Well the seat is more comfy and its a macbook on my lap and its not quite as messy but you get the general idea…

Li pointed me towards a great new service from Pierre which helps solve what should be (But never is) a simple problem.

Cligs

When you want to drop in an affiliate link somewhere out on the web often you will find that many of the people who are exposed to that link are from a location that the merchant doesnt want traffic from.

You know the kind of thing, you are promoting a UK offer yet if you drop the link in facebook you find a large percentage of the people who click it are US based and so the network tells them they dont qualify for that offer and sends them somewhere pointless instead.

Cligs helps solve that problem by allowing you to still have an innocent shortened URL whilst allowing you to send the traffic to different places depending on where they are located.

So UK people get the UK offer and US people get something equally tasty.

Simple ideas are often the most useful

Honestly if you are a user of Xrumer for forum spamming then please try to use your brain a little.

I am completely ok with the numbers game that is forum spam and that you have to try to throw as much out as cheaply as possible on the knowledge that some will stick however please try at least and do some quality control.

When doing a mass run of link spamming I would suggest that investing the time in checking what has stuck is probably a good idea before you repeat the same run again. If nothing else it tells you whats working and whats not.

Heres a snapshot of my inbox from 10 minutes ago…

Honestly these are all fake Xrumer members looking to spam Affearners. You cant do it.. I dont approve you and even if I do the site is spam tollerant. You cant drop forum profile links, they dont count. You cant drop links in posts as it gets removed automatically by my scripting.

All you are doing is showing me you dont know what your doing

Im looking for your suggestions on what I should write about. To make it easy for you to tell me I have added Skribit to the sidebar on the homepage here.

Its a simple service where you can suggest topics for me to cover and ill do my best to write content that matches those suggestions.

Some things I have been thinking of writing about include: -

Scraping - basic principles and technique
Making your on page links less attractive than the links that pay
Link bait starters guide

Lately I have been finding it easier and easier to post regular entries here and I thought I would share the reasons why. I like most people with a blog that gets a few readers find it hard to motivate myself into getting all the bits together to make up a new post.

You know, text, images, open up photoshop, get a brew, log in - thats enough to make me think ‘meh ill do it later’

Well now I have a way of working that cuts through all that crap and I can just get back to writing.

Software: -

For writing the posts I am now using MarsEdit on the mac (This page has some good suggestions for those on windows). MarsEdit is a great offline blog writing tool. Heres a screenshot of me working up this post.

(Note that MarsEdit underlines my crappy spelling)

I then send the finished post up to the blog automatically as a draft and publish when I am ready and have finished the tags, extras and stuff.

To add the images I have moved to using Jing which is a fantastic tool for grabbing, formatting and annotating the image before uploading it straight to Flickr leaving the embed code on my clipboard so I just paste it into MarsEdit.

You can add arrows, text and frames to suit. I will even screenshot straight out of photoshop to save me the effort of saving it as a web image first (Told you I was lazy)

Once the post is uploaded to the blog I will log in at my convenience and add some tags, meta data etc. Zemanta is a great tool for adding links automatically to any post as well as offering up so

me image suggestions to help illustrate the post too.

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

Small things I know but they make the creation of posts a job that can fit in around the rest of the jobs you have to sort.

Some things to add to this way of working: -

For post ideas I am thinking of adding Skribit but to be honest I hate what they have done with the latest version.

I am also thinking of writing a simple plugin that allows me to post a new blogpost announcement to Twitter automatically as its published, depends how useful others think that would be?