Diary of a Market Hacker

Howto: Text to speech your email before sending with eSpeak or Festival, Evolution and Ubuntu Linux

July 30, 2009 – 2:58 pm
These steps will give you a GUI only way to proof listen to your email from Evolution. Something that I really missed from the Windows world is a little program called ReadPlease.  It allowed me to listen to my emails before I sent them.   I'm terrible at proof reading my own emails, especially right after I write them. This morning I was tired of going without it and spent an hour or so on learning about TTS (Text To Speech)  and Linux.  True to Linux community form, there are loads of threads, bug and ubergeeky websites dedicated to TTS software packages.  Most of which have crudy documentation. The two I tried were festival and eSpeak.  Festival has GUI front end that I could not get to work...  It's just as well, really.  I want something simple that can read my email from Evolution so I don't make my self look like an ass ...

Posted in Things that help me work | No Comments »

Help with Zencart and Transfirst (Transaction Central / Merchant Anywhere)

July 8, 2009 – 11:53 am
It can be a pain to get help installing the Transfirst.com payment gateway into zencart.  There's no module download on the zencart site and depending on whom you speak to a Transfirst, they may tell you that there is no module....   Very confidence inspiring. There are in fact two different versions of the Transfirst gateway for Zencart.  They're both writted by a developer at Transfirst.   The most current one is called "Transaction Central".  The older oneis called Merchant Anywhere. Yes, we still use it here www.gracedigitalaudio.com.  I'd guess that the person you spoke to didn't know about it.   The module is called "transaction central"  and there's an older one called "merchant anywhere" Here's the contact information for the group in charge of it.  ...This comes directly from the module. E-mail: tcintegration@transfirst.com Phone: 1.888.835.1777 ex 6991 ..Here's a screen capture of what the installed module looks like in zencart.

Posted in zen cart | No Comments »

SEO spam - personal yet vague …with a high conversion rate!

June 30, 2009 – 11:11 am
A friend/customer recently forwarded an email he received from an SEO company.  The company sent a personalized form letter appeared to specifically created for the customer's site.  It pointed to specifics and generated some concern and fear.....  I'm sure the response rate for these emails is high.  Here's the short email conversation where he asks about some specifics that this SEO company pointed out. ----------My Response--------- Sure, no problem. First of all, this email was, most likely, not written by hand and it was not created after someone reviewed our site manually. It's just specific enough to be personal and seem relevant. This is really good spam. I assume you already know this. ....My partner firm uses this tactic and it works well for them. Point 2: One question... relevant to what? This depends on the search term, the content of the page and ...

Posted in Everything else | No Comments »

To Compete or not to Compete

February 20, 2009 – 1:14 pm
 A friend asked me about link building systems.  Specifically, he wanted to know if the email he got from an SEO firm for link building was "fooling Google". I want to make sure you understand that this technique is considered "black hat" by some and Google too.  If Google were to actually recognize and take the time to investigate the site using it then it's likely that the site would incur a penalty and possibly loose search results in Google's listings or be banned outright.   Though, Google (Matt Cutts) also states that there's "almost" nothing that someone can do to harm a sites ranking.   Well, if I can link to a site using a link building system without the site owner knowing and Google will punish sites for using such a system...   You're seeing contradiction right?  I could also report the site to Google for buying links. The problem for entrepreneurs and ...

Posted in Search Marketing Perspective | No Comments »