Blind Ape Seo

The path of the ape

The path of the ape

Content Creation – The Video and Voice Recognition Experiment

Content Creation – The Video and Voice Recognition Experiment

June 18, 2013

PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay

As I have mentioned before, using voice recognition software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking will multiply your content output and protect your poor hands from RSI at the same time.
So I decided to exmperiment some more.

The experiment

When I recorded the first tutorial video for the blind ape I did a little experiment with the Dragon at the same time.
While I was recording the video on my iPad, I wore my wireless Logitech headset and had the dictation software running on the laptop.
The idea behind experiment was to use the output to help me write the text part of the post.

That experiment was a failure. Read More »

3 Link strategies that keep your blog fresh

June 7, 2013

If we are going to look at the topic of freshness on blogs, we’ll have to look at the nature of the beast.
The way most blogs are set up, is that blog posts appear on a timeline.

While this is intuitive, it also means that, as posts fall off your homepage, they loose the link power from the homepage.

However, apart from the homepage, there are other, special pages that keep links from all over the place. The archive and tag pages.
This actually leads to the problem a lot of SEOs are seeing with those pages outranking the actual article posts.

A lot of SEOs are actually actively removing the archive, tag and categories pages from being crawled or setting the links to them as nofollow.

So in this post, we are going to look at three ways to link to the posts that are fading away over time that keeps them fresh and accessible to your visitors and the Search engines. Read More »

Sometimes it is nothing but sheer effort that will get you there

June 6, 2013

WikiImages / Pixabay

In a recent chat, a guy who owns some products with affiliate programs dropped this gem about one of his affiliates

he writes the shit outta some content too, and does a ton of press releases.

He’s one of those guys that does great in seo through sheer effort, he doesnt spend too much time trying to find shortcuts or secret links, he just goes out and does it, I send him checks for all kinds of stuff, he Powns the SERPs for that product

(This is straight form a chat, typos and all)

The message is solid gold.

A lot of time is spent by people involved in SEO and affiliate marketing looking for shortcuts, hidden backdoors, the golden bullet.

When really all that you need is to put in solid, consistent effort.

Deep Monetization

June 5, 2013

Deeper Content System

  1. Introduction
  2. Tools
  3. Topic research
  4. Creating basic content
  5. Analyzing content
  6. Augmenting content
  7. Monetization

After all this work comes the money.

PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay

Of course we’ll use advertising, but we’ll add a little extra. We are going to automate it.

If you stayed with me this far, it should be clear what this old ape is going to base the monetization on.
Of course, the keywords and categories from the analysis.

The basic idea is to create a database with offers you are going to promote. We can be very broad with this, add anything and everything. From your favorite affiliate network to amazon. Read More »

Augmenting the content

June 4, 2013

Deeper Content System

  1. Introduction
  2. Tools
  3. Topic research
  4. Creating basic content
  5. Analyzing content
  6. Augmenting content
  7. Monetization

Alright, this is where everything comes together.

To summarize, at this point we have:

  • the basic content (courtesy of a writer, or WordAI)
  • a summary, provided by libots
  • tags, concepts, people, places, organizations … provided by the Alchemy API

Augmenting – what is that?

Augmenting is basically improving, enriching, adding to (in a good sense). What we want to do is to add depth to the basic text.
For this to happen, we use all the information we got in step 4 – analysis to gather elements to add to the text. Read More »

Analyzing Content

June 1, 2013

We arrive at this step after you finished your raw content. This doesn’t mean unpolished, but mostly plain, unlinked text. This is the module where we get to use the whole variety of tools available to analyze the content and find ways to add layers of meaning, and media, and links, and, and, and….

So basically this provides the information we need for the following steps which are augmentation and monetization of content.
The resources we will use in this step are the Alchemy API and the libots “Open Text summarizer”. Both of those are free to use, libots because it is an open source tool, Alchemy API can be used free up to a high count of requests actually 1’000 daily requests on a free account, or 30’000 for approved academic users (know a student?).

If you’d like to dive right in, try the web demo of Alchemy or one web frontend for the text summarizer. Read More »

Creating Basic Content

May 10, 2013

In this part of the Deep Content series we will deal with getting or creating our basic content.

There’s two ways to get that content.

First: Procured content.
Second: Manually created content.

1. Procured content
As was said before, we would never just blatantly steal content. Nooooo.
This step is about how to use search engines and other sources to get raw content.
Any content you get this way will have to be reworked at the end. The best way to do this is to automate this using Word AI.

So, where to get the content?

Search engines
The targets here are easily defined:  Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

This really is a two-step process.
In the first step you crawl the search result pages.
In the second step you crawl each result individually.

Step one
I’m not going to go into the details of web scraping here. You can write about using the language of your choice or use your box to quickly bang out a scraper. A good resource on programming bots is the book Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL

A good tool to use to bang out those bots is – of course – uBot Studio.  I have mentioned it previously in this series under Tools and have also reviewed it here.
However, what I want to go into more detail on is what to look out for when crawling the search engines.

Search engines protect their search engine result pages. You can employ two essential tactics to get around this.
1. Make your bot look like a human
This is actually the easier of the two techniques. What you do is simply space out your requests over time. A simple random wait interval between requests can take care of that. Make the bot wait 1-10 seconds before sending off the next query, done.
Pro: This is simple to implement and quite effective.
Con: This means that bigger jobs need more time and having to prepare your searches before hand makes ad hoc idea exploration difficult. In our example (1-10 seonds wait, the average will be 5 seconds wait between queries. Assuming a full roundtrip (send the query, wait for response, save result) takes 2 seconds, this would make an exploration of 1’000 queries balloon from roughly 30 minutes to two and a half hours.
2. Use proxies
Loads of proxies, loads of them.
Pro: effective, make huge amounts of scraping possible.
Con: This is harder to implement and quality proxy services cost money.
3. Bonus Technique
Another way to get around this protection is to use selected sources.
Explore your niche space and find important sites, forums, and article directories related to your topic. You can then collect all these into a custom search engine or CSE. You can then hit that one for more focused results either manually or automatically.

Manual content
This means using writers for your content.
This can be either yourself or guest writers for your blogs or paid writers. If you’re going to pay for writing services I would suggest you check out writesources.com or textbroker.com
Protip: Don’t be a cheap bastard. With content, you truly get what you pay for.

Trust your old sensei, he tried. (sigh)

Deeper Content System

  1. Introduction
  2. Tools
  3. Topic research
  4. Creating basic content
  5. Analyzing content
  6. Augmenting content
  7. Monetization

Niche and topic research

April 30, 2013

This is basically „how to get topics to write about“.

The three ways we’re going to look at are:

  • niche exploration
  • seasonal topics
  • trending topics

Niche exploration

To go through the whole topic of niche exploration would be an article series of its own. (Note to self…)
Just remember that the two tools you need are Google and SerpIQ.

SerpIQs keyword discovery tool is what you actually use first to get a feel of specific niche and its possibilities.

After you have narrowed that down, you can use it to analyze your competitors, their strengths and weaknesses.

I’m going to leave this here and leave you with a list of links to explore on your own, as other people have outlined this process quite nicely.

 

Seasonal topics

These are great, as these are topics that would repeat over and over and over again.

This means recurring income at predefined intervals and tons of offers to sell to consumers. However, this also means that there is likely established competition.

Going off to these then, involves thinking out-of-the-box and going after the long tail. To get the long tail, fire up SerpIQ’s keyword discovery engine and go full blast ahead.

There is three types of seasonal topics

1. Holidays

Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, St. Patrick’s, Thanksgiving, etc…

A lot of these are religious, don’t forget about other religions in your target market.

2. Seasonal sales

spring-training, cyber Monday, black Friday,…

These vary by location, so get knowledgeable about your target market’s sales.

3. Special events

these can be national or all of international importance

think fashion shows, the Oscars, sporting events such as the Super Bowl, the Olympics, world championships in whatever have you.

 Trending topis

Another thing to look at is trending topics.
For these, I believe you might like this short list of trending sites.

Google Trends
Google Hot searches

Yahoo News Trends

AOL Search Trends

Trending on Fox News

MSN now

Whatthetrend – US

Topsy Google+

There’s loads of those out there, and this type of site is still created by bright new startups, so just take these to start with.

Deeper Content System

YouTube – making the case for crappy ads

April 24, 2013

At the SOM13, the Vice President of Google Europe did an astonishingly disappointing talk – all hype for YouTube, hidden under a small blanket of “we can change the world”.

Of course, the talk also hit a short note on advertising on the video platform.
While he showed off memorable and funny clips, like this one from Three mobile


What stuck with me was the quote on payment

“The advertiser has to pay only when a viewer does not skip the ad before 30seconds or the end of the clip, whichever is shorter.

The good news then is that you don’t have to pay if people just skip.

Now the bad news:
Make a funny and memorable, maybe even “viral” clip and you’ll waste your advertising budget.

People will watch because it is a good clip, not because they a interested in what you have to offer.

The solution:
Target your advertising as well as you can and …. Well, tone it down.

The challenge will be finding a nice middle ground at which interested parties don’t and non-interested viewers will get bored enough to skip.

One clip that does this well in my mind is treehouse – can’t find the ad as standalone clip at the moment, sorry.

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