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Forget BANS Sites and Learn to Love Data

December 3, 2008

You may be a blogger. That may be where you start. You may be a PPC affiliate marketer. That could be a starting place. You may not want to get your hand dirty with all the technical details. That’s great also, if you have a staff or a budget for hiring other people. But I would say that most of the readers of this blog do not.

Data. What is data? Anything on the internet for the most part. As soon as you post an article to your blog, it becomes data. I know. I know. You wrote it. It’s the result of your work. But once it hits the internet, it becomes data. What else is data? The Clickbank marketplace XML. Affiliate datafeeds. Your bookmarks. The list goes on.

I am a blogger. I am an affiliate marketer. I do use PPC. But data is what got me as far as I have. It is a big piece of the puzzle. I write software also. But the software’s purpose: to manipulate, present and transfer data.

There was a time when I was looking for the killer app or trying to come up with the code to create it. This app would handle everything I do online to make money, from brainstorming a post to submitting it to various sites. Great idea and still on backburner.

But the data behind such a tool is basically the same data I have now. What if I took out the killer app and worked with just the data? That would give me more options. I could use the tool suited to each specific job and then move the data between them.

So that’s where I have been. On a software hunt. It takes me away from my normal schedule, but in the end, it is worth it. I always find something new and useful that speeds up one process or another. Well here is what I found this time:

Screen Scrapers

Not necessarily black hat. Sometimes you just need information, whether it be from Wikipedia or elsewhere. Or maybe just to check your rank in various search engines.

Affiliate Datafeeds

Datafeeds help you to move the data for your affiliate program fast. About 90% of the money I have made through affiliate marketing has come through affiliate programs that supply datafeeds.

And what the hell, here is more from Cubrowski.

Tools for Moving and Transforming Data

These are relatively new. Take any data source format at any location, local, remote or secure and move and transform it into any other data source.

Working with MySql

MySQL
Image via Wikipedia

Here are some tools that make working with MySql easier. There are many more out there. Or you can use PHPmyadmin.

Importing Csv Files Into Wordpress

For the longest time, there were only paid versions of plugins that would do this. I am sure I will be modifying one of these so that it can import pages and not just posts.

  • Import CSV - There is a pay version of this plugin that does more like integrate with All-In-One SEO.
  • Convert CSV Datafeeds to Wordpress Posts - Not actually a plugin, in that you have to navigate to the tool manually in Wordpress, but it will also do the job.

Now this may be the boring part of the job, working with data. But eventually, you may learn it’s power. If you could divide the internet into three parts, those parts would be people, data and algorithms. There is a motherload of tools in this post. Some I wish I had earlier. Some I never thought existed. So if you don’t need them now, if you stay in this business for any length of time, you might want to bookmark this post for later. Or just wait. I may give an example of their usage here. Forget paying for a bans system. You can do it better with these tools for free.

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