Searching Google this morning for the word “blog” i discovered that the london2012.com blog was ranking 4th.
Now 4th is a pretty good result for a blog that only launched in 2006 and is pretty unlikely to attract many links. In fact the site is doing quite well on the link front with 393 but that’s [...]

The big talking point over the last week has been about Google’s decision to allow trademark bidding in the UK.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether allowing trademark bidding is a good or bad idea, I understand why Google would want to keep a good relationship with advertisers by preventing competitors bidding for their [...]

The SEO industry is an exciting place to be; it has developed rapidly over a considerable period and it is still such a comparatively new sector that it is filled with entrepreneurs – people who saw the industry potential way back when. Many of our clients understand the sector or have researched all aspects of [...]

Google AdWords have today added a new feature which allows advertisers to name and view different conversion types.

This looks like it could become very useful to clearly differentiate between leads, registration signups, sales etc. For more information here’s the Google Help page.
Post from SEOptimise’s SEO Blog
Google AdWords adds Conversion Tracking Naming

Yahoo! has launched a preview of its new SearchMonkey tool and is requesting developers go and have a play.
The ideas behind SearchMonkey were first shared with the online community back in February, but now website owners and developers are being encouraged to sign up for the SearchMonkey, check out the demo and even attend the [...]

Knowing what you want before you dive in is extremely important, otherwise you will end up getting sidetracked, wasting precious time and energy on things that won’t make you any money, but instead bring you frustration and disappointment. Nobody ever said it was easy to make money online. Well, we think someone should have, because it is!

The thing you’ll need though is a solid game plan, to tackle any challenges, which will undoubtedly cross your path to .COM riches at some stage. Prepare yourself for what’s coming. Channeling your efforts into one subject at a time is 100x more productive than going at it like a loose cannonball.

The problem with trying to do everything at the same time is that you’re more likely to encounter multiple issues at the same time. The best way to become a unmotivated blogger is to stack up a nice pile of problems for yourself. And it’s easier to quit than to keep pushing isn’t it?

Unfortunately, quitters don’t make money online.

There’s no rush into setting up your blogging operation. Make sure you over think every step before you take it. If you’ve done your homework, and you have created a solid ground for your blog, the only way is up. If you rush through things without thinking, you will probably run into issues sooner or later.

Just imagine:

You’ve picked the cheapest web host plan you could find, only to be unpleasantly surprised at a later stage that there are tons of limitations to their service. Bandwidth restrictions, shared CPU time, insufficient memory. All these things equal downtime, pissed off readers and loss of income.

• You could have gotten a bigger or scalable plan with the right host, but now you’re looking to transfer your blog somewhere else. Most likely facing database problems, DNS issues and ofcourse, more downtime.

  We use a dedicated server from our sponsor, Top Hosting Center. Obviously this is overkill if you only have one blog, but they do great blogger hosting plans too.

You’ve downloaded the latest version of WordPress, start blogging away without optimizing the CMS (Content Management System) first. Months down the road, you find out that Google doesn’t like your site, and organic growth isn’t going as fast as you’d like to.

• You will now have to dive in and start fixing things. Unfortunately it’ll be too late for all your previous posts with the SEO unfriendly permalinks. http://example.com/?p=N just doesn’t work as well as http://example.com/best-post-ever in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Google updated its infamous pagerank, and despite your entire link building strategy, you only got a mediocre PR3 (like us). Would you have gotten a PR5 or higher, you’d be laughing to the bank because your advertising spots would have been worth at least twice as much as they are now.

• Since you didn’t bother with the WWW or no WWW preset, Google now thinks you have two separate blogs. You’ll find that the backlinks are divided between your http://www.blog.com and your http:// blog.com.

  Oops! Fortunately there’s a great WordPress plugin that takes care of that issue. Also make sure you have the right settings in your WordPress > Options > General section. Stick with either WWW or no WWW, so Google knows it has to put all the pagerank it for you has towards your one blog.

Get your own domain name! This is extremely important for any blogger that wants to build a reputable brand name online for themselves. Anyone can setup a free blog at Blogspot or WordPress.com, but again, these free options come with a lot of restrictions. Besides that, people tend to think that personalized domains are more authoritative than the free variations.

A .COM domain is the number one choice, followed by .NET and .ORG as second and third option. Stay away from exotic sounding TLDs (Top Level Domains) like .WS etc. Our sponsor is offering free domain names for everyone that signs up for one of their $6,75 hosting plans. (That’s cheaper than just the name at GoDaddy!)

Checklist:

1) Make sure you’ve got the right hosting plan, keeping your blog’s future growth in mind. A good start is half the job done!

2) Before even writing and publishing that first post, get your wordpress configuration SEO friendly. You’ll thank yourself for doing this a few months down the road when you see the amount of organic traffic (free traffic coming from your SERPs) ever increasing.

3) Set your online identity with your personalized domain name so people will recognize your blog the next time they stumble across it. If it looks familiar, chances are they’ll stick around to read it again.

Special Deal: Get a 15% monthly recurring discount on the best hosting plan on the planet at Top Hosting Center. Use coupon “JohnCow“. (Three months free hosting when you get a 12 months plan!)

Do you get caught in the “OCD Loop?”

Do you sit there and hit the send and receive for your email inbox repeatedly, anxiously waiting and looking for “something”… not sure what but “something”? Do you log into your ClickBank or AdSense account 25 times a day, in hopes that something magical has happened? Do you find yourself automatically going to a website, even though you were just there 5 minutes ago and nothing possibly could have changed yet? Do you stop what you are doing everytime the phone rings, even though we know it will take us 20 minutes just to get back into the grove of where we just were… destroying all our momentum.

It is like watching TV (not sure if this is mainly a guy thing here) and constantly flicking to the next channel… we are not sure why we do this, perhaps something is telling us that the most amazing show in the world is on and we are missing it. Regardless of why, the fact is we do and the end result is by the time we shut the TV off, we have not really watched anything.

The same is true for growing your business. You are constantly doing things but at the end of the day nothing is done.

You see the OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many in the “MMO” field where they exhibit a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that they are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, even if they make no sense. If you were paying a person by the hour and saw them doing those activities, you would fire them… or re educate them anyway.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you need to ask yourself how often you actually allow yourself to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring money into your business. Pinpoint your tendency for falling into this trap, and start thinking of ways to snap out of it when you feel yourself getting sucked into this loop, because it can waste a lot of your time.

STOP THE MADNESS

If at the end of the day you feel exhausted, stressed out and anxious because you know you were busy but are not sure what you have to show for it…. then maybe it is time to do things different.

How… Tell me please.. How?

Well, if there is one thing we have learned is there is no perfect answer for everyone. What works for us might not work for you but what we do recommend you try however, is to ask yourself these two questions…

1. Is what we are doing right now making us or going to make us significant money for our business?

2. If we were paying someone to do what we are doing right now, would we feel good that the money is being well spent?

These two questions might not do it for you, but we hope you see our point here. Busy work does not mean quality work. Focus on your ROI (Return on Investment) and treat your business like a business.

Using content to get subscribers, prospects, build reputations and get traffic to your blogs can be very powerful… but ONLY if done right!

We are not talking about content on your own blogs here, but rather posts and content that you use on other sites to promote yours.

In school, we are all taught to always finish a story with a closing paragraph and so when we start writing to promote ourselves online, we do just that, complete with a close. Let us ask you this (actually quoted from a good Australian friend of ours named Dean)…

“If you close your content, wouldn’t that satisfy the reader’s appetite in such a way that that there was no need for them to go any further.”

In other words, why would they need to take action on anything and search for further information about the topic if you already gave it to them?

We thought about this a lot and the more we did, the more it made sense. Your content needs to be crafted in such a way that if a reader wants a closing paragraph, then why shouldn’t we link to it so the reader has to take the action we want (such as visit our site).

Some of our favorite movies are those which don’t finish with a happy ending. No, we are not masochists but they finish in such a way that leaves us wondering whether there’s going to be a next installment. It’s like you’ve built to a crescendo and the hero appears to have won but the last scene reveals something sinister brewing beneath the surface. Then the end credits roll and we all think…

“What the…????”

We want to know what happens; we want to know more but we’re going to have to wait until version 2 hits the big screen. With your content, the reader doesn’t need to wait because there are a couple of live links in our content with specific call to action instructions they can click on to find out more. And that’s exactly what we want them to do… isn’t it?

We are not saying you should finish your content in such a way that it doesn’t make sense but instead do it in a way to entice the reader to take a look out of curiosity at what we have got to offer.

There is a fine line between readers just reading content as opposed to reading and clicking through and that fine line in our opinion is the closing paragraph. Yes, the entire content itself needs to be interesting enough for them to continue reading but if they get to the end then you can be rest assured they were interested. What a shame if you gave them that dreaded closing paragraph such as…

“And that folks is what you need to do when grooming a Norwegian Humpback. We hope you’ve enjoyed this post and thank you very much for reading it.”

Would we want to click on the link in the content with a finish like that. We know we wouldn’t. Maybe an ending like this would have been more appropriate…

“Want to know how to finish grooming the healthiest Norwegian Humpback in your neighborhood? Subscribe to our RSS Feed at “Insert Link Here” and we guarantee your Humpback will be the envy of everyone in your street! “

The end of your content needs to catch their attention…. or they are just not going to do what you want them to!

Technorati Profile

Special Deal: Get a 15% monthly recurring discount on the best hosting plan on the planet at Top Hosting Center. Use coupon “JohnCow“. (Three months free hosting when you get a 12 months plan!)

People around the world take advantage of classified internet sites. One of them, located in UK, has been launched in September 2007 and contains Classified Ads in many different categories from pets and property to leisure and computers. The site is very user friendly and was designed to appeal both to young as well as older people.

Since credit card usage is so popular there are many companies offering their credit card and advertising it as the best one. Some companies which issue credit cards might offer attractive deals, like credit cards with no annual fees. It sounds right, but you need to understand that credit card fees and surcharges cost consumers more than $30 billion each year. To compare credit cards, you can use the tool I wrote about in one of my previous posts about comparing credit cards. But here are some things you might want to look for when looking for extra charges:

Late Fees are very popular. If your credit card company doesn’t get paid on time, you may have to pay a fee of $20 to $50. This includes being only one day late. Some claim that in situations where the payment delay was out of control, the credit card company might eliminate the late charge if you explain to them what happened.

In my next post I will write about a few more extra charges and how to avoid them.