Archive for December, 2007

Merry Christmas

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Yes, it’s that time of year again. The presents have been bought, if not wrapped, I’m just busy backing up data and working out what I need to take away with me and then preparing for departure tomorrow. I’m headed for the Costa Brava, so as well as the normal turkey I hope to get a dive or too in at the same time, although the weather isn’t looking fantastic.

Anyway, here’s to a merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous 2008!

SEO tools reviewed: Keyword Elite by Brad Callen

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Keyword EliteKeyword Elite is a piece of software written by Brad Callen which looks at keyword supply and demand to help identify low-competition niches. I’ve been aware of Brad for quite a few years now, although my memory is slightly hazy as I always used to confuse him with Brad Fallon - I could never work out why emails from the 2 Brads never seemed to file themselves properly in Outlook as I thought they were one person, but that’s another story.

I bought Keyword Elite earlier this year when I was starting to look at Adsense arbitrage following the release of the ebook by Michael Plante. Before that I was using a combination of Overture results and hand checking competition for small keyword lists and the rather clunky keyword tools in Site Build It, which relied at the time on input from Overture as well as Wordtracker. BTW, don’t bother looking for Michael Plante’s book now because Google has effectively killed arbitrage and if you do try it anyway you’re likely to have your Adsense account terminated with no chance of being allowed back in. I still have my Adsense account because when I saw the way it was going I stopped arbitrage. (more…)

Search Engine Myths Exposed

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Jonathan Ledger is currently promoting a free ebook entitled Search Engine Myths Exposed to his mailing list. The video doesn’t really explain very much about it but you can find out more from his site here.

I don’t know how good this report will be, but worth taking a look when it comes out anyway.

Internet Marketing - it’s not about the tools

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007


Jackhammer

Originally uploaded by Tom O’Neill

I blogged the other day about my favourite 7 internet marketing tools - in fact I’ve thought of some more I should have added to make it up to at least 10, but I’ll leave it for another time. The problem is it doesn’t matter how many tools you have or how good they are - if you don’t set out from the start to do your internet marketing right you aren’t going to achieve a thing.

So… before you spend any more money on IM tools, make sure you have a plan to actually achieve something. If you can justify a new tool because it will help you with your plan, by all means buy it. If it is just the latest fad tool, then leave it alone and spend the money on a good IM education or PPC.

The nightmare before Christmas

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

3 presents waiting……… Originally uploaded by paper by design

Only a few more days before Xmas and I’ve still got to think of some presents. I keep meaning to spend some “quality time” to daydream myself into action, but it just isn’t happening. Weirdly enough I can’t find a website that helps choose presents based on your relationship with the person and their own likes and dislikes. So here I am working at SEO/Internet marketing and wondering what I’m going to do when I hit the shops tomorrow.

Any ideas?

Learn how to make the most of Facebook ads

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

One of the great things about Immediate Edge that I keep going on about at the moment is Ed Dale’s course on Facebook ads, which depends on geo-demographic data. Ed can probably explain better than I can:

The course will be released as a standalone product in the New Year, but you can get access to it right now by joining Immediate Edge now! I have huge respect for Ed and Dan Raine as internet marketers and the information I’ve got from Immediate Edge is absolutely first class, so if you want to get in on Facebook ads before Christmas and get a head start over the crowd, now is the time to join The Edge.

Advanced Internet Marketing Strategies from the Immediate Edge

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

Immediate Edge

Since I joined Immediate Edge at the beginning of September I’ve been really focusing on the strategies shared by Dan Raine and Ed Dale at every opportunity I can. Not aimed at beginners like the 30 Day Challenge, Immediate Edge is all about showing how to use advanced internet marketing strategies and to eliminate risk from the equation.

The first of these is the Maximum Edge, which is a superb way of ranking on the first page of Google withing 24 hours - it really is unbelievable.The other strand which I’m following with interest is Ed Dale’s series on Facebook marketing. This really is the cutting edge of internet marketing and will be released as a stand alone course in the new year - luckily we Edge members get this in advance and it’s being rolled out now.

Another great thing is the newsletters. Appearing approximately once a month they are packed with info to try on your existing websites and often include software to add a feature. If you can set up a Wordpress blog then you can almost certainly get this software up and running too.

You can try out the Immediate Edge’s advanced internet marketing strategies risk free. Sign up and if you are not happy with it within the first 30 days you’ll receive a refund. Great stuff.

My 7 top Internet Marketing tools

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

I was thinking about what Internet marketing tools I use most the other day and decided to write a post on it and list them here. They’re in no particular order, but I do use everything listed here on a regular basis and so recommend them on that basis.

1. Firefox with loads of pluggins, including the SEO tool, ScribeFire for blogging, Google notebooks and Session Manager. If you change from Internet Explorer you’ll know why…

2. Keyword Elite is a great tool for finding niches by checking search volume and competition of keywords from Wordtracker, Google, Ask and Yahoo. I used to use it exclusively for my keyword research until…

3. GTrends Second Edition is based on the idea that came out of Immediate Edge and then the Thirty Day Challenge to verify keyword data using Google Trends data. The idea is to use a keyword with a known search volume to more closely estimate the search volume of your target keyword. I now use Keyword Elite to generate keywords to research and then GTrends to generate the data.

4. WordTracker gives you 100 keywords for free, but to really go deep into a niche you can generate 1,000 long tail keywords by signing up for the full service.

5. Webposition Gold allows you to automatically check your website rankings for a list of keywords on Google and a whole list of other search engines. It also has a tool to analyse the on page stats such as word density and compare them with top 10 listings to help you rank better, although I don’t use this - linkbuilding is far more important these days and as long as you have an optimised title and description that’s all you really need to do, except for control PR through “nofollow”.

6. OnlyWire is a great free service that allows you to social bookmark to a ton of sites automatically.

7. Socialposter is another free service that helps you submit to a whole load of social bookmarking sites. I use it for Digg, Propeller, Reddit and Stumbleupon only as it isn’t as automatic as Onlywire because these sites require some user input.

Well that’s it, my seven top internet marketing tools. What do you think?

PS If you’d like to keep up to date with my thoughts on Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization, why not join my mailing list? Don’t worry I’ll never Spam you!

StomperNet - Going Natural 2.0

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

StomperNet

StomperNet Going Natural 2.0 

I’ve been pretty hard on StomperNet in the past after the fiasco that their SIMPLE program turned into, but have just watched the first video in the Going Natural 2.0 series after being alerted by Ed Dale, one of the faculty members. The great news is that you don’t have to pay anything, you don’t have to give your email address, all you need to do is watch, understand, make notes… and put it into action.

The video is by Andy Jenkins and although slightly technical in nature is so blindingly obvious that I can’t believe that I didn’t think of it myself. Anyway, I’m going to do something about it now, right after I’ve this post. Enjoy!

A view from my office window

Friday, December 7th, 2007

I just looked out the window to see a fantastic sunset and decided to share it. In fact it was much more spectacular than the photo suggests, perhaps because it was taken on my trusty Nokia phone.


Barcelona sunset

The building work - just in case you were wondering - is the new Ciutat de la Justicia, the new law courts for Barcelona and Hospitalet and has been going on forever.