I’ve tried A TON of keyword research tools:  Micro Niche Finder, Market Samurai, Word Tracker, Keyword Elite, you name it…I’ve tried ‘em all.

What sets SECockpit apart from its competitors is that it’s ridiculously fast.  Since it’s a web service rather than a local software app, you can run as many queries as you want simultaneously…in fact it can handle 200 fully processed and analyzed keywords per minute.  I’d like to see your current tool do that!

Not only that, but SECockpit uses multiple keyword sources:  Google Adwords, Google Suggest, and Google ‘related search terms’.

Let’s take a look at the SECockpit interface, for this example I used the seed keyword “deals”:

As you can see, it comes packed with tons of useful details for each keyword.  The “Niche” column is the SECockpit evaluation of how “good” the niche is for that keyword.  You can see which domains are available to buy for each keyword, with hyphens and without.  You can see which of the top 10 results are sniper sites or Youtube vids.

And if you double-click on a keyword in the results, you are taken to the top 10 Google results which give you some juicy data such as mozRank, Page Authority, Juice links (count of links that are valuable in determining SE ranking), and a direct link to go to Open Site Explorer.

Pretty slick, eh?

Get SECockpit here.

If you’re like me and use Skype for a lot of internet marketing communications, you’ve likely noticed that it saves all conversations in encrypted files on your local hard drive.

Why?  I have no frickin’ idea, but it’s a bit ridiculous.  This means that if you have Skype installed on your laptop, desktop, and cell phone, there’s 3 different versions of your conversations stored…one on each device…that you can only access locally.  If your laptop is stolen, there goes all those conversations, never to be seen again.  And if you decide to reformat your computer, reinstall the O/S and Skype, good luck retrieving your conversations, even if you backed up the encrypted files.  There’s not even a tool available to unencrypt the files.

Hopefully you’re familiar with Gmail and its kickass archiving, labeling, searching, and cloud-access functionality.

Well, the good news is I’ve found a Skype plugin that will save all your Skype conversations (both text and voice) to your Gmail account.  This means you’ll never lose anything, you can access your history from any computer, anywhere in the world, and everything is super easy to search.

How much will this cost ya?  Well a couple months ago I paid $24.99 (one-time fee), but for the next 5 days it’s available for only $14.99.  Heckuva deal if ya ask me!

If you’re like me and obsess over how your sites are ranking with the search engines, you’ve likely been looking for a tool that’s fast, user-friendly, and reliable. You may have tried some of the various FireFox plugins that are slow, buggy, and not good at tracking historical ranking changes.   Or perhaps you’ve tried one of the many websites that offers a Google position checker service but were disappointed in its speed and lack of features.

Well look no further…

Meet Traffic Travis.  

Here’s how it works:

First, you setup a “Project”.   This requires entering the name of the site you want to track, it’s URL, the search engines you want to use, and a list of keywords.  You can even enter competitor’s sites to see how they compare against your keywords, over time.

Next, you click “Start Update” and Traffic Travis goes to work.  Very quickly you see results coming in.   Whenever the current ranking beats the previous best ranking, a row is colored yellow.  And similarly, when the current ranking becomes worse, a row is colored blue.  Pretty handy for easily seeing where you stand.

Finally, Traffic Travis tracks all your historical ranking data.  You even get a cool graph or can print/export the data to BMP / HTML files.

If this was all the Traffic Travis could do, I’d be satisfied.

But it’s not…not even close.

Here’s a list of other features, some of which I haven’t even tried yet:

• Keyword research
• Backlink checker (also shows PageRank, noFollow, anchor text, and IP of each backlink…pimp!)
• PPC analysis
• Page analysis (how good is your on-page SEO?)
• SEO analysis (how competitive is certain keywords…for the top 20 listings in Google)

Last but not least, it just feels solid.  As a software developer, I can recognize good code when I see it.  For whatever reason, in the internet marketing world there’s a lot of bloated, slow, buggy, and visually unappealing…shit.  But Traffic Travis is sleek, slick, and sexy.  It’s no wonder that it’s had more than 100,000 downloads on Download.com and is considered by many to be the most popular SEO application EVER.

Well what the heck are ya waiting for?  Go get the best Google position checker (and bask in the glory of all the extra features you didn’t even know you wanted)!

This is the latest piece of software that I’ve had to request a refund for.

It has promise, don’t get me wrong.  There’s just too many bugs for me to handle.

SocialBot (version 4.0 was the one I tried) was created by a company called IncanSoft. I’m not entirely sure but I think they’re based out of Greece, from reading about them on WarriorForum.

The purpose of this software is to quickly submit pages from your websites to up to 54 social bookmarking services.    This list includes many of the popular ones like Digg, Technorati, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google, etc.

Here’s how it works (supposedly):

• Setup a company (could be yourself, could be a client if you’re submitting someone else’s website)
• Setup a website that you want to submit social bookmarks for
• Setup a profile (a list of social bookmarking services you want to submit to)
• Let SocialBot spider your website and find all the pages, or manually setup the pages yourself
• Modify the keywords or descriptions for each page being submitted (or leave as is)
• Click “GO” and everything should work like a charm

Well, let me just say that I really, really, really was hoping it would work as advertised.  I launched SocialBot all wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to let all my social bookmarking dreams become reality.

Unfortunately it was just not meant to be.

Here’s what went wrong:

• First I tried the “spider” functionality which is supposed to traverse through your domain and find all the unique pages.  Unfortunately it had trouble with link-loops (ie. page A links to page B which links back to page A).  One of my sites with about 30 pages, somehow had over 1000 pages according to SocialBot, until I killed the “spider” process.
• I tested it out by just submitting to a single service, Delicious.  The submission “failed” and I went into the Submission Review field but it was completely blank.  I managed to figure out by myself that the password I had entered was incorrect, but gee, thanks for being so helpful SocialBot!  Sigh.
• After I made a successful submission to Delicious, I manually loaded up the site in FireFox and checked to see what my submitted page looked like.  To my utter disgust the tags were all fuxored.  I had entered comma-separated tags in SocialBot, but apparently multiple-word tags aren’t possible, because all of my multiple-word tags in Delicious were broken up into single words.  (if you’re familiar with my posts you may remember that I’m sort of a tag-Nazi)
• I emailed all three above problems to IncanSoft “support”, which was really just the email address of “Big Mike”, the CEO/president/janitor.  His trusty sidekick Diego replied saying,

Thanks for your feedback; We are releasing an upgrade at the end of the month, and I’m going to test the bugs you found if they are a real problem.

• I thought, ok, no big deal, I can live with the above three issues.  So I then created a profile which contained maybe 20 of my favorite social bookmarking services. I queued up 10 or so pages from one of my sites that I wanted to submit to all of them.  Then I clicked “Go”.  And waited.  And waited some more.  And had a beer.  And came back and noticed that only a single page had been submitted to a whopping 2 services.  In about an hour.  This was the final straw.

So after all that fun stuff, I requested a refund, which I was given quite quickly so that was nice.  Now I’m not sure if SocialBot is just buggy on 64 bit Windows XP, because I occasionally have issues with software that don’t exist on other operating systems.  But…even the bugs aside…the speed is what really irked me…

I can honestly submit my sites faster manually to those social bookmarking services than automatically using SocialBot.

So, two thumbs down from me.  Sorry “Big Mike”.

Edit – June 6, 2010

I’ve had a lot of people asking me if I’ve found a better tool than SocialBot. Well, since this review I’ve gone ahead and created my own social bookmarking service – SocialAdr – which is entirely web-based, automated, and submits bookmarks from thousands of different accounts. Contact me for a special coupon code!

I’ve been using this app for about a month now.  Actually, it was the very first piece of commercial software I started using for internet marketing. After reading a bunch of good reviews on WarriorForum, I took a leap and bought it.

These are steps that I used to do manually, for each potential keyword phrase, one-by-one:

1. Google External Keyword Tool (# of monthly searches)
2. Microsoft Online Commercial Intention Tool (commercial intention)
3. Google.com (# of competition)
4. Yahoo Site Explorer (strength of competition)

I would then use these metrics to calculate the potential profitability of a new “niche” (keyword phrase).

Well now I do all that in Micro Niche Finder.   Those 4 steps are done automatically through MNF in mere seconds.   It even suggests related keywords and calculates their metrics at the same time.

Here’s a screenshot of the “meat & potatoes” of the app:

Note: I chose “fat loss” as my search phrase purely for this review.  I don’t actually think this is a good market to approach, as you can see by the numbers…the competition is insane!

And a quick description of what each column means:

• Phrase – these are related keywords that are automatically generated by MNF.  By default it shows results for the EXACT phrase (ie. a search in Google with “quotes”) but you can also choose BROAD (without quotes) or PHRASE (words out of order)

• Search Count - the total number of searches each month for this phrase on Google (ie. the DEMAND).  I usually only look at phrases with > 2000.

• Exact Phrase Count – these are the number of results for the phrase in Google (you can verify yourself by going to Google.com and typing in the phrase with “quotes”).  This is the COMPETITION.  I usually aim for phrases with < 20,000, but the COMPETITION / DEMAND ratio is also important.  If it’s, say 4, and the COMPETITION is 100,000, those are darn good numbers.

• Ad Cost – how much Google charges advertisers per click they receive on their AdWords ads based on this phrase.  This is usually relative to a combination of the Commercial Intent and Strength of Competition.

• Commercial Intent - how likely it is that a person searching this phrase on Google will end up buying something.  Anything less than 50% usually isn’t worth your time.

• Strength of Competition (SOC) – how strong the competition’s websites are.  This calculation considers things like PageRank, number of one-way backlinks, etc.  The lower the better!  That red X image turns into yellow (medium) or green (good) depending on how low the SOC values get.

Micro Niche Finder. Very. Useful. Tool.

Here’s more information on it if you’re interested…