David Leigh

I caught The Sisters of Mercy at Razzmatazz in Barcelona last month which was an amazing show. It was the best Sisters gig I’ve been to in 25 years of following them(!) - or at least the one I enjoyed the most.

I followed that up with a trip to Leeds where I saw them at the O2 Academy, from where I took the pics below. The gig wasn’t as good as Barcelona IMHO, but enjoyed it massively all the same PLUS went with my old mate from back in the days, Chris.

I briefly talked to both the guitarists at the after show party - great music BTW - but had to leave before Andrew Eldritch arrived.

I’ve got to say I’m slightly amazed that it’s taken Ed Dale this long to delete his 5000 “friends” in Facebook in order to regain Facebook for himself, as he clearly didn’t follow his own advice from months ago.

I signed up with Facebook a couple of years ago I think, but could never get the hang of it from any point of view. Most of my “friends” were in the internet marketing arena and I got no value out of it at all. At some point I set up Facebook pages for a couple of niches, but without the facilities of a normal Facebook profile they were next to useless. Yes, I could send broadcast messages, but they didn’t really allow me to add any value to anyone who joined.

I only really discovered what Facebook was about when I deleted all my internet marketing so-called friends and suddenly I could see the wood for the trees. Without the noise of pitch after pitch I could actually see what my sister in Australia and my brother in London were up to. And the reason I ditched all those so-called friends was because Ed Dale said - I think in Immediate Edge, but it could have been somewhere else - that the way to find out what Facebook was all about was to it like normal people use it, not like internet marketers.

That was before Xmas 2007, and it’s taken this long for Ed to follow his own advice

Anyway, Facebook have added features to their pages so that they are more like a normal profile and so Facebook may start to become useful for the internet marketing community at long last.

I know it’s mid-February already, but I’ve been really, really busy and just haven’t found the time to do anything with my blog.

Just for the record - I commented unfavourably on John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0 some time last year - I still think a lot of it is long winded and I don’t think the action plan (or whatever he calls it) works particularly well, but I have actually referred to some lessons a few times for ideas and putting them into action, so I obviously didn’t think it was as bad as I thought

This year I’m getting much more organised with developing my businesses for the long term, which means developing long term plans and really working them. It doesn’t mean I won’t have some side projects and a little fun though

These days I’m running numerous websites and don’t have time to write for them all. I still need content though, and so have been outsourcing some writing for the last couple of years or so.

While I did find some good writers through Elance, and also got some real garbage too and so earlier in the year joined Need An Article, a monthly subscription service with fixed price articles. The price is pretty low and costs $10 per month membership and then a little over $5 for a 350-500 word article and was recommended by Dan Raine at Immediate Edge.

However, once again the quality is completely variable.

Sometimes the articles are fantastic, sometimes they look as of they are made up of random sentences flung together. And so I ask myself - why do these writers think they can write? Writing is more than putting words on a page - anyone can do that - for website articles it’s a case of presenting ideas in a form that can be easily digested by the people they’re aimed at, and should be interesting to read and accurate.

Which doesn’t describe some of the articles I’ve been delivered lately.

Do you have any tips or advice on getting quality articles written?

It’s funny, but I’ve come across several affiliate programs recently that don’t allow deep linking unless it’s using the links provided by a merchant. In fact, I remember a case at least 10 years ago of EasyJet (I think) insisting that anyone linking to their website should only link to the homepage(!) - nothing to do with an affiliate program even.

What are they thinking?

Taking someone to the home page of a website just isn’t going to convert as well as taking them to the product that they want and dream of and some of the markets I’m serving have requirements that are so niche that these merchants don’t provide links that are any use to me as they don’t know these markets exist.

There are ways of getting around this, but why don’t they simply allow affiliates to deep link to what they like? It would make it easy for everyone, and get more sales in the process.

It’s not going to hurt their brand and might help effectively target a client base that they didn’t even know existed. Isn’t that one of the great advantages of affiliate marketing? Or am I missing something?

I was browsing the other day and visited the website of Goldsmiths, the UK jeweller, only to be presented with the following:

Application Firewall Alert

Your request triggered an alert! If you feel that you have received this page in error, please contact the administrator of this web site.

I laughed, thinking that their website had gone done in what must be a really profitable period for them - yes, I can be evil sometimes.

I tried again today, and the same thing, so checked Google’s cache, which was dated today and displayed correctly. I also tried viewing the website from a UK proxy and then switched browser - from Flock to Safari. Bingo, it works in Safari… and Firefox… and Opera… wow, and even IE!

So why doesn’t the Goldsmiths website like Flock?

Because the admins have never heard of it and they’re trying to ban bots from the site perhaps?

So next step, check Opera Mini on my Palm TX… yep, it works ok. Let’s write a scraper script and see what happens…

Weird, that works. Anyone got a clue?

All you hear from the internet marketing gurus these days is video, video, video.

While video when done right can be highly effective and something I don’t use enough, there is also the danger of overuse. And that is certainly seen in the internet marketing space.

These days hardly a day goes by without receiving an email urging me to watch a video explaining why I have to buy X product. Sometimes they look tempting and I save them for later, but the fact is I rarely have enough time for video and if it’s too long I’ll start multitasking and will miss something vital anyway. It’s also one of the big problems I had with Traffic Secrets 2.0 recently - if you want me to watch video send me a DVD, otherwise audio is far better.

If you’re going to target me you really need to do it through audio, as I will take the time to load it up and listen at the gym, which in a normal week amounts to 4 1/2 - 5 hours. Outside of this timetable I will often set aside time away from the computer to listen to something if it’s really worthwhile - unlike video, where I give up on many presentations, especially when they’re 50 minutes or more.

I guess these gurus are testing, but I can’t see how anyone can devote so much time to watching videos when we’re all being bombarded with them and I have really missed Ed Dale’s podcasts.

Anyway, I mentioned in a previous post about Internet Marketing This Week, a weekly podcast by Ed, Paul Colligan, Lynn Terry and Michelle Macpherson and it hits the nail right on the head. Ed has been saying how podcasts are coming back bigtime, but I don’t really think they ever went away - it’s just that the next big thing arrived.

I’ve been thinking of producing a podcast for one of my niches, but there is a podcast in the niche and it’s not hyper profitable, but on the other hand I half feel like doing it for the hell of it.

The results speak for themselves, but check out the organic traffic from Google on this site. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it is a personal hobby niche and I’ve gone in pretty deep since April/May 2004. One of the keys to its success is the number of natural backlinks it has received.

If you ‘d like to me to help your website gain results like these then please get in contact - just leave a message below.

I seem to have been busy with everything except doing any real work for a while, and the lack of new posts on my blog is indicative of that.

One thing I have done since the summer though is to go through John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0 and Stompernet’s Stomping The Search Engines 2.0. As a reminder, TS 2.0 cost $500, caused me a few problems and had lousy customer service, STSE 2.0 cost $10 or $20 postage when I subscribed to The Net Effect, Stompernet’s new magazine, so while there is no contest in terms of price it is interesting to compare them side by side.

Traffic Secrets 2.0

I must admit I was expecting big things from John Reese, as I’ve benefited from some of his pearls of wisdom in the past dispensed in interviews etc, but TS 2.0 didn’t do it for me. There is far too much filler and quite frankly I couldn’t concentrate on the videos for long because of that. The content was added to the website in MP3 format, which at least allowed me to listen at the gym, but still, it is all too vague and lacking the killer content I was expecting to find although maybe I’m not who it’s aimed at, so perhaps there are people who have genuinely benefited.

I also got a couple of DVDs from Frank Kern with Traffic Secrets 2.0, which are quite something. If you’ve come across Frank in the past you’ll pretty much know what to expect, but he really holds your attention and has a completely off the wall sense of humour.

Stomping The Search Engines 2.0

I’ve had issues with Stompernet in the past and for me they come across as being far too corporate for their own good, but I thought I’d check out STSE 2.0 anyway - for that price I’d have been stupid to miss it. I had listened to the original course, so had an idea of what to expect. The course is far more compact that TS 2.0, and better for it IMHO.

Among other things it really gets down to the nitty gritty of keyword research, on page factors, off page factors and a very strong section on link building by Dan Thies. I’ll also say that I had no problem with the order process and delivery of The Net Effect and STSE 2.0, although there are many people who have had issues and are really fed up with Stompernet for it - one of my big complaints previously.

Why is good customer service so elusive?

It seems to be a common problem for internet marketing companies to have extremely poor customer service, and I don’t know if it’s genuinely because they are taken by surprise by the number of orders they receive, poor planning, scalability issues, they’re let down by delivery fulfillers or they just don’t care, but one essential piece of the marketing jigsaw is customer service - get this wrong and it can crucify you.

And I’m amazed that it isn’t talked about more, until just recently I came across Lynn Terry through Internet Marketing This Week, also with Ed Dale, Paul Colligan and Michelle Macpherson. Lynn’s big bugbear seems to be lack support for both customers and affiliates, the latter of which resonates with me as I have been unable to sort out an issue with the Immediate Edge affiliate program that I first raised in September. To be frank, that is pissing me off and I really hope that it is sorted soon and while I value my membership of Immediate Edge, I certainly won’t continue to promote it, let alone push it more.

Funny thing the internet. I met a business colleague yesterday who told me that he’d met someone on Monday who’d told him that he had a real hardcore SEOer working for him - me.

Although he didn’t quite get the business relationship, it’s nice to know that I’ve got some kind of positive reputation