ZamDoo.com Dev Blog

Yesterday I posted a series of 5 big updates to the ZamDoo service, wow what a rush! I haven’t been able to do fixes lately because we are working on our “secret project” that we are trying to release by the end of january. That being said, just between you and me I think it’s going to be more like the end of febuary.

The fixes cover the following items:

1. New PC client version (first update since August 07)
2. New scraper libs for MSN & Yahoo
3. New feature to export keywords in campaign to a txt file
4. Test page now supports France, Spain, Canada, US, UK, and Australia
5. Big update to pruning code / keyword counts (this dramatically increases the accuracy of our zamdex )

It was a big update and I have to be honest, it felt great to do it. I miss doing zamdoo updates and hopefully after the secret project is released I will be able to get back to it.

Jeff

Well it’s a new year and I think the first resolution has to be for me to update the blog more. I have been so slammed with the deluge of new customers that I just havent had time to update as often as I would like!!

In the past 6 months ZamDoo has gone from a idea and a internal (just for Dave & Myself) to a industry leading technology showcase with a plethora of users and our ever growing forums. In the next 6 months Dave and I have some serious changes planned to not only increase our product offering, but also to bring new products to market which should enable the casual internet marketer to be more effective at a fraction of the cost.

Stay tuned, it’s only going to get better from here on out

After nearly 3 months of code writing, debugging, rewriting, new server deployment, and sleepless nights we are finally close to shipping our hosted services!!

We are going to open up the hosted services to current customers on Thursday at 5pm pacific time and then to the public on Friday at 5pm pacific time. Initially we will have a small number of account spots for the first round to make sure the infrastructure can handle the influx of traffic.

When we launched the silver membership in August we wanted to launch the hosted memberships in September, however after watching the horror story that is GCD we became even more determined to not ship until it was ready. So we have been running a private beta of the service since late September and we are finally happy with the quality level.

After the hosted solution has shipped, we can get back to feature design such as integrating the charts and keyword tool more closely with the core ZamDoo user experience.

-Jeff

We are very happy to announce that our hosted services are going to be available starting November 2nd 2007. That means you will be able to sign up for a fully hosted service based on the ZamDoo platform.

The fully hosted ZamDoo memberships will be accessible wherever you are and regardless of whether you have a Mac, Linux machine, PC or public internet terminal - you’ll be able to use and access ZamDoo.

In order to offer these increased levels of service, we’ve had to scale out our infrastructure pretty extensively. As a result, we’re only going to have a limited number of spots available. This isn’t some cheesy attempt at creating demand - we are limited by hardware and bandwidth considerations to a fairly small number of hosted customers.

Unlike some other offerings of late, we intend for this launch to go smoothly and without negative impact on our systems. Thus, we’re going to bring a limited number of folks on to the hosted system, and then if demand exists for more folks, then we’ll add new infrastructure to support them incrementally. What this means is that there are going to be more people wanting to get on the hosted system, than there will be spots to support them.

If you look at our Gold offering, it costs $129 a month and for that you get the ZamDoo keyword research platform, you are fully hosted ( just log in and use the system), access to the new integrated keyword research tool, our new charting features, ability to export the data to related programs, and of course access to the members only sections of our forums at http://www.zamdooforums.com. If you compare this offering to our competitors we are by far the best game in town.

-Jeff

Since posting about our new keyword tool we have got a very large positive response. Our clients love the fact that a keyword tool is integrated into ZamDoo and many of them have decided to cancel memberships elsewhere.

There have been a number of questions regarding the source of the keyword data. When we decided to create a keyword tool we wanted to make sure we have the best data available. After several months of investigations and research, the brand of Keyword Discovery stood out from the crowd.

Keyword Discovery is a industry leader in the keyword research space and we are very happy to offer their services to all our customers free of charge.

If you want to know more about the product and services they offer, head over to thier website and check it out.

-Jeff

Last night we issued an update to the ZamDoo platform which integrated our new keyword tool technology. We are starting off with an “advanced search” style interface with plans to increase the fidelity of the integration over the coming weeks.

This new keyword tool technology is huge value add for our clients giving them the opportunity to do all or some of their keyword research through a completely integrated experience at ZamDoo.com

Our keyword technology is state of the art and it’s 100% free with a ZamDoo.com membership. That means all existing and future ZamDoo clients can take advantage of this exciting new offering at zero extra charge.

When you look at the ZamDoo platform with our 100% reliable crawling technology, our integrated charting features, our export capabilities, and now our keyword tool it’s clear that the ZamDoo platform has become the industry leader.

-Jeff

Today we released a new charting feature to the ZamDoo.com website. We have started with a collection of 5 charts to get the ball rolling.

Charting is a very exciting feature which will allow our customers to view and understand their data in terms of trends from a visual standpoint that no amount of text of static images could ever do.

Check out the screen shot attached which shows two of our charts in action on a real account:

These charts show the total number of keywords and ads per campaign and easily allow allow you to spot trends. For example notice that the campaigns for “welding” and “Time Share” have the same number of keywords yet the number of ads in the “Time share” campaign is considerably more. That’s a clear trend and suggests a niche I might want to look into further.

We are just scratching the surface of our new charting feature and over the coming weeks we will epower our clients to view and spot trends like never before. As always we will be soliciting our clients feedback on charts they would like to see as we are committed to helping our clients reach thier goals.

-Jeff

I stumbled across this great walk through that posed the problem of designing Google.com if you wanted a high Google ranking. The article is great because it illustrates what overzealous SEO optimizations can look like.  I am a huge fan of a sleek uncluttered UI and it pains me when I look at crowed websites that are obviously just trying to appease the all mighty search bot.My viewpoint: Design a simple and easy to use website and the customers will follow.

Article: http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html

A new study has just come out that says “U.S. online advertising revenue surged to a new high of nearly $10 billion in the first half of the year, rising 27% from a year before, according to data released Thursday”.

What that tells me is that the advertising market is growing even bigger and if you want to play with the big boys, you have to look for ways to make your time more productive. To that end, using tools such as ZamDoo and Affiliate Radar are becoming more and more crucial to executing a successful strategy. 

Source:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202201206

As we announced last week we have closed memberships so we can integrate the hosted service into the ZamDoo application space.

The hosted service could of been launched over a month ago technically, however  I just wasn’t happy with the performance of it. The last big work item for the service is the addition of metrics so I can measure and monitor the performance. Here are a few of the metrics I am tracking:

• Scans per min per user
• Scans per min machine wide
• Scans per min globally ( all machines )
• Scan time per keyword
• % of failed scans ( timeouts )

I am really looking forward to shipping the hosted service, I am eager to get back to working on website features such as charting and the ability to export your data to other programs.