A lot of people are fans of the new XSite Pro 2.0.

Even Splork from www.lostballinhighweeds.com sings its praises (and he doesn’t praise a lot of stuff at all, usually the opposite).

But I have to disagree with Splork on this one as I’ve found XSitePro 2.0 to be a big let down. Still I’ll give it a 7/10 because while as an upgrade from 1.0 it isn’t much better, but it’s still a good product, just didn’t live up to its hype and isn’t a great improvement over XSP 1.0.

XSite Pro is certainly a handy piece of software, don’t get me wrong. It is great for newbies (and even advanced people) who are trying to set up and design websites that make money (in particular article sites). But there are obvious problems with the software and for the last year we’ve been told that XSP 2.0 was going to be the answer to all of those.

One of the biggest, most annoying things about XSP is that the code it spits out is not great from an SEO perspective. It is heavily focussed on a table layout which is what is easiest for XSP to implement, if you wanted to get the same look using css and divs you are still going to have to know html a bit, which is frustrating as I thought that would have been done for you in this new edition of XSP (which is supposed to be focussed on internet marketers - ie people who care about loading speeds, optimization and so forth).

Seemed like the obvious next step, but no, still the same crap that needs a coder to go in and fix up. They should at least have given us the option. Yes I’m being hyper critical here of a good piece of software, but this has been a long time in the making, it is expensive, and it isn’t really much better than the original edition from last year (why pay more? why the hooplah over 2.0?)

XSP 2 also has trouble importing XSP 1 websites and takes a lot of fiddling which is another frustration of mine, although I hear they are almost finished fixing that.

Also, it’s really annoying how xsite pro makes it so difficult to remove a left hand menu (lets say you want to keep it on some pages, but not on others (e.g. ppc landing pages)). If you remove it, it removes itself from every page, which isn’t what is wanted. Yet if you decide to ignore page layout completely (the solution that XSitePro recommends), you lose all your settings, not just your menu, but your fonts, backdrop headergraphc, the works.

I admit XSP 1 and 2 are good products, don’t get me wrong there, as they are very good for newbies to use and make it fast and easy to set up article sites. I still say that I lean on the recommending XSitePro side as it is the easiest web design software to use and is particularly good for article sites. But I see no real great advances in xsitepro 2 that are actually going to greatly increase your $$$, so if you already have XSitePro 1.0, I wouldn’t rush out and upgrade if I were you.

If you don’t have XSP at all, and you are looking to build high quality affiliate websites, then yes it is fantastic for that. Just note my pet peeves above so you are aware.

To visit the XSitePro 2.0 website, click here.

Hi Guys,

I had a few people emailing me asking how to create a thumbnail screenshot image, so I thought I’d do a blog post about how to do it using paint.net. I chose paint.net as it is free

Below you can see I’ve loaded up Paint.net and this is my starting canvas (notice the similarities to Adobe Photoshop):

Now, the first step in creating your thumbnail screenshot is to take a page that you want o make a thumbnail out of and load it up in your web browser. I chose the affilorama blog. Then press the "print screen" key on your keyboard. Then click into your paint.net windown and press ctrl-v (paste). Allow it to resize the canvas if it asks you for permission.

You should now see a page like below:

Next you’ll want to crop out any unnecessary stuff that is in your image. What you do is click on the dotted square box on the top left of the toolbox in Paint.net. Then select the area that you want to keep (ie the shaded area as shown below):

Then go to the Images menu at the top and choose "Crop to Selection"

Then go back to the images tab and select "Resize"

Now change the height to the height that you want your thumbnail to be. I’ve chosen 200 as you can see below (btw, make sure that ‘maintain aspect ratio’ is ticked):

Now you’re done, you can save your image as a jpg, gif or whatever you wish.

And as a result, we have our final thumbnail screenshot below (created in paint.net):

Bear in mind there is a whole lot more you can do using this handy, free image editing tool, such as drawing, applying effects and more. It isn’t as good as adobe photoshop, but hey, it’s F-R-E-E, and it does the trick

Mark

Hi Guys,

I had a couple of people recommend that I test out MSN’s new Online Commercial Intention tool, www.affilorama.com/oci, so I thought I’d check to see if the recommendations that it gives are accurate.

In fact I’ve heard that a large number of you are using this tool, that’s why I thought it was important that someone like me who has a LOT of data to test it with, had a look to see what’s really going on. Here’s my review.

What is this tool, first of all?

The tool is located at: http://www.affilorama.com/oci

When you click on the ‘query’ radio button, you can enter a query in the search box above it.

Then what the tool does is gives you a number between 0 and 1, which shows the probability that the searcher is searching with commercial intent (ie, they are thinking about buying something, rather than just browsing for free information).

Over the last few years, I’ve collected a LOT of accurate data about which keywords are profitable and which ones aren’t. Here’s a screenshot of one of my google adwords accounts just so you can see the level of spending I’m talking about:

At first I started playing around with a few dog training keywords and then I looked at some others across different markets, time and time again this tool proves to be accurate about 75-80% of the time.

Yes it does some silly things, like the word "free" it ranks as 0.5 (which is very high according to this tool). Then again, I haven’t tested this keyword, but common sense tells me that by itself, the word ‘free’ wouldn’t be selling anything.

So with that in mind, you wouldn’t want to put your house on the data you get from it, but you can get a pretty good idea of where to start when you have a bunch of keywords to kick off with.

Here’s an example of some of the keywords that I punched in. You’ll have to click the smaller image to see the full size image. You’ll see that for the 6 different learn guitar keywords, MSN’s Online Commercial Intent tool (www.affilorama.com/oci) was correct in it’s estimates 5 out of 6 times:

Not bad data to get for free. I spent thousands of dollars learning that information from my own tracking.

So anyway, I recommend that if you are serious about pay per click as a method of making money online that you check out this tool.

No I’m not an affiliate of this tool (it’s free), I’m just recommending it via this redirect here because the url for it is quite long and hard to remember: http://www.affilorama.com/oci

What are your thoughts on it? I’m interested in hearing what you have to say about it and the results that it gives you.

Mark

Hi Guys, 

Twitter is a relatively new (launched July 2006) microblogging and social networking website that allows you to make short text posts (140 characters max) to the twitter website, via twitter itself, or even craftier… though your cellphone, or a third party application such as Facebook.

Sound complicated?

Actually it isn’t. Perhaps many of you reading this are Twittering already. There are millions of people using this service, posting over 3 million messages a day.

I’ve recently set up my own personal twitter profile (not to be confused with the twitter profile’s I set up under a pen-name for my affiliate sites).

Here it is: http://www.twitter.com/markling

The way I twitter is pretty much whenever I suddenly remember to do it, I spend about 60 seconds, log into twitter and make a post (140 characters max) about what I’m up to right now.

It is just a short snapshot of my stream of consciousness.

I’ve been encouraging my writers lately to do the same and have recently developed a plan for using twitter to assist me in my search engine rankings (actually Mr K of my web 2.0 traffic secrets interview created most of this plan).

Many other marketers use twitter itself to make money (not just to help their organic search rankings improve for their websites).

Here are the most common ways of using twitter to make money:

1. Every 10th post you make, advertise a product that is relevant to the market that you twitter about. E.g. if you are always twittering about golf and your golf results, then every 10th twitter post could recommend a different affiliate product that you’ve found success with (or every 20th if you twitter often).

2. Business networking. It is a great way of keeping up with the play and actually getting to know some people who are high up in your industry that you are interested in. For example, it is not difficult to post a message and get a reply from John Reese, or Robert Kiyosaki (of Rich Dad, Poor Dad).

3. Getting more visitors to their websites from people who search twitter and follow people who they are interested in. For example, an avid dog lover might follow you if you regularly twitter about stuff to do with dogs. It is simply another avenue for getting traffic.

4. This is what I do, I follow what Mr K recommended to me and am implementing a cross linking strategy to get higher rankings in organic search results. Listen to my interview with Mr K for details on that. I’ll let you know my results in a few months. I have a lot of confidence in this as it makes a lot of SEO sense to me.

Anyway, if you haven’t set up a twitter account for yourself. It only takes a couple of minutes. I recommend that you set up a test account for yourself today and post about a topic that interests you (preferably one that you are an affiliate in).

All comments are welcome.

Mark

p.s. Sign up to twitter and follow me: www.twitter.com/markling

I get emails from people every day asking what are some profitable affiliate markets.

I do teach you how to find them for yourselves inside of the affilorama members area. (Sign up for a free account and you’ll receive over 50 step-by-step training videos inside).

However if you just want a list to take a look at, then here is a good list of profitable affiliate markets. There are MANY MANY more, but if you do decide to affiliate in any one of these markets, they are certainly worthwhile:

If you are looking for profitable affiliate markets in clickbank, here are a few:

Tattoos
save marriage tips
Learn Japanese
Body building
weight loss
Wholesale Supplier databases
learn french, spanish, german etc
learn guitar
learn to sing
learn songwriting
learn piano
turn your car into a hybrid (water & fuel)
conversational hypnosis
dog training
cat training
stop panic attacks
cure yeast infections
fix your computer’s registry
how to be irresistible to men
how to be irresistible to women
learn sign language
how to get pregnant
learn german, spanish, french
world of warcraft strategy

and there are many more…

Those ones are particularly in reference to affiliate products at Clickbank. You could also look at some really good CPA affiliate offers at places like Azoogle.com and CPA Empire.com.

I hope this short post sparks some of you into action. If you can’t figure out how to find a profitable affiliate program (and you really should check out my video lessons in the affilorama members area, which you can sign up to here), then just choose one of those markets above, I’ve made it easy for you!

All the best to your success!

Mark