Tinyurl was the first big boy on the block doing exactly what its name implies, it shrinks urls. So an ugly url like this

http://www.club-veracity.com/2008/finance/credit-counseling/ 10/what-are-the-important-gains-of-a-credit-card-debt-negotiation-program

can be turned into this

http://tinyurl.com/credit-card-debt-negotiation

The second one is far more friendly and apt to get more clicks because for many people long urls scare the crap out of them.

How about this url that screams Click Me So So I Can Sell You Something!

http://www.mb01.com/lnk.asp?o=668&c=7211&a=18851

What the hell is that and why would anyone in their right mind click it?

Services like tinyurl, and budurl, solve this problem by making urls like this look a little more palatable

http://tinyurl.com/thesurveyclub

A friendlier looking url like the one above has been show over and over again to get more clicks.

So it’s clear, short, non-marketing looking urls are the way to go if you want to get clicks. But what can Budurl do for me that tinyurl can’t? It can track your clicks

I had heard of budurl but it was Jack Humphrey’s post Track Your Social Marketing that pushed me to take a closer look and I’m glad I did. Budrul offers the same features as tinyurl with the addition of the all important link tracking.

If you’re sending out tweets, digg shouts, or squidoo casts, for example, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many clicks you’re getting. This will help you tremendously by steering you from wasted campaign efforts and towards those that are actually pulling traffic. It’s all about testing testing testing, and with budurl this is a snap.

As Jack points out in his post, be sure to keep track of where you place your various urls so you know not just that url was clicked x number of times, but where that urls actually was! This means different locations should have different urls.

So is Budurl the end all in link shrinking, cloaking and tracking?

While budurl and tinyurl are great tools, are simple to use, and in the case of budurl offer some great link tracking, they both have one major drawback … It’s Not Yours!

In fact any online url cloacking service has this problem. If you don’t think it’s a problem then consider what will happen if you have a few hundreds (or thousands) of urls out there all running through budurl and budurl goes down for the day due to technical problems (or business failure problems). Instantly your business grinds to a halt and is at the mercy of a third party service to get things going again.

For some marketers having their links become inactive for a day could mean thousands of dollars. What happens if you’re doing a promo or launch of some sort?

Having a third party service being the conduit for your money flow is in my opinion pretty risky. Sure the benefits are that it’s free, simple to use and ready to be put to work immediately, but when you use them be aware that they do carry risks.

And the risks are not just technical downtime wither. Consider that you have those thousands of links spread around the web, or allredy sent out in an ebook, and your free link cloaking/shrinking service decides to change their business model and chart $5/1000 links. It’s not much, but the point is it’s out of your control.

So while budurl is a great service, it’s quick and easy and free, just be aware of the dangers all this convenience comes with.

I’d be hypocritical if I told you I never use these services myself, but I’m doing so less and less these days as I move my campaigns over to a solution I own and have full control over. One that runs on my own hosting account.

My links are my assets and to place those assets in someone else’s hands for the sake of convenience doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If you’re building a business it’s important to maintain control over your assets, especially the ones that are critical path like your links are, and you can do that for only a few dollars with any of a number of third part cloaking tools.

One that’s been around a couple years now and has a lot of followers is powerlink generator. Powerlink Generator is feature rich but some people have had issues getting it set up. Fortunately their support
will actually log into your account and help you fix any issues you have with setup if you ask them to.

There are other options but I have not had a chance to evaluate then personally.

Lastly, these scripts are not that difficult to write if you have some programming skills. Also there are some free scripts flying around but for the time you might spend looking around, testing the various freebies or writing your own I think you’d be better off dropping $20 and then spending your time on more productive tasks.

It’s amazing what you can learn from simply trying to give things away for free! Last month I began what will likely be a monthly draw for some cool free marketing tools and I just wanted to update everyone on what’s going on with that.

The prize for two months free Wealthy Affiliate membership has been awarded. No worries if you didn’t win though as the contest will continue and your entries from the previous month will carry over to the new month. In fact they never expire. Enter once and play over and over.

I’m just finalizing the next prize and will announce it in the next few days.

Dang It! Now I Have to Change the Rules!

So this being the first contest of it’s kind that I’ve run I’ve learned a few things that are going to require some minor changes to the rules.

So what did I learn?

1. I learned that the comment box on a squidoo page is really NOT the best way to accept submissions or any other specific type of feedback from readers. Squidoo users have become so accustom to simply dumping random comments for the sake of backlinks into those comment modules that they really don’t take the time to read description text associated with the comment module. I could have told people that they could leave their info and receive a free IRS audit and it would have filled up just the same.
2. Next thing I learned was that there are a great many people who would rather not leave urls back to their pages where they placed contest entry links. This to me was a little surprising since most people are just begging for back links to their content. Well it turns out I received vastly more entries via email. People were emailing me saying they’d placed a link to my lens but would rather just email their url to me rather than put it on the lens. That’s ok with me. In fact, given that there is a couple other places on the lens to place PR4 backlinks to your content I guess it’s not really a big deal for people.
3. Lastly, there are no shortage of people trying to game the system ;). There were a couple people who submitted the same url multiple times hoping to get multiple entries. Fortunately I check for this and so if this is you trying to game the game then you’re wasting your time. Sorry.

How To Enter

OK so in light of the first month experience here are the new revised rules for entering the draw. I think they will actually work better for most people.

1. Place a link to any of the following
   1. http://www.longtailtreasure.com
   2. http://www.squidoo.com/longtailtreasure
   3. http://www.longtailtreasure.com/LongTailTreasureChest/longtailtreasuresignup.html
   4. Or any blog post on this blog
      
2. Email me a link to your page with the link you placed
   1. Send it to the email address for the Long Tail Treasure course
   2. Se sure to put “Win Free Stuff” in the subject line of the email. This is important because my mail program will be using this subject line to filter all the contest entries for me
   3. If you’re not signed up for the free course then you can do so with the signup form on the side bar of this blog. The email you receive from the course is the address to send your entries to

That’s it. Pretty simple huh? Tell others about my free course and then send me an email about it and you’re automatically entered for the free draw.

Prize Suggestions Please

There’s such a diverse group of people here at Long Tail Treasure and I’m really hoping to find prizes that will appeal to as wide a range of people as possible which is why I’m rotating the prizes each month. I’m looking at membership trials to various sites as well as SEO tools and course material.

Hitting the target and picking the right prizes will be much easier if you can take a minute and tell me what sort of prizes you’re interested in winning. Just leave a comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do.

thanks

I’ve started a free monthly contest on my squidoo lens where you can enter to win some kick ass affiliate marketing tools starting with 2 months of Wealthy Affiliates, a $78 value.

Although the prizes will likely change from month to month I decided to start with Wealthy Affiliates since they’re currently running a promotion where each new member receives a copy of their excellent guide to mailing lists called Inside the List.

With the Wealth Affiliate track record I’m confident that after 2 months it will easily be paying for itself giving you a way in at no out of pocket cost to you. The idea is to give you a free foot in the door so you can put it to work and become self sufficient more quickly.

You can enter as many times as you like and each entry is good for all future monthly draws so the more you enter the more chance you’ll have to win over time.

This is an experiment and the more participation the contest receives the larger the future prizes will become.

It’s FAST, FREE and EASY to enter … you have nothing to lose and everything to gain!

Contest Rules and Entry Form

I blogged about the last Inside the List promotion back in April and it turned out to be a very popular event as a lot of people took advantage of the deal. If you missed it then you can catch it this time around.

I’d hate to use a cliche, but it’s true, the money is in the list. That’s why EVERY marketing website worth it’s salt has one and it’s the reason you need one too!

If you’re ready to make a serious run at your affiliate marketing career and are planning to check Wealthy Affiliates out for a month it’s a great time to do it since this book alone is worth a couple months membership.

I’m not sure how long this promotion will so get on it right away if you want to claim your free $69 Inside the List.

Well it works much like if you were using articles from an article directory where you are supposed to leave all live links in place.

The idea is to use Syndicate Kahuna as a free source of quality targeted content. This will give the search engines something to index and improve your organic listings significantly. You’ll get more comments on your blog making it appear more active. Additionally you’ll have more for other bloggers to reference.

The biggest objection I hear is from affiliate marketers that want extra tight control of their links to funnel their prospects to a specific action.  My answer to them is that syndicating content from elsewhere with links you don’t own is a trade off. Sometimes it’s well worth it, others it’s not. It depends on your site and marketing strategy. I think if you play around with it you’ll easily find a way to fit it into your campaigns for a net benefit.

Why Syndicate Kahuna Should Be In Your Toolbox

1. When you’re just overloaded and don’t have time to write but still need to keep the blog active. It creates flexibility in your work and campaign schedule by providing instant content assistance when you need it.
2. Making 1 out of 5 blog posts a syndicated post still leaves you with the overwhelming majority of the content written by you so you’re blog remains your style and feel, but you get 20% extra free time for other marketing tactics
3. You can use catchy content on your sidebars, headers, footers (and blog post footers) of the blog to draw the readers attention to your content. This way the the blog post draw the traffic in and you divert it to your benefit with clever bonuses or opt-in offers etc…
4. You can create a blog based on a certain topic and put it on full autopilot but having 100% of your traffic syndicated content. All you do is spend an hour or two a week promoting the blog a bit. Then in 6 months when their is great organic listings and lots of incoming links you simply step in and begin monetizing it. Setting multiple blogs up like this to brew in the background slowly gaining momentum until you need them is a great way to use free resources to do 90% of the work of getting the initial link building and indexing for a new campaign off the ground.

Don’t forget, with Syndicate Kahuna you still control the content placed on your blog. When a post is sent to your blog is appears as unpublished and only you can review and publish the content to your blog. You have full control!

Check out the 2 minute Syndicate Kahuna video

]]> http://www.longtailtreasure.com/how-i-use-syndicate-kahuna/feed/ http://www.longtailtreasure.com/the-free-syndicate-kahuna-doors-are-open/ http://www.longtailtreasure.com/the-free-syndicate-kahuna-doors-are-open/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:20:47 +0000 Todd http://www.longtailtreasure.com/?p=52 Last week I gave you a heads up about a free tool called Syndicate Kahuna due to be released that provides you with all the targeted blog content you need without having to resort to crappy PLR.

It’s called Syndicate Kahuna and it’s F.ree and it’s now OPEN for registration.

I’m not sure if there will be limit on the registrations though so check it out ASAP. Sometime these kinds of tools can only take so many users at a time until it’s had time to grow and then they open the doors again.

Basically Syndicate Kahuna is blog content provider. You attach a free script they give you to your blog and then specify the kinds of content you want to receive. Everyday you’ll have new content on your blog waiting for you to publish it.

Notice I said waiting for you?

It’s not so bold as to actually publish on your blog. You still have total control. The post appears in an unpublished status and you simply approve or disapprove at your discretion.

This is a wicked weapon and should be used as often as needed. Especially when you’re just swamped but need to get a post out to your blog.

Get Syndicate Kahuna For FREE Here …

You won’t be disappointed.

Article spinners are tools that take an article and then helps you to “spin” new unique versions of that article very quickly. Basically you specify sections of your article that you’d like to have swapped with certain keywords or phrases and the tool will go through various combinations and produce articles that are considered unique by google content standards.

Article spinners have become more common in the past couple year largely because the quality of the tools
has increased tremendously while the price for them has dropped significantly.

If your a member of a decent affiliate membership site like wealthy affiliates or traffic kahuna you’ll have access to some pretty decent article spinners within their member areas. If you’re membership site doesn’t have a decent article spinner you can use a free article spinner from article apps. For a free tool it’s pretty impressive.

Like all article spinner tools I’ve seen you usually need to spin a couple articles to get the hang of it and then your productivity will literally take off. being able to put out a dozen articles to various article directories in in just a couple hours will significantly boost your traffic and make it much easier to rank for your keywords.

FREE Article Spinner

I know I’ve been talking a lot about the Kahuna team lately and it’s mostly because they’ve been putting out so much great stuff lately, but their new free tool called Syndicate Kahuna is simply awesome and needs to be seen to be understood.

Checkout this 2 minute Syndicate Kahuna Video (opens in new window)

Syndicate Kahuna has not launched yet so only Traffic Kahuna members or those on the Traffic Kahuna notification list would have been given the early heads up. However it’s only a matter matter of days until the launch!

The thing I like most about the supply of blog content is that it’s so automatic while still leaving you with full control. Once this tool is set up you can specify how many posts you’d like to receive a day and for what topics. Then each day post will arrive in your blog in an “unpublished” state. This gives you the chance to look at it and decide if you want to publish it or not. It’s your blog so you decide what to publish.

How to be Notified of the FREE Syndicate Kahuna Launch

Since this is a Traffic Kahuna tool that is being given away the easiest way to be notified of the Syndicate Kahuna launch is to get on the

Traffic Kahuna notification list

Being on this list will ensure you get notified when the launch happens so you can off load the burden of always needing content for your blog.

I’m a member of Traffic Kahuna and based on the quality of tools they have built within Traffic Kahuna I can assure you this tool will totally Rock!

If your new to this wonderful tool here’s the gist of it. Comment Kahuna is a free tool that allows you to search for blogs, squidoo pages, and many other types of pages that support commenting, based on keywords and Google page rank. This allows you to quickly find blog posts relevant to what you’re trying to link to so you can comment on them and gain a back link. The best part is it separates out the ones that use the NO FOLLOW tag from those that do not. You can read more about that in my previous post on Comment Kahuna, “Building Back Links Fast with Comment Kahuna“.

If you’ve already been using this tool you should know that just the other day the Comment Kahuna team released a new version of the free tool to address “some changes Google has recently made”. It’s not clear to me which changes their referring to, but regardless, the changes that have occurred with Comment Kahuna since my first review are significant.

The most impressive improvement in my mind is the profile management. The features they’ve added to manage profiles and multiple user names per profile make it very easy to build out a number of commenter profiles very quickly.

With these profiles in hand you’ll have no trouble finding blog postings based on your keywords and submitting comments almost on autopilot.

btw, I believe the user manual is redone as well (not sure). Either way, it’s only 7 pages and very easy to understand. The tool is simply that simple.

Comment Kahuna is still one of the fastest and cheapest (free) ways to build backlinks to your pages.

You can grab a free copy of Comment Kahuna here.

My last post I told you about the free guide John Cow put out recently and many of you have emailed me telling me how good it is. Well if you’re grabbed a copy you already know about the keyword research tool they just released to go along with the guide.

As I mentioned before, the guide does an excellent job of showing how to do successful keyword research ensuring you’re targeting keywords that really do pay.

Well today they announced to those who have the guide that they’ve released a free keyword research tool that was designed to work with the free Build a Business Not Just a Blog guide. The keyword tool makes the techniques in the guide easier and faster!

I can assure you this is not a sales pitch. The guide really is that good!

When you get your copy you’ll receive a notification of where you can download the keyword tool.

cheers