Introducing the ArticleMasher Project

Yesterday I posted about my method of creating lots of articles quickly by doing an article mashup of a few base articles.

This was boring work and I very quickly concluded that it was a task well suited to computer automation. This is when it’s cool to be a programmer :-)

Reader Comments on my Method

I’ve had quite a lot of interesting comments to my mashup method. Sean from WarriorBlog tells me that I’m doing far too much work and that I should just use article re-writer software. I do agree and I will try some software out but I can use that as a secondary method to generate even more articles. I believe the results will still be better with 3 or 4 original articles to work from, rather than just one.

Mark from 45n5 says that I should find databases of articles and use an API to submit tens of thousands of pages to these directories. That sounds a bit spammy to me but the key point is that more articles = more links. I still want to control the process (I haven’t submitted any yet) and for my current niche, I doubt there is a database that would be any good.

I have picked a niche that I am familiar with and can write about. It’s a geeky niche and if generic writer who knew nothing about it tried to write for it, his articles would probably look very lame.

Building an ArticleMasher Tool

Steven Brown called my method a ‘paragraph rotator’ technique, which I think is kinda neat, and that’s exactly what it is. It is just copying and pasting paragraphs from several source documents into a destination document. This is tedious and error prone to do manually and it is ideally suited to computer automation.

Building a tool to do this would be relatively easy. Furthermore, I scratched my head a bit when plugging in the section numbers into the spreadsheet. This could be coded into an algorithm. The tool would figure it all out for me.

So, that’s my plan. I have missed doing software development and this is simple enough for me to be able to knock up fairly quickly. It should save me around 30-60 minutes work for each batch of articles so I think it’s worth doing for that alone. But I have another reason for wanting to build this tool…

Making the Tool Public

It’s vaguely possible that other people might like the idea and want to try it so they may also find the tool useful. So it makes sense for me to release it. It’s not exactly going to be a stunning example of software engineering but it will give me the opportunity to test out various Internet marketing tactics that I have been wanting to explore. Namely :-

1. List building
2. Tutorial-style videos
3. Software distribution

Lauching a New Project

I mentioned in my podcast that this would not be a software blog. I’ve told you about the software I wish to develop but I’m not going to blog about the development itself. Instead, what I want to do is focus on what I can do with that software from a marketing perspective.

List Building

I’m going to create a new domain and give away the software on that domain in exchange for an email address. This becomes my introduction to list building. I’d like to build a list for this blog but I would like to have some kind of newsletter to support that and I don’t have the time to do that just yet. This project gives me a way to learn about list building very quickly.

Tutorial-Style Videos

Now that I have a headset, I am in a position where I could made videos of the style that record the actions on a computer and have audio overlaid. I can’t really think of a suitable topic to put on this blog but if I build a software tool, that lends itself perfectly to having tutorial videos to support any written documentation. Even if the software is crap, I can still make a video :-) Again, it gives me a chance to learn something new.

Software Distribution

Lastly, I have read in various sources that people are using software as a way to drive traffic to some web property. Obviously, to try out that strategy I need some software and this is my first test candidate.

The ebook that I recently purchased, “20 Ways to Make $100 A Day Online” had two chapters about making money with software. Although I’m not intending to sell it, (it’s a wee bit too simplistic to charge for!) it will be interesting to read those chapters to see what I can do with it.

I’ve created a new ArticleMasher project page for this project and put in a todo list. Notice that I don’t intend to do any work on the website until I have actually developed the tool! So there may not be any updates on the project for a little while.

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