As Wikipedia states, "A scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping."

The most common type of scraper sites are blogs that pull posts directly from other blogs' RSS feeds (technically, the FeedWordPress plug-in can be configured to create a scraper blog). The scraper blogs publish this material as their own and then populate their blog with advertising (most commonly, Google AdSense).



Recently, the topic of scraper blogs has become an extremely popular topic to discuss within the blogging community. Some bloggers, such as Lorelle, take extreme measures to track down and stop every single blog that is scraping their content. Although fighting scraper blogs may be the latest trend in the blogging community, my personal opinion is: Oh Well.

At first glance, this may seem like a foolish position to take. However, the reason that I don't waste my time acting like a detective and tracking down scrapers is because I know how to optimize posts to deal with them. By implementing the tips below, you can save yourself a lot of time and worry, and even benefit from your blog getting scraped:

Internal Linking: If you're not already linking to other blog posts from within your current posts, it's time to start. Not only will this give you free links from blogs that scrape you, but it will also help your internal linking structure. In addition to linking from SEO optimized keywords, you can also link images to other posts or areas of your blog.

RSS Footer: By using this simple plug-in, you can do the following:


This means that you can actually earn revenue from the blogs that are republishing your feeds

Because there are so many bloggers who waste their time "chasing down" blog scrapers, the majority of scraper sites don't last too long. However, while they are live, follow the simple steps above and you can reap some benefits for doing minimal work.

(Some people worry about scrapers triggering duplicate content filters, but from my experience, your site will not be affected, it will only be the scrapers that are unable to rank).

Do you want to increase your traffic and set yourself apart from your competitors? Although there are many approaches that you could take, here's one of the simplest: write content that entertains your visitors.

When people visit your web site, you need to have content that grabs their attention. The days of writing repetitive, keyword dense articles are gone: if you really want your web site to succeed, you have to write for your VISITORS, not the search engines.

The best way to accomplish this task is to write content that tells a story. Not only will this entertain your visitors, but it will also help them relate to you and your web site.

Since we like providing you with actual examples of the tips we recommend, consider the following:

Recently, a woman was able to sell a $10-$20 box of 44 generic Pokemon cards for $150 on eBay. Not only did she make a huge profit, but her auction attracted nearly 200,000 views!

How did she do it? Simple: instead of giving a generic description, she wrote a story that was entertaining and easy for people to relate to. Since the auction ended several weeks ago, here's a copy of the story she wrote for the item's description:



"I’m selling a bunch of Pokemon cards. Why? Because my kids sneaked them into my shopping cart while at the grocery store and I ended up buying them because I didn’t notice they were there until we got home. How could I have possibly not noticed they were in my cart, you ask? Let me explain.

You haven’t lived until you’ve gone grocery shopping with six kids in tow. I would rather swim, covered in bait, through the English Channel, be a contestant on Fear Factor when they’re having pig brains for lunch, or do fourth grade math than to take my six kids to the grocery store. Because I absolutely detest grocery shopping, I tend to put it off as long as possible. There comes a time, however, when you’re peering into your fridge and thinking, ‘Hmmm, what can I make with ketchup, Italian dressing, and half an onion,’ that you decide you cannot avoid going to the grocery store any longer. Before beginning this most treacherous mission, I gather all the kids together and give them “The Lecture“.

“The Lecture“ goes like this…

MOM: “We have to go to the grocery store.”

KIDS: “Whine whine whine whine whine.“

MOM: “Hey, I don’t want to go either, but it’s either that or we’re eating cream of onion-ketchup soup and drinking Italian dressing for dinner tonight.”

KIDS: “Whine whine whine whine whine.“

MOM: “Now here are the rules: do not ask me for anything, do not poke the packages of meat in the butcher section, do not test the laws of physics and try to take out the bottom can in the pyramid shaped display, do not play baseball with oranges in the produce section, and most importantly, do not try to leave your brother at the store. Again.”

OK, the kids have been briefed. Time to go.

Once at the store, we grab not one, but two shopping carts. I wear the baby in a sling and the two little children sit in the carts while I push one cart and my oldest son pushes the other one. My oldest daughter is not allowed to push a cart. Ever. Why? Because the last time I let her push the cart, she smashed into my ankles so many times, my feet had to be amputated by the end of our shopping trip. This is not a good thing. You try running after a toddler with no feet sometime.

At this point, a woman looks at our two carts and asks me, “Are they all yours?” I answer good naturedly, “Yep!

“Oh my, you have your hands full.”

“Yes, I do, but it‘s fun!” I say smiling. I’ve heard all this before. In fact, I hear it every time I go anywhere with my brood.

We begin in the produce section where all these wonderfully, artistically arranged pyramids of fruit stand. There is something so irresistibly appealing about the apple on the bottom of the pile, that a child cannot help but try to touch it. Much like a bug to a zapper, the child is drawn to this piece of fruit. I turn around to the sounds of apples cascading down the display and onto the floor. Like Indiana Jones, there stands my son holding the all-consuming treasure that he just HAD to get and gazing at me with this dumbfounded look as if to say, “Did you see that??? Wow! I never thought that would happen!”

I give the offending child an exasperated sigh and say, “Didn’t I tell you, before we left, that I didn’t want you taking stuff from the bottom of the pile???”

“No. You said that you didn’t want us to take a can from the bottom of the pile. You didn’t say anything about apples.”

With superhuman effort, I resist the urge to send my child to the moon and instead focus on the positive - my child actually listened to me and remembered what I said!!! I make a mental note to be a little more specific the next time I give the kids The Grocery Store Lecture.

A little old man looks at all of us and says, “Are all of those your kids?”

Thinking about the apple incident, I reply, “Nope. They just started following me. I’ve never seen them before in my life.”

OK, now onto the bakery section where everything smells so good, I’m tempted to fill my cart with cookies and call it a day. Being on a perpetual diet, I try to hurry past the assortment of pies, cakes, breads, and pastries that have my children drooling. At this point the chorus of “Can we gets” begins.

“Can we get donuts?”

“No.”

“Can we get cupcakes?”

“No.”

“Can we get muffins?”

“No.”

“Can we get pie?”

“No.”

You’d think they’d catch on by this point, but no, they’re just getting started.

In the bakery, they’re giving away free samples of coffee cake and of course, my kids all take one. The toddler decides he doesn’t like it and proceeds to spit it out in my hand. (That’s what moms do. We put our hands in front of our children’s mouths so they can spit stuff into them. We’d rather carry around a handful of chewed up coffee cake, than to have the child spit it out onto the floor. I’m not sure why this is, but ask any mom and she’ll tell you the same.) Of course, there’s no garbage can around, so I continue shopping one-handed while searching for someplace to dispose of the regurgitated mess in my hand.

In the meat department, a mother with one small baby asks me, “Wow! Are all six yours?”

I answer her, “Yes, but I’m thinking of selling a couple of them.”

(Still searching for a garbage can at this point.)

Ok, after the meat department, my kids’ attention spans are spent. They’re done shopping at this point, but we aren’t even halfway through the store. This is about the time they like to start having shopping cart races. And who may I thank for teaching them this fun pastime? My seventh “child”, also known as my husband. While I’m picking out loaves of bread, the kids are running down the aisle behind the carts in an effort to get us kicked out of the store. I put to stop to that just as my son is about to crash head on into a giant cardboard cut-out of a Keebler elf stacked with packages of cookies.

Ah! Yes! I find a small trash can by the coffee machine in the cereal aisle and finally dump out the squishy contents of my hand. After standing in the cereal aisle for an hour and a half while the kids perused the various cereals, comparing the marshmallow and cheap, plastic toy content of each box, I broke down and let them each pick out a box. At any given time, we have twenty open boxes of cereal in my house.

As this is going on, my toddler is playing Houdini and maneuvering his little body out of the seat belt in an attempt to stand up in the cart. I’m amazed the kid made it to his second birthday without suffering a brain damaging head injury. In between trying to flip himself out of the cart, he sucks on the metal bars of the shopping cart. Mmmm, can you say “influenza”?

The shopping trip continues much like this. I break up fights between the kids now and then and stoop down to pick up items that the toddler has flung out of the cart. I desperately try to get everything on my list without adding too many other goodies to the carts.

Somehow I manage to complete my shopping in under four hours and head for the check-outs where my kids start in on a chorus of, “Can we have candy?” What evil minded person decided it would be a good idea to put a display of candy in the check-out lanes, right at a child’s eye level? Obviously someone who has never been shopping with children.

As I unload the carts, I notice many extra items that my kids have sneaked in the carts unbeknownst to me. I remove a box of Twinkies, a package of cupcakes, a bag of candy, and a can of cat food (we don’t even have a cat!). I somehow missed the box of Pokemon cards however and ended up purchasing them unbeknownst to me. As I pay for my purchases, the clerk looks at me, indicates my kids, and asks, “Are they all yours?”

Frustrated, exhausted from my trip, sick to my stomach from writing out a check for $289.53, dreading unloading all the groceries and putting them away and tired of hearing that question, I look at the clerk and answer her in my most sarcastic voice, “No. They’re not mine. I just go around the neighborhood gathering up kids to take to the grocery store because it’s so much more fun that way.”

So, up for auction is an opened (they ripped open the box on the way home from the store) package of Pokemon cards. There are 44 cards total. They’re in perfect condition, as I took them away from the kiddos as soon as we got home from the store. Many of them say “Energy”. I tried carrying them around with me, but they didn’t work. I definitely didn’t have any more energy than usual. One of them is shiny. There are a few creature-like things on many of them. One is called Pupitar. Hee hee hee Pupitar! (Oh no! My kids’ sense of humor is rubbing off on me!) Anyway, I don’t there’s anything special about any of these cards, but I’m very much not an authority on Pokemon cards. I just know that I’m not letting my kids keep these as a reward for their sneakiness.

Shipping is FREE on this item. Insurance is optional, but once I drop the package at the post office, it is no longer my responsibility. For example, if my son decides to pour a bottle of glue into the envelope, or my daughter spills a glass of juice on the package, that’s my responsibility and I will fully refund your money. If, however, I take the envelope to the post office and a disgruntled mail carrier sets fire to it, a pack of wild dogs rip into it, or a mail sorting machine shreds it, it’s out of my hands, so you may want to add insurance. I will leave feedback for you as soon as I’ve received your payment. I will be happy to combine shipping on multiple items won within three days. This comes from a smoke-free, pet-free, child-filled home. Please ask me any questions before placing your bid. Happy bidding!"

Recently, I decided that one of the blogs I run needed to have more content. Although I post three to four times per week, I felt that this specific blog would benefit from more posts. After thinking about what kind of content would provide the most value to my visitors, I concluded that my readers would benefit most from current news about the subject of my blog.

After a lot of searching and experimenting, a found a simple plug-in that could do exactly what I needed: FeedWordPress.

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from Atom or RSS that you choose into your WordPress blog.

This means that you can syndicate content from any blog, newsfeed or other source that you choose. Best of all, once it's setup, FeedWordPress runs automatically.

After you have downloaded FeedWordPress, uploaded it to your WordPress plug-ins folder and activated it from your WP admin panel, you can have several different customization options to choose from:



To add the feeds that you desire, simply add the blog, news source or other web site that you choose to your Blogroll and place it in the contributors category. Once you have added all the sources you want, click the Syndicated tab (under the Blogroll tab), click "Find Feed" next to each blog and FWP will automatically find the Atom or RSS feed for that source. You can also choose which of your blog categories you would like each of the feeds to be posted under.

After you've finished customizing and adding feeds, the last thing you need to do is create a cron job to automatically update your blog. If your host has a cPanel, this task is extremely easy. Simply click the Cron Job icon, paste in the following code:

cd $HOME/www/wp-content ; php -q update-feeds.php

(If your file path is different, be sure to update it accordingly),

and choose the interval at which you would like FWP to update your blog.



Once you have completed all of the steps listed above, FeedWordPress will check the RSS feeds you've chosen at the intervals you've selected. When it finds new content in the feeds, it will use it to automatically create new posts on your blog!

View 5 Comment(s)

What is a resource library?
A resource library is a group of articles on a web site that provide relevant information to the web site's target demographic. The articles in the resource library can be anything from a detailed explanation of a specific term or topic, a step-by-step guide about how to accomplish something or a review of a new concept within the industry. Although there are all kinds of articles that can fit into a web site's resource library, the key factor is that instead of trying to sell or promote anything related to your company, they simply provide your visitors with original, usual knowledge.



Why should I create a resource library?
In case you missed the obvious, the article you are currently reading is part of our resource library. As you have probably noticed, this section of our web site adds a lot of value for our visitors. Although we do not promote or sell anything through this section of the web site, we feel that the more informed and comfortable you are with the subject with internet marketing, the better our long-term professional relationship with you is going to be.

In addition to building trust with your potential and current customers, a second benefit of a resource library is that if you update it on a regular basis, you are going to increase the amount of returning visitors that your web site. As long as you continue to produce quality content, people will continue to come back to read the information that you are offering.

Finally, a properly optimized resource library will increase your search engine traffic. Not only will other web sites be more inclined to link to your non-commercial pages, but the search engines will be able to trust your informational pages and thus supply your web site with quality rankings.

So, whether you decide to create a resource library in the form of a blog, forum, static pages or anything else, the key is to provide your users (and the search engines) with great articles that are original and useful!

Need to build-up content for a new site FAST?

Sure, you can hire a copywriter and pay them to write unique articles for you. That's always ideal. But what if you're low on time? budget? or both?

PLR articles to the rescue.

PLR stands for Private Label Rights. PLR articles are a group of articles, typically purchased in bulk for $0.10 to $2 per article, where you get a non exclusive right to use and distribute the articles as if they were your own.

PLR articles, or private label rights articles, are a good way to add useful, interesting, search engine friendly content to your website.

Using PLR articles we often build content sites with hundreds of pages, in less than two weeks and without spending more than $1,000. Search google for PLR articles and you'll find dozens of sites offering these packages.

There are a few things you should be aware of -

#1. PLR Membership sites - some PLR article sites require that you join and start paying a monthly membership. The "hook" is, you'll keep getting updates to the PLR articles and keep building your site. While it's obviously best to continually build and expand your content site, most PLR membership sites are a scam.

#2. Exclusive vs Non exclusive - Some sites offer you pay slightly more and gain exclusive rights to the articles, where they will remove those articles from their site as soon as you purchase them. In some cases this is worth looking into.

#3. Reputation - We've seen some PLR article sites, selling articles that don't belong to them. Do your homework so that you don't end up getting hit with copyright infrignment.

#4. Duplicate Content slap - Google (and other search engines) automatically remove listings from their directory where page content matches the same content on other sites. PLR articles are often purchased by multiple users, making it more difficult to avoid the duplicate content slap.

When purchasing PLR articles, always make sure you rewrite the content so that it becomes unique. One quick solution we found is WhiteSmoke. WhiteSmoke lets you enrich content, adding adjectives and nouns throughout the text, making your articles unique.



Here are some recommended PLR article sources that we've used:

Constant Content
PLRBuyer
EasyPLR
PLRMiniMart


Please use the comments section to recommend any additional sources for PLR articles.

View 2 Comment(s)

How wide should your website be?

Should you design your site for 800x600 resolution or 1024x768?

If you monitor your website visitor screen resolution stats, the numbers probably resemble this chart:



Research shows most users have switched to a resolution of 1024x768 or higher at a ratio of 2 to 1 compared to users who are still using 800x600.

Some experts claim it all depends on who your users are, what their needs are and what time of day it is...

Our main interest was what converts better.

It's not what looks better, what users like better or how do you fit as much as possible above the fold. It's all about what sells more.

We just had to know the real deal.

So as part of this Make Money with SoftwareProjects series, I am going to share with you the results of a three month case study we conducted, to answer the age-old question of what resolution should you design your website for.

Thin or Wide?

Case Study - Comparing conversion rates across a wide array of thin (800x600) vs wide (1024x768) landing pages

Details - We designed 5 landing pages, across different industries and divided the sites to three groups.

5_ThinSites: Landing pages designed to fit 800x600 resolution
5_WideSites: Landing pages designed to fit 1024x768 resolution
5_ResizableSites: Landing pages designed to fit 100% of page width, displaying properly under both 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions.

Each group of landing pages contained two mortgage-leads sites, one business-leads site, one diet-pills site and one ringtones site.

We used the same 5 landing pages across each of the three groups, redesigning the pages so that they fit each resolution.

The Test -

Over a period of 90 days, we used Email Marketing, Pay Per Click and Link building techniques to drive traffic to the three groups of sites. Every campaign was designed to split traffic evenly across the pages.

So for example an email campaign that generated 100 clicks, click1 was sent to site1 of first group, click2 was sent to site1 of second group, click3 was sent to site1 of third group etc.

Results -

See below a chart summarizing the results over 90 days across 15 landing pages:



The results clearly show visitors to the thin sites (designed for 800x600 resolution) spent less time on the site (it was easier to find what they wanted), less users bounced from the site without reading through and most importantly - thin sites achieved a conversion rate of 4.4%, which is 37% better than the resizable-sites (made to fit) and 8% better than the wide sites.

Explanation:

Yes, most users have resolutions far higher than 800x600 these days. But when your site takes 1024 pixels wide or worse yet, 100% of the screen width, users are forced to concentrate harder moving their eyes left to right and back as they read through your site.

61% of the users left the wide sites without reading any further, compared to only 42% with the thin sites.

The conclusion is clear: Design sites to fit 800x600 and you'll dramatically increase your bottom line. Limiting yourself to 800 pixels wide, will force you to clean up pages and not clutter them with too much information.

If you absolutely have to go wider, do so AFTER the conversion event, or after users login to the site. Keep the external store and landing pages to a maximum of 800 pixels wide.

--

For those of you who don't know the "rules" behind the Make Money with SoftwareProjects series, here they are:

Every Friday, SoftwareProjects will post a new "make money by doing X" post. It can be an invitation to perform a service, a tried-and-tested technique to immediately boost sales, free traffic etc. The only requirement is that whatever we post as part of our "Make Money by doing X" series - must be stuff you can immediately take to the bank, and not just vague ideas.

Hopefully this series will encourage & inspire new entreprenuers, provide value to business owners and demonstrate the depth and breatdh of SoftwareProjects services. Feel free to link to this series and blog about it.



View 6 Comment(s)