I’ve been intending to write something about this for a while now, but the subject came up today on one of the forums I frequent and so I pretty much said what I wanted to say. This is of course with regards to creating revenue generating “niche” websites. I don’t have a ton more to add really, so I’m just going to re-post it here verbatim (gee, I’m syndicating my own content… how novel!) Enjoy!
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Good discussion…

I’d like to add a comparison - television.

I should start off by saying I have NOT used this database yet. Honestly, I’ve been mostly avoiding articles up to this point because they are a pain to integrate! However, this has me about to change my mind. I’m still teetering on the edge personally, but I know some of you are specifically looking for a good article database solution, because we’ve talked about it. Anyway, if you’ve been after something along these lines but didn’t want to pay a big monthly fee, check this out. At the holiday price of $47, this may be pretty dang hard to beat. No it’s not ArticleMiner or whatever other article system, but it just might solve a problem and is really cheap. The integrated rotation functions are a big part of what has me intrigued. Oh and of course, the idea of having article snippets as content for a site, that are keyword specific and will rotate.

Here you go… for all you NicheCreator fans/users out there. Steve already posted “+” and “-” keyword tokens on the forum, but nobody had done the KEYWORDCAPS token that was asked for. I really thought someone else would do it before I got to it, but aparently not. So, here it is!

NicheCreator %%KEYWORDCAPS%% token.

Enjoy… not much to it really, it will make the first letter of every word in the keyword/phrase into uppercase. Just drop it in your include directory and you can use the %%keywordcaps%% token to call it wherever you wish!

If you do anything online with blogs, you no doubt know (or sure as heck SHOULD know!) that you need to ping the various blog update services, so that you can get more spider activity to your blog. The trouble is, so many “sploggers” and the like have hammered the update directories so much that many of them are either not accepting pings at all anymore, or have pretty severe spam filters in place. So far every ping list I’ve ever seen for people to use in their blogging software has contained sites that either specifically blacklist anyone who pings, or just plain don’t accept your ping at all, wasintg your bandwidth & server resources.

Yesterday I wrote about FastContent, a cool little utility for grabbing articles in quantity and formatting them for your websites.

I am digging into it a bit deeper, and have found one annoying limitation. It does not seem to handle multi-word keywords as a single phrase. For example, a search for red widgets seems that it would reveal articles with EITHER red OR widgets ANYWHERE in the article. This is a real drag… putting the phrase in quotes does not seem to change anything, nor does adding a plus sign between keywords, such as red+widgets.

I’m really happy to have happened upon this little gem. It’s dirt cheap (especially before December 15th) and is basically what Orwell wishes it could be. You enter a keyword, and it goes out to a number of article directories and grabs articles on the keyword, and if you want will even spit them out as their own mini site complete with cross links, adsense, etc. I’m using it to get articles on my NicheCreator sites personally. I was able to put nearly 50,000 pages online just last night alone, but I was skipping articles for them because Orwell was too dang tedious, and I can’t justify something like ArticleMiner right now.

Well I posted a few days ago about httPulse, all excited about it. I’ve been waiting for a decent index tracking utility for some time, and preferably a free one. So, several days and 1 software upgrade later, I still can’t use httpulse.

I don’t know why exactly, and I’ve been in contact with the developers about this. Sounds like a few people just have problems with it crashing, and they aren’t sure why yet. I have volunteered my testing abilities to help them solve it, so hopefully they take me up on it as I really would like there to be a decent free utility out there for checking one’s domain indexing. Plus, I wrote a script already that automates the data entry of large lists of domains. Without it you have to enter them one by one, and if you have anything more than about 10 domains that’ll drive you crazy!

I’ve been waiting very very impatiently for this for a few weeks, and JUST got the email about it a moment ago. I have not even launched it yet to try it myself, I wanted to get it posted immediately!

What am I talking about? Well, here it is straight from the horse’s mouth:

Free webmaster tools - A 3-IN-1 tool that will confidentially store your sites’ login info, monitor all your indexed web pages for unlimited sites, including a free reminder function you can use to track any number of things.

If any of you use RSS2Blog (and I know you do! ) then you probably already know about issues like having outbound links in your content postings. There are two problems with this, one is the page rank that you are now potentially giving away to other sites, and the more serious problem is visitors can LEAVE YOUR SITE! Since the goal here is to earn our living, we need to make sure that visitors don’t leave by any means that doesn’t pay us (short of closing their browser or typing in a new address).

You may have seen some buzz about this on various forums if you do any portal site or keyword-based site building. Well, I decided to take the plunge and check it out, not wanting to miss out on the low intro price, just in case it really was as good as it claimed. So far…?

WOW.

Now I warn you, this program is still early in development so it has some rough edges, and if you just take it out of the “box” and use it with its defaults, you may not be impressed. But you shouldn’t be using ANYTHING the way it comes standard!