Product Review: Zeus

Have you ever thought about promoting your site? It does not
really matter if your site is about your cat, a product you want
to sell or mythology ... presumably you are trying to communicate
something to the entire world, or at least a portion of it. It's
a pretty sure bet that somewhere in the world at least one (or
hopefully more) person would want to see your site.

However, site promotion offers perhaps the biggest challenge of
all to most webmasters. How in the heck do you get the word out
about your site to the people who need or want to know? To make
matters even more confusing you have to follow a poorly defined
set of ethical standards; if not, you might be accused of
spamming, and who wants that?

If you are like most other webmasters, you've tried just about
everything. You've submitted to search engines (these are fair
traffic generators) and FFA lists (worthless), created an ezine
(good source of return traffic), added your site to webrings
(minor but sustained traffic) and even added your site to dozens
of top site lists. Sure, you've managed to get some traffic to
your site, but still no where near the big leagues.

If you've done all this and nothing else, then you've missed a
couple of the biggest traffic-generators of all: viral marketing
(not discussed in this article) and link exchanges.

Exchanging links should be a normal part of your promotional
habits. In fact, the best strategy that I've learned over the
years is simply to keep my eyes open as I surf. As I visit sites,
I enjoy what they have to offer, learn what they are attempting
to teach, and decide if I want to exchange links with them. What
is this decision based upon? Whether or not I believe the web
site has value to my own readers. That's the only criteria that's
important - if the link does not have value to my readers then
they will figure it out and will lose trust in me. This can be
fatal to getting return visitors.

Building up a proper link exchange is a constant, daily effort
which should never cease. This is perhaps one of the most time
consuming efforts of all - building up and maintaining a link
exchange.

That's where a product called Zeus comes into play. This
interesting program theoretically automates a fair portion of the
link exchange process. What you do is "teach" Zeus what kind of
sites you want to include in your exchange. At first you do this
explicitly by specifying keywords, then you do it implicitly by
accepting or rejecting sites.

It's a long and tedious process, but in the end you do wind up
with a reasonably intelligent robot. Now you cut it loose on the
internet. The robot (it's really a spider) examines web pages,
looking here and there for pages (sites) which match it's
internal set of rules.

Once you have let Zeus run for a while it will build up a list of
a few sites (or a few hundred, depending on what it finds). Now
Zeus works more or less like a surfing tool - you just visit each
site using the Zeus browser, examine it, then indicate which
category (if accepted) you want it to appear in. You can then
tell Zeus to send an email to the webmaster of the site, and
handle any additional correspondence as needed.

The other task that Zeus is good for is maintaining the link
exchange pages themselves. This is especially useful in the PRO
version (costs a few hundred dollars), as you can customize these
pages as much as you want.

So the typical daily cycle is (a) let Zeus run for a while (a
full day, perhaps) looking for sites, (b) examine what it finds
and accept or reject sites and assign to categories, (c) send
emails to the webmasters, (d) update the status of sites as
webmasters respond, and (e) upload your new link exchange pages
with updates. If that's really all you want to do, then Zeus is
an excellent choice for you.

Zeus is very good at the things it does. The robot is excellent
(if properly trained) at choosing web sites for your exchange.
The email organizer is excellent for keeping a record of
webmaster contacts and the page creation system lets you create a
very nice looking link exchange program. The templates are
complex out of necessity, but they are very functional and can
be heavily modified without much trouble.

On the other hand, I've found that using Zeus is a major headache
at times. The program is difficult to train and very difficult to
correct later if you happen to train in a pattern which you do
not like. It requires constant attention, and the robot is
exceptionally slow (my system is a 2-gigahertz, dual processor
monster and the program runs sllloooooww).

Perhaps the major problem with Zeus is a huge feature that it
does not have. Zeus does not check links for you. This is an
issue because it is important that link exchange sites maintain
a link back to your own site, and it is a serious drawback to
the program. You must check the linkbacks manually.

Another issue is a choice that the developer made - he uses an
Access database. Access is infamous for data corruptions and
other issues, especially as databases get larger and more
complicated. In addition, Access databases tend to be
exceptionally slow. There are many better choices for databases
which are faster and more robust.

I think my final hesitation towards this program is the extremely
confusing and frustrating user interface. Program controls are in
strange places, they are poorly explained and difficult to find.
There is an incredible amount of data presented which is probably
very thrilling to the designer, but to most of us it simply
doesn't matter. I would highly recommend to the developer that
the next version do a complete redesign, and this time field test
it with some actual users.

There is a free version of Zeus, but you will need to purchase
the PRO version if you want to make it's link pages match your
site. Check out the free version, but be prepared to spend
several long days learning the system and training it to know
what you want.

Would I recommend Zeus? Well, it depends. Zeus is a valuable tool
and it is useful in a link exchange strategy. On the other hand,
I've found that Zeus tends to turn a daily activity which is a
chore into an organized chore. The major drawback, and my main
hesitation, is the exceptionally poor performance. I purchased
the tool and I do use it on a regular basis - however, even on my
monster machine it is annoying slow. So I would hesitantly
recommend this program, with the above-mentioned caveats.