MarkAttwood.com

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.

Personalised search has been around on Google for a while, but only for people who were logged in to their google accounts whilst searching. It basically tailors the search results to your browsing history. Recently this feature has been widened to include people who are not logged into a google account when searching.

It has interesting ramifications for SEO – your listing will appear in different places dependent on how many times the user has clicked on your site for the search term.

One client of mine emailed me recently asking if I could do anything about the fact that his site was no longer Number One for his tier one keyword. I checked on my laptop and he was indeed still number one. The company he said had overtaken him were nowhere to be seen on my screen. I asked if he’d been clicking on his competitor’s site a lot recently (he had), so I told him to click on the Search Settings at the top right of the Google page and then to disable the customised search.

Sometimes Google doesn’t show this information, and sometimes it puts up a little “View customisations” link just above the information about how long the search took and how many pages were returned for the query. If you click on that, you get a message like this:

“When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you’re signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history.”

Disabling it is one thing, another is to go to a Google Dance tool like this.

The Google Dance tool allows you to check your rankings on different google servers from around the world, and will give you your actual, non-personalised rankings. The “Google Dance”, if you’ve never heard of it before, is simply the term used by SEOs to explain how rankings seem to jump up and down as Google’s servers get updated.

You should also make sure you’ve got Rank Checker installed in Firefox and schedule your rank checking automatically.

Now…I really should be out in the snow instead of blogging about rankings the day before Christmas Eve!

How does one review this book?

If you are in business, my message is simply this: take your finger out of your backside, buy this book, read it, implement what you learn as fast as you can.

Drayton is the dog’s bollocks. He’s erudite, funny, brilliant.

David Ogilvy said Drayton knows more about DM than anyone else on Earth.

Ogilvy knew his onions (literally, as he used to peel them for a living in a Parisian Restaurant in the 1930s before he became the “King of Madison Avenue”).

This book is about as definitive as you can get on the subject of direct marketing. You know, the kind of marketing where results and profits are actually measured. The kind of marketing that does not get taught at Universities. The principles of which form the basis of all successful internet marketing.

I first met Drayton when we both spoke at The System Intensive in London in 2008. We met again in 2009 and regularly exchange jokes and advice by email. You can see how good the old goat is here (in fact, that’s my developing bald spot you can see in the foreground):

So, go and get “Commonsense”, then whilst you’re at it, get this as well:

Then follow one of the best blogs on the whole t’internet here:

One word: Wow.

I’m just getting started on my adwords seminar in Cheshire. Should be a good day. Updates later….

This is a picture of everyone coming into the room before an exhausting 8 hours of me talking.

It was a great day. I’ve spent so many times in the last 6 years looking into peoples’ adwords accounts and seeing so many fundamental errors, that to get 50 of them into a room at the same time and “fix” them was wonderful.

To all that came – thankyou for being such a receptive and friendly audience. Now go forward and make your business more profitable please.

If you missed it, I have three pieces of advice:

1. Go and get Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords. Best ton you’ll ever spend.
2. Take control of your own adwords account. If you do outsource it, make sure you’re getting proper reports and that you are tracking every profitable keyword. When you know which one’s make the moolah, that’s when you do the SEO.
3. Make sure you’re on my adwords workshop list. I’ll be emailing you when the CD is available for the event, and news about future events. Use the form below.

Not sure? Check these testimonials out:

Here’s the trailer for the DVD of “The Art of Blogging for Business”. If you want to know how to get hold of a copy of this 4-part DVD set, fill out your details in the form below. If you want to know how good the seminar was, check out these testimonials.