The author replied to say he would exchange, but wanted to conduct the exchange via his new link exchange system, Lavalinx.

I was pretty skeptical about another link exchange system, having found others overrun with really low quality sites.

What is interesting about Lavalinx is its ability to triangulate link exchanges between different pages.

Furthermore you can automate link exchanges by inserting some PHP code into your site / blog, so that when you approve your link exchanges (via the Lavalinx control panel) they are automatically inserted into your site.

You can also configure multiple pages for your link exchanges making it easy for site owners to exchange contextual links, i.e. you are not trading links of spammy “Links” or “Friends” pages.

To get their ball rolling Lavalinx are offering 500 free account’s on their system, after which they will move to paid subscriptions.

I have already traded 5 links with this system and have probably declined another 5-10. That may not sound a lot, but they currently only have 100 members, when they get up to 500++ a lot more exchanges will take place.

Furthermore, I did not have do do anything to get those link exchanges… just signed up and waited for the requests to come in, so even this small number has made it worth while joining.

Also, they were decent exchanges… relevant sites of a reasonable quality, and the fact that it is to become a subscription based service will hopefully keep it that way.

I hope Lavalinx works out, partly because I got a free account, but mainly because it would be a really convenient service, particularly if you want to launch and back-link few small sites for SEO purposes.

The person I was speaking to at Lavalinx also mentioned that they have secured further investment for their product, and plan to develop their system further, something Ill have to keep an eye out for…

They still have some free accounts available if you want to try Lavalinx for yourself.

StockXchng has been around for some time but really seems to have come into its own over the last year.

They claim to be the “leading free stock photography site” currently listing 313484 free images with 400 – 500 new images being listed every day!

They have over 25000 photographers submitting images and a lot of them are very good!

I have found a number of good free images suitable for use in banners etc.

There are premium or paid images listed too, starting at $1 per image. These are actually hosted on a sister site StockXpert are to a very high standard.

If you are prepared to pay one or two dollars for your images then istockphoto.com is also a very good source of stock images, with a much larger selection than stockXchng / StockXpert but alas, no freebies.

A problem few seem to address is how to get good back-links for a niche blog.

The problem with getting back-links for niche sites is that it is hard to find other relevant sites to get links from.

If you are doing niche properly, then by default there will be very few specialized sites like yours out there, and finding them can be problematic.

If you do blog searches on Technorati for example, you will find hundreds of spam sites, but very few of value. This is because search engine spammers use automated blogs to hit huge lists of long-tail keywords.

If you search Google then you will mostly find old static sites, but your chances of getting links from those sites is almost zero. If you refine your Google search to look for specific blogging platforms you will find what you are looking for, but you will need to develop specialized searches for each blogging platform, and going through the results list is time consuming.

There are Firefox plugins and other cheap software tools you can use to make life easier, but even with these products finding the right sites can be a slow process.

However, as I have been fortunate enough to be given a copy for the forthcoming release of Comment Hut to evaluate I now have a solution to this probem

Comment hut will search for blogs on WordPress, Live Journal, Drupal and Type Pad, as well as two additional platforms that have not been formally announced yet You can search one or all of these platforms for your niche terms.

Furthermore, Comment Hut will ONLY return URL’s with ‘commentability’, i.e. only blogs on which comments are enabled.

It also allows you to set the minimum PR (Page Rank) of sites to be returned, so, if you only want to look for PR 3+ sites, it will do that for you.

The fact that it allows filtering by PR in itself acts as a spam filter, as spam sites almost invariably have no PR.

Once you have your list of URL’s you can export it to file, or just click the links in the page. There are a couple of export options, (Exel or HTML), again allowing you to click the list to open URL’s.

You can then order the list by PR to prioritize the sites you want to target, then go off and start commenting.

You can just leave link bait if thats how you want to play it. Personally I prefer to take the time to build collaborative relationships with other bloggers, working with them to mutually boost our SERPS on a given phrase.

The only things that seem to be missing from Comment Hut are the ability to search the mySpace and Blogger platforms. Though there are two new platforms available in the forthcoming release, mySpace and Blogger are not among them. That said, with the number of results it does bring back, you will have plenty to be getting on with!

As a little test I thought I would do a search on “fear of flying” as Mitch at harpzon.com is doing a case study on a site in that niche.

Above you can see some of the wordpress URL’s returned by comment hut along with their PR. In total I was able to find 118 PR3+ links containing the search term “fear of flying”. I have been through the lists and found a number of sites which are directly discussing fear of flying (as opposed to mentioning it in passing) that would make the best sources of backlinks. If you want you can check the list here.

The current price of Comment Hut is $97 which seems a little expensive, however, with products like this you have to remember that economies of scale are not working in your favor!

You can get the demo version of Comment Hut free, which will search wordpress blogs only, and return just 10% of the results… this gives you an idea of what it can do, but is in no way representative of the results the full version delivers…. there is a huge difference between the demo and full versions.
Also, to get the free version you have to supply a mail address… if you do this be aware that these guys do run mail campaigns and you will get periodic mail shots from them.

So, is it worth $97? Well if you are serious about niches then my honest opinion is yes it is.

I am no stranger to advanced Google searches, even so, this product is a real time saver and helps hook you up with others in your niche very quickly.

Whether you get your $97 back is down to how well you select your niches in the first place, and how many sites you build!!

I have no doubt that I will squeeze $97 back out of this software pretty quickly (I reviewed this software for a reason ).

If you have any further questions about Comment Hut both Paul and Stewart are very approachable guys and are contactable via their site.

For the record there are no affiliate links in this page, and after getting my grubby paws on the evaluation copy I was free to say whatever I wanted about it….

What WP-Omatic does is scrape RSS feeds. It does this on a CRON job, so you can schedule your scrape to run every hour. You then set which categories scraped content is put into… and before you know it you have your very own automated blog!

The current release creates a duplicate of the original rss feed, so, when your target feed / blog updates…. you rip their content shortly afterwards….

Now, this is not a very good plan as you will start upsetting people, and Google will recognise the duplicate content… however, if this plugin reaches maturity it will have re-writing capabilities, so that links or keywords can be replaced.

Furthermore, it would be possible to incorporate a thesaurus into this kind of plugin to extend the rewriting capabilities….

Where this is going is… that you can scrape and rewrite other peoples content automatically… just build a blog and leave it churning out unique content all by itself.

The down side to this is that the rewriting process means articles become less readible and stop making sense, and a lot of pages get dropped by Google shortly after indexing, but, given the fact that the posts take zero effort to create, the fact that some get dropped is not a major concern.

I should point out that when experimenting with this I only ripped my own feeds… no-one elses!!

My previous two posts were Automate Website Browsing which discussed a browser containing a scheduler, so you can set it to browse sites at different times of the day, and Automatically Browse and Test Websites with Firefox which discussed the Salenium plugin for firefox.

Like Salenium iMacros is a plugin for Firefox which allows you to record whatever you do in your browser and then play it back again.

Once installed you need to access the plugin via View/Sidebar/iOpus iMacros …

After which you can start ‘recording’ !!

I much prefer this plugin to Salenium as it is a lot easier to use. Also, like Salenium all actions are recorded in a text file, so you can save your actions for later. Unlike Salenium the format of this text file is very easy to work with, so it can much more easily be modified, either by hand or by writing scripts to build up more complex actions.

You can set the recorded actions to loop over and over, re-visiting sites, you can also control the speed at which the browsing takes place, and the timeout if a page is not found.

It does not have the advanced features of Salenium which are useful for testing… but for automated browsing I think it works much better…. it is certainly a lot easier to work with.

Unfortunately it still does not have a scheduler, for that you will have to use the product reviewed in my Automate Website Browsing post.

I recently did a site for someone who had paid for a template, which, whilst ok was only as good as the average template available from the Open Source Web Directory.

I have seen a few people ‘reselling’ templates for commercial companies, and to be honest think they are wasting their time. I don’t believe these businesses will exist in a few years time, certainly not for static templates.

The reason? Traffic and exposure is a commodity easily exploited with a free template. I recently wrote about a free template I found, the authors of which claimed to have around 200k templates in use around the world. They generate a lot of interest in their activities by distributing a small number of good quality templates.

There are now thousands of free templates available, designers are competing to get you to download them, for free!

Similarly, there is a growing industry in WordPress templates with many free designs available, though, there are still relatively few high quality functional designs available.

For those that are successful, i.e. produce a good template the exposure they get is invaluable. Take this site for example, the template it uses has over 40k downloads, and at the bottom of the page you will see a link back to the author.

So, that is how web designers make money with templates, they get free publicity, showcase their work and get paid commissions for high value bespoke work.

On the other site, it is possible to make money deploying these templates. Many are complex and require an understanding of CSS and (XX)HTML to be able to work with them.

On top of that, building static sites is a bad plan as they are so difficult to maintain, which means you also need PHP to be able to chop the site up into constituent components, and then javaScript to add some tricks as required.

This is an opportunity for deployer’s of templates and software to earn their crust, and is really how I see the market going, deployment and configuration with a much smaller design / development element.

Why not build the site from scratch?

Well why re-invent the wheel, using templates gives the following advantages:

• Lower cost to the customer
• Faster turn around
• The ability for the customer to choose a ‘starting point’ from thousands of free templates

There are already a number of companies making good profits deploying open source applications and templates. I have done this myself.

If you are going to do this, in my opinion you just need to be honest, tell the customer what you are doing, let the price reflect you are using a template as your starting point, and leave the back-link to the original author.

I have seen a few people claiming to be designers, checked their portfolio and realised they are using other peoples templates, not good when their customers find out!

I spend a lot of time typing, at work and home, typing E-Mails, Blog Posts, letters and documents, programming, using chat clients… a lot of button pushing!

I learned to touch type around five years ago before starting a University Degree course. Typing was not taught when I went to school, but I realised what a benefit it would be to learn, as degree’s involve a lot of writing!

Five years later it is still a major benefit to me… anyone who has ever used a chat client to talk to me will testify to the fact that I push out 10 words to their one (not always a good thing!!), and I am still working on other stuff in between!

I decided to write this post after someone at work commented on how fast I was typing and I realised that I have only met one person who can out type me, that person was a PA to a company director with professional typing / shorthand qualifications.

So, what does touch typing mean?

• Make use of all digits on both hands, not just your index fingers!
• Looking at the screen, or document you are copying from, not the keyboard.

The benefits of touch typing are two fold:

1. You will be able to type at least twice as fast!
2. As you are looking at the screen (not the keyboard) you are able to concentrate fully on your work, it is far easier to get into a creative flow if you can touch type.

I taught myself to type using an old copy of Mavis Beacon, by Old I mean pre 2000. The graphics were really poor, and the commentary was really annoying. I muted the sound on my computer and spent two hours a night using the CD ROM for five consecutive evenings.

After those ten hours I had learned the keyboard well enough to type without looking at the keyboard, however I was still typing a lot slower than I had been using my previous finger and thumb method. I think this is where a lot of people fail when leaning to type in this way, they learn the keyboard, but …. old habits die hard.

You have to force yourself to use the new methods you have just learned, if you do this, within a couple of weeks you will be working faster than you ever have before, and will continue to do so for the rest of your life!!

It really is one of the most useful self taught skills I possess, there is no way I could get as much done without being able to touch type.

You can get an old (used) copy of Mavis Beacon for less than five dollars (£2.50) on Amazon! If you use the CD properly, and force yourself to use your new found skill, it may well prove the best $5 you ever spend… really!

The blog has a few tips and tricks, but the really useful stuff is all in the forum, which can be found by reading about YACG on the blog!

YACG or Yet Another Content Generator is an open source application written by Busin3ss to automatically create websites including content gathered from a range or sources.

Busin3ss has just released some information on a private project he is working on, the black hat seo command centre!

Its a real shame Busin3ss is not releasing the source for this program, it looks really interesting, allowing the creation of new domains / sub domains on a server, automatically deploy websites onto those domains, harvest keywords and a lot more.

Busin3ss is however releasing a mass installer for his YACG project and other components used in the command centre and other readers of his blog / forum are already working on their own variants.

One of the most interesting things going on in the forum is a case study. Using these black hat seo tools, busin3ss is describing an attempt to make a LOT of money online by automatically generating thousands of sites over hundreds of domains.

Whether you agree with this stuff or not there is no denying the level of commitment and expertise being demonstrated here, its a really interesting read, particularly if you get access to the forum.

Accessing the forum is free, but you are asked why you want to join. I have no idea whether anyone has ever been refused access to the forum, but I was allowed in, so they can’t be that choosy

A limitation of Selenium as an automated browser is the lack of a scheduler, which would allow you to browse sites at set periods.

If this is something you want to do, then, the Easy Bee could be what you are looking for.

I recently used this to log onto a website and refresh and advertisement every 30mins.

The Easy Bee is a relic of a pre RSS era and was not designed as an automated browser so much as a news aggregator. It allows you to record all your actions within the browser and select page elements (text or images) which you want to store for later use.

Once you select an element to save, then you are able to set the scheudle:

Now you can see why there haven’t been any screen shots until now!

It may not look nice, and the worker bee analogy gets annoying, but it does the job.

The image above shows the content I wish to collect as well as a timer counting down to the next run.

The Easy Bee can be downloaded free of charge from most download sites, such as download.com.

Unfortunately, the free version does note let you schedule within periods of less than 30 minutes, though you can create more than one “bee” and offset the times to get a faster refresh rate.

The full version will schedule once a minute.

The other problem with the free download is that it has “bee’s” configured within it which constantly “fly” round pre-determined sites. Now, as only one “bee” can “fly” at a time your own schedules don’t get to run. To get the program running you need to delete all the other “bees” and “honeycombs” and restart the “hive”

With such an ugly interface and silly analogies it is little wonder that this software never really made it, that along with a price tag of $129 for the full version

Selenium is available as a Firefox plug in and allows you to record your actions in the browser window.

Once installed you use Tools / Selenium IDE to open the control panel:

Then click the record button, and move to a browser window.

Selenium will then record your actions:

You can then ‘play’ your actions back, and save / export your test to run at a later point in time:

As well as recording from the browser, you can manually write your test scripts, using the comprehensive drop down list of options provided.

Interestingly the scripts, whether generated by recording, or using the GUI can be translated to a number of different formats for export, including HTML, which allows you to easily copy and paste processes from one test to another.

Its a really nice plug in for Firefox, which could be used to automate daily tasks as well as for its intended purpose of running test scripts.

A nice addition would be a scheduler, so that you could run your processes automatically throughout the day, perhaps the authors will add this in time, if not, there is another tool I am going to review which, although less flexible than Selenium does have a scheduler.