Well – thin affiliates sites – (as Matt Cutts calles them), driven from a database that was replicated 1000s of times over the whole web were killed years ago by Google’s duplicate content filter – back in 2005 or so. The idea of DataFeedR is bascially the same – import a generally available database into your wordpress, and manage it from there… but…

DataFeed Sites a’la 2008

The improved concept of filling up Google’s index with product descriptions and images from big vendors here is the augmentation with content written by yourself, your writer or maybe your users (i.e. blog comments). Of course the fine line between success and failure here is HOW you do that job… imported the datafeed and leaving it as is would probably be just a waste of money…

DataFeed Pre Processing

But at least you get Stefan to sort our and clean up the merchant’s datafeed mess for you and provide you a quality download. And judging from the quality of his content packages those feeds must be killer quality.

And on the other hand, assuming that you have some funky programmer’s inhouse, you could still builld your own converter tools for feeding into this plugin and then use it “only” as a data management tool and forget about Stefan’s feed processing service at DataFeedR.

Merchant’s supported so far

Stefan made some quick screenshots of merchants supported currently here and here and here

DataFeedR’s price

But what you get for this is a rock-solid data feed management solution with attached data pre-processing services I’ve yet to find. And it supports WordPress 2.2-2.3 AS WELL AS the new 2.5.x

Other features

• Support Forum – the young forum is there – it’s up to Stefan and his team how he lives up to our expectations

• Update only parts of products – obviously you need to rewrite and optimize the product descriptions, so when you update your product list, the following values are updated with new product information: Affiliate Link (URL to the network), Price, Image URL, Thumbnail URL - This means that when you have changed product descriptions and product names these changes will NOT be overwritten by uploading a new datafeed version. But you can customize that behavious as explained in the forum

• Embed products within your blog posts – you can add multiple products to your WordPress Posts or Pages – check this out

I’ll keep you posted about DataFeedR and comparable products (which all seem to suck compared to DataFeedR) and my experiences with them. Some impressive features that are announced to be here soon are

Meanwhile you can go check it out yourself

What it does offer:

• permutations of keywords (like all 50k+ cities) thru your keywords, ads and landingpages
• generation of proper ad groups (Google Adwords only allows 2000 lines per group, so if you are bidding broad,exact,phrase that means no more than 666 REAL keywords)
• a datafeed script that allows you to populate your landing pages with product info from merchants (good if you are to promote video recorders or other retail productc)

Thereby a close to perfect match between

Keyword >>> Ad Text >>> Landing Page

which in turn means a good CTR (click thru rate) to your ads and (jopefully) a better QS (quality score) on Google Adwords (GAW).

SpeedPPC also allows tracking on the keyword/ad/landing page level…

What it also promised is to lifts conversion rates by dynamically changing the landing pages based on the original search keywords used. That means injecting the keywords into the landing page – which isn’t new or hard to do at all. but still.

For roughly $ 500 this tool is not cheap.

For $ 500 you can buy nice things, but keeping in mind that this is a one-time investment (compared to subscription based tools) this new SpeedPPC could offer a nice all-in-one-solution for stomping out full “long tail campaigns” and this would be perfect for things like bidding on “lawyer in city” …

I read, that SpeedPPC has a promotion for $497, which implies that they want to raise the price, so maybe today is a good day to buy that tool… give it a shot!

Update Feb’08 : I came across Efficient PPC today and it looks like it offers the same functionality minus datafeed integration as Speed PPC

why no YSM? because you need a gold account for importing files, that means you have to spend 500+$/mo

• Completely overhauled interface icons.
• Added answer limiting based on a previous question for array question types – wow – more dependency features!
• Added drag’n'drop re-ordering for groups and questions … yummy yummy – very handy
• Lots of fixes for the spss export – oh well – expectedt those badly – export wasn’t always funny
• Added page-by-page saving of the answers usability!
• Changed the mailer class to PHPMailer which is alot more reliable and easier to configure. I remember when I had manually restart mailing just because the old version hit the max 100 mails per hour limit of my smtp server
• Added Feature to save the referring URL. Kind Donator: Lawrence Weathers — mmmh one could abuse this as a sort of affiliate tracking
• Added random survey number generation to make guesses on the surveyid harder — hmmm people want to hack into surveys once you can win something there I guess
• Changed upgrade feature and added DB Versioning for easier updates to the DB in the future — maintainability

Cool – I really feel asured for my selection for this tool last year and since found a lot of online surveys being done with that tool. I will also use that tool for my online community research survery that I’ll conduct with BIG portals of 35000+ members!

tech-note, they also got new requirement for minimum MySQL 4.1, PHP 4.1 and either gettext OR mbstring library installed.

But remember… this is an unstable alpha version. Do not use it for production purposes.

Their claim:

Get your free Ether Phone Number.
Set your rate. Set your hours.

This is an interesting approach with a tool that might spread like fire…

I just need to checkout if they offer options for Europe, either calling experts there or providing free numbers there…

Articlesender is a quite powerful meta-article submission engine, that allows you to submit your articles to a huge list of sources and sites

Their claim "Article Submission is the Key to Targeted Visitors" underlines the marketing perspective they are powering with their service.


The idea is very similar to pre sell pages as they want to create real human traffic and inbound links by good quality content that is good for the users, not the search engines.

Article submission has advanced to the more sophistiacted marketing methods, just like pushing out press releases… in fact a whole "article syndication site" world has been established in the last months, just for the purpose to host all that content.

I wonder when Google, yahoo and co will see these "article sites" as "low-quality" sites compared to huge news networks … and maybe even go to the lengths to call them "web spam attacks" …

performing online surveys are important instruments for gathering your clients opinion, demographical data and in general learn more about your audience…

I found the following open source solutions for later evaluation:

PHPSurveyor

• Unlimited number of surveys at the same time
• Creation of a printable survey version
• Unlimited number of question groups in a survey
• 20 different question types with more to come
• Ability to set conditions for questions depending on earlier answers (branching the survey)
• Re-usable editable answer sets
• Ready-made importable questions
• Assessment surveys
• Unlimited number of participants to a survey
• Anonymous or open surveys as well as closed surveys
• Optional public registration for surveys
• Sending of invitations, reminders and tokens by email
• Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time
• Cookie or session based surveys
• Back-office data entry possibility
• Survey start & end-dates for automation
• import and export functions to text, CSV and MS Excel format
• Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility
• more than 15 different languages

phpESP

ModSurvey xml based survey configuration

Open Survey Pilot another nice solution for survey creation, altough these have less diffent question types and a bit more instable look/feel than PhpSurveyor… the german main page is here