Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Today we’ve released an update to CSVPiG, our WordPress datafeed import plugin.

The new features only apply to the Pro Version but the Free version should be updated too.

• Brand new post templating option replaces column mapping, now just paste tokens into the WP content elements you want. Post Content areas can contain tokens and HTML!
• Clone settings now includes your BlogPiG API key so that CSVPiG is ready to run with all your custom settings as soon as the plugin is activated
• You can now use commas inside text delimeters in the header row e.g. column1,column2,”column2,b”,column3
• CSVPiG now keeps the case of column headers (previously it changed headers to lowercase)

The last two features were added as a result of user requests.

Please don’t forget we’re a community driven development company. We build features and product that YOU ask for! So don’t be shy drop us a note with anything you think will help you work faster and make you more money.

You can download the updates of CSVPiG Pro & Free inside the BlogPiG members’ area.

CSVPiG Free can also use the auto plugin update in WP Admin.

More features coming soon.

Today we’re releasing 3 new desktop applications and re-releasing one existing one.

They’re all completely FREE to download and use with your BlogPiG API key.

The 4 apps are comment extractors for YouTube, FriendFeed, Twitter & Yahoo Answers. I had them built to compliment CommentPiG, our automated blog comment simulator, but you don’t have to be a CommentPiG owner to use them.

The instructions are the same for all 4 apps and they are really simple to use:

- If it’s the first time you have ever run a blogpig desktop app you’ll initially be asked for your BlogPiG API Key. This will then be stored on your PC and you won’t be asked for it again for any BlogPiG dektops apps. If you don’t already have a BlogPiG API key you can get a free one by clicking on the link at the top of the page.

- Once the app has loaded just a enter the keyword or key phrase for which you wish to find associated comments

- If the app allows it choose whether it should be phrase matched for the comment search (returns less comments but more accuracy)

- Choose how many comments you would like returned (obviously more comments will take more time)

- Check the box for a “delay between requests” if availabe. Whilst this will slow down the comment extraction it will prevent your IP getting a potential temporary ban

- Browse to location you would like to save the resulting file, it defaults to the file extension CSV, I prefer to change this to TXT as it makes the Excel import easier.

And that’s it, couldn’t be easier…

You can download the apps from here or inside the BlogPiG Member’s Area:

Download YouTube Comment Extractor
Download FriendFeed Comment Extractor
Download Twitter Comment Extractor
Download Yahoo Answers Extractor

How I Use the Extractor Apps

I use these 4 extractor apps in conjuction with CommentPiG to preload my autoblog networks with a database of cleaned comments. Once uploaded CommentPiG autoposts these comments onto all the blog posts at regular intervals giving the blogs a natural popularity and content boost over time.

Let’s see an example:

- I’ve decided to build a 10 site autoblog network for the “singing lessons” niche, which is a great niche btw!

- I run all 4 extractor apps and set them to extract 5000 comments for the key phrases “singing lessons”, they won’t all extract 5000 comments it’s just a ceiling.

- When naming the save file locations I make sure I put the source name in the filename for each app and I also like to change the extension to .txt as Excel gives you more options later. e.g. “singing lessons comments twitter.txt”

- Once complete (it takes a little while to run through) I repeat the searches for more key phrases, I chose “learn to sing” & “singers” (this last one is more generic) [make sure you choose new filenames for each new search]

- Now I have 12 txt files containing thousands of potential comments, now we need to combine and clean them.

- There are several specialist tools out there than are really powerful for cleaning extracted content, I particularly like Text Pipe Pro. That being said you can easily & quickly clean comments in Excel.

- I open all of my .txt files in Excel, whilst opening it should ask you how you wish to import, be sure to choose NO delimeter character and leave the text delimeter as ”

- I now copy all of the files into one new Excel worksheet so they are all in column A. I currently have over 10k comments. (If you don’t already now about keyboard shortcuts in Excel this would be a great time to learn as it can really speed up your blog building. I particularly like SHIFT+CTRL+{ARROW_DOWN} to select a whole worksheet of row then CTRL+C to copy followed by CTRL+V to past into the new sheet. Then CTRL+{ARROW_DOWN} to zoom down to the last row. I also tile the windows so I can see them all at once but I do have a pretty big screen.)

- Now I clean the comments, I start by using Excel 2007 to remove the duplicates, this is in the Data menu

- Next I add the formula =len(A1) to cell B1 and drag it down to fill all of the b column giving the length in characters of each comment. I chose to delete all comments with less than 20 chars or more than 500 chars

- Now I sort by column A1 so the comments appear in alphabetical order and scroll through them quickly, this gives a very good overview of comments that are very similar or comprised of the same inital groups of words but where not caught by the duplicate filter.

- I also used Excel’s search & replace wit “@* ” in the find box (do no include the quotes but notice the space after the asterix). This removes all the Twitter usernames in the comments.

- You really can be a brutal as you want here don’t be too fussy about deleting the comments. If want to be really picky you can even put a formula like =IF(SEARCH(”singer”,A1)>0,”yes”) into B1 and drag it down all the comments then sort by “yes” in column B and delete those that don’t contain your keywords. Obviously this will eliminate a lot of comments and also reduce the amount of stemmed keyword comments you get, but it is a good way to keep comments on topic.

- I keep cleaning until until I’m happy with the balance of quality vs. quantity of my comments. I use a combination of filters, sorts, formulae and search & replace to get rid of any rows or words I don’t want.

- After about 20 mins of cleaning I still have just over 5000 comments left

- I import these 5000 comments into each of my 10 autoblogs using CommentPiG and let it post on random to my blog posts as they appear. I can use random comment selection as they a pre-cleaned and reletively on topic.

- I also personally don’t worry about the same comment appearing on different blogs as there is such a big pool, but if you are concerned simply divide the cleaned comment DB by the number of blogs you want to use it on

Get the apps now and start turning your autoblogs into communities!

I’m pretty confident I’ve tested most of the major content platforms over the years – Joomla, Drupal, MoveableType, Blogger etc. etc. The list goes on.

One of the more annoyings things I’ve heard is people claiming that just by using one particular CMS your SEO and traffic needs will be sorted, this is complete rubbish. It’s not the CMS itself that makes or breaks your site building campaign it’s how you leverage that CMS features that really counts. At the end of the day 99% of any CMS is all back-end anyway. It’s totally invisible to the end-user and search spiders, and of course that’s the way it should be. Here are my criteria for choosing the perfect backend for my sites:

• Thousands of other users
• Unrivalled expandability
• Fast customisation of front-end (appearance and layouts)
• Good support
• Cutting edge web 2.0 technology

Maybe you shouldn’t use any off-the-shelf system? Perhaps the best path would be to develop your own back-end DON’T DO THIS! At least not until you’ve proven that there is absolutely no third-party solution that can meet all your needs, and I seriously doubt that’ll be the case.

Trust me on this, I learned this the hard way, right at the start of my site building career I convinced myself that there was nothing on the market that would be good enough for my site building exploits so I hired a coder to build me the ultimate back-end from the ground-up. It took over 9 months and thousands of dollars in development to get anywhere, not to mention hundreds of hours of testing and fixing and testing again. The product’s potential was amazing and it had some really awesome features but tying them all together and getting everything integrated was a total nightmare.

Fortunately whilst the development was underway I was running a lot of parallel tests on off-the-shelf-systems and one in particular stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. It met all my criteria and best of all it provided the perfect framework for tying together all of the functions and features I’d been trying to have developed. What was it? WordPress of course! It was a simple, easy to use platform with infinite customsation options available through the addition of plugins. Most importantly it was in use by millions of websites already. I immediately shelved the custom development project and had the all key features re-coded as WordPress plugins.

This was the birth of BlogPiG…