I just learned that Robert Puddy of AdvertisingKnowHow has launched an autoresponder service
I’ve known Robert to produce quality services, so I’m expecting this new service to be of the same high quality.
If you get an autoresponder from Robert, then you’re in the safe hands of someone who really knows what should go into a good autoresponder service.
No TagsAdd comment April 9th, 2005
Article Equalizer is an application created by Rod Beckwith and Jeff Alderson.
The Article Equalizer version I’m testing is 1.1.1
I originally started out by testing version 1.0.3, but halfway through my tests I received an update from Jeff and Rod.
Article Equalizer comes with a 22 page PDF manual covering the installation procedure, the interface, how to set up a project and how to select the article source.
It also shows you how you how to upload files using FTP and how to use the File and Edit menus.
I skipped this manual and went straight on to testing the program.
Article Eqaulizer is divided into 5 tabs:
The first thing I did was to set up my “Output Folder”. Basically it’s just telling Article Equalizer where it should put my files.
Make sure you specify a directory that will be used exclusively for this specific Article Equalizer project. Don’t just point to your Desktop or your Documents folder.
My recommendation is to create a directory called “Article Equalizer Output” and create separate sub-directories in this folder for each project.
Then I selected the “Article Page Template” and the “Index Page Template” for the project.
Article Equalizer comes with two example templates that I think you should use for your first test.
Then, when you are familiar with the product you can either build up new templates based on the original templates, or you can modify existing templates for your site so they can be used by Article Equalizer.
The next thing to select was the “Article Page Title”.
“Article Page Title” is a drop-down menu with two different options:
Personally I chose to create my own “Article Page Title” like this:
People spotting the article on a search engine result page couldn’t care less about which site it came from, but the title of the article is very important for them. So title first, and then my site name because it contains keywords describing the overall theme of the site.
Then I selected how many articles Article Equalizer should fetch.
From 10 to 200 in steps of 10, from 200 to 900 in steps of 100, and finally 999 articles as the absolute maximum number of articles. In version 1.1.1 an additional option, “All articles”, was introduced which will let you fetch all the articles in a category.
I didn’t really know how many articles I could expect to find for my test, so I just went for a nice round 100 articles to collect. I later changed this to “All articles” because of a feature that was introduced in version 1.1.1
Then it was time to set the “Link Text Max Length”. The default is 60 characters, but you can choose anywhere between 20 and 100 in steps of 10.
60 seemed like a good starting point, so I just went with the default value.
“Output File Extension” is where you decide between the following:
I went for .htm because this is the extension the existing files on my domain use.
The next thing to set up is “Articles Per Index Page”.
The default is 20 articles, but you can set it just like “Articles to Collect”.
20 links to articles per index page seemed like a good choice, so I just went with the default.
A new feature in version 1.1.1 is the ability to choose how each page is named.
In version 1.0.3 filenames were made up of the words in the title of the article with spaces substituted by dashes.
In this version you can choose between:
The concatenated version is hard to read, and the last naming convention does absolutely nothing for your search engine ranking, so stick with one of the first two options.
ettings are done from the “Project Setup” tab.
The next tab is the “Data Source” tab, and this is where you select which article database website Article Equalizer should use, and also which category it should choose from.
There are currently 3 different article database websites included for you to choose from.
One site features 23,550 articles, the other has 33,442 and the third serves something in the vicinity of 17,000 - a total very close to 74,000- and growing every day.
For the test I selected the article database website with the most articles, and chose an appropriate category.
You can select just one article database website at a time, and you can also just choose one category.
These few settings are what are needed to start collecting the articles.
When the 100 articles I decided on had been fetched Article Eqaulizer told me that 99 had been added to my local collection, and that 1 duplicate had been found.
I noticed that one of the article databases showed “Fetching article xxx of 100000” while getting the the articles despite the fact that none of these databases had more than 100,000 items. It stopped nicely after it hadreached thereal number of articles in that category though.
It would have been nice to be able to select categories “fitness”, “health” and “sports” at the same time.
But it’s not, and this is where I think Article Equalizer could be improved. Being able to select multiple categories would be really helpful.
Thankfully there is a workaround to this. It not automated, but it’s working.
You see, I like to test stuff, so I selected the second appropriate category and let Article Equalizer fetch 100 articles again.
I didn’t know if it would throw my initial 99 articles away or if it would append these new 100 articles to the ones I fetched before.
Gladly it kept my first 99 articles and added the newly found 100.
So I went back and selected the third category where I expected to find articles and let Article Equalizer find me an additional 100 articles.
So far I’ve only spent something like 5 minutes from I started installing the program.
To visit the article database web site myself, download the 300 articles and check them for duplicates would have taken me the several hours.
Browsing to an article, selecting the text, copying it into the clipboard, pasting it into an empty document and naming the document while saving it takes time. And multiply that by 300 and you pretty much know what to do that day.
So far I’ve just grabbed the articles from one source, but I decided to see what would happen if I went back to the “Data Source” tab and selected one of the other article providers.
It went pretty well, and I ended up going through all the article repositories and all the relevant categories.
Before I knew of it I ended up with 806 articles.
Satisfied with the number of fetched articles, I went on to explore the options on the “Output Selection/Preview” tab.
The first option is to “View Selected Article”
Not all articles will be relevant for you, so it’s essential to preview them before creating your pages.
Some you can eliminate just by looking at their title, but others you need to view to make that judgement.
“View Selected Article” opens a browser window with nothing but the article.
So it’s easy to determine if the article should stay or go.
So far I haven’t even glanced at the 22 page PDF manual, but at this point I needed to.
The “Output Selection/Preview” tab has two buttons (“Remove Selected Article” and “Remove & Ignore Article”) that seemed way too similar for me to figure out any differences.
It was in fact a so well though of feature from Jeff Alderson and Rod Beckwith that I didn’t think of it myself.
The thing is this: Articles are collected based on category, and some categories are very wide or your niche is very narrow.
So there will naturally be articles available that will never fit you well no matter how many (slightly) different article sub-directories you create.
And this is where “Remove & Ignore Article” comes in. If you select this the article will not be taken into consideration when you re-generate the collection.
Before starting to weed out irellevant articles I suggest you sort the list of articles by Author.
Authors tend to write about the same type of things, so once you find an author that writes articles about topics that are not relevant for your site, you can easily just mark all those articles for removal in one go.
A nice feature would be to include the option to “Remove all articles by this author” and ”Remove & Ignore all articles by this author.”
Anyway, going through the articles soon revealed that not many people had written articles about the topic I decided on for this review.
But I had seen a significant number of articles on another slightly related topic, so I decided to go with that instead.
Going through the list of articles is a pain.
With 806 articles and a non-resizeable window that only shows 12 (16 in version 1.1.1) at a time you do a lot of scrolling 
It would be a nice feature to be able to resize the window.
Version 1.0.3 didn’t have the possibility to search the articles for specific keywords, so you had to got over each and every article title to determine if it should be used.
In version 1.1.1 you have the possibility to search for specific keywords which is a significant improvement over version 1.0.3
It took me less than a minute to single out all the articles I wanted after I had upgraded to version 1.1.1
The “Search & Analyze” is actually two features in one.
It has a “Keyword Search and Select” where you can search Title, Author or the article itself for specific keywords. This is how I reduced the original 4,784 articles down to 123 that all contained a specific keyword.
The other part of “Search & Analyze” is “Keyword Density Analysis”.
And I actually managed to crash the application, with a “Run-time Error ‘6’: Overflow” when I tried using this function
The project that crashed actually had 4,784 articles, which might have been a tad too many.
So I started another project with just 100 articles, and it worked fine. So I tested 200, 300, 400 and all the way up to 1,100 articles, and the keyword density feature worked fine.
So the current crash-free limit is somewhere between 1,100 and 4,784 articles.
What “Keyword Density Analysis” does is calculate the keyword density for the keyword you enter, and bring these numbers back to the list of articles.
You can then sort the articles by keyword density and choose only to include articles with a certain keyword density.
I hit “Generate Articles/Indexes”
Before creating the pages, the program asks me if I want to empty the output directory before generating the pages.
If you selected an output directory for your pages where you also have other stuff, then cancel the generation of pages and go back and make sure that the specified output directory is used exclusively for this specific Article Equalizer project.
After verifying that the generated article looked fine it was time to upload it to my server.
The ability to upload the generated pages is built into Article Equalizer in the “FTP Upload” tab.
Basically you just enter the IP address or name of your FTP-server, the FTP port number, your FTP username and your FTP password.
Then you select the folder to upload the files to.
And here is yet another smart feature. Many people make the mistake of thinking that the root folder of their webserver is the same as the root folder of their server account.
You can’t modify this field manually, so you can’t enter non-existing folders.
What you do instead is let Article Equalizer connect to your server and let you select the folder.
Uploading the 130 pages I had selected for the test took just 2 minutes to upload – and I didn’t even have to remember to switch my FTP client from Binary to ASCII 
And this pretty much completes my test of Article Equalizer.
Article Equalizer is a nice little application that’s easy to use.
There’s a natural flow as you move through the different tabs from setting up, to fetching the articles, to selecting the ones you need, to generating the pages and uploading them to your web site.
The interface is clean and uncluttered
I only managed to crash the program once when calculating keyword densities for almost 5,000 articles. 1,100 articles was handled nicely though.
There’s nothing Article Equalizer can do that you can’t do manually, but you can’t beat the speed.
The time from coming up with an idea for a small article-based niche site to having it all done, complete with affiliate program links, could be as little as one hour.
Click here for more information about Article Equalizer
No TagsAdd comment April 9th, 2005
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Mar | Dec » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |