Automate Your Business

Archive for May, 2009

I’ve recently been doing some intense Visual Basic work for a new project, and because my VB is a little rusty, I keep having to check things online. (I threw away the best VB book a year or two ago, when I thought I’d done my last ever VB project. Silly me).

Anyway… Virtually every search I do in Google comes up with a page at bigresource.com in the top 10 results

See the results here.

BigResource.com scans a few programming forums, scrapes the first post in each thread, and lists them on a page. Each page then has links to a lot of keyword-related other threads beneath it, with the text of those threads as well. So each page in bigresource.com is keyword-rich, themed, and full of content.

Every bit of it scraped.

So why is it doing so well in Google.

And how much are they earning from the Adsense ads they’ve got?

And how could you replicate this?

I’ve just started work towards a little experiment in social bookmarking, and couldn’t be bothered creating loads of social bookmarking accounts. I considered outsourcing the work, and then came across some discussions about SENuke.

I downloaded it a couple of days ago on the free trial, but didn’t do anything with it due to working on more important stuff. Yesterday, I got an email to say that they’ve even integrated human-implemented captcha resolution into it.

I downloaded the new version, and less than half an hour later, I’ve got accounts set up in 26 (if I’m counting correctly) bookmarking sites. All done whilst I went downstairs and made a cup of coffee, then sat watching it (unfortunately, you have to leave it maximised and “on top” of your desktop, so you can’t do anything else – good job I’ve got two old laptops sat there I could use this for).

As mentioned, the software ties into an army (I’m assuming) of people who are doing captcha work (god bless them – I’d last about 5 minutes before having to find some other work, but at least I’ve got the choice to do that). And they’re fast and accurate.

So far – I’m impressed. At this point, I don’t know if it’s worth the monthly subscription, but if the rest of the software performs as elegantly, it’s going to be difficult to say no.

I posted this on the Warrior Forum last week during a spare 5 minutes with internet access, whilst away on holiday, and thought I’d share it with you as well.

It’s easy in this IM business to be busy. Busy creating products. Busy writing articles. Busy reading email. Busy doing research. Busy writing software. etc etc

But one thing that I think many of us might not be busy doing is “thinking”.

I’m on holiday this week. I’ve got some web-access for limited stuff like checking my personal email, checking support tickets, etc, but I’m not “working” as such. Heck, I don’t even have handy the logins for my sites’ cpanel/FTP access, so I can’t really do much.

But my brain has been working. Whilst I’ve been playing with my son and nephew, dining outside in the first bit of really nice weather I’ve had whilst off work this year, walking in the park, vegging in front of the TV in the evening, getting a bit more sleep, etc, my brain has been chewing things over.

And it’s taken one simple idea that I’ve had on the backburner, and fleshed it out. I’ve now got a good, workable, and more importantly – easy to implement – outline of how a new service will work.

I’m sure if I’d been “busy” this week, I won’t have had that outline come to mind quite to quickly, effortlessly, or in as workable a design.

Remember to build some time-out into your schedule!

Some ideas:
* Play – REALLY play – with your family (young or old)
* Get back to nature for a while
* Go for longs walks round the neighbourhood
* Explore new places or try new things
* Sit in the garden
* Grab a coffee in a outside cafe and watch the world go buy

I’m going on holiday from tomorrow, back on the 11th May. I will have access to email/web, but it’ll be limited.

If you submit any support tickets, I apologise for any late response

I’m still playing with the theme. The latest one is created by …

… me!

Using a useful new bit of software called Artisteer. It’s a tool for creating new WordPress themes (with a version available that also allows you to create Joomla and Drupal themes as well). Whilst there are a lot better themes available, I’m sure, the ones produced by Artisteer are less “snazzy” than some of the professional ones (ie, they are easier to read and navigate round).

And if you are creating a series of blogs, but want to use some similar themes, it’s easy to pick a layout that you like, and then vary the colour-scheme per blog.

It’s worth having a look at the software if you want to be able to quickly create some themes for your blogs.