Tag Archives: tools

Clean Up Those URLs

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If you are running PPV, you are most likely scraping URLs. If you are scraping URLs, then you have probably wasted money on bad targets.  I certainly have.  Here’s a money-saving tip that will keep you from blowing through your testing budget bidding on google.com or answers.yahoo.com:

Go through your scraped URLs before you launch the campaign!

Scrubbing Bubbles

Nobody has cleaner URLs than this dude...

Yes, I understand that if you are targeting thousands of URLs, it can be time consuming to go through them one-by-one.  But here’s the trick: you don’t have to!  If you have your list loaded up in Excel, just press Ctrl + F to open up the Find menu, and then search for the usual culprits:

google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com, wikipedia.org, etc.

Alternatively, if you are using AffExpert, you can filter these domains during the scraping process.  Just click the “Show/Hide Domain Filter” button on the URL Scraper tool, and it will open up a second box where you can put in the URLs you want to filter out.  Done and done.

So there you go, a simple tip that can easily save you $20 a campaign or more.

AffExpert > AffPortal (A Review)

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AffPortal was the first “PPV Tools” website on the block.  It took a whole bunch of tasks that PPV marketers have to do on a regular basis, and made them faster and easier.  Things like URL scraping, etc.  Now that it’s been out for a while, a competitor has sprung up called AffExpert.  At first I was skeptical, because I am a huge fan of AffPortal.  But once I got the chance to dig in and use the tools during their free Beta period (which has expired), they won me over.

Most of the tools are self-explanatory by the title, but there are a couple of things that I really like about AffExpert’s system that make it unique:

  1. When you are scraping URLs, it automatically shows you the Alexa, and Quantcast rankings for all of them.  This is pretty cool because you can tell how much traffic a target is going to get before you even test it out on the PPV network.
  2. There is a really cool Basket system that you can save all the URLs to that you want to keep, and then download them all at once in one nice file.  This eliminates the all-too-common problem of duplicate URLs you get when you are scraping  through other methods, and it will also give you the option to add or remove the final slash (/) at the end of the URLs.  Since PPV networks like DirectCPV consider “domain.com” to be a different URL than “domain.com/”, this can be handy.
AffExpert URL Scraper

URL Scraper in action

Here are the PPV/CPV tools available:

  • Related Keywords
  • URL Scraper
  • Site Analytics (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast)
  • Domain Expander
  • Related Domains Finder
  • Top 1 Mil Domain Explorer
  • Domain Typos
  • URL Query Generator
  • YouTube Scraper
  • URL Follower

There are also some PPC tools:

  • Google Campaign Builder
  • Competition Spy
  • Adsense Finder
  • Keyword Grouper

There is also a self-hosted Weighted URL Rotator.  You can install this on your own server so you don’t have to worry about the data being snatched by somebody else (unless they have access to your server, and then you are just a moron).

I haven’t personally used the PPC tools much, so I can’t report on how they work.  That being said, it’s nice to get them for the one monthly fee, and if you are paying for another keyword tool that does the same thing, you can eliminate that extra expense and just use one tool set for everything.

All in all, I highly recommend AffExpert.  I use it personally on every PPV campaign I do, and it is a major time saver.  You can get a 7-day, fully functional trial for only $1, so what are you waiting for, give it a shot!

P.S.  Use promo code “BETAUSER” to get a discounted membership for life.

SiteSnatcher Has Landed

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If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts.  Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea.  A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher.  I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor.  When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site.  The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on.  It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window.  This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool.  This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche.  One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you.  This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them.  This tool does it all for you.  Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page.  This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in.  These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results.  It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it.  On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day.  As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run.  You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package.  I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash.  If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads.  I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better.   If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link.  If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5