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.
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.
We Guarantee to At Least Double Your Click Through Rates
If you’re frustrated with the performance of your pay-per-click marketing, and you are looking for a PPC consultant or specialist, why not take us up on a challenge?
We regularly achieve 100% CTRs with Google adwords – and the best bit? Google charges us less for the clicks on those ads AND raises them in the rankings.
Why? Because Google rewards relevancy, the key reason behind it’s success.
What’s the challenge? Simply call us up on +44 161 482 6226 with your google account details to hand so we can both look under the hood of your account. We will know within seconds if we can help you (don’t worry about security – you can change your password as soon as we log out).
A badly optimised PPC account stands out like a sore thumb, and we are experts at managing pay per click accounts – we have managed over £1 million on our own businesses, and we are now opening the doors for other companies to benefit from our hard-earned experience.
You might be wondering who the hell we are? A blog post is not a traditional way of selling services like this. Don’t let that put you off. You can find more detailed information about me here and you can google the keyword “Internet Marketing Expert” to see where I rank for this highly competitive phrase.
The deal on offer today is simple: we will look at your adwords account and then make you the guarantee of doubling your CTR. We will then offer you a one-off payment deal to do this (it will depend on the size of your campaign). If you accept, we will then do the work and you will only pay if we achieve our guarantee. Sound like a good offer?It is!
One of the reasons we are making this offer is because we are so annoyed at the phone calls we are getting on a daily basis from PPC rip-off merchants that are giving Google a bad name. Their promise of getting companies on page 1 for a one off £90 fee is an utter scam – you should avoid it like the plague.
The very best way of getting more business for less cost is to take control of your own PPC campaign. We can fix it up and manage it for you, and we can teach you how to manage it properly going forward (or you can pay us to manage it if you haven’t the time to do this). It’s up to you to be in control of marketing your business.
There are many other credentials we are happy to talk you through over the phone when you call (we don’t want to give everything away on here), or you can email us using our contact form here.
In the meantime, here’s a video clip of me talking at The British Library in June 09 about internet marketing (so you know who I am before you call).
It’s always exciting when Google does something new.
As Google’s webmaster frontman, Matt Cutts, has put it: “This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.”
What’s he talking about? It’s being called Google Caffeine (or “New Improved Google”) and it’s basically a faster, smarter, more comprehensive update on their current search.
If you’ve been following our advice and doing white hat techniques, there should be no problem. Google still wants and rewards relevancy. Just give it to them and you’ll be fine.
Why have they done this? My view it’s just another evolutionary step in the world of search. Yes, twitter and facebook have real-time search. Yes, Microsoft has just launched Bing! in a blaze of publicity. Yes, Yahoo has rolled over and given up on doing it’s own search. But, I don’t think Google are scared of these things too much. They’re are just flexing their not inconsiderable muscle and upgrading themselves splendidly.
At the end of the day, it’s all about giving the user a better experience in finding what they are looking for fast.
We haven’t had time to check everything yet (and if you do look at your site in the link above, bear in mind it’s not on the UK servers), but all shake ups are good. It separates the men from the boys, and we welcome the SEO challenge!
I watched a video last night of a talk given in April 2008 by Professor Jonathan Zittrain. Prof Zittrain is a compelling speaker and he was talking about the contents of his book “The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It”…
I have been pondering where the internet is going for a number of years myself, whenever tearing myself away from working on it has given me the time to truly ponder what is going to happen to it.
I have myself been concerned recently about the Berlin-wall that is building up around Facebook and how an ever growing number of people enter the net through it. Those people aren’t freewheeling through the internet like I was when I first got on board in ‘93 (although I sent my first email in 1984) – they’re unknowingly inside a closed community, like one of those god-awful gated communities you find in Noth America. I’d actually liken it to being inside a prison. Not that they’re not free to communicate with people who are also on the inside, but that their freedoms are severely limited inside Facebook compared to the freedoms available on the old wild world wide web. Just look at how they are preserving their legal rights to so much of our private information. And we just willingly give it up because we can’t imagine what could possibly be malevolent about this.
Because so many of the newbies (who are really oldies) joining the internet don’t know of any other kind of online world, they are blissful in their ignorance. It not only frightens me, but appalls me in terms of the potential for compliant censorship of ideas, and therefore potentially another massive slowdown in the development of human potential, not dissimilar to the Dark Ages. I say this in context of the massively exciting period we lived through ‘95-’07 when all things online were possible (i.e there were no “Terms and Conditions” for putting up a music app online. Try creating one for the iPhone now. And no-one could stop you producing anything on the grounds of ‘taste and decency’. Who decides what’s tasteful and decent for fuck’s sake?)
Admittedly, I have spent most of my time thinking about how this would factor in on the niche world of internet marketing. I have seen other marketers dive in headfirst with Facebook and Twitter and the like. I have dabbled myself. I even managed a 100% click-through-rate with a Facebook advert, against the average of 0.04%. They sent me a T-shirt.
Professor Zittrain has been thinking about this too, but he goes much deeper and places the development of the internet, which is a fascinating story in itself, within the context of sterile and generative technologies developed throughout the 20th century. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s been a fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and is currently (I think) at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He’s internet royalty as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve also been interested about the way that coders are being tempted to create programmes (or applications, or “apps” as you probably know them as now) within the constraints of Facebook and the iPhone because of the fact that these are “cool” and “killer” and because of the massive income potential they offer. In the old days, coders created apps for the fun of it. You could create anything and anyone could download it from anywhere. Good stuff went viral and made a name for the coder. They often went on to monetise these ideas in massive ways (skype, anyone?). But now, when you create an app for Facebook or the iPhone, you’re writing it for “The Man”. Don’t take my word for it (I’m not a coder) – take a look at this interesting blog entry by coder Brian Webster.
The Prof also makes the point about how it is the generative nature of the internet as an open network based on IP that is both the basis of it’s brilliance, but also it’s downfall because of the pure ease in which a malicious piece of software can be placed on any computer in the world at any time. It’s the security fears that lead to the gated community. It is not an easy dilemma to solve, and the direction it goes in will have profound effects on us all.
The reason why I urge you to make a cup of tea and spend an hour in a quiet room watching this video is because of the message behind Professor Zittrain’s ideas – it’s up to all of use to collectively be aware of what’s happening in order for us to collectively help shape the future of that most wonderful of human inventions, the internet…
