Links from the Trenches #6

How Make Money On A Site With A Small Budget
Shoemoney had an awesome post this week on how to advertise on a website with a low budget. A reader of the blog posed this question to him in his QA post last week, and he answered the question by delving into how to use Google Analytics to track your goal (new rss subscribers), and then how to use those stats to decide where to advertise. While his math seemed a little fuzzy to me (he even points it out), the overall concept is solid.

APIs
I've been looking into APIs this week. This was sparked by the interview that John Chow had with on the Lab with Leo. In that interview John said he maintains a list of 1,000 news sites that he emails when he's got a new story on the Tech Zone, and that is the #1 way how he started the Tech Zone. I emailed John about how he emailed them, but no response as of yet. I'm just wondering how he does it without it looking like spam, and I doubt that he emails them all one by one. If anyone has any hints, I'd love to hear them.

Technorati API
I made a page scraper that's got me the top 1000 blogs about web development from Technorati, because when looking at the API I didn't seem to me that the 'search' would do a blog search by tag. I'm going to look into this more because it might do it. You are limited to 500 queries a day, and you can't use the results for commercial use.

Alexa API
You have to pay for this one, and it is through Amazon which owns Alexa, so I guess I be scraping that too. But you might be able to do a one off search if you already have a list (I'm sure all the plugins that generate alexa numbers in Firefox addons aren't paying anything). Need to look into this more.