Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Download now the new antivirus

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell that this is a bunch of crap!

If you get an email with "Download now the new antivirus" as the subject line. Just delete it. It isn't from microsoft and it doesn't lead to a microsoft domain and it isn't a virus detection program. My bet is that it is a virus itself.

The return path is: anonymous@www003.ifxwh.com.br
even though the reply is microsoft.com

Monday, September 04, 2006

The truth about Website Content Wizard

OK.. so I haven't written in a while :) But, 1) I've been extremely busy with two separate coding projects and 2) I didn't have anything real useful to say. But now 1) I've reduced my hours on one project and 2) I've got something worth saying. So. . .

If you have subscribed to any marketing newsletter, you've probably already heard about Website Content Wizard. If you haven't Website Content Wizard is being sold as an easy way to rewrite articles in order to avoid the duplicate content penalty.

However, if you watch the videos on the sales page, you will quickly learn that there is a lot of prep work involved before you get to the point where you can create 100 copies of the same article in 14 seconds. So, if you are looking for something that can read an article, deduce what it is about, and rewrite it so that a computer could not tell it was the same article, keep looking. And if you find it, let me know. There are a ton of people still looking for this.

I've been looking at article generating tools for a couple of years. In fact, I've written my own tool that does a pretty simple search and replace operation. What I can tell you from my own research is that you can have one of two possible solutions. You can create a tool that produces documents that look like they should mean something but don't. Call this the Jabberwocky tool. Basically replacing nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, prepositional phrases for prepositional phrases, etc. Or you can create a tool that will create "real" documents. Using the Jabberwocky tool, you will be able to knock out documents quickly but they won't mean anything. I suppose if you are ONLY after adsense income, this might be a useful solution. However, any tool that creates real documents will take time to setup.

Now, if you are looking for a tool that you can install, push a button and have 1000's of articles 10 minutes after you purchase the product, Website Content Wizard isn't for you. A better solution for you would be the Essay Generator check it out. It's free! If you're willing to do some work, but still want a free tool. Check out the SciGen tool. (Warning: requires some programming knowledge and/or a 'nix computer.)

If you are willing to do a bit of work and want a tool that will HELP you. Get Website Content Wizard.

Now, before I get into how it works, let me go over a few possible ways this tool could be used. These suggestions are based on what the product currently does and my conversations with the developer on planned enhancements.

  • An ecommerce site might use this tool to produce unique sales copy for each product.
    In fact, David has a great example of does just this using cameras as one of his video tutorials. It's pretty sad that so many of the people who bought the product completely miss this use.
  • Create multiple versions of the same sales letter and split test them to determine the most effective sales letter.
    Did you know that just changing one word in the title of a sales letter has been known to double sales? Most of the time, you would have never guessed this unless you had made the change and done the split test.
  • A web designer might use this tool to create web templates.
  • A student might use this tool to rewrite essays.
    Before anyone thinks I'm talking about cheating, which this tool could easily be used for. There is also the possibility that a student would want to use this tool to rewrite or enhance an article they personally wrote.
  • Creating multiple copies of the same article to submit to article directories so you can use the article on your own site without suffering from a duplicate content penalty from your own article.
  • Using an article as a blog series.
  • And obviously, creating multiple unique articles for the same site.
How can we do this? Well, there are two very powerful features of Website Content Wizard
that make this all possible:
  1. An extremely large and very useful thesaurus.
  2. Block substitution.
Let's address block substitution first.

Block substitution allows you to place a marker on your main project template that indicates one of a set of words should occur at that location. You can then attach a list of related phrases to that marker such that every time the application comes to that marker, it will randomly pick a phrase from the list. The current version only allows "flat" substitution. But, we're told that a future version will allow nested substitution. Very cool! Very powerful!

The other thing you can do with this tool is thesaurus substitution. Using this feature, you can mark words in your main document that you want to use substitution for and then choose the words that should be substituted. Again, a future version should also allow this within the blocks as well as the main document. Even if all you use the thesaurus for is to help you come up with a better way of saying what you want to say, the price of the application is well worth it!

The last feature that makes all of this useful for the ecommerce project I mentioned above is the "mail merge" feature. You can put content in an excel spreadsheet and merge it into your project template with the block substitution and the thesaurus substitution and end up with unique product descriptions for all of the products in the spreadsheet.

My advice. Go grab a copy of Website Content Wizard now while it is new and then join the discussions in the private forum and shape the future of the great product before it's too late and you have to accept the product the rest of us had a hand in creating because we bought it early.

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Category: web content