Birds of a Feather...

It occurred to me yesterday that I no longer have any close friends in full time employment.

Even those neighbours I've got to know are all self employed.

My brother and sister also have their own businesses.

After 15 years of being in business myself, I could no longer imagine being employed. I think I could even be unemployable.

Something happens to a person who becomes self employed. You don't notice it, it just sort of gradually creeps in and takes over.

I think it happens because a self employed person has to make it in the world pretty much on their own. Independence has its rewards. It also creates its own problems.

Dropping friends along the way is lind of sad, but in many ways, inevitable.

It took me a long time to realise that not everybody has ambition. I thought everyone was pre-programmed to strive for the things they want - and then go out for more.

Being self employed makes you different.

I'm not saying it's good or bad, just different.

Looking at my circle of friends now, I can see it immediately.

If you're considering self employment for the first time, be prepared to wake up one day and realise that you're likely to change more than just your job. You'll be changing your entire life. Things cannot and will not be the same ever again once you make the jump.

Do it online and the changes are even more profound.

Imagine what your own friends will say when:

• You have no job to speak of
• You no longer have to commute
• You don't have to get up if you don't feel like it (That WON'T happen by the way)
• You can spend time with the kids or your wife or anyone else
• You can make money passively

Do you think your current friends and colleagues would understand that?

Would they be pleased for you?

Could you explain your new way of life to them in a way that you doesn't appear smug?

Be prepared to make some changes, because if you answered yes to any of those three questions, you're in for a shock.

GET RICH QUICK!

It's Monday morning and I've woken to find about half a dozen new product launch emails in my inbox, as usual, offering me the path to riches for between $29 and $197 per month.

I can see who's going to get rich offering monthly subscriptions!

How come they are all going to close their doors once they reach their magical subscription figure?

Does ANYONE really believe this nonsense.

Why would anyone turn customers away?

I've been looking into that actually and it's not as stupid or suicidal as you might initially think. The "closing the doors" pitch is there to make you join their mailing list when you go back in a week and see a new landing page saying that their membership doors are shut.

There's a vague promise that they might just reopen the doors to a select few later on...

Of course they will. They want our money.

As regular readers of this blog know, I don't buy into anything anymore. If the gurus and marketers want to give me their stuff for free, I'll try it and I'll review it honestly, with complete income figures for all to see.

Funnily enough, ever since I posted my offer here over a year ago, not one of these marketers has had the balls to take me up on it.

Why would they? There are millions of paying suckers out there eager to snap up just about every get rich quick offer they find.

These same people would, years ago, have the ones scouring the pages of the Sunday papers and various magazines looking for the same thing.

Here's a trick to defuse the undoubtedly good sales copy on the various landing pages. Scroll straight to the bottom and click on the link that says "earnings disclaimer". You'll see the real value of what you're about to buy.

Here's One I Prepared Earlier...

Once upon a time on the Internet, it was suggested by a number of marketing guru's that in order to make a quick few thousand Dollars, all you had to do was write about what you know and sell that information as an eBook - using software that they produced of course.

Today, I redicovered an old site of mine that carries one of earlier works - an eBook I wrote about finding a new job.

As I have a strong recruitment and sales background, I felt that I knew my subject better than most and therefore that people would be interested in the subject.

Maybe if I'd have promoted it more, then I could have sold it online.

The problem was that I didn't think people would buy it and so I decided to give it away free and place occasional affiliate links inside the text, just as many Internet Marketers do now.

I didn't earn a penny from my efforts, despite the fact that the eBook was downloaded many times.

Sometimes, just a "thank you" is nice - but sadly, in the online world, even those are few and far between. Rarer than hens teeth in fact.

I'm posting this as a warning for those readers who might feel the need to succumb to the eBook software salesman's pitch.

Grab yourself a free copy of one of my very first forays into the extremely profitable, think yourself rich world of eBook publishing at http://www.job-hunting-tips.com/jobhuntingtips.exe

Just don't reproduce it anywhere - a lot of effort goes into producing unique content!

This is a .exe file that opens the eBook on your pc when you click it - it's perfectly safe and doesn't plant anything nasty on your computer.

Sometimes, it's interesting to revist your older work. I am almost embarrassed by the quality of this thing, but the content is ok and the idea was a good one at the time.

Maybe you just have to be a better writer to strike it rich online. Or perhaps if I'd marketed it more...

Yes, eBooks are the stuff dreams are made from. I even bought the software to make a nice eBook cover. The rubbish I've bought along my journey - I hope you're learning from my many mistakes!

It was efforts like this that convinced me that the only way I was ever going to succeed online was to ignore the experts and just go along doing my own thing - selling high value services that have little cost of fulfilment, just like an eBook, but better.

Domain Name Appraisals

Have you ever triedto sell a domain name?

Some domain name reseller services insist that the seller gets an appraisal or valuation of their domain name before they will list it for sale.

I first wrote about this subject several years ago, but it seems that some people still don't learn. I know because I get loads of emails from people asking me for my valuation of a domain name.

So, let me say it loud and clear here:

There is no accurate domain name valuation service available anywhere at any price.

The only valuation you can rely on is your own, along with that of a purchaser - when you both agree a price and neither of you feels any remorse, then you've reached the right price at that moment in time.

So what if your buyer goes on to develop the name into something worthwhile and more valuable, making a profit on the deal later on? Sorry, but that's what buying and selling is about.

Consider for a moment that you own a piece of land that's empty. You know that it would be worth a lot more with a property on it, but you can't afford to develop it and you don't have the skills and experience to do it yourself.

In such a case, you'd get what's called, "land value". Someone else will take the risk and build on it, making their profit on their own efforts - nothing to do with you of course.

Another situation with the same land might be that the buyer knows he'll be able to sell it to somebody else to build on, somebody he knows is looking for land in the area. Somebody you don't know.

In such circumstances, you might well feel disappointed and ripped off, even though you haven't been.

The same is true of a domain sale.

Undeveloped, it's just a name and is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it at that time. Tomorrow, you might get a better price. Who knows?

Any value you put on it is purely subjective. If someone agrees to pay your price, fine, but don't fall into the trap of paying somebody else for what can only ever be an opinion, as opinions are the cheapest products on earth. Everyone has them!

With land and property, you can set a valuation, since there is always a basis for comparison.

The same is not true of a domain name since no two names are the same and each will appeal to a different type of end user ultimately.

So, do yourself a favour and never succumb to the snake oil salesmen calling themselves domain name appraisers or valuers.

Newsgroups Revisited

A post on a message board reminded to today of my early days online. It mentioned newsgroups (Usenet), which were the Internet's earliest message boards, a true revolution in their day, but these days little more than Spam based rubbish.

At the time, I was running an IT Recruitment business with brother. That year, must have been 1993 or 1994, we recruited a graduate who was an extremely keen advocate of all things IT.

As we only had a Packard Bell PC purchased on my maxed out credit card at the time, the idea that it could be used to generate fees was more than a little absurd to us.

However, our new graduate (his name is Frank Morris - thanks Frank!), one day suggested that we go online to look for new candidates and to post jobs.

We had no idea what he meant, but trusting his judgement, we invested around £120 on a modem and we bought a subscription to a service called win-uk.net, which we needed to get us online.

The first step was to subscribe to the two previously mentioned news groups.

I remember my brother and I saying, "How does this work Frank? Where do the bloody jobs go once we press send"?

We knew how faxes worked - and they hadn't been invented that long ago. But to post something where there was no paper... How weird was that?

Anyway, we had a quick look at some of the jobs that were being posted on uk.jobs.offered. There weren't many, but I was certain I could write better ones.

The key to a good (or bad) ad is the headline, so we came up with the highly original, "A BAG FULL OF IT JOBS"

Immediately and without warning, nothing happened.

It was 5p.m. and so we went home.

The next morning, I fired up our email account and sat there waiting for our dial-up modem to spring into action and do whatever it was supposed to do.

Message after message came in - they told us to stop shouting. They told us to post only one job at a time. They asked who the hell we thought we were.

And then a strange thing happened.

CV's started arriving. Not just one or two, but hundreds of the things. Applications came in by the bucket load. These were IT people after all. The better ones were looking for new jobs online at a time when most people didn't know what online was!

Suddenly we had access to one of the richest sources of candidates that we'd ever seen. Not only that, but we discovered that people were posting their profiles on uk.jobs.wanted - so we just subscribed and got notified of every new candidate that came along.

Our world changed overnight. The local competition took a full 12-18 months to cotton on.

That single advertisement for a bag full of IT jobs, netted us around £40,000. I've yet to make a better headline - and being honest it probably wasn't even my headline.

Then we got a call one from a guy called Robbie Cowling. He wanted to show us a new service. A web site. We batted his calls away at the time.

Who needed web sites when you could fill jobs from a newsgroup.

Anyway, we didn't know what a web site was at that time.

Robbie's business was (and still is) called jobserve.com - eventually we joined and it did make us a lot of money. It made Robbie a fortune - and all from a portakabin at the bottom of his garden. I remember having to FAX our jobs to his staff so they could then enter them online each night...

How times have changed. I could put up a fully featured job site with everything that jobserve has got in less than a day now - but I could never replicate that success.

This post is dedicated to Frank and Robbie - Frank for introducing me to the net and planting a seed and to Robbie for showing me what can be if you just grasp the nettle and go for it.

If only I could turn back the clock a little...

The £250,000 Click!

Today, I finalised my largest ever contract from a single Internet enquiry. The initial value for supplying services is £250,000.

I have to do some work, as the contract is to conduct a few hundred asbestos surveys, but it's in a lovely hot country, where I can take my wife and kids for holidays at the same time.

Remember, with services, there is no product and very little overhead.

I can also do the work at any time I please, so it really is a wonderful contract to have secured.

To think, I only do that work to get me out of the house and to keep me sociable!

It all came from a click on one of my web sites and ours was the only company asked to quote by this particular organisation.

This goes back to copywriting and targeting the words precisely for a particular audience.

Still I see too many companies concentrating too hard in the wrong areas.

Instead of gently building interest and trust, they simply try and tell their visitors how great they are. Their web sites are online brochures. Brochures don't sell. Can't sell.

My approach has been to give away information via an autoresponder. In this case, I supplied sample surveys, information I wrote myself about the asbestos regulations and what's invoved in conducting the survey.

It's amazing to me how many people in business fail to explain what they physically do for their clients. I have yet to find another surveying firm's web site that actually tell people what happens when they are onsite. As that's the services that's being paid for, it's a pretty obvious thing to include.

That information is sent by email over the course of a few days and in that time, the person charged with gathering the information is usually sold on the service.

Bear in mind though, that the person tasked with getting the information isn't always the buyer.

That's why I try to empower that person with more information that they could possibly need. They then do the pre-selling for me so that all I have to do is agree terms.

The last email in the sequence usually asks what they thought of the information and if there are any other questions they need answering.

You know you have got an autoresponder set up correctly when people send replies!

If you've ever bought anything online from one of the myriad of gurus (I wonder if the collective term could be called a gaggle of gurus), or joined their mailing lists, they usually just tell you how great they are and push their back-end products. Relentlessly.

I've never liked that approach so I do it differently.

Instead of writing about what I (or the company) can do for them, I simply explain what needs doing and why. It's all written in a completely independent and objective style that doesn't even talk about what we can do for them until perhaps the very last paragraph.

Maybe that's just a British sales approach. Sure, I ask for the order and I ask often, but not in an "in-your-face" type of way.

If I'm ever affected by the recession that's coming, maybe I'll trn my hand to consulting or copywriting for services businesses - the market must be enormous.

At Last! Parking For Adult Names

Not many domain blogs mention the "Adult" world, even though many domainers started off making their money with adult oriented names.

In the earlier days of the Internet, it was possible to get a great adult name, point it fdirectly to an adult site and watch the money come in from sales commissions.

But, as more adult sponsors entered the market, things got ugly. It was hard to know the good from the bad and there was a lot of distrust.

With normal mainstream domains, there are many ways to earn from your doains - anything from pay per click parking, pay per click development (Adsense) and full blown development of sites.

In adult, the choices are more limited. Full development is impossible without expensive content and good quality, honest adult sponsors are harder to find.

Google and most other ppc providers won't take on adult names. It's strange really, because as an advertiser on Google, you could actually buy adult keywords - and they're not cheap.

So, it was good to see the launch this week of Maxxximized.com, a pay per click program designed especially for adult names.

Adult isn't a dirty word online, it's a reality. People are looking for adult content and if you have a name that generates clicks, the Maxxximized.com program pays 90% of revenues.

Press Release Rejected On Basis That It's Rubbish

I tried an online service this week.

The promise was good - the company concerned would write and distribute a professional press release for about £200.

Apparently they use professional journalists to write the release, because of course, they know what editors are looking for.

By implication, that means that the customer gets a snappy, easy to read release that will hit the desk of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of editors in industry specific publications. A release that is so good, that editors will find it irresistible.

If only.

I got the draft release back yesterday and was so disappointed, I told them I'd write it myself and leave the distribution to them.

Honestly, I really should have known better than to trust someone else to write something that I consider important to the business.

I'm not the only one though. One of my sites, www.cover-letter.co.uk attracts quite a bit of traffic. Surprising amounts really.

One day I received an enquiry from somebody wanting a cover letter for a new job. That person was an English teacher applying for a position with a private school.

You'd think with her English degree and several years experience that she'd have been able to handle that. I don't have a degree. Nothing even close. They weren't necessary to a 16 year old in 1976 - not when there jobs to be had and women to chase!

Anyway, at least what I delivered worked. She got the interview.

With the PR company, I wrote my own release and will just leave the distribution to them.

I could have used PRWeb for less money, but I needed a distribution source in the UK. I hope I picked the right one. Can't help but worry somehow. First impressions and all that...

Original Content

How hard is it to write original content?

Personally, I find it pretty easy. I just think and type as I go, usually without any preparation and the words appear magically in my head.

I then read back what I have written, probably rearrange one or two sentences and upload the new content to my server.

Content is the one thing that will separate your web site from anybody elses. It's also the main component needed to get search engines to visit your site and determine how important it might be to their own users.

The more important a search engine views your site for a particular subject, the further up the rankings you will go.

Given that most webmasters want people to visit their sites and actually read what information they post to their sites, how come so many refuse to produce their own content?

Many webmasters these days simply want to create sites in order to generate income from pay per click affiliate programs like Google Adsense.

In these cases, where volume of pages is the order of the day, the webmasters think that it simply isn't worth their time to create their content, so they do one of two things:

1. They visit article sites to use other people's content or
2. They outsource article writing to places like India and let someone else do the work

These strategies are ok on the surface and let's face it, if you need 100 articles in a hurry, it's quicker than doing them all yourself.

The problem is of course, that the same content is being used elsewhere on other sites, yes, even when you subcontract the writing.

The outsourced writers can do the work cheaply because they are simply grabbing articles themselves and re-hashing the words, but inevitably, they will leave in a percentage of the original content, which could get your sites penalised by the search engines.

If you have hundreds of site, simply because you wanted to do something with your domain portfolio, you can get away with this approach, as one site amongst hundreds probably doesn't matter a great deal.

When you are building a site that matters though, you should never, ever use articles from article sites and you should also never outsource the writing.

In order to be successful, a web site needs to have some character and that chracter can shine through in your writing. The way you make your offer to your visitors, the sales call to action, the way you communicate - it is vital if you are to create any trust and get people to buy.

Throw up regurgitated content and your visitors will spot that you're a phoney.

I write all of my own content these days. Having experimented with articles from article site, I know they are not for me. (Though I'll write for article sites - that's different)!

It is time consuming to write something useful and interesting, that's probably why most blogs fail - the owners lose interest and can't think of anything to write.

I've been writing content for a long time, because it comes naturally to me.

Some examples?

Well, recently I've been having to learn some new skills to expand the surveying practice. This is in the area of Energy Performance Assessments for commercial buildings - so not the most interesting subject in the world.

So, I've been taking elements of it and writing about it - the bits I know about. I need to educate my clients.

Here are a couple of examples for you, just to show you what I mean. Two sites, same subject matter, different words!

Energy Performance Assessment For Commercial Buildings 1

Energy Performance Assessment For Commercial Buildings 2

Those individuals whop know a bit about SEO will know exactly why these two links are on this post and why they are worded the way they are. It's all about deep linking.

You see, a blog, whilst imparting useful information, should also serve to help the writer. What you've just witnessed is a top SEO trick and it's one that I hope you'll digest and use to your advantage - but use your own content and don't tell anyone who might be a commercial energy assessor!

Search Engines - Back To Basics

I want to share a secret with you about getting top positions in search engines.

There is no secret to getting top positions in search engines!

Don't tell the gurus - they won't believe you.

But it's true. I have been building web sites now since 1999 and one of my very first ventures online was to write an eBook about getting top search engine positions. It was so long ago that I don't even have the material I wrote anymore.

It still works though, because I haven't really changed the way I do things, yet I still get most of my pages listed in the top ten of the top search engines, including the mighty Google.

Let's take a trip around "Search Town".

First stop is "Backlink Boulevard". This place is full of street vendors called gurus, who tell you that you need tons of backlinks from "authority sites". An entire industry has been created , of people and firms dedicated to getting backlinks for their clients. These little sweat shops, hidden away in Backlinks Boulevard, house indivisuals tied to their computers for up to 23 hours a day, employing child labour to work automated machines loaded with specialist backlink software, that the search masters, cruel and hard taskmasters, customise with their own names and logos to give themselves a hint of respectability.

Just down the boulevard are the tall glass and chrome buildings where you'll find a whole host of software companies that have got rich on the back of the thriving back street businesses promoting their quality backlink services. They produce the software products that take a lazy individual and make him rich. Except they don't make anyone rich.

So we move on to Article Alley. Read the notice boards in all of the shop windows here. Apparently, if you write articles that other people can reproduce on their web sites, you end up with ten of thousands of one-way backlinks, where sites link to you, but you don't have to link back.

The vendors in Article Alley are very convincing. They take all of the work away from creating a great web site. If you can't write yourself, or if you're too lazy, they'll often help you find somebody who can write for you in your own native language, yet based thousands of miles away where your language is their third language, so you can be certain to get a great, well written, articulate article that you can send promote in Article Alley.

For years I've wasted time submitting articles to article sites, using software made especially for the job, feeding yet another tranche of gurus and software builders.

Come out of Article Alley and move on across to Content Close. Browse the shelves of the many stores and you'll find all the content you could possibly want. The quality varies and so does the price. For just a few dollars, which is the universal currency of Search Town, you can pick up expert articles written by people you'll never meet, from countries that you've never heard of.

Sure, you won't make any sense of the writing, but then, this is content made for search engine, not humans. It's called spider food. And it stinks. Really bad.

Blog Street is interesting. The many vendors here tell you that in order to get your site ranked in the top ten of Google, you need to blog on each of your sites.

Maybe. But again, go down Blog Street and you'll soon discover a bunch of gurus waiting to sell you their latest tome on how to create the perfect blog.

You'll discover software vendors giving away their latest blog software and hundreds of market traders selling pretty templates, widgets and other wares to create the killer blog. There are book sellers too, of course.

Be careful in Search Town as the place is full of misinformation and every corner leads to yet another avenue crowded with sharp suited salesmen eager to take your last penny from you.

Many who venture into Search Town come out much poorer and with little to show for their efforts. Gloom and despondency is the order of their day, for no sooner have they unpacked their goodies, the new toys that will solve all of their problems, than they start getting the follow-up mail - and it all starts again.

So, what's the answer to top search engine positions?

It's easy.

First, concentrate on a niche market and don't deviate from that subject. You can't have a web site about internet marketing selling the concept of blue bananas.

Build your web site using your own original content. This blog article took me 15 minutes to write for example. I quite liked writing it.

Add new content regularly - once a week or once every two weeks. It doesn't have to be a blog and you don't have to do that on all sites. The idea is to create ONE site with plenty of content.

When you have the one site up and running, begin adding text links to other sites that you wish to promote. Not other people's sites though.

Don't link back to your main site.

Create excellent meta descriptions for each page that you make.

Target the key phrases you want ranked carefully, by creating a new page for each search term. Pages rank, web sites don't.

Carefully craft you page titles, ensuring that your key phrase is included there.

Make sure you have robots text file uploaded to your server.

Create a site map and link every public page to it.

Create a Google sitemap too - it's a bit more complicated, but well worth the effort.

That is all I do these days.

I've been going through the stats on some of my mos important sites. One site I launched only a few weeks ago now has 1171 top 10 search positions across the 5 major search engines.

Another I did for a client is number one in Google for the search term she particularly wanted. There is plenty of competition for the search term and I have done nothing except on-page optimisation for the site. No back links, no cloaking, no clever tricks.

Oh yes, the site was created using XSitePro and I recently revamped it using XsitePro2.

Sorry search gurus, I've just p'd on your parade, but don't worry because there are still plenty of suckers to fleece.