on your site.

However they will be sharing the revenue with you.

They also mention that in the future they may also offer you as an alternative, a payment model option, if your number of queries goes above a specified threshold.

At present you can use Yahoo BOSS free without ads.

I’m wondering…

Do you know how Yahoo BOSS is different from Google’s gData API ?
Have you used Google’s gData API ?
How will you be using Yahoo BOSS ?

 StomperNet are having a free teleconference today Thursday July 17th at 8pm EDT.

If like me you’ve been thinking about joining StomperNet, then this teleconference could be for you.

Andy Jenkins, Brad Fallon and the Entire StomperNet Faculty

Will be personally addressing any concerns or questions you may have about joining StomperNet.

Its not only going to be one way…

They’ll also be answering -

 
Your #1 Most Burning Question You Have About YOUR Website.

They do stress though that -

This is ONLY for people who have seriously considered joining StomperNet in the past.
Please don’t take a spot on this teleconference if this doesn’t apply to you.
Because we are answering EVERY question, we can only accept a strictly limited number of people on the call.
So please do not reserve a place that could have been used by somebody who’d make better use of it.

More details on the  StomperNet Teleconfernce Page

Are you a member of Stompernet ?
Or have you used Stompernet in the past ?
What are your thoughts on Stompernet ?

I use the Google Keyword Tool a lot, its one of the first keyword tools I use when I’m researching keywords.

However, it was only yesterday that it dawned on me…

It’s now giving you the number of searches per month for the keywords instead of those frustrating bar graphs that it used to show.

To me, these only gave you a hint that a keyword may be searched for a lot or a little.

But compared to what ?

Now you can see Google’s own search volume numbers, which for me is a whole lot more useful.

But the weird thing was that this only seeped into my head the other day that I was now looking at numbers, how bizarre is that !

Apparently as posted by Trevor Claiborne in Google’s official Inside AdWords blog it was announced last Tuesday, July 08.

OK, they do cover themselves by saying these are Approximate numbers.

But numbers are better than coloured boxes anytime in my book.

So now you can see the approximate average monthly number of search queries for your keywords.

For me this means I’ll be using this tool a whole lot more in the future.

Its got to be now, one of the best free keyword tools out there, because of what you can do with it.

Check it out for yourself here

How do you use the Google Keyword Tool ?

What other keyword tools do you use ?

Unfortunately as expected his excellent promo videos have now disappeared from the Traffic Secrets 2.0 site.

A great pity as the tips he gave away in those promo’s were worth knowing, I hope you managed to get a look at them before they went.

However, they’ve been replaced by a breakdown of what you’ll be getting for your money, which you can see on the revised Traffic Secrets 2.0 site here.

My questions are:

1. Have you bought Traffic Secrets 2.0 ?
2. What are your initial thoughts ?

Traffic Secrets 2.0

The buzz for this has been building rapidly over the past few days and I’m getting the feeling that this product isn’t all just hype.

I’ve already learnt a few tips and tricks from his 3 promo videos.

(But watch them quick as I’ve heard that they’ll be disappearing once Traffic Secrets 2.0 goes live.)

I think that no matter what level you’re at or which niche you’re in, there’s going to be something in it for you.

Here’s a quick overview of what Traffic Secrets 2.0 is all about…

• Social Media Marketing & Strategy
• Advanced Content Syndication
• Cutting-Edge Video Marketing & SEO
• Leveraging Software & Widgets
• Setting Up Automatic ‘Content Factories’
• Building An Affiliate Army
• And much, much more.

And to top it all…

For those that get Traffic Secrets 2.0 fast, they will receive the following…

• LIFETIME UPDATES To The Course
• Private Coaching & Mastermind Community
• Web-based ‘Action Tracker’ Learning System
• And even more!

So provided you GET IN QUICK with Traffic Secrets 2.0, you’re in for life, so as traffic strategies change, you’ll be kept on that leading edge.

You can see his first promo video here.

My questions are:

1. Have you used the original Traffic Secrets ?
2. What were you’re experiences with it ?
3. Will you be getting Traffic Secrets 2.0 ?