A few weeks ago Google mentioned the fact that the speed at which a site loaded would have an impact on it’s rankings. As usual, SEO world goes into minor meltdown on forums etc., but the reality is just common sense.

In a nutshell, if you have two identical sites in terms of links, relevent content etc., then Google would favour the faster loading one. Why? Simply because it’s all about the user getting to what they need to get to as fast as possible. It’s about Google’s customer experience. Just like it always has been. So, is the loading speed of your site important? Yes, but it should be anyway. No-one wants a site that takes more than a few seconds to load. That’s why many of my sites are “lo-tech”.

Here’s Google’s Matt Cutts making it even simpler to understand:

So, speed is one of 200 other SEO factors. Our job as business owners is to “best guess” the importance of these other factors. And the best guess that works best for the majority of website owners is common sense: keep producing relevent, quality content, a good user experience, and attracting good quality links from other relevent, aged, authority domains. Most of the other noise around SEO is just that: noise.

Yes that’s me with the tiny head up there. Imperfect action always preferable to perfect inaction, and all that.

This is going to be a lot of fun, and a great learning curve for me as well as you.

Warts and all training on the fly. I’m utterly convinced I’ll make this website work, but you’ll have to join me to see if I succeed or not.

One thing I can guarantee – there’s no better way to learn how to market a website properly than doing it with a live example.

I’ll be releasing details of which website I’m going to be improving INSIDE the members area by the end of January, BUT I’m not letting more than 100 people in. First come, first served.

See you on the inside! (Join Here)

(and yes, brownie points to anyone that spots my deliberate misth-take)

Attendees to my Blogging/SEO seminar in November were promised an exclusive peek at the updated SEO Blogger tool from Mike Mindel of Wordtracker. You may be wondering where this is? Simply put, it’s my fault you haven’t had it yet. Mike kindly did a video showing how to install and use it, and it just fell of a cliff somewhere. I apologise. If you did come to the seminar, but are not on the blogging seminar email list, just sign up below and we’ll email you a link to the video. Cheers!

It was minus 16 at home this morning. Water pipes frozen. No water for tea, cooking, washing up or cleaning my pits (or kids). Took three hours to melt enough snow to make a pot of tea. News full of “Frozen Britain” everywhere. Cars skidding all over the show. People not turning up for work. Inbound call levels dropped, business down. More of the same tonight…but, you know what? What a fantastic time this is.

I’ve had more strangers in the street smiling at me than at any time I can remember. You know, that knowing smile that says “yeah, I know, mate. It’s bonkers isn’t it?”. There’s a Dunkirk spirit in the air, or what I imagine to be a Dunkirk spirit (I was not actually at Dunkirk during the time the alleged “spirit” appeared). Neighbours are being more friendly than I’ve ever experienced. Shop staff more chatty than usual. More jokes being cracked everywhere.

When things slow down like this, it’s a good time to write that sales letter you’ve been putting off, do a bit of keyword research, tidy up a database. But it’s an even better time to build a snowman and go sledging with the kids. Here’s a magnificent example of a snowman and a dog I just had to snap on the way into the office today:

It’s also a good time to take a good look around. Yeah, it’s cold and it’s a pain in the arse, but just look at it! It’s absolutely beautiful. Seven years ago we spent a small fortune on our honeymoon to go to North Sweden to experience this weather and stay in the ice hotel. Now it’s come right to our doorstep! Enjoy it for what it is and while it lasts.

That’s an extremely nice thing to say, Drayton, thank you.

The point of putting this video up is not about butteringup my ego, rather to bring to your attention that there is a monumental opportunity here for entrepreneurs to tap into the mind and vast experience of a man who has helped shaped not only the way businesses market themselves over the past 50 years, but also our culture (anyone buy a Bullworker? That was Drayton).

Compared to the plethora of marketing gurus out there (many of which have only ever run one business: the marketing guru business), this is a diamond in the rough.

The fact that this man wants to share and help people when most other people would have long hung up their boots is too good to miss. It’s one thing buying and reading his extraordinary books, but entirely another to engage with the man himself. He’s currently in test mode with his “Drayton Bird Learning” programme. You could do worse than take a look at it here: Drayton Bird Learning

There’s nothing in it for me apart from the hope that you get something out of being exposed to this man’s brain. Enjoy!

Drayton brings up a very important point here, one close to my heart..

I have met an extraordinary amount of people that focus on the latest trick or fad whilst ignoring the fundamentals of their business: find a hungry market and sell to it.

It’s that simple.

Here is Drayton on the recession, and how it breeds mistrust in business…

Here is Drayton sharing his thoughts on the perils of believing your own success is all down to you, and what that can do to your ego…

It’s more than a valid point. The longer you go on in business, the more people you meet who are at various stages of success. Some are on the way up, some are there, others are on the way down. In business, as in life, you’re never aware of being in a peak or a trough until you’ve passed the event – you are usually somewhere in between either point. Business is truly a roller-coaster ride. It’s also entirely amoral.

Success brings it’s own demons, such as jealousy from competitors or colleagues. The biggest problem though, is yourself.

I know. I was one of the people that Drayton talks about (and I suspect he was one himself once).

In his masterwork “Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing” he points out in Chapter Two:

“..I was most interested to read that an eminent Japanese businessman, when asked why he was in business, replied: ‘To ensure the survival of my company’. I suspect this reply would not be unusual in Japan. For many years Japanese industry tended to invest a higher percentage of its profits in building for the future than the UK did. It did not feel obliged to squeeze very yen out of the annual turnover and hand it over to the shareholders.

Clearly, if you are intent upon survival rather than a fast buck, you are going to plan more for the long term. No doubt this attitude explains why the Japansese did better than us for a good 40 years, and still do in many areas. But whatever your aim, it will colour all you do: the way you structure your organisation, manage your staff and set their targets, everything, right down to the smallest marketing decision.”

If you haven’t got this book, I highly recommend it:

Attitude is clearly king.

I’ve lost count of the number of show-off entrepreneurs I’ve met with pictures of million dollar boats on the wall of their office, Rolexes dripping off their wrists, and all the other gubbins that seems to motivate them. When I first started making money, it did go to my head a bit. I’m from a council house background, so it was bound to :-)

In recent months I’ve become much more focused on building for the future. I’ve experienced massive highs and massive lows, especially in the past two years. One piece of literature that I find hugely leveling and inspiring whenever I feel the need for a lift (or realise my ego is running away with me) is the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, which I shall reproduce for you here:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

In relation to Drayon’s point in the video, I think the lines..

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;”

…are particularly relevant.

I hope you find it useful too, and wish you a fantastic 2010.

Turkey was not the only Bird I had at Christmas this year.

I was also honoured to have Drayton Bird over as a guest. We’re cooking up a few very exciting things in the New Year together, which I will soon be sharing with you. In the meantime, I got a few snippets on tape from the Grand Master himself for you to enjoy. Here’s a funny story about Christmas and a certain David Ogilvy….

Look out for the next one in a few days.

Lovely to report that I’m listening to my old friend Lemn Sissay on BBC Radio Manchester being interviewed by Alan Beswick about the fact that’s he’s been awarded an MBE! Regular readers of this blog will know that Lemn is not only an inspiration to me, but also thousands of other people, especially children – he has spent thousands and thousands of unreported hours doing workshops and talks for kids all over the world. In fact, when we used to knock about in Manchester it always amazed me how many bouncers we’d bump into who suddenly drop their guard and say stuff like “Fuck me, it’s Lemn Sissay!”, then give him a big, star-struck hug and spend 20 minutes telling him how much he inspired them in a talk he did at their school years before (much to the chagrin of the other revelers in the queue desperate to get into whatever house of ill repute we were attempting to enter).

Apart from being Best Man at our wedding (the poem he wrote and read at the ceremony “Heart Garden”, is one of my most treasured memories and possessions), he is also Godfather (in a non-religious type way, if that’s possible:-) to my son. Here they are just after he was born:

You can get further background on Lemn here, and you can get his work from Amazon here:

His second published book was “Rebel without Applause”. As he said on Alan Beswick’s show this morning, after Alan chastised him for moving from Manchester to London, he’s now a “Rebel with a baguette”. I can’t publish what he said MBE stands for. “Might Be Ethiopian” was my suggestion – not as funny as his.

One project Lemn has created that is really exciting is the GPS (Global Poetry System), a typically brilliant idea that is a user generated world map of poetry. Watch the video about it here:

We’ve often chatted about the use of poetry in the commercial world over the past 20 years. A couple of things we did together that I’m very proud of include the famous poem on the wall of Hardy’s Well pub on the busiest bus route in Europe on Wilmslow Road heralding the entrance to Rusholme from the South in Manchester. I pulled that together along with Toby Hadoke and the then landlord of the pub, Andy, back when there was a little comedy club in the back room.

That was back in 95/96 – and it’s still there!

The other thing was that when I won a sales promotion contract with Stagecoach to promote their weekly Megarider ticket (with the company I set up in 2001 that’s still going strong, AIM Solutions) I convinced them to them to do the whole thing around Lemn and use his poems in the promotional material.

We got Lemn on the side of hundreds of buses lying down “Sex and the City” style, his face on millions of tickets and posters inside the buses with his poetry all over them. I’ll never forget the meeting with Stagecoaches’ management when I proposed it. One of them said “I don’t want to do it if he’s associated with drugs”. Oh, racism. What a bizarre and stupid thing you are.

Lemn Sissay. Friend. Brother. Member of the British Fucking Empire!