What’s this an ad for? If you hadn’t heard of Market Samurai how would you know you wanted it? I find this really odd…
June 5, 2010 By 2 Comments
Choked
I was running my website stats (using the bestest tool in the world Market Samurai )when I noticed something really odd. This blog’s Google Page Rank had taken a drastic tumble, from 4 to zero. I silently went crazy inside. WTF had happened? Sure I hadn’t been posting as much as I sometimes do but apart from that there had been no change to blog itself. I had never seen a blog just fall off the ranking like that without something drastic happening..but I had made no changes that would make such a drastic thing happen.
I check backlinks…still around 6000 incoming links and no major drop there at all. Steady as a rock actually.
So I then spotted something that just DID NOT MAKE SENSE.
Google had only 1 page indexed for this blog. I let loose a string of OMGs and WTFs. 1 page!!!…Google was WRONG it had to be WRONG, how could I go from several hundred pages of indexed and backlinked content- to 1 page?
Before I tell you the answer I really have to point out a very important point. If I wasn’t tracking my stats using the handy dandy awesomest web stats tool in the world – Market Samurai – I wouldn’t have had a clue anything was wrong. Soon my site will be falling off the #1 spot for “Allison Reynolds” and I would be tearing my hair out blaming Google for it’s recent change in algorithm and my site would have just…disappeared out of the search results. If you rely on your website for your income then you, or whoever does your blog work MUST use Market Samurai to ensure something like this doesn’t happen you you.
So what was it that caused the problem?
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post to find out. You can take a guess in the comments section if you like (apart from Brent Hodgson who I told the answer to when I figured it out 
)
October 7, 2009 By 1 Comment
FTC Declaration
After the announcement today that the FTC will require specific behaviour from American bloggers and Internet Marketers there will be a lot of declaration going on to make sure people are compliant before the December 1, 2009 deadline.
This blog of mine probably doesn’t come under FTC jurisdiction seeing as I am a British Subject living in Australia writing on a blog that is hosted in Europe. There are a lot of people asking out there whether they need to comply as they aren’t American, but their blog is hosted in America. They have American readers or customers, or American suppliers. There’s a lot to be explained by FTC lawyer types to non-Americans (don’t take anything I say as professional advice… or anyone else for that matter unless you are paying them for legal advice).
Even though I am pretty sure I don’t have to make a declaration, I still am going to. I believe in cleaning up the internet sales and marketing business, and while I know this FTC ruling will be used by numb-nuts like the twat who filed a DMCA copyright against the SWBN blog, in the long run I prefer the jerks out of the business that poison it for everyone.
Here goes
My blog contains affiliate links (SWBN owned) to Market Samurai which I was given a free copy as a beta tester. Keep that in mind when I tell you that Market Samurai is awesome (which it is 
)
My blog contains links to the Immediate Edge, a membership site I receive in exchange for blog moderation of the Thirty Day Challenge. Keep that in mind when you click on the affiliate link to the Immediate Edge, read my annual Immediate Edge review first.
Thanks to erin_johnson for this image
September 10, 2008 By 10 Comments
Cutting Your Own Throat
It was the best of customer service times, it was the worst of customer service times.
In the last two months I have observed companies that are polar opposites in handle their customer enquiries and issues.
The Good (In fact I Would Say GREAT)
The team over at Noble Samurai offer the very pinnacle of customer service. Their product is new, it was launched at the same time that Google made some hefty changes to their data serving (that Market Samurai the application uses) and the user base the product was being offered to was 90% complete and utter newbies in using the tool (and in some cases the INTERNET).
Brent, Eugene and Andrew have a mature outlook when it comes to dealing with customer frustrations. They recognise that the frustration that users are showing when they vent is a “good” thing. It means that their customers are passionate people who really, really want their product.
The Samurai guys do not get flustered or angry at a user who is being less than civil (which by the way was 99.9% of the time is user error in the first place), respond in calm and measured ways. They go out of their way to not only service, but delight their customers with the response they get. It is very obvious that Noble Samurai has a great customer service policy that they ensure is front and centre with any transaction with their customers.
The Bad
In chatting with some of my IM colleagues a conversation came up regarding the affiliate commissions being paid by a membership site. They suddenly said something that rang a bell with me, although they KNEW they were referring new members who were signing up, no commission was being recorded or paid.
Me being me, had not said anything about that because I had automatically assumed I had done something wrong with linking (after all 99,9% of faults are user error), popped it in the too hard basket and went off to do soemthing else. Yet my colleagues HAD done something and placed help desk tickets (no answer), PMd people who ran the course (no answer) and in the end started fuming behind closed doors that they were being ripped off by something they felt was a worthwhile course to recommend.
The Ugly (or You Gotta Be Kidding me?!?!)
One of my IM girl friends had signed up during the 30DC with one of the recommended services. Where there was the opportunity to take a “free” option, she actually took advantage of one of the special discount monthly continuity plans. While she doesn’t have much cash, she recognised the benefit of the product and the value of the offer.
Come her first bill she realises that she is being billed for $10 a month more (the non-special amount). Like I said, money is tight so she gets onto customer service to ask what is going on and her account to be adjusted. The customer service response to her was, NO, you signed up for the higher amount.
This comapny has just cut its own throat for the sake of $120 a year.
Not only that, the referrals that would have come from my friend would have made them a bucketload MORE money than the $120 they just chose to quibble over.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Moral of the story here: Great customer service should be the FIRST thing you think of when setting up a business, not the last…
August 12, 2008 By 6 Comments
Oh It’s True, It’s True
Been watching my tweets today? No? Well if you did you would have seen that I decided to do a speed run at doing the Thirty Day Challenge up to now in one day. If I am too slack to post each day, well i can do 12 days in one and post about it.
You might think something like “She’s a witch! Burn Her!!”, or that I am insane, or both. Hard to tell at the moment with all of the cough medicine I have been taking. Still it might seem a big deal to some people to try such lunacy but if you have a procedure you can do anything 10 time quicker than flailing around in the dark.
For 8 years I worked for IBM and in that time I wrote dozens of procedures. I wrote them for people who had no idea what they were doing, I wrote them for highly technical people, I wrote them for managers and I wrote them for people for whom English was a second language. Procedures rock, and this is coming from someone who gets off on chaos.
The Thirty Day Challenge lays out the steps so clearly and simply that once you have done it once, you can easily replicate again. Now I don’t expect a new person to all of this to be able to do what I did in one day, but you can definitely chop in half the time it took the first time, and the time after that probably halve again.
So what did I achieve?
7am started research using Market Samurai. I picked a high end market and drilled down to a three word micro niche. Seriously with this tool you can pick ANY word and find a niche waiting for picking. That is just what i did, picked a word out of the air that I knew would like writing about. Simple.
Stats: Searches 2433/SEOT 1021 SEOC < 50k cheated a little because I know I can OCI 96%
Speed Niche Before
The SEO page shows a lot of big name sites that you would probably know that sell or link to a page selling the physical item or a variation of it. The parts of this table I personally thing are important are the BLP (which the competition is sorely lacking in) and the BLEG (again lacking). The on page SEO title, URL etc I can kill easily having a blog set up, rather than an eCommerce site.
7:30am I bought the domain name. Now this might interest you, or it may not, but when I have a niche term that ends in an S (Market Samurai will tell which term is searched for more) naturally say like British Bulldogs I will buy a domain that goes like this www.britishbulldogsite.com . See what i did there? BOTH search terms british-bulldog and british-bulldogs are in the domain name. Google will usually be able to figure out plurals but I like to make absolutely sure that I am SEO ready for anywhere
8 am Dropped kids to bus stop while DNS resolved and returned to write content and eat breakfast
8:30am Blog is up using WordPress Direct dead easy (though they still need to work on cleaning the crap out of their templates)
9 am starting sourcing affiliates from Share-a-Sale who I use for my affiliate testing stuff (and a couple of sites that sell pretty well). Like i said, this niche is a physical product and there were a few good affiliate deals that pay 10% or more on pretty high ticket items.
10 am Affiliate pretties added, site proof read again (to be sure, to be sure) and then the bookmarking began. I manually used Digg, which I have to admit is something i would NOT normally do, good content will mean that people will do this for you, but this was for speed … erk ends justifying the means was never my strong point, must pay back my social networking karma on that one . I also fired up Traffic Android (wait for tomorrow on that one *wink) and went to town.
11am BOOYAH!! Site is ranked 5 in broad match (I don’t really care about exact match because I look at #1 broad as THE goal). That’s the site, not any of the social bookmarks. so 4 hours from NOTHING to a top 5 raking. Shit hot stuff!
Speed Niche after ranking
12 noon broke for lunch.
1pm Site moves to 4th in Google. I write more content and post a second story. Set off Traffic Android to bookmark second page in a couple of hours.
2pm Nap time…yep still sick and rest and fluids are important
4pm Wake up and check site. Ranking is now 3 for domain name and 5 for first post awesome!
5pm read more stuff for content, spend some quality time with family and order dinner
6pm Write this blog post before going to create Squidoo page and Hub Page.
7pm Up to date with the Thirty day Challenge and have a site already dominating the search term in 12 hours.
Not a bad day all in all. Yep, the goal is still the same with this one. Get it earning cash and then flog it off… which reminds me about a little thing i pointed out to my 30DC team mates about Market Samurai… but I will leave that post for another day.
August 7, 2008 By 2 Comments
Remember Me?
Yeah me….the annoying one. The one that promised some kind of regular posting since the beginning of the month but did not quite make it heh.
So the story so far.
Market Samurai ILOVE this tool. You can expect me to be posting more about what it does, shows and why if you are into website building, you should buy it.
Pros
- easy to use
- looks great
- gets information from various sources
- very versatile in what information it provides
- more features still to come
Cons
- Everyone will be using it and making SEO that much more competitive
Ed Dale Mankini as I mentioned on the Ed Dale Mankini Terapad blog I have stopped posting there for the time being due to focussing on the 30DC. If you are following on with the 30Dc you will know NEVER to try and break into a search phrase that looks like this
Ed Dale mankini all SEO pimped out
The BLP and BLEG will be the decider in this one; but like I said, i am busy for this month
WordPress Direct is the blogging tool that is being used by the 30DC and to be honest I am still not sure about this one yet as I have not had enough time with it. One day of use and I can see the great benefits it will add to those who want to set up blog clusters around various niches.
At this stage for me
Pros
- removes the need the manual searching for relevant content
- Can be used to set and forget to keep blogs fresh
Cons
- Site looks god awful (geeze guys surely you could have grabbed a better theme for yourself)
- Blog templates still need to be edited to remove backlink links and crud from them
- Still waiting to be cached (but I am spoiled by Terapad’s 2-8 hour ranking)
Still in this business test, test, test is the mantra and that is what I will be doing.
August 2, 2008 By 5 Comments
I Don’t Know How Ed Dale Does It.
Warning you may see a more direct side of me in this post you might not have wanted to see.
My goodness me, how on earth does he survive this part of the challenge every year? After spending a metric shitload of time (and I bet money as well) getting the whole event up running and with absolutely no hitches (well apart from kicking the power out on the first live video presentation) some people feel it is absolutely fine to get on the forums and bitch about the most petty of things.
I really do not understand people who choose to be like this (probably my very polite English upbringing). What does it benefit them to be seen as whiny complainers?
Talk about pearls before swine. The Market Samurai tool is a fabulous piece of work that will save people hours of drudgery. Last year we were measuring lines on our screen with bits of paper we had drawn on; this year we have an awesome project tool that looks great and works even better. I cannot sing its praises high enough.
Last year I could not believe that Wordtracker GTrends was released for free and said so, this year it seems that a group of people think that although they are getting better for FREE that they have the right to make demands about it. I would like to see them say the same to anyone else who offers a free sample of a product.
Really in the end, all the complaining is a smoke screen to cover the utterer’s own insecurity. The old “I knew it wouldn’t work because blah blah blah” …sheesh where is taking personal ownership and making the best of whatever is offered? I am compassionate, but not very forgiving when adults act like this.
Congratulations to Ed Dale and the team, to bring another great teaching event for free for those who want to take the opportunity. If only everyone was as grateful!
Planned and executed my exit from the corporate world. Walked away with a 6 figure payment to boot.