Work at home on the Internet: internet marketing and affiliate program help.
Back issues here Issue 263 | Feb 23rd 2003

Letter from Phil

ok, what am I writing about today? Well apart from the usual ramblings and rubbish you'll find lots of info on some new tools I've been using lately.

There's a look at

Nichefinder

a useful tool for encrypting Paypal "buy now" buttons

a great spam solving program

What else?

Well just my ramblings, so I may as well start them now :)

Pic from the kitchen window today, of more low flying clouds
heading towards the house. When the clouds hit the garden
they roll up the hill like fog and through, or around the house.

It's the middle of summer here in Australia, and the middle of the day, and the sky is supposed to be beautifully blue. But it's not.

I just stepped out of my home office to make some coffee and found a cloud in the house.

It sounds nice, and it is in a way, but clouds in the house are a real problem. They're very wet and if you let them play around inside the house they turn everything moldy.

So here we are in the middle of a hot day and I've had to close the windows and light a fire to dry things out. Weird stuff.

Still... it's really nice standing outside and feeling it on my face.

Hope you find something useful and interesting here....

1. NicheFinder Keyword Research Tool ...

Last week I wrote, briefly, about some software called NicheFinder which is a marketing tool to speed up your market research.

It works by researching and analyzing the potential profitability of keywords and phrases, helping you come up with profitable niches to develop mini sites and businesses around.

At that stage I hadn't bought it, but around 25 of you wrote to tell me how great you thought it was.

Well 23 said it was great. 2 of you were not so keen saying it didn't match Site Build It's research tools.

So I bought it from the affiliate link of the first person to write to me, Gary Harvey, who should know what he's talking about because he runs a niche marketing site and sells a book called Niche Marketing Explained which is a big collection of articles about finding and profiting from your niche. Gary was full of praise for NicheFinder.

Daniel Hardt from www.lifepathnum.com said: "I have been using the NicheFinder for several months and have found it to be a quick and easy way to come up with killer keywords. I have dismissed several ideas because the NicheFinder results did not indicate a strong enough market and have renewed my efforts in a direction that had more solid support than I had thought it would."

So Daniel, Gary, and 21 other people, gave good reports on NicheFinder. But what do I think?

Well my initial thoughts match the two of you who think the keyword research tools aren't as good as those in Site Build It.

The problem I found is that you're not given the chance to delete unwanted keywords so plenty of them are useless. Also there are quite a few zero figures, and I'm not sure what that means.

The main keyword I was researching came up as zero potential, when all the other keyword tools I've used say it has lots of potential.

However I ran 4 more tests on different subjects, and was very impressed with the detailed reports.

Usually Nichefinder uses a lot of sources for the research, rather than just analyzing what comes up in a couple of search engines.

So do I recommend it? Yes, but with caution. It seems to do a good job on most keywords but went off the rails with my first one.

On the big plus side is the one-off low cost.

So yes, if you're building mini sites, or doing other keyword research it's a tool worth investing in.

2.Paypal Tool - Paylock Generator 3.0...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a clever new automatic headline writing tool, and because I'd bought the resale rights, I linked to it via a Paypal "Buy Now" button.

However, I stuffed the link up by getting too clever.

You might not know it, but whenever you sell something via Paypal, and don't use a script to scramble the download link, people can look at your source code and go straight to the download page without paying for the product.

I'm not saying you'd do it, and I know I wouldn't (in fact I bought a best selling ebook this week where I could have stolen it in this way)

Anyway, being dumb (as usual) I scrambled the download link to the headline tool using a script designed to hide your email address from robots. What I didn't know is that it added a mailto: link at
the beginning of the scrambled code. So the link didn't work.

As soon as I found out about the linking problem I went online and started hunting around for the best tool to make encrypted Paypal buttons.

A few pieces of software would have solved the problem, but after evaluating them all, the one I ended up selecting was Robert Key's Paylock Generator 3.0 - and it works to perfection.

Why did I choose Robert's? Well apart from him having the same name as my best friend when I was seven or eight, he's a member of The Paypal Developer Network, which made me think his product would be reliable.

It was also just $27, shows clear screenshots on the sales page, and promised to simply and quickly do everything I needed it to.

Working from your desktop you can quickly create all kinds of encrypted Paypal links/buttons including recurring subscription buttons, and shopping cart buttons.

Do you need something like this?

Well you do if you buy resale right products and sell them via your Paypal account. And you also need it if you sell your own products through Paypal.

Just one strange thing. Robert doesn't sell it through Paypal :)

3. Mailwasher Pro Anti Spam Tool...

You might like to sign up for a brand new affiliate program for some spam fighting software called Mailwasher Pro.

There are at least 10 other spam fighting tools around, and I've tried most of them, but in my opinion this one beats the rest hands down.

I've only been using it for a week, but it's considerably lightened my load and the time needed to spend sorting and deleting spam from my inbox - it appears to work perfectly, and is going to be a monster hit for a long time to come.

I'm not saying it's going to be easy to sell, not unless you build a mini site reviewing all the latest spam fighting tools.

What I'm saying, or trying to say, is that spam fighting tools are going to become an essential - so it DESERVES to be a monster hit.

It's already become an essential for me. I'm only using a trial version, but I'm going to buy before it expires.

So why is it so good?

Because Mailwasher Pro works by letting you delete spam before you even download it. Instead of using your usual email program to get your mail you start Mailwasher instead and it lets you look at the mail on your server.

You can then decide whether to delete, bounce, or blacklist messages. You then just click on the Process Mail button and it goes to work deleting messages you don't want, and returning
spam to is sender so that you fool them into thinking that your email address is not valid.

Good stuff.

Anyway, if you decide to sell this program, don't expect immediate returns. You're going to have to be patient because there's a 30 day free trial.

As far as I'm concerned all you've got to do is get people to sign up for the free trial because there's going to be a big conversion rate - after using it for just a few days I don't see how I can conduct business on the web without it.

You can try it out for yourself here by using the fully working month long free trial version

Or just sign up for the affiliate program here.

I suggest you do both.