Here’s the experiment:

1. Pick an obscure niche or long tail keyword (I’ve chosen potato boxes)
2. Go to Squidoo.com, open an account, write a ‘lens’ on the subject. Make sure your keyword is the title of the lens (or at least in the title if someone’s already nabbed that)
3. Follow Squidoo’s “Health Check” advice and make sure you write two or three good text modules, pull in some content from amazon, youtube, RSS feeds etc. (It’s really simple to do)
4. Link to your new page using your blog (like I have here) and then email all your mates and ask them to reference the Lens using your keyword as the anchor text.
5. Sit back and see how quickly the lens rises in the rankings.
6. For the next bits, email me :-)

I got asked a question about how to add a paypal button to a website or blog today. I made a video that shows you exactly how to do this in the Members Area.

I just got my copy of the DVD of Rachel Elnaugh’s Marketing Magicians event at the British Library in June.

Take a look at it:

It’s a fantastic package crammed full of super-useful information from a diverse bunch of speakers, including me!

Royston Guest – a really useful and inspiring speech about how important referrals are in your business. I guarantee you are not doing everything Royston recommends, and you are losing sales because of it.

Thomas Mahon – a remarkable story of a tailor and his blog. Thomas was inspired to “start a conversation” on a blog. He did this – by blogging about what goes into making his Saville Row suits. He’s got a full international order book because of it. A superb lesson on how powerful blogging really is.

Me – I give away Waaaay Too Much Information in my talk. One attendee told me the other day that he’d halved his PPC budget and quadrupled his hits just from the adwords info I give on here.

Alan Forest Smith – from hairdresser to powerhouse direct marketer, Alan is a remarkable speaker.

Sue Stone – an inspirational talk from officially “the happiest woman in Britain”. Seriously, Sue has clients from all over the place and she teaches them to be happy applying the law of attraction and positive thinking.

Rachel Elnaugh – The First Lady of Dragons Den has been there and bought the T-shirt. Red Letter Days was an amazing achievement. The fact that it went down was heartbreaking, but Rachel’s fighting fit and gives an impressive talk here on branding that will inspire you. A true testament to the fact that being a successful entrepreneur is as much about how many times you can pick yourself up off the floor as anything else. Go and read Rachel’s book: “Business Nightmares”

Here’s a clip of me speaking at the event. There’s 1 hour and 20 minutes of me on the DVD.

There are some more clips in my Members Area, but if you want the whole shebang, I suggest you buy it today:

You’ll get a copy in the post within 14 days of us receiving the order. There is only a limited stock, so I’d get this valuable piece of business education as soon as you can. When you’ve watched it, feel free to come back and leave some comments here.

Former Dragons Den judge, Rachel Elnaugh uncovers the moments when she and other business personalities hit crisis point. This contains Rachel’s truthful account of the much-publicised crash of Red Letter Days. She then boldly interviews business celebrities such as Jeffery Archer, Donald Trump, Stelios, Karan Billamoria, the Innocent boys, Ivan Massow and many more, about their darkest times in business.

This business book exposes, through detailed and insightful profiles how even the mightiest business people were fallible and did not make it plain sailing; that all business go through bad times but can still come out the other side and be hugely successful.

The author, Rachel Elnaugh is the epitome of a successful failure in that she was running the hugely profitable Red Letter Days, and lost it. Highly exposed in the media due to her celebrity status on the Dragons Den, Rachel became the scapegoat for the crash of this business. For the first time, you can hear Rachel’s side of the story, exclusively and honestly, in this book. It is written in a series of revealing interviews and delves into the darkest business moments of many massive business personalities, divulging what really went wrong, how the events unfolded, how they felt and how they emerged from the crisis and what they learned from their experience.

In a world where most business books bang on about “how to make millions in minutes” and “being a millionaire is easy”, Business Nightmares is a refreshing change in this market. Businesses fail for all sorts of reasons, and it’s usually the captain of the ship that takes all the flack.

A must read for any entrepreneur. Get it here:

We build and run a lot of blogs, for ourselves and our clients. We use WordPress mainly, although we do have some Moveable Type blogs (as recommended by Dave Taylor). We also run a few Joomla MyBlogs. We tend to steer away from Blogspot mainly due to snobbery :-) Blogspot is, to me, the domain of the teenage diarist, and that’s not the real estate on which to build a proper business blog.

I get asked a lot by clients “what’s the best host for wordpress?”. In fact, it worries me when clients aren’t asking about where to host their wordpress blog. Not all hosts are the same, and to get maxmimum SEO juice out of your seo-maxed WP blog, I always recommend 1&1. They just have it set up perfectly to handle WordPress. So, in a nutshell, that’s my answer: 1&1.

It’s important to note that this advice is for standalone blogs being used for online reputation. If you have a “money” site with a blog built in already, no need to change that. But if you want to build a blog for yourself and you want your money site to benefit from link juice from your blog, always a good idea to host it on a separate account like 1&1.

There’s much more info on how to use blogs effectively for your business in our Members Area.