Getting Away From It All

I took a break this week and took my wife over to our apartment in Spain where we enjoyed a few days of blazing sunshine and relaxation.

For the first time in many years, I reisited the urge to take a laptop and steered clear of all Internet cafes that until now have proved irresistible to me when I'm away.

What a refreshing change!

For four days, I have been completely free of technology and noise. Not even a television was turned on!

Even the hire car had a couple of days off when some kind local residents lent us their bicyles to discover the beautiful, unspoilt area of the Mar Menor.

I often joke that I don't have a job and that I don't work. I realised this week that although I work mostly online, I actually put in twice as many hours as just about anybody I know!

Now that I am back home, I am straight back online. My emails have all been answered and I have caught up with all of the little things I had left undone before I went away.

It's not even 9am yet!

Most people haven't even started work yet. I know, because I can see the queues of traffic outside!

It got me thinking.

Many Internet marketers will love to show you themselves relaxing in some idyllic, sunny place, demonstrating how you can be just like them, if only you buy their super-expensive products or attend their seminars.

Let me tell you. It's a mythical lifestyle.

These guys work hard, just like me. I bet they are as addicted to the net as I am. I bet they do minimum 80 hours weeks.

You see, there is no magic formula to making money online or elsewhere. Somebody, somewhere has to do the work.

Yes, some can be outsourced and of course, automation helps too.

But the thinking, the writing, the learning and to some degree, the teaching and preaching involved when you make your living online, never stops.

Unless you take time off occasionally.

This week, I had my first proper break in ages. I strongly recommend that everyone who works, or wants to work online, do exactly the same thing and totally remove themselves from technology - you'll be amazed to find that there is a slow old world out there.

Google Gets Tough On Adsense

According to the excellent Jensense website, Google is getting tough with some of its Adsense publishers and disabling their accounts, if they feel that the web sites they have Adsense ads displaying are little more than content scrapers.

The good news is that we'll hopefully see the end of awful landing pages stuffed with keywords, made from cheap and nasty content "writing" software or from offshore writers with no grasp of grammar.

Could this see the end of dozens of would-be gurus promoting their latest "Adsense Riches" ebooks and software on Clickbank? I just did a quick search and found 69 products with the word "Adsense" in the title. I'd hold off on buying one of those for the moment!

Does it mean that thousands of little (and not so little) web sites designed to derive an income from Adsense will suddenly disappear?

Would that be a bad thing?

I suspect a lot of people will be worried by this change in Google's policy, but in many ways it makes a lot of sense.

As someone who buys the occasional keyword from Google on their Adwords system, I always exclude their publisher network, as I don't want to be advertising and spending my money on poor quality web sites.

I know that other Adwords buyers do the same thing.

Google wants and needs to keep its advertisers happy. Now that its proved that pay per click advertising works and has had tens of thousands of people help them promote the fact, they can now safely pull the plug and bring it all in-house again!

I hold my hand up and declare that I do have a number of sites in my portfolio that were built specifically to generate Adsense income. I suspect they'll be under the spotlight some day soon.

It doesn't matter too much to me, as I don't consider Google to be one of my main income streams.

I imagine Yahoo will see a massive shift of publishers to their network. The only question is, will they want them?

Why would Yahoo want Google's cast-offs? Even if the publishers do manage to swap out all of their Adsense ads for Yahoo ads, it surely won't be long before Yahoo has a clear out of it's undesirable accounts.

There's a seachange coming. The easy money could be a thing of the past - at least for those who don't have real content sites.

No more buying a piece of software to automatically generate hundreds of pages of crappy, meaningless content and stuffing them with strategically placed advertisements.

Hooray I say!

Do we need these useless sites? I doubt it.

Just yesterday, I saw some software being promoted that can create 200 pages of total crap in 14 seconds. The developer claims to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars from Adsense last year using this software.

I wonder what he'll make next year?

The Internet presents us with the best promotional tool that business has ever seen.

There is a fortune to be made. All you need to do is choose the right online method.

There's more to online life than Google.

Do You Really Need Design Tips From Me?

Today I was prompted to create an entry after I received an email from a business owner who wanted to trade links for me.

I won't identify the individual, except to say that he was interested in receiving enquiries for his steel framed building business.

As that is an area I am interested in at the moment, I took a quick look at his site and was surprised at what I saw.

The site looked like it had been knocked up in a spare half hour.

Taking up most of the space "above the fold" was an advertisement offering a free Xerox colour printer!

Why???

It's been a long time since I have seen a site like it.

A little down the page was an ad for batteries, together with a $5 off coupon. Then came a huge advertisement for a free home alarm system, another for Adobe Creative Suite , Flowerstore.com, Free Cell Phones and more.

Completely lost somewhere on this page must have been some information about steel framed buildings!

Even the contact page for the company was loaded with ads. This time, flowerstore.com featured prominently, along with two ads for an online voice player.

The "about us" page had ads for flowers again along with a nice Microsoft Office Live logo and link.

I thought that EVERYONE wanting to promote their business online would automatically know the basics.

I was wrong.

Here are the basics:

1) If you're not a designer, hire a designer - they are cheap and can work on a per-project basis.

2) If you fancy designing your own site, use something like XSITEPRO because it's really difficult to get it wrong!

3) Keep the screen size of your web page to no more than 800 pixels if you want to be certain to avoid having your visitors scroll widthways. Nobody likes having to do that.

4) Have a standard design running through your site so that your visitors know they are still on your site. Don't change the colour scheme halfway through.

5) Make it easy to navigate. Include instructions like "click here for this information".

6) A web site is a selling tool first and foremost. Remember to SELL. People want and need to be sold when they land on your web site. Most web surfers are ready to buy when they land, as long as you have targeted them right.

7) Only add links to your web site that are relevant to your market. If you're selling construction services, your visitors are not ready to make a purchase for flowers. Really, they're not!

8) Having a contact page is great, but on a services page, include your contact information at every opportunity - preferably after each sales message. Why make it hard for your customers to contact you? It's not an intelligence test!

9) Wherever possible, have an autoresponder that sends your visitor an email after they have contacted you. This way, you can build up a free mailing list of people interested in your services. Offer some free information and you'll get many more sign-ups to your list. It's not as hard as you think. I use Aweber's service and I wouldn't be without it.

10) Keep things simple.

I'm sure you don't need tips from me about web design, but clearly some people do need a helping hand. It's difficult to remember the early days when I first started out online. I made all of the mistakes along the way, just like everone else.

So, this post is for all the newbies out there. I hope it helps someone!

Value of a Click

Some time ago, I joined a guru course on copywriting. It cost a lot of money, but after reviewing the materials, I returned them and requested a refund.

The contents of the course were simply a bad copy of a seminar. Poorly produced and full of ads and plugs for other guru courses and software packages.

Esentially, these guys were promoting the idea of reproducing royalty free materials and repackaging it as your own work via electronic download, or ebook.

I thought I was buying into something professional, afterall, there were loads of testimonials to read on the web site and it seemed that people were making tens of thousands of dollars for little or no effort.

In reality, the course was promoting the idea of creating loads of web sites, filling them with Google Adsense ads and watching an automated income appear as if by magic.

Life is rarely that simple, but as a person who has a ton of Adsense sites, I can't completely rubbish the theory :)

Anyway, it got me thinking.

Last month one of my web sites brought in a genuine commercial sales enquiry for services that I quoted £625,000 for - that is more than $1million.

That means that my sales copy convinced a corporate buyer.

As it happens, I was a tad too expensive with the quote. That's life - you can't win them all.

Do these leads come along every day?

YES!! Almost.

This week, I have been invited to tender for two jobs. The first is to conduct more than 450 asbestos surveys on behalf of a government. If the bid is successful, I'll get a load of free holidays as well as a nice wad of cash in the bank.
Just think a GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT came to the Internet to find what they were looking for.

Then just today, a national, household name PLC company invited me to tender for a large number of surveys too.

Not only that, but on the basis of the information on the web site, my company is already classed as an approved supplier!

The question I asked myself was simple:

"What on earth possessed me to think that a so-called "guru" on copywriting who uses what I consider to be less than honest means to make a few bucks at a time by selling worthless info products, could teach me ANYTHING about writing, when I can pull in ONE sales lead worth hundreds of thousands of pounds in profit all on my own"?

Make you think doesn't it?

I haven't been on any fancy courses. I write how I speak. I give away as much of my knowledge as possible for free, because I know that's the way to get more business.

If you are tempted to spend $1000 on a set of crap quality DVD's from self-appointed gurus (by their own admission by the way), then you would do well to focus instead on what talents already lie at your disposal.

If you can write in the same way that you speak when doing business, then you have all of the tools you need to make a fortune online.

By the way, I have very little in the way of formal qualifications - so you abslutely don't need an education to do well online.