Interprise Suite v1

I've been following Interprise Suite for the last 18 months or so. I was a beta tester for a while, but I grew tired of waiting around for their release (originally scheduled for late 2005). They just unofficially put out their first release. You can get it here: http://www.interprisesolutions.com/Forum/Topic3911-57-5.aspx#bm3978

I haven't really messed with the software yet, but I hope to use it to start a drop shipping business.

Viral Marketing with phpList

I've been messing around a lot with phplist. It is a fullfledged newsletter manager with a double opt-in subscription mechanism, scheduling, RSS, click-tracking, attachments and bounce management. The plan is to create a viral marketing script that uses the PHPList database to control user access to the member areas of the site.

I'm also trying to incorporate the GeoLite City database, so I can capture a users region when they sign up for the newsletter. Since the niche I'm working in is very location oriented, I hope to be able to use PHPList and PHPadsnew to target them with location specific newsletters and banners.

I'm going to try the plan similar to the 15kchallenge. The plan is to offer something for free if they add their email address, and confirm using the link in the welcome email. Then offer something else for free if they sign up 3 friends (and they confirm).

Amazon API IntelliTXT

I'm sure other people have done this, but I created a script that injects Amazon products (w/ new product previews) into articles similar to the way IntelliTXT works. I use the automatic keyword class from previous posts to find keywords in an article, search the Amazon API with those keywords, and then replace the keywords in the article with the newly created link. It seems to work fairly well. Mouse over the links in this post to see how the Amazon Previews work.

//To use this you'll need to first download tools.inc.php
//which is included with the AWS Book (awsbook.com)
//samples.
//http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=88612
//Find tools.inc.php under 'Chapter 4'
//
require_once("tools.inc.php");
define('SUBID', '1A7XKHR5BYD0WPJVQEG2'); // Your subscription id

define('Searchindex','Books');
//define('Searchindex','Music');
//define('Searchindex','DVD');
//define('Searchindex','Toys');
//define('Searchindex','Video Games');
//define('Searchindex','Software');
//define('Searchindex','Software Video Games');
//define('Searchindex','Electronics');
//define('Searchindex','Tools');
//define('Searchindex','Sporting Goods');
//define('Searchindex','Art Supplies');
//define('Searchindex','Kitchen');
//define('Searchindex','Gourmet Food');
//define('Searchindex','Apparel');
//define('Searchindex','PC Hardware');
//define('Searchindex','VHS');

function awsreplace($keyword) {
$request = 'http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId='.SUBID.'&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords='.urlencode($keyword).'&SearchIndex='.Searchindex.'&Sort=salesrank';
// Get the response from Amazon
$xml = file_get_contents($request);
// Parse the results
$Result = xmlparser($xml);
$ASIN = $Result['ItemSearchResponse']['Items'][0]['Item'][0]["ASIN"][0];
$url = '<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/'.$ASIN.'?ie=UTF8&tag=duelcoastweb-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN='.$ASIN.'">';
$replacestr = $url . $keyword . '</a>';
if (!isset($Result['ItemSearchResponse']['Items'][0]['Item'][0]["ASIN"][0])) {
$replacestr = $keyword;
}
return $replacestr;
}

I call the function from within my page like this:

foreach ($keyword_array AS $keyword_replace) {
$body = str_ireplace(trim($keyword_replace),awsreplace(trim($keyword_replace)),$body);
}
?>

AIS Script Finished

I finished my Smarty script. Complete with automatic keywords, SEO URLs, valid xhtml. The speed is great, and there is no need for a database. Just upload the articles, no other configuration needed. I'll be setting up all of the domains I lost when I was hacked over the next few days with the new script.

The only problem I am having with Smarty is with the caching feature. I cannot figure out how to make Smarty see a script with parameters (i.e. smarty.php?a=1) as its own file. Right now it is caching the page as 1 file, regardless of if the parameters are different. If anyone knows how to solve this problem with Smarty, please let me know. Right now, I have cache turned off.

Smarty, SmArticle

I've been out of the loop for a while, so I just got exposed to Burt's SmArticle tool. I don't own his product, or have ever seen the code... I decided to write my own version of his tool using Smarty Templates. I've wanted to play with Smarty for a while, and since I have no money, I figured creating my own tool would be the way to go. I'm going to mess with the
Automatic Keyword Generator PHP class by Ver Pangonilo (of Limbo fame). I'm just about done the script, I just want to figure out htaccess redirects to make the URLs SEO. I'll post a link to the site once finished. I don't think I'll release the code since Burt's tool should do the job for most people. If you have any suggestions of things I should include in my script let me know and I may share the code with you.

What Happened?

My last post was April 10th of this year. A day or two after that post my reseller account was hacked by a Chinese hacking group. They deleted all of my domains as well as all remote backups that I had stored through the hosts remote backup server. Watching my AIS go from around $900/month to $0 in one day was pretty disheartening. I've rebuilt some of the sites, but haven't taken the time to get them all up and running. I've made only $58.25 in adsense since the sites were hacked. Backup your sites to disk ASAP. Having a remote backup server does not completely protect you.

I'm starting to get the AIS bug again, and will be working on a viral marketing script. I'm developing a product, and hopefully will launch in the next month. If anyone has any opensource code that will help with the viral marketing script, please let me know. Also, please let me know if anyone is still reading this. Thanks.

New AIS

This relates to my last post... I've been working on a new AIS.
http://www.bullsessions.com/admin/2006/04/post-your-adsense-on-our-blog/

Multiple Adsense Accounts on One Page?

Can anyone tell me if it is within the Adsense TOS to have multiple adsense account ads on one page? So have an adsense ad at the top of the page from one users account, and another ad further down the page from another adsense account.

I've been looking at the TOS and can't figure out if this is allowed.

Adsense Update

I made some changes to one of my original adsense sites, and it has started to do better. I split some larger pages up into smaller ones, and replaced some adsense ads. I read a post somewhere saying that all pages should be between 5-10k. I'm not sure there is an exact science to it, but making the pages smaller on this site definately seemed to help.

This month so far I've done $251.50 in adsense, and a little over $50 on the affiliates. The site that I made changes on made $13.80 last month, and $7.31 so far this month. If anyone wants to share some PLR articles (all on 1 niche topic) with me, I'll share the tool I've been working on. I need to see some examples of how the PLR articles are delivered so I can adjust my tool appropriately.

Unique Articles

Reading about http://www.plrmanna.com/ made me think about the RSSG article script I wrote, and how I could manipulate my articles to make them appear unique. I would want to do this as the article is displayed in the page, and not in a once and done type of way. Since my pages are cached, the article would display the same way for 14 days, and then on the next page load would become unique in a different way.

The first thing I wanted to try to do was to put a block of text in the middle of the article. How would I find the middle? Depending on how the article was formatted (I'll assume 2 BR tags are used between each paragraph) I would count the total number of occurences of the paragraph break, divide by 2, and merge my text there.

The first thing I needed to do was to figure out a way to find the Nth occurance of a string within a larger string. I was able to do that using this function:

function strposnth($haystack, $needle, $nth=1, $insenstive=0) {
if ($insenstive) {
$haystack=strtolower($haystack);
$needle=strtolower($needle);
}
$count=substr_count($haystack,$needle);
if ($count<1> $count) return false;
for($i=0,$pos=0,$len=0;$i<$nth;$i++) { $pos=strpos($haystack,$needle,$pos+$len); if ($i==0) $len=strlen($needle); } return $pos; }

To find the middle of the article, I would do:

$text = file_get_contents($article_path . $file);
$paragraph_count = substr_count($text, "(2 BR TAGS REMOVED FOR BLOGGER)");
$middle = floor($paragraph_count / 2);
$middlepos = strposnth($text,"(2 BR TAGS REMOVED FOR BLOGGER)",$middle);
$start_text = substr($text,0,$middlepos);
$end_text = substr($text,$middlepos);

So that got me the beginning and end of the article. I could then add text in the middle like this:

$middletxt = "(2 BR TAGS REMOVED FOR BLOGGER)This is the paragraph I am adding";
$outtext = $start_text . $middletxt . $end_text;

I know this is pretty easy stuff, but I thought I would post about it. I would like to get together a list of synonyms that can be used on most articles without causing problems. I'll then have my script automatically replace these words in the articles. Adding a header, middle, footer, and replacing the synonyms should make the article appear more unique to the search engines. I am going to sign up for one of the PLR article sites as soon as I get this script working as wanted.

January Stats

Best month so far, here are the stats:

Adsense: $640.04
Affiliates: $234.24

Total: $874.28

Hosting cost me $19.95, and I registered a few domains at $2.88 each.

Dropshipping

I've been a beta tester for Interprise Suite by Interprise Solutions for the last 8 months or so. I am pretty excited that the final release is coming out in March, and when it does, I plan on trying my hand at a drop shipping business (they are offering a FREE 3 user version). I already know what I want to sell, I've registered the domain, now I just need to find a supplier.

Has anyone successfully gotten into dropshipping? I would love to have a conversation about it (IM or Skype).

Looks like I'll fall alittle short of my $1000 AIS for the month, but not by much. I'm at around $850 so far on the month, with today and tomorrow left.

Drupal CMS Search Engine Optimization

I’ve been messing around with Drupal CMS a lot lately. As I have stated in previous posts, I believe my IP address (which contains all of my sites) has been banned by Google. Now that I am making fairly good money from my sites, I am going to get another reseller account, and start hand building sites using original content (nothing scraped). I’m going to do this with the Drupal CMS.

Drupal is very search engine friendly right out of the box. Adding the pathauto module, turning on clean urls, and adding an optimized theme makes it even friendlier. It has built-in syndication, and is pretty easy to setup.

If you have a site that’s doing nothing, I highly suggest messing around with Drupal. I'll do my best to help you out with installation issues, just leave a comment with the problem and your email address.

http://drupal.org/

AIS Update

Most of my sites are doing terrible. However, I have 1 site that with a little bit of attention each day can easily make $50+ in adsense any day of the week. I've made $50+ dollars every day for the last week. It takes me about 10 minutes a day to achieve these results. If I spend no time on the site, I make nothing that day.

I'm still basically unlisted in Google. I believe I've been put onto some type of IP address ban, because all of my sites are on the same server, with the same IP address. I need to get a new resellers account.

Reading Burt's post today about his $50 day yesterday made me want to "Set it and forget it". 10 minutes a day doesn't seem like a lot, but the fact that it makes nothing if I forget to touch it, or am away from my computer is very annoying.

I am going to get a new resellers account and start slow, building true "Set it and forget it" AIS sites. I still have not paid $1 for site generating software or keyword lists.

Update

If you've been following my blog, you know I recently just bought a house and moved. Unfortunately, AIS has had to take a back seat for the last couple weeks, but I'm now committed to getting back up and running. My goal is to hit $1000/month in AIS by the end of the year.

I just created a new type of AIS site (who knows if it will work) using a modified version of RSSG. The content on the pages is lacking, but I'm hoping to be able to generate enough traffic using other methods. http://www.fenderguitarstore.info/