Monday, October 30, 2006

BlogJet 1.6.2 Review



"BlogJet is a weblog client for Windows that allows you to manage your blogwithout opening a browser. Those who are seriously concerned with blogging, cannot imagine their work without using this wonderful tool with elegant interface. "


Blog clients allow you to update your weblog straight from your desktop. Blogjet offers this feature, plus more.


Easy to setup, easy to manage you blog. Intuitive Account Wizard helps you to create a new blog or use an existing one with BlogJet (it supports almost all leading blog services Blogger, blogging.com, Wordpress, MSN Space and other. Now Blogger bate is not suport) Furthermore, the intuitive smart interface of BlogJet will help you to start using the program right away. And if you have many blogs, you can manage them all from BlogJet. Use Manage Accounts. BlogJet integrates with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers; FeedDemon, RSS Bandit, NewsGator and other news aggregators to enable you easily blog about the current web page or news items.
Not only does it have a straightforward WYSIWYG editor, it can even act as a FTP tool (if you have FTP hosting). Some of my favorite features also include: multiple blog support, back editing (ability to edit the last 5 posts), automatic excerpt generation and ability to choose multiple categories (if your blog supports this).
It's also very quick and easy to install and to operate. But, my biggest problem with it is that it can get quite unstable. Sometimes, the FTP functions don't work. Or, at times, I would be given an error message even though my entry did get published successfully.

Pros

Light program, easy to install.
  • Easy to use.
  • Simple and clean interface.
  • Great features - including audio blogging capabilities.
  • easily insert photos from your flickr account.
  • Cons
    • Limited documentation for novice users.
    • Curently only available for Windows platform.
    • A bit buggy - occasionally shows some instability.

    Friday, October 27, 2006

    Blog Farm Pro Review.

    Blog Farm Pro Review

    Before we begin I will warn you that Blog Farm Pro is not for the feint of heart. You will need to be a fairly experienced web user to realise the full potential of this set of tools. In particular you will need to be familiar with the Web Host Manager/Cpanel software. Having said that, there are very useful screen capture videos detailing every major process so if you can learn, you can use BFP.

    On to the review ... rarely does a piece of software come along which gets my juices flowing like this fantastic offering from a couple of guys who've managed to create what is possibly the most powerful set of tools you could find online to help you profit from blogging.

    In case you haven't heard, blogging is all the rage. There are even recognized blog awards putting this modern age phenomenon firmly on the map as something which allows almost anyone the chance to express their opinion and strike up a dialogue with those of a like mind. Very simply, a blog is an online diary with the option of allowing the readers to comment on the entries posted by the blog owner. A blog is a great 'community builder'.

    Partly because of the social aspects involved, search engines absolutely love blogs and using them as a way to make money with programs like Google Adsense can be very profitable. Using the free blog software known as WordPress it is very easy to set yourself up with a blog, begin posting content and hopefully begin profiting from clicks on your Adsense.

    Once you begin down this route you soon begin to realize that three or four blogs are simply not enough if you want to make good money with contextual advertising programs such as Adsense. This is where it comes down to numbers pure and simple. To make real money using this method you need to dramatically scale up the number of blogs you own.

    An initial target would be seven hundred to one thousand WordPress blogs. With this in mind, once you see how long it takes to setup one blog (even though the install process is very simple) you will realize that it could take you a very long time to set up enough blogs to begin making good money. When we are talking these kinds of numbers the system is referred to as a blog farm. Using blog farms there are some very tidy incomes being earned online but it does take work.

    For this reason, I was very excited when my friend introduced me to Blog Farm Pro. For a minimal investment you gain access to an exclusive membership site providing you with a comprehensive set of tools which enables you to build anywhere from ten to as many as three hundred blogs or more in one day. I haven't tried to calculate the amount of time this site has saved me but I know we are talking days not hours.

    Here's a quick rundown of the main tools available to the Blog Farm Pro user.

    Blog farm tools

    * Blog Farm Creator
    * Blog Farm Subdomain Creator
    * Spider/Poster 1&2
    * Pinger

    Site building tools

    * Domain Hosting Creator
    * Subdomain Creator
    * Content Manipulator
    * Web Site Builder

    Control tools

    * Simple Cron Editor
    * Advanced Cron Editor

    Misc tools

    * Article Regenerator - Single
    * Quick Blog Creator
    * Quick Database Creator
    * Quick Cron Creator
    * Quick Pinger
    * List Shuffler

    Everything has been specifically designed to run on Cpanel servers. If you are using any other kind of server software then Blog Farm Pro will be no good to you.

    The blog farm tools are the core of the system. Here you can create multiple pre configured WordPress installations using randomly selected themes with custom plugins all of your choosing. Blogs can be created on top level domains or sub domains.

    Blog Farm Pro sequentially works through your list of blogs to be created. It actually logs into your web host manager, creates the domain (or sub domain), database and WordPress installation all in one go ... awesome! Once your blogs are created you can give the spider a list of web sites whereupon it will go off and spider those sites posting the content (with a link back) to your specified selection of blogs at a schedule determined by you. Doesn't get much better than that.

    The site building tools are also very useful. Here you can create multiple Cpanel domain hosting accounts and any number of sub domains. These tools dramatically increase the speed at which you can create your hosting accounts. If you have ever tried to sit down and create a thousand sub domains you will appreciate how useful these tools actually are.

    With the content manipulator, site builder and FTP upload facility, Blog Farm Pro brings weblog/site-building on a massive scale easily within the reach of every web marketer.

    The control tools allow you to set your schedules for spider posting and here you can also select the ping schedule. The pinger allows you to specify any number of blogs and ping them from a regularly updated rotating proxy IP list at a schedule you determine (phew!). Again, the seasoned Adsense blogger will absolutely love this feature.

    The miscellaneous tools provide you with an article regenerator, single blog, database and cron creators a quick pinger and a list shuffler which are all very handy items to have in your toolbox. The owners of Blog Farm Pro are very responsive and you will always get an answer to any questions you may have on the forums.

    I have used Blog Farm Pro enough to know that this is something I really cannot do without. If you want to build massive blog farms in a very short space of time then Blog Farm Pro is definitely worthy of further investigation. The amount of time this package saves you is enough to give you that competitive edge which you need to succeed in the Adsense blogging game.

    Just imagine ... you could easily build a thousand blogs in a week - hell you could build three thousand! Now if each one of those blogs only earns you one dollar per month then you would be making one thousand to three thousand dollars a month. Now we're talking!

    The idea behind Blog Farm Pro was actually not to create monetised blogs but to use your blog farms as a means of getting your money sites indexed in the engines. The theory goes: build your blog farms, build your sites, post your sites to your blog farms and watch the indexing happen. This works too and whichever way you decide to use BFP I'm sure you'll quickly come to realise that here's a set of tools you really need ... like, yesterday!

    Article Source: Article Beam - a service of A1 Web Server Web Hosting

    More info on Blog Farm Pro. Fabio Marcell is an online entrepreneur with a fascination for anything that automates menial tasks :) He especially enjoys reviewing software and would love to hear from you if you have a tool which you need a write up for. You can contact him here: fabio @ linkz-and.info

    RSS more effective than email.

    Long have I been proclaiming the effectiveness of RSS as a communications channel for non personal communications over that of email. The protection and anonymity that RSS can offer over email means that it is fast becoming the preferred medium for many users. It seems visitors to your site now put more trust in RSS as they are five times more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed as they are to the equivalent information via email.

    A recent article from Rok Hrastnik at Marketing Studies shows that there is greater trust in RSS over email as well as RSS being more effective at attracting visitors back to your site. Over a 48 hour period it was shown that the average CTR from feed to site was 23 percent. That means that nearly a quarter of the readers of your RSS message click through back to your main site.

    Rok's report also shows that there is a 6.8 percent average CTR from a content item in your feed to the web page that the content item points to. Better still is the results that show a 150 percent CTR from your feed to the site within a 30 day period. That means on average each subscriber of your RSS feed clicks through to your site one and a half times each month.

    The report also points from data obtained from Lockergnome where it is shown that RSS subscribers out number email subscribers by 5 to 1. This clearly shows the increased take up of RSS, particularly among the more tech savvy internet audience.

    At http://newsniche.com/ I have often argued that one of the major benefits of RSS over email is that it does not have the flaws that makes it susceptible to spam and control over the subscription to the information you provide is totally in the hands of the subscriber. This makes RSS subscribers more confident than email subscribers that they can unsubscribe knowing they will no longer receive communications from that source.

    I have seen numbers banded about that show there are as few as 5 percent of the browsing public use RSS. The reason for this is that it is not yet as ubiquitous as email, but email has had a lot longer to be established. I truly believe that these results will encourage more webmasters to offer RSS feeds to their readers and help educate the browsing public to the benefits of this form of communication.

    Allan is the webmaster at http://www.newsniche.com/ an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.

    What Is This RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom Business?

    It's been a long day at work and you're in no mood to cook dinner or go out. Time to count on the reliable pizza delivery guy. The order is called in and he promptly arrives with smokin' hot pizza within 30 minutes as promised. If it were only that easy with a picky family where no one can agree on the same restaurant for dinner. One wants Mexican, another wants Chinese, and another wants a burger and Mexican. Instead of running to three different places, you call a delivery service that goes to all of them and brings it to you. What could be easier in getting a meal without cooking it or fetching it?


    RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom are the food delivery guy of the Internet. The content they deliver is mixed and cooked elsewhere on the Internet just like the meal isn't made on your door step and the acronym fellows bring the content to you via software or an online application. Instead of trying to remember all the places where you like to go to get the latest news, it all comes to you once you order your food.


    Click on any of those orange or blue RSS, XML, or RDF buttons and you see unreadable text. Some of it is readable, but reading between the is slow and difficult. In this case, you've got the raw ingredients of the content known as a feed. To make it easily readable, download a feed reader that can interpret (aggregate) the ingredients or sign up for an online service that can do the same.


    When the software or application is ready to go, click on the orange or blue button (or "Syndicate This Page," or whatever is along these lines) and copy the resulting URL from the address box. Paste it into the application to cook the ingredients where it's delivered to you ready for your enjoyment.


    Syndication is a not a new concept on the Internet, but it's growing in popularity as more Web sites and newsletters are churning content to turn it into syndicated files, which are fed into an aggregator. Think of it as the content that's ready to travel anywhere it needs to go. Grab the feed and feed it to the aggregator, another way of bookmarking (or creating a favorite) a site because you wish to come back again another time. But how often did you go back to the site through your bookmarks / favorites?


    Instead of schlepping from site to site in search of information, I have it all in front of me via the aggregator. The feeds are sorted in folders by topic for easy finding. If I'm writing about the latest virus or worm, then I open the security folder with the security-related feeds and scan them. Scanning content through aggregators is easier than on a Web site because it's in one folder with headlines and maybe a short summary. On a Web site, you're only getting the benefit of that site's news and no where else. The folder has news from over ten resources including blogs, news sites, and newsletters.


    Any content can be syndicated. It's a matter of having the backend process in place, which is dependent on the application used for managing the content. If a site doesn't have such resources, then there is software for entering content to create a file with the feed for posting on the site.


    Most aggregators have exporting capabilities so the feed can be shared with others interested in the same topic. If you're interested in my security feeds, I can export them into, in most cases, an OPML file and you can import it into your aggregator.


    Spam filters are preventing readers from getting newsletters or they get lost in the spam pool. Offering a feed for the newsletter is a compromise. Readers can get the content, only instead of it coming to the emailbox, it comes through the aggregator. It's a way around spam. Like everything else, it has its advantages and disadvantages:

    Advantages:

    • Filters can't stop the newsletter from reaching its destination.

    • The recipient will get it - if the server is down, it'll download next time and email can get lost.

    • The feed can be syndicated providing more exposure for your content.

    Disadvantages:

    • Rely on readers to open aggregators like they open email client, but some aggregators are built-in with an email client like NewsGator and there are online aggregators like Bloglines, which can be your home page.

    • Metrics won't be as complete, but it's still there through the links.

    • Not as pretty as HTML-based newsletters.

    If the feed is automatically created, what have you got to lose? You're providing another way for your readers to get your content just like you can get pizza in different ways: go to the restaurant, have it delivered, or make it at home. More applications are adding syndication capabilities, which make the process effortless. Some have said they won't read something unless it has a feed.


    Syndication works better than bookmarks. With bookmarks, you click on a site that might have the security information and arrive there to find it doesn't. So, back to the bookmarks to click on another site. Lather, rinse, repeat. With aggregators, there is no jumping from site to site. Scan the headlines right there until you find what you need.


    There was a time when we didn't have the option to have pizza delivered to our doorstep. When we're too tired, we know we can rely on the delivery guy. In term of content, expect to see it show up at your doorstep more often than the pizza guy plus it's cheaper with the cost only coming from the software though there are many free options available. Syndication is here to stay and should be added to a company's communication toolbox rather than as a replacement. Witness it by watching for RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom out there.


    Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl.net who increases conversion rates by writing and editing content so organization can focus on their core business. She is the editor-in-chief of the eNewsletter Journal and Shavlik's The Remediator Security Digest. Visit her Web site at http://www.meryl.net/blog/

    What Are RSS Feeds.

    RSS Feeds.

    RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

    Benefit to the Webmaster:
    As the web has become more crowded webmasters have been striving to provide fresh and up to date content for their website visitors. Many webmasters have discovered they can easily utilize the information in RSS feeds to provide fresh web content.

    RSS feeds are composed in XML, which is a very simple markup language. Similar to HTML, XML uses tags to identify fields. Webmasters can easily parse the RSS feed and dynamically create web pages that contain headlines and summaries. The feeds will continuously update, supplying a steady stream of automatically generated fresh content.

    RSS allows webmasters to:

    1.) Provide fresh and relevant content on their website, which encourages users to return.

    2.) Constantly changing content means that search engine spiders will visit more frequently.

    3.) Automate content delivery.

    The benefits of RSS feeds are not limited to webmasters, surfers too benefit from the technology as well.

    Benefit to Web Surfers:
    The beauty of RSS is that readers can quickly scan headlines (titles) and read articles of interest. Because the information is condensed and provided in a single location users can generally review more information in a shorter time frame. Additional information is only a click away. Best of all readers choose the feeds they wish to see, there is no spam with RSS. If you are not completely thrilled with the content appearing in a feed simply remove it from the newsreader. The technology is a pull technology rather than push technology, meaning the content is not forced on the consumers, who pull the content they want to see.

    RSS allows for users to:
    1.) Easily locate information.

    2.) Read condensced information or 'soundbytes' with clearly marked and dated topic material.

    3.) Classify and categorize information in an easy to navigate manner.

    4.) Maximize their time without having to deal with spam.

    RSS feeds can be viewed in a news aggregator or reader, which constantly updates and shows unread feeds. I found the functionality of the newsreaders to be similar to a simple email client. Consumers generally enter the URL of any RSS feeds that interest them. Topics with a common theme can be segregated into related groups.

    I highly recommend FeedDemon http://www.feeddemon.com by BradSoft as a newsreader. FeedDemon is extremely easy to use and allows for quick scanning and indexing of topics. FeedDemon allows users to quickly scan, sort and scroll through headline and article summaries, while viewing the actual content in a split screen web browser.

    Finding Topic Specific Relevant Feeds
    In order to find feeds that provide niche information users can search Feedster. Feedster http://www.feedster.com is a rapidly growing news search engine that indexes information contained within RSS feeds. Searches for topic specific feeds can be conducted and feeds can be retrieved for syndication.

    Benefit to Content Developer
    While the benefits to users and webmasters are clear the distribution opportunities made available to content developers should not be overlooked. Information contained in the RSS feed can be easily syndicated, increasing content distribution and reach.

    RSS allows for content developers to:

    1.) Increase exposure in niche markets.

    2.) Communicate with user bases and reach potential customers via an alternate communication method.

    3.) Disseminate relevant information.

    4.) Define themselves as an industry expert.

    5.) Automate content delivery.

    RSS has effectively standardized the format for content delivery and has effectively defined the accepted standard for content distribution and syndication. RSS will likely rival email as a means of content distribution in another few years. The shear simplicity makes the technology very appealing.

    The distribution potential, while albeit difficult to measure, is still attractive to all parties making the likelihood that RSS popularity will only continue to grow.

    RSS Feeds to Try
    Feeds exist for almost any topic consider trying these feeds out by entering the url in your feed reader:

    Small Business Feed - small business tips and news
    http://www.small-business-software.net/blog-feed.xml

    Software Marketing Blog Summary - software marketing and online news
    http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/blog-feed.xml

    SMS, Wireless Messaging Related News. - news related to telecom, wireless industry and NotePage's software
    http://www.notepage.net/blog-feed.xml

    Free Content Articles - collection of free content articles, updates when new article is released.
    http://www.small-business-software.net/article-feed.xml

    Software Marketing News - news related to software conferences, awards, software development and marketing
    http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/feed.xml

    About the Author:
    Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net

    Wednesday, October 25, 2006

    An Appeal To The Bloggers!

    Blogging is smart an art. Blog sites are the nicest portals which do aid people to unfurl their inundating mind streams, in umpteen aspects and share their ideas and experiences. It satiates several yearning hearts by being a platform for unleashing the artistic potencies from within, in writing reviews, articles, poems, stories, etc.

    Personally, I've been craving for such a thing for a substantially long period, until my student and above that my friend, Mr. K. Rakesh, kraki@rediffmail.com, to whom I am grateful, came to my rescue by acquainting me with one blog site. (Visit - http://srinispree.blogspot.com) There is ample scope for registering our stuff, which might be of mammoth use to many others. To publish and later tweak it to the anticipated levels of perfection and subsequently seeing the transition for ourselves is an ethereal experience! I hope many of you know this better than me.

    My humble plea is only this - please don't use blogs for perverted purposes or illegal intentions. There are lot more areas for such things. Spare blogs!

    Certainly blogs are also for fun and frolic, but within the bounds of acceptability.

    May it be a perpetual source of inspiration, nurturing sensational writings that vibrantly serve humanity, yielding reciprocal harmony and international integrity in a broader sense, in near future. In the present context... at least self-improvement.

    About The Author

    Srinivasa Moorthy

    I've a innate craving to write and register many of my thoughts/values...I would like to start with reviewing PC games, movies and stories, writing articles of general/social values and publishing interesting snippets, poems, etc., in English!

    srinivasa_moorthy@yahoo.co.in

    Why Wordpress is now my Blog of Choice?

    The more I use Wordpress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn't yet support.

    1.you can set up Wordpress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, you'll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.

    Think about how long it can take you to build a regular site, get the search engines to index it, get backlinks to improve your listings, and then start getting traffic. A blog like Wordpress can do all that "grunge" work for you automatically.

    2. Wordpress allows the use of Categories. Categories are a very powerful way to improve the structure of your site both for human visitors and for the search engines.

    Let's say the topic of your site is Widgets. You could create a Category for black widgets, one for orange widgets, and one for green widgets.

    Now when you add posts to your blog, you can choose which of your categories your post belongs to. Now your blog will archive your past posts not only by their month and date, as Blogger does. But also by Category.

    So if you have a visitor who is especially interested in green widgets, they can easily find all your posts on green widgets. They don't have to go through your entire archives to find them. With a blog that has been around for awhile and has hundreds of posts, that would be pretty discouraging. Using Categories makes it very easy.

    Categories are also very search engine friendly. When you use Categories in your blog, there is a link on every one of your pages to your categories. Think about this: would you rather be #1 in the search engines for March 2003, or for green widgets, one of the main keywords of your site?

    By using the Category feature, you will eventually have hundreds of pages on your site with links to green widgets, black widgets, and orange widgets. All those backlinks to those keywords can result in much higher search engine rankings.

    Another neat feature is that you can easily create an RSS feed for each of your categories. Then every time you post to your blog, it could be pinging the Blog/RSS directories for each feed!

    Compare that to putting up a new page on a traditional website. Even if the search engines find your new page right away, it might be a month or two before it actually gets indexed and starts drawing traffic. It might be a long time before it enjoys a first page position for its keywords.

    It's almost amazing how easy all this is with a well-structured blog like Wordpress with Categories enabled!

    For more tips and ideas on how to make money blogging, be sure to
    visit my "Why Marketers Should Blog" weblog at (what else)
    http://www.WhyMarketersShouldBlog.com

    Tips for Better Blogging - Promote any Product or Service

    People start blogs for all kinds of reasons. Ego. Political comment or agenda. Staying in touch with family and friends. Marketing. Why did you start your blog?

    If you want your blog to get read, and your readers to be loyal followers, you had better structure it to their liking. Here are some tips for better blogging and basic blogging advice for anyone who wants to promote a product or service using blogs and RSS.

    Write in a conversational tone. Forget what you learned in school, and just write the way you'd speak. Think of yourself as talking to a friend, or writing a letter to a friend when you compose the entries to your blog.

    Check your spelling and grammar. In spite of what I just said above, use your spell checker, and a grammar checker if you have it. You'll have zero credabilatee if you can't even spell it!

    Pick an interesting topic, and stick with it. People don't want to know what you ate for breakfast, or who broke your heart lately. They read your blog looking for information, and they won't stick around long unless they perceive you as a credible expert on whatever topic you
    are writing about.

    Stay informed. Especially if your blog is of a business nature, do enough research to be informed of the latest trends and information. If you expect to maintain your credibility, you had better know what you're talking about. Be prepared to write about the latest developments and hot new trends. Don't just "rehash" old stuff that has been around forever, and blogged to death.

    Be yourself. If you're naturally funny, or opinionated, many of your readers will love you for it. They want information, but they also want to be entertained. If you can combine the two, you have a ready-made formula for success.

    Keep it short. Blog readers aren't looking to read a novel on your blog. Keep your entries short and to the point. A couple of hundred words is more than enough. If you have more to say, split it into a series of entries, or write it up as an article and post it somewhere, and then link to it from a shorter entry in your blog. By the way, that's a great way to use natural links to get both links and traffic to a website.

    Update frequently, but don't burn yourself out. Many of the blogs I've visited seem to contain a few entries, and then go stagnant for months. Others will have a flurry of entries, and then nothing. In both cases, they're going to die. You need to update with some regularity, to keep your
    readers coming back. It seems to me that a couple of times per week ought to do it, but I'm not aware of any studies that would back that up. Blog every day, or every hour, and you'll burn out quickly.

    Don't post nonsense. If you have nothing new to say, keep your fingers off that keyboard! Better to have some really gritty commentary on an irregular basis, than to fill your blog up with fluff and drive away your fans.

    Don't turn your blog into a blatant sales pitch. If you're using your blog as a marketing vehicle, be subtle about it. People hate the feeling they are being subjected to a sales pitch. You can weave references to your product, or affiliate links, into solid, informative content, which is what people will read your blog looking for. Give them what they want!

    Happy Blogging!

    John Barbour, Ph.D. is the author of a new blogging guide which teaches people how to promote any product or service online using blogs and RSS.

    John also maintains several internet marketing educational websites, and manages a new directory for blogs related to intern marketing. Visit the emarketing blog directory and find an interesting blog, or submit your own for inclusion.

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