feed hat blog

Welcome back to Friday, friends. There was no major news this week. Oh, wait. There was that one minor blip on the radar — a.k.a. the release of Twitter’s new, official retweet feature.

The long and short of it is that no one likes it. Lisa Barone dissects the many shortfalls of the function in Why Twitter’s New Retweet Feature Sucks. (Tell the Wall Street Journal I said hello, Lisa!)

Google also had some news to share this week. The source code for Google Chrome Operating System has been opened up to developers. That news and other updates were shared by Google during a press conference this week. You can find coverage of the event across the Web, but readers got a special treat as Matt Cutts joined the liveblogger corps.

Microsoft announced that their anticipated cloud computing system, Windows Azure, will be fully live early next year. The company is inviting software developers to create programs for the platform, hoping to catch up to the cloud computing pack leaders Amazon and Google.

And Yahoo!’s playing catch up in the social search arena as the search engine introduces Twitter results, as well as photos and videos, to their news search results. However, unlike the direct access secured by Google and Bing, Yahoo! will be using Twitter’s public API to incorporate tweets.

Twitter added a new API to the family this week, the Twitter Geotagging API. Now tweets can be geotagged to display location information about where the tweet was posted from. The feature is opt-in only, and is not available on Twitter itself, but through third-party applications.

As the wave of holiday season giving rolls up, search aggregator LeapFish is using Twitter as a tool to donate a Make-A-Wish gift to a young boy and his family. A simple tweet and LeapFish will donate $.05 toward sending a four-year-old to Disneyland. They’re still far from the $10,000 goal. Won’t you take a moment and tweet?

With Thanksgiving less than a week away, we’ve officially entered the winter holiday season. PPC Hero offers us search and shopping statistics, popular gift categories, peak shopping days, and Yahoo!’s holiday campaign best practices and tips.

As I get myself in shape for the eating marathon that is Thanksgiving, it’s hard not to send out a wish of support to all the poor, deprived waffle lovers in the country. Breakfast lovers are renewing the cry “leggo my Eggo!” ever since the waffle maker announced that a shortage would exist until the middle of next year. Here’s hoping none of your loved ones have waffles on the wish list this year.

SEO industry thought-leader Danny Sullivan wrote a search marketing industry retrospective on the 10-year anniversary of the first search marketing conference. What were marketers talking about 10 years ago? Human powered engines, cloaking and that little engine Google.

Hard to believe that big monster Google was ever a baby, but it’s true. How are these for some fascinating facts about babies? New research shows that newborn babes cry in their native tongue. Picking up language patterns from the womb, babies come out crying in the familiar inflections of the local language.

One doctor of linguistics has performed his own language experiment with his newborn, speaking to his kid only in Klingon for the first three years of his life. The result? One adorably nerdy three-year-old.

We may never fully understand the mechanics behind language acquisition, but for some, it sure is fun to try. One mystery I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole is the Riemann Hypothesis, an unsolved math problem that turned 150 years old this week. If you’re more adventurous than I am, give it a shot. Solving the problem comes with bragging rights and a cool $1 million. [Also a lifetime supply of pocket protectors, nerd. --Susan]

In coming-down-the-pipes news, Twitter’s co-founder has confirmed that corporate, for-pay Twitter accounts that offer additional feedback and analytics will be launched in a matter of time. Meanwhile, rumors about a Google-branded Android phone have been all but confirmed.

Slightly more certain is the fact that 2010 is just weeks away. How did the first decade of the new millennium pan out for everyone? It’s been quite a ride, hasn’t it? The Webby Awards has published its list of the ten most influential Internet moments of the decade. It boggles the mind that these formative events only occurred in the last few years when it’s hard to imagine life any other way. I mean, like whoa.

Things I learned from Boing Boing this week:

• One can have a spiritual experience at an aquarium. Or just by watching an online video of an aquarium.
• Though we once thought warm bloodedness was a trait of every mammal, a recently discovered extinct goat was cold-blooded!
• Money has always been in fashion, but origami takes it to the next level.
• Kitties are cute. Okay, it may not have been a learning moment, but in a must-see vid shot from a police car dash cam, one kitty worked his magic, thus proving that kitties are cute! [And that that policeman was dedicated. He was going to get that ticket written, affectionate snugglekitty or no. --Susan]
• While I thought it was just a fiction dreamt up by The Pirates of the Caribbean writers, the rising and setting sun can actually flash green!

Read the original here: 
Friday Recap - Little Genius Edition

Twitter was once only the domain of online geeks and Internet freaks, but it has since exploded onto the scene into being a relevant service for major news outlets, overgrown professional athletes, and freelance writers alike. Everyone from Katy Perry to Barack Obama is on Twitter and there is no denying the potential that a strong Twitter account can have.

To fully harness the power of Twitter, you need followers. Ideally, you want to have a lot of dedicated followers who are actually interested in what you have to say, but getting said followers is easier said than done. This review will take a look at FlashTweet, a “complete Twitter account management solution” that could put you on the fast track to Twitter stardom.

What is FlashTweet?

You’ve probably encountered a variety of other Twitter” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>Twitter tools and utilities on the Internet. Each of these may promise you one function or another, but what sets FlashTweet apart is that it is really four tools in one. To give you a quick overview into what this Twitter software can do, take a few minutes to watch their video.

Managing Twitter with Four Fancy Tools

So, as mentioned, FlashTweet is comprised of four different tools that handle slightly different aspects of managing your Twitter account.

After you login to your FlashTweet account, you will be given the opportunity add your TwitterTwitter account. You are not restricted to managing a single account either, as it seems like you can add as many accounts as you’d like. You will have to provide FlashTweet with your username and password, however, so anyone with security and privacy concerns should probably look elsewhere.

For the purposes of this review, I added my DotComPho Twitter account to FlashTweet. From there, I gained access to the four icons corresponding to the four different tools. The interface is about as straightforward as it gets, since you just click on one of the huge icons to access that utility.

Follower Management and Mass Following

Although FlashTweet is made up of four tools, the main appeal for marketers and other people who want to build up their followings are the Follower Management tool and the Mass Follow tool. The Schedule Tweets tool can come in handy too, since you can timestamp tweets into the future. The Tweet RSS Feeds tool takes on the same functionality as something like WordTwit and Twitter Tools.

Let’s start with the Follower Management tool.

When you use the Twitter website or you use any of the several different clients available out there, you typically have to follow and unfollow accounts one at a time. With the Follower Management tool, you can follow and unfollow accounts en masse. This tool can display only the accounts that you are following (and not following you back), only the accounts that are following you (and you are not following back), only the accounts with mutual following, or all three of the above.

This is not an automated script, like how you may find through some competing products. You still hit the checkboxes manually, but you can follow and unfollow multiple accounts at a time. I don’t like how there’s only a single-column view, however, since this makes for way too much vertical scrolling. A grid layout would have been much better.

The Mass Follow tool is more interesting. You can use it to view the friends of another Twitter account (like me). This leads back to an interface similar to the Follower Management tool, letting you hand-pick who you would like to follow. The other side lets you search for a keyword and follow the people who are talking about that topic. This can be geotargeted as well.

Both the Mass Follow tool and the Follower Management tool sound handy, but you can easily get overwhelmed when you start to deal with marginally larger numbers. This is also how you can quickly exhaust your API calls and potentially get yourself banned from Twitter (for spam).

Make Money with FlashTweet Too?

FlashTweet will cost you $6.95 a month, but you can try them out for 14 days for free. It’s not in place yet, but you can presumably recoup some of these costs through the upcoming affiliate program.

I can see some of the value that FlashTweet can provide to people who want to better manage their Twitter accounts, but the functionality and layout aren’t on par with some other alternatives. Further still, since “tweet” is in its name, I have a feeling that FlashTweet will soon be hearing from the Twitter lawyers for trademark infringement. We’ve seen it happen to TwitterFollower and TweetLater already, after all.

CLICK HERE TO TRY FLASHTWEET FOR FREE

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Read more from the original source: 
Manage Your Twitter Account with FlashTweet

One of the companies I’m looking forward to meeting at the Affiliate Summit East next month is Tatto Media. In a very short time, Tatto has managed to come out of nowhere and become the third largest ad network on the Internet. Tatto has achieved this through creating technologies that no other network have. What’s more, they don’t rest on their laurels.

I wrote about Tatto back in May and since then, they’ve added so many new features to their network that I need to write about them again. If you’re already a Tatto Media affiliate, then you’re already taking advantage of the new features. If you’re not an affiliate yet, here’s a breakdown on all the new stuff.

New Design for Reporting and Statistics – Reports and Statistics is even faster and more efficient than before. Data view pages can easily be searched and sorted accurately even with multiple pages of data.

Conversion Tracking Report – This report provides specific lead/sale information, including sub id, tracking info, transaction id, IP address, and payout, allowing you to quickly run sub id reports. While “info” in current tracking links will continue to work, it has been replaced with “aff_sub”.

Updated Tracking Links – Updated tracking links that are easy to understand. Sub ID tracking has been updated as well as Source name added. Specify a Source name in the tracking url to easily drill-down and analyze performance in reports.

Offer Tiny URLs –You can shorten your tracking links with our own TinyURL. This is great for sending offers to your Twitter followers.

Browser Targeting – The Tatto Affiliate Network now can target offers to users based on their browser. This will redirect users to receive offers designed for mobile devices including iPhones and thus increase your conversion rates.

Creative Manager – A valuable feature that quickly generates tracking code with creatives, making it simple for you to include the creative you prefer with the offer-specific tracking url. Also new features to browse and preview creatives.

Suppression List – Updated suppression lists to better support email marketers.

Refer a Friend – Enhanced Refer a Friend feature to reward you for introducing friends into our network.

Improved Stats API – Updated functions and documentation to make working with our stats API even easier.

Live Support that AIMs affiliate’s Manager

More offer Categories for navigational ease

Support tab with help and glossary.

All the previous features that made Tatto such a great affiliate network, like the Proprietary Tracking Technology and Self Serve Interface that allows you to place your own cookie and tracking pixel are still there. These new features just put the icing on the cake.

The number of affiliate offers has increased significantly since May and they’re still all 100% in-house deals with payouts among the highest in the industry. Speaking of payouts, Tatto pays their publishers weekly. Tatto Media welcomes affiliates and publishers from all over the world – you don’t need to live in the USA to apply.

Tatto Media Affiliate Network

Find out what I’m doing right now by following me on Twitter.

Excerpt from:
Make Money Online with Tatto Affiliate Network

I’ve been starting to use a new plugin I helped develop with the coding expertise of Josh Team from Dallas Nightlife Entertainment. It’s called PingCrawl. Its a plugin that helps get your Wordpress blogs deep links automatically on every post.

Plugin Summary
Every time you make a post on your blog it grabs similar posts from other blogs that allow pingbacks using the post tags. It then links to them at the bottom of the post as similar posts. It then executes the pingback on all the posts. You can specify how many posts to do per tag and that many will be done for each tag you use in your posts. Typically it has about an 80% successrate with each pingback and they are legit so the ones that fall into moderation tend to get approved. This creates quite a few deep links for each blog post you make and through time really helps with your link building. Especially for new blogs.

Theory Of Operation

* The plugin will listen to anytime a post is saved, published, updated, etc.
* The plugin on execution time will find all the tags on the post and perform the following per tag:
o Use Google API to check for ( 35 ) results with the tag name.
o With the ( 35 ) results it loops through them and performs the following
+ Does the result have a pingback meta tag?
+ Does the result have trackback somewhere in the source
+ (if yes to both) it stores the pingback xmlrpc location in memory.
+ (if no to either) we skip that record and move to the next.
+ Once their are 5 legit pingable servers we then append their links to the post we currently added.
+ We then retrieve the xmlrpc urls from memory, and execute a pingback.ping against the xmlrpc as defined in the pingback 1.0 spec. (due to the nature of pingbacks and php it is not a 100% guarantee. A lot of dependencies on state, server responses, headers, etc.)

Their are built in features such as caching google’s recordsets per tag, so you don’t have to make request out to google for the same use. And logic to know if you’ve already “PingCrawled” a post then on edit to ignore it, etc w/ a built in polling system.
Installation:

1. Download Plugin
2. Put file in the wp-content/plugins directory of your wordpress installation
3. Login to your blog dashboard
4. Click on Plugins
5. Click on Active to the Right of PingCrawl in the list
6. Make a Post

*Note ( because of the nature of the script any one tag can make as many as 41 HTTP request and storing source code into memory to run regular expressions against. Because of this I would try to limit my tags to no more than 3 (123 HTTP Request). Use more at your own risk.

Warning: This plugin can really slow down the time it takes to make your posts so I would recommend not using more than 3 tags per post. Also we coded in a small link injection which will put a link of mine into the mix about once every 10 posts. They will all be very white hat and clean links so no worries and if you left the code intact I’d consider that a substantial thank you for the plugin.

Screenshot
*The size of the links are entirely customizable. I’d recommend making them very small at the bottom of the post but in this screenshot I made them big so you can see the format better.

Here is the original post: 
New Wordpress Plugin - PingCrawl

Holy cripes! It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down and written a Blue Hat Technique. It just so happens I need this one for the next SEO Empire post. I’m like blah blah talking about Keyword Spinning then I realized you guys have no fuckin’ clue what I’m yammering about. So I figure nows a good time to fix all that and luckily this one is really really easy but like all Blue Hat Techniques it works like a mofo in many situations.

The Problem
Let’s say you have a database driven website. A great example would be a Madlib Site or an E-commerce site. In fact this technique works so damn well with Ecom sites it should be illegal along side public urination. So we’ll use that as our primary example. You got your site setup and each product page/joint page has its keywords such as “17 Inch Water Pipes For Sale” and the page titles and headers match accordingly. You have several thousand pages/products put together and are well SEO’d but its impossible to monitor and manually tweak each one especially since most of the keyword research tools available aren’t entirely accurate to the keyword order. Like they may say “Myspace Pimps” gets 50 billion searches a day when really “Pimps On Myspace” are getting it. So while amongst your thousands of pages you have one page that could be ranking for a solid phrase and getting an extra 100 visitors/day for people searching for “Water Pipes For Sale 17 Inch” you’re stuck with virtually no search traffic to that page and never knowing the difference. It’s quite the dilemma and you probably realize that it’s more than likely already happening to you. Luckily its easily fixed with a simple tool you can create yourself to fit whatever needs and sites you have.

Methodology
1) Add an extra field to all you’re database entries. Any row that creates a page of some sort add an extra field called TrafficCount or something you can remember.

2) Add a snippet of code into your template or CMS that counts each pageview coming from a Goohoomsn referrer and increments the appropriate field.

3) Wait a month….*Goes for a bike ride*

4) Call the titles in the database. It can only be assumed, even in a commercial/free CMS that the titles or keywords are held somewhere in the database. Locate them and scan through them one by one.

5) Use the Google/Yahoo/MSN API’s to see if the page ranks for its keywords.

6) If it does rank than compare that to the traffic count for the month. Compare that to some sort of delimiter you’ve preset. I prefer to use a really small number like 5 for the first month or two then start moving it up as needed. If the traffic is too low than split the titles/keywords and randomly reorganize them.

*Sometimes you’ll end up with some really messed up titles like “Pipes Sale Water For Inch 17″ so if its too un-userfriendly than you may want to make a few adjustments such as never putting a For,The,If,At type word in the front or never rearranging the front two words so like Water Pipes always stays in the front then only the trailing ends. Once again it depends on how your site is already organized.

7) Reset the traffic count.

Wait another month and watch your search traffic slowly rise. Every month the site will get more and more efficient and get more and more deep traffic to the site. The pages that are already good will not change and the poor performing pages will start becoming higher performing pages. As an added bonus it will help improve your sites freshness factors.

9) Take a scan of your average number of keywords or title sizes. Let’s say your average page has very short key phrases such as “Large Beer Mugs.” There are only so many combinations that those keywords will produce so if its just a low traffic keyword theres no point in continually changing the titles every single month forever. So I like to only have the Keyword Spinning script run for a preset amount of months on each site. For instance if my average keyword length is three words than the most combinations I can have is six. So I should logically quit running after 6-8 months. At which point my site is about as perfect as it can be without human intervention. Lastly don’t forget to make improvements to your CTR.

Simple huh! Keyword Spinning is a really easy way to get the most out of nearly all your sites. The more you can squeeze out of each site the less sites you have to build to reach your profit goals. With minimal scripting its all very quick to implement and automate (please don’t do it by hand!). That’s all there is to it.

Usually with my Blue Hat Techniques I like to drop a little hint somewhere in it that references a really cool trick or spin to the method that’ll greatly increase your profits. Since You’ve been all so damn patient about me being late on the SEO Empire part 2 post, and for the moment at least, quit asking me why Blue Hat sucks now I’ll just tell it to ya. My answer to that question BTW is that I’m still working on my projects which is eating up some time and I’m not happy with what I’ve written so far. If I’m not happy, it doesn’t get published. Sorry but the boss has spoken.

The Secret Hint

3) Wait a month….*Goes for a bike ride*

Use this technique on your Cycle Sites that you’ve choosen to not cycle out. Instead of competing with the original author, who you are probably linking to might I add, you can sometimes grab even better phrases and rank for them giving you a ton more traffic (I’ve seen Cycle Sites increase their SE traffic over 50x by doing this). If not than you’ll eventually get their original title again which at least will put you where you started. It’s also the strangest damn thing, you’ll get a percentage less complaints and pissed off bloggers when you switch the titles around, maybe they don’t care as much when they don’t see you ranking for their post titles.

Here is the original: 
Blue Hat Technique #19 - Keyword Spinning