David Leigh

I know that many people who read this will think that this is impossible, but I was telling Dan (fellow Stomper/30 Day Challenge/Immediate Edge/fellow ex-pat Brit in Barcelona) recently that I got a page to rank in Google in 15 minutes using the techniques used in the 30 Day Challenge and Immediate Edge.

He was stunned, but luckily he believes me. Anyway, I decided to write an article for one of my websites tonight. I published it less than 25 minutes ago, but when I checked 14 minutes after publishing on Wordpress doing all the Web 2.0 SEO stuff it was ranking at #1 already. OK, so it isn’t a competitive phrase, but how long does it take you to rank?

Let me tell you this; Immediate Edge works; 30 DayChallenge works; Ed Dale and Dan Raine are SEO Gods.

I’ve signed up, have you? I even persuaded my bro to go along for the ride - we’ll be the core of a team, even though I won’t be able to follow the full 30 days.

Watch the vid then go and sign up at the Thirty Day Challenge. You know you want to

And if you don’t - you’re just about to miss one of the best opportunities around to learn all about Internet marketing from some of the top guys around. And it’s free. Spelled F R E E.

I’ve just been reading an post on Aaron Wall’s blog about 301 redirects and how they can affect your rankings.

I played around with 301 and 302 redirects with a couple of my sites earlier in the year due to a structural reorg on one site and a Google penalty the other. (more…)

First Squidoo started to act against spam on July 5th and then lensmasters reported that many Squidoo lenses were losing their rankings over the weekend.

Was this due to Google taking action against Squidoo, as many people fear; or the result of sites “insulating” themselves against the sudden increase of Squidoo spam reported last week and Squidoo therefore losing backlinks as claimed by Squidoo? (more…)

Looks like We Build Pages are getting into internet marketing education, with the promise from CEO Jim Boykin of videos and a free newsletter. Jim’s blog is a great resource for link building strategies, so I look forward to seeing what he produces.

Matt Cutts is asking for feedback on Google’s webmaster guidelines, which is a good thing as they are too vague in places and contradictory in others. Maybe when I have a bit of time I will comment, but I’m out of town at the moment so it’s not the right moment for me.

 What I really want to know is why Google sunk one of my sites in September. I then wasted 3 months going through it, tweaking, rewriting and searching for anything that Google might no think was up to scratch.

Despite following Matt’s advice and requesting feedback in the webmaster forums and submitting a reinclusion request, the site never ranks higher than 30 for any search term. That sucks.

Maybe one day I’ll finish my 5 things I love about Google and 5 things I hate. Matt makes an appearance, but I won’t tell you on which list

 He deleted the first comment I made on his blog, I have’t been able to return the favour to date.

Talking about more Web 2.0 stuff that I don’t quite get yet. I’ve got 2 or 3 Squidoo lenses published to date, but none of them seems to drive any traffic, although it never hurts to receive a bit of Google link juice.

My last lens was published on June 17th and as yet is unlisted in Google. It’ll be interesting to see where it does rank after it’s been picked up - it is keyword targetted in a moderately competitive niche and the content is ok-ish. Maybe I should take a look at editing once it is in Google.

The great result would be top rank top 10 and both drive traffic and PR boost my website, which also ranks top 10, although it bounces quite a bit as I try stuff out.

Lets give it a shot using twitter as a driver…

[update]

I should have checked one of my other lenses before posting. With the top 2 positions it beats my site into third place for one keyword phrase and is just behind my site on another. Outstanding! I look at the visitor stats and it took off on June 17/18. Did I do something then? Probably. But I don’t remember.

 [/update]

As you may already know, I was one of the people who signed up to the Stompernet SIMPLE $1 trial in May. We had limited access for a month, while being taken step by step through their new program designed to get newbies up and running with an info product in record time.

So was it any good?

Overall I would have to say YES. Although I didn’t sign up for full access at nearly $800/month, it could be worth it simply for access to some of the SEO gurus they have on the faculty. I did sign up to continue the SIMPLE process though. Although I’m far from a newbie I am currently looking to diversify my revenue streams and one of the ways to do that on autopilot is to sell info products.

So what’s good and bad:

• Some of the TOP internet marketing experts guide you through the process
• Each step is explained in a short video as well as in writing
• The whole process is through an online workbook
• The forums allow you to swap ideas and ask the experts

But…

• Under delivery -  The program promised an internet business by the end of 30 days, but in fact all we had was an incomplete website with no traffic.
• Unorganised - the program was a bit too fluid and it was clear that things changed as we went along. In the week before it started Ed Dale had a set of videos in which he told us to set up an iTunes account and Twitter. We didn’t use either of these in the program.
• Concepts were not always explained well. Landing pages were talked about and pre-sell pages talked about, but not the content required and whether these terms referred to the same page content or not.
• No clear overview.

I’ll see how it goes paying $97/month as I am interested in learning how to use some of the web 2.0 marketing techniques to generate traffic, but think that much of the 30 day period allocated for Stompernet SIMPLE was wasted.

I’ve recently come across Dan Thies via StomperNet and somehow found his SEO Fast Start Portal. Dan has recently updated his SEO book which you can download for FREE and is a great read covering the basics of keyword research, structuring your navigation and dynamic linking and a whole host of other stuff I haven’t got to yet.

Don’t miss it, Dan absolutely knows what he’s talking about.

http://www.seofaststart.com/

I recently read some positive comments about Auction Ads, an alternative to Google adsense which allows you to display Adsense style ads website of Ebay listings. You earn commision from people signing up with Ebay as well as earning a percentage of the total amount.

It sounds a great product and so signed up, putting the code on just one page, but with a good number of daily page views and excellent Adsense clickthough rate. I left it for a few days and waited for the money to come rolling in.

Unfortunately Auction Ads on this test failed to perform at all. The Adwords CTR on this page is generally 30-40 percent, which is way above my overall average, so one of my top earning Adsense pages; the Auction Ads CTR on the same page in exactly the same position was….

…just 2.6 percent and my total earnings over this period were $0.

I’m not going to write Auction Ads off at the moment, I’ll take a look at running more tests, but what I do know is that you need to be careful. If you do change over do it slowly, preferably split testing each change. In this particular example I think that the Adsense Ads are much better targetted to the page than the Auction Ads, hence the excellent CTR, so I’ll look at a fairly high traffic page with bad Adsense CTR as my next test.

Let me know how you are getting on with Auction Ads.