Posted on

Market Samurai and Traffic Travis Ask For Registration Again

Market Samurai Not Working Anymore?

Why is my Market Samurai and Traffic Travis asking for registration keys/details again? I’ve paid for my Market Samurai copy more than a couple of years ago, if I remember right, and it has been working nicely until about a week ago. Or, at least that’s when I started it up again after having not used it for a time.

The first time it presented itself, I inputted my registration details. No joy. It spit it back out the way the hulk spit out the bullet that Bruce Banner sent in.

Just a few seconds ago, I opened MS again and this is what it showed me again. (BTW, I’m writing this in real time as I’m testing MS and trying possible methods to make it work).

[warning]

Please Enter your Registration Details to Access Market Samurai

Paid Users: Please enter your Registration Email Address and Full Version Key below to completely unlock Market Samurai permanently on this computer, and gain full access to all available features.

Trial Users: Please enter your Registration Address and Trial Version Key below to unlock Market Samurai’s Keyword Research tools on this computer, and gain a free trial of Market Samurai’s other advanced internet marketing features.

Market Samurai could not connect to the registration server. Please try again in 10-15 minutes. If this problem persists, please check your firewall before contacting Support via http://www.noblesamurai,com/support

[/warning]

Solutions?

Have your experienced this too? If so, what did you do?

So far, I have not contacted support yet, as I want to explore a solution on my own before I give up. After all, they’ve suggested that a possible problem could be in my firewall.

I remember having accepted a Zone Alarm trial upgrade offer just very recently. Could it have made changes to the firewall settings?

I checked it, and it seems to be working alright. Where it set it for ‘Ask’, I reset it to ‘Allow’. Yet, the problem persist.

I remember to have also availed of a trial offer of AVG which allows the use of all features of AVG Internet Security 2012 for a trial period.

I checked and found its firewall enabled. I haven’t been meticulous prior to this installation so I did not know if it has been enabled before. Under select firewall profile are the choices:

  • Allow All
  • Block All
  • Directly connected to the internet
  • computer within domain
  • Small home or office network

It’s default selection is the last choice. And inside, Market Samurai’s action is set to ‘Allow for Safe’; Traffic Travis’ is set to ‘Allow for All’; MNF is set to ‘Allow for all’; and MNF 5.3.1 ‘Allow for Safe’. Current MNF version is 5.7.0. (MNF, btw, also has problems with ‘verifying activation status’).

[note]
I changed to ‘Allow For All‘ for MS and for MNF.

Then, I run MS again. OMG! It’s working now!!! And MNF too!

So, it’s just a firewall issue after all.
[/note]

But Traffic Travis is still Not Working!

What bugs me though is why TT’s still not working?

TT: I changed the ZoneAlarm Trust Level to Super for TrafficTravisV4.exe residing in the Appdata/roaming directory (as that is where the shortcut points to). No joy!

When I entered my registration code, it returns an error:

That’s it. I sent a ticket to Traffic Travis support. At least though, I’ve got Market Samurai working again.

UPDATE:

June 2012

Traffic Travis support emailed me the following suggestion:

[note]”Please re-install directly through http://traffictravis.com/software/traffic_travis_v4.exe and activate it using your code, XXXXXXXXXX“[/note]

The code was the same code I had the first time I installed TT.

It worked!

March 2013

Perhaps Traffic Travis has some code embedded in there that monitors usage. I haven’t been productively using TT for some time, thus the same problem occurred again.

It again asked for a registration code and wouldn’t accept the old one. Thus I dug back the old email reply from support and re-applied it.

Worked again!

The downside to this is that with each re-install, you’ll lose most, if not all, of your previous data.

Posted on

Other Keyword Research Techniques

market samurai

micro niche finder

Actually, this post should have been called ‘Another Keyword Research Technique‘ or method, because I’m expounding on only one of the methods below. After all, the first few methods are already very well known and well over-used by both beginners and experts.

So, most of you already know the following methods of keyword research. Of course, there’s a lot of methods out there. I’m just showing off some of the techniques I’ve learned in my almost 2 years of blogging after office hours. 🙂

  • Google Adwords Keywords Tool:
    • The mother of all keyword tools.
  • Spyfu.com:
    • Shows number of advertisers, search results, daily search volume, cost/click, top ppc domains, and related terms.
  • EzineArticles.com
    • Using the proper search terms will yield some interesting results where you’ll find the number of views an ezine article has gone through. The more number of views, the more searched the article is. Of course, what’s left is for you to find which keywords are being used in the article. The title often gives enough clues to find the keywords.
  • Google Products:
    • The auto-suggest feature of Google products gives ideas about new keywords for further research. I use this for creating sites selling physical products from Amazon.
  • keywordspy.com:
    • go to keywordspy.com
    • type in a seed keyword in the search box
    • select ‘keywords’ among the options below the box
    • click Search
    • In the ‘Overview tab, you’ll see statistics for your chosen keyword
      • you’ll also see keywords related to your seed keyword with search volume and CPC
      • listed also are PPC competitors and organic competitors
      • you can also check (spy on) any website’s keywords
  • Micro Niche Finder:
    • A keyword tool that’s not free. I use it as my primary keyword research tool. Versatile and has more than paid for itself.
  • Market Samurai:
    • Having relied on MNF for keyword research, I use Market Samurai more to spy on the competition backlinks-wise and to monitor my sites’ rankings. I have yet to explore it’s other features though.

The Other Free Keyword Research Technique

And finally here’s the other Keyword Research Technique/Method I was talking about.

  • Checking newly registered domains

other keyword research techniques
One site I found out which can do this is nsspy.org. If you go there, you’ll be presented with 50 most active name servers for the day you are checking it. Or, if you click on the ‘Browse all monitored name servers’, you’ll see all of them. Clicking on any of the links shown will bring you to a current month calendar page that has clickable day dates. Clicking on a date will bring you to a page listing all newly registered domains for that date.

There are 2 things you can get out of this:

  1. You’ll get ideas for new keywords. If the competition is not steep, you may jump into the melee, by buying the .net or .org domains, or some other variation of it, and try to out-SEO the others.
  2. You could use the new keyword as a seed keyword and search for its long tails.

I’ve tried it, and of course, I have to admit that it takes a lot of patience as you browse through the endless list of new domains starting from 0 (zero) to A to Z. And that’s just for one name server e.g. lunarpages. Last time I checked, nsspy.org is monitoring 514 name servers. If you have lots of time on your hand, and you’re not the impatient type, then you could try this technique out.

Other Keyword Research Resources

Let’s Keep Up With SEO – Be Notified of Similar Posts

We’ll notify you of new posts of this nature, or other posts you may have missed. Please fill in the boxes at the left and click the ‘subscribe’ button.
To your success!
Posted on

Enjoying MNF Again

My MNF (Micro Niche Finder) is back and working even better than before. Whew, I was almost ready to accept that I’d never see my copy work again. After all, it’s paid off its worth many times over already. I thought I’d lost forever one of my best SEO tricks.

[tip]
For the ‘uninitiated’, Micro Niche Finder is a keyword research tool that evaluates the viability of your keywords, giving you an idea as to how easy or difficult it is to use for ‘seo’ purposes. Particularly interesting is the ‘Brainstorm’ feature where with one click you are given several random keywords and the feasibility of each one. This is specifically helpful for someone who doesn’t have any idea for a keyword to start researching for. I owe to this brainstorm feature one site of mine that has garnered some considerable success in the serps. For more information about (MNF) Micro Niche Finder, please check this link out.
[/tip]

No, the MNF copy in my notebook is still not working, just as the Google adwords keywords tool is still not working when I use IE. I have stopped pestering MNF Support because I had a feeling that the fault is no longer with MNF. This, after they told me to try using the Google Adwords Keywords tool using IE. They said if it doesn’t work, MNF won’t work. Some say it could be due to a Win7 update, etc. Besides, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion about it in the MNF Facebook page. If the problem had affected everyone, it would have become a big issue. Seems like everyone else is sailing smoothly with their mnf, including those who are ‘outside the US’.

MNF Is Back

Last week, my wife got her wish of getting her new Lenovo netbook. It only has a Win7 Starter Edition OS. I installed a second copy of MNF there. Lo and behold, MNF worked and is back in all its glory. All features worked seamlessly. Looks like I’m back in business again. I have yet to inform support about this.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, the copy on my own notebook is still useless. I’m contemplating on doing a ‘system restore’ back to when it last worked. This would entail some backup work, but I just might get to do it soon when I get the inspiration, or when I get tired of borrowing my wife’s netbook, whichever comes first.

[note]
Presently, I use the tandem of Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder for my keyword research.
[/note]

Now, all I need is to do is schedule and allot a time to get back to keyword hunting.

Try Market Samurai now for free!
Posted on

SEO Side Effect – A shot at a highly competitive keyword

I’m just writing out some observations I made after checking the stats lately of one of the few business sites I’ve created a few months ago. I have yet to analyze these data. But I just am posting these right now and hope to make a follow up post after my analysis (which may take awhile, considering that I am allotting for these tasks only a few hours a day).

If you jump back a few months ago to my post about my ‘Update to Keyword-In-Domain-Name Experiment‘ post, you’ll see that I made a rather detailed account of what I did, novice as I am, to my very first business site to bring it from nowhere to #2 in the google serps. This site is the very same site I was talking about in my post called ‘The Power of the Keyword-In-The-Domain-Name‘ when I tested the veracity of what I’ve been reading everywhere being preached by the gurus. I can never thank MNF enough for giving me that first green keyphrase and my ‘First Step Up Google’s PR Ladder‘ excitement . I was just lucky enough to have a friend who gave me time to play awhile with his Micro Niche Finder on his laptop. After finding how cool MNF is as an SEO tool, I decided thereafter to buy a copy for myself (although I could have just continued using my friend’s) in order to thank James Jones. It proved to be one of the very best investment I’ve ever made.

I started out working on a 3-word keyphrase that glowed green in MNF. Most bloggers/webmasters by the way, when they talk about their seo experience, for whatever reason (competition?), never reveal their keyphrases (although some do). I think a struggling newbie like me would be better off sticking to the same policy. So, let’s just symbolize my keyphrase with a dummy phrase like, say, ‘robotic swing arm’. The root keyphrase ‘swing arm’, although it has a tempting high search count, was very competitive and was colored red in MNF which means ‘you’re out of your league here, go find another less competitive phrase’. So I settled for the longtail ‘robotic swing arm’ because it was as green as an empress’ jade pendant, although it only has a search count 1/10th that of ‘swing arm’.

Long story short, my seo efforts brought me a little success. Number 2 in google. There were even a few days at a time when it tiptoes at number one, only to rest back to number 2. Then lately, I found that my site has begun to show up in the google searches for the 2-word keyphrase ‘swing arm’ although I did not do any seo work specifically to rank for that keyphrase. Yesterday it was #19 out of 17,300,000. It looks like my seo efforts to rank for a 3-word long tail keyphrase produced a side effect of raising my hopes to rank at the 2-word root keyphrase. I run MNF again and checked out this 2-word phrase’s data. It’s SOC (strength of competition) value is a whooping and glaring red 1000! Green SOC values range from 0 to 50 only. Now I ask myself, do I have a chance at landing within the first page of google if I focus my seo work on this particular phrase? MNF’s SOC tells me it’s a difficult climb (SOC 1000). Even Traffic Travis showed a Difficulty Rating of ‘Extremely Difficult’. Market Samurai also threw an extremely high SEOCTR value of 186% (low seoctr, say 0% to 7%, means weak competition). It’s like, everywhere I turn, everybody tells me ‘you can’t do it’.

Like I said earlier, I have yet to give these observations a little more attention. If some of you have had experiences that run along these lines, you could probably cut short my analysis time by giving me advise based on your experience. What do you think?

Some SEO Videos

SEO Tips

Finding .gov and .edu backlink sources