Conversion Matters

It’s nearly 2008, another year has passed, so it must be time to formulate some rough plans for the year ahead.

Personally I have two sets of goals: ‘real life’ goals and online goals.

Real Life Goals

My real life goals are pretty simple. I want to carry on having an awesome time at university. The first term has been so much fun and I’m pretty happy with how the works going!

Online Goals

My online goals are also pretty straightforward: make enough cash online to not have to worry about how much beer I’m drinking at uni!

How am I going to achieve this? Well so far I have my eye on two actionable projects:

• eBay affiliate sites
• Mini niche sites

Once I have say, 20-50, mini niche sites and 10-20 eBay sites then I think that will be a pretty solid foundation for further ventures. I just need to find the time to make the websites.

What will your goals be for 2008?

Are you going to be blogging harder, faster, stronger? I’m not. It’s not very profitable unless you’re really unique. I’ll probably only be blogging when I feel I have something genuinely interesting to say. I’m bored of seeing the same regurgitated shit across the blogosphere and I don’t feel the need to participate.

Are you going to try and build your online empire? That’s what I’m going to do. I want to build 50 sites that make me $3 a day. It’s going to be a lot easier than making the next facebook. Once I’ve got the cash from that then I’ll think about the next facebook ;).

Are you going to expand your business? I’ve been doing a little freelance analytics work, which I wouldn’t mind doing more of but I doubt I’ll have much time while I’m at uni.

Are you going to embrace social media? While I’m an avid user of facebook I’m certainly not a power user on any social networks and I would really like to be but at the moment I just don’t have the time. Everyone seems to think when you’re at uni you have loads of free time but I can tell you that with the partying, the studying and the sleeping to recover there’s not a lot of time left!

Some random stats from 2007

The majority of people who found this blog in the past year, were looking for harry potter porn (I should probably try changing that next year). After that it was google analytics tutorials.

I got the most referals from stumbleupon, more than Google. I’m quite happy with that.

The blog that sent me the most traffic was davidnaylor.co.uk. That’s just from commenting though.

My top content was the big social media marketing mix.

Right I’m bored now, have a good new year!

I was just reading something on Tamar’s SEO blog about copywriting and keyword density and I’m wondering if copywriter’s jobs should be evolving?

Obviously in the past (and probably still true now) a copywriter’s job mostly involves writing articles targeting specific keywords, which hopefully the search engines will index and rank while still being appealing and readable to users.

However, I’d suggest that you’re not going to rank highly just writing targeted articles and that something needs to change. I don’t think this SEO tactic is going to yield many returns especially in competitive markets.

You couldn’t expect to write a keyword dense article about car insurance and then magically rank for the term car insurance!

What should SEO copywriters be doing to add value?

In this day and age of social media, copywriters who can write articles that appeal to the people at digg, stumbleupon, del.iciou.us etc. have a strong competitve advantage over the ‘old-school copywriters’.

Imagine you are a motorbike insurance company. You could start a blog and crack out some articles on the following topics:

• Top 10 superbike wipe-outs (this would have embedded videos)
• 101 great motorbike rides in the UK
• What you need to know about motorbike maintenance and tuning

I couldn’t say whether any of these would actually take off - they’re just quick ideas of the top of my head. Try and be creative and experiment.

It’s more valuable to be able to create content that gains major traction in the social media arena. Content that does this is able to gain natural, ‘editorially-vouched-for’ links, a huge spike in traffic - which may not directly increase the bottom line but can increase mind share in the market and increase your brand awareness (alternatively you can just make a few dollars off CPM ads).

Link-bait and social media marketing seem to be one of the few ways which is left to webmasters and SEOs to promote a website without falling foul of the Google Guidelines.

Paid links are a no-no, unless you’re sneaky, directories are pretty pointless. There’s no better way to get your content out there than through social media (as long as it is quality content and you invest the time to interact and engage with the communities).

Summary

• It’s still important to have quality content on your website related to specific keywords but…
• …Don’t pump out article after article purely for search engines - it’s not going to help much unless you’re targeting an uncompetitive market
• Instead try and create link-worthy content that may gain traction in the social spheres - it all helps with your brand-awareness and organic rankings

Well after 5 or so months with the same theme I decided it was time to change and update. Especially as I keep seeing other blogs using ‘my’ old theme.

I’ve decided to add some minor advertising to the blog. I hope it’s not too annoying. They’re standard 125×125 ads as seen on many blogs.

If you’re interested in buying one of the ad spots take a look at the advertising page.

If you notice any bugs or anything funny with the theme please let me know.

Right I’m bored of having two pages out rank me for a search for my name on Google UK.

Also I just saw a couple of posts on the distilled blog about getting your facebook profile ranking.

So I’m going to try and get that to rank as well the Adam Taylor page at Durham University. It’s a bit spammy so I don’t know how well this will work but hopefully I’ll be dominating the SERPs soon!

There appears to be a proper PageRank update happening at last - the front page of this blog is now PR4. Now I can starting selling text links to casino sites… ;)!

How did you do? I only had a brief look around but was some what surprised I ended up with a higher (front page) PageRank than bloggingfingers. Not that it matters or means much; but there’s still the ego factor!

How did your sites/blogs fair?

But just in case you’re interested there is a lot of talk about the PageRank decreases happening. I won’t say what’s already been said over and over but here are a few links if you’re bothered.

Earners’ Blog
Internet Babel
Search Engine Guide
Andy Beard
SEOmoz
Sebastians Pamphlets
And probably the best PageRank post.

There’s definitely more but I have a 9am lecture and should sleep!

Yesterday was my 20th birthday! I was just randomly checking some sub-folders in my inbox. I have lots of rules and stuff because there are loads of emails I’m sent that I’m not interested in and just filter off into different folders.

However, I got one yesterday from As Seen On Screen that was wishing me a Happy Birthday and giving me a £10 voucher! How cool is that?

I don’t how innovative it is but I’ve certainly never seen anything similar. It’s such a good marketing technique. I feel loved by ASOS and I’m likely to go and give them my cash now.

The only thing they did wrong was they didn’t seem to know my name even though they new my date of birth. I’m willing to overlook it though ‘cos they sent me a voucher and a personal email.

Whoever runs their marketing department is doing a good job in my opinion!

I’m an advocate of the more tag for a number of reasons - some people don’t like it but I use it where I feel it is appropriate.

Continue Reading…

Well I’ve used Twitter once - I signed up and Twittered or whatever they call it, and then never used it again! Why? Because it seems totally pointless to me. It’s like a limited Facebook. I don’t have any friends on Twitter whereas I have loads of friends on Facebook.

As far as I can tell, though I may be wrong, is that the twitter thing is pretty much the same as the Facebook status update. Why would I bother with Twitter when I have Facebook?

If someone can provide me with a compelling reason then I may go and check it out again but otherwise I’m really not fussed.

Hello everyone, I’m back from the Freshers’ blogging hibernation! I don’t have nearly as much time to blog at uni as I would have liked so I’m going to have to try and blog in batches and make good use of the future post option!

Anyway - here’s some of the interesting things that have caught my eye over the last few weeks.

How to Optimize for Ask. These are supplementory tips to the guide to How to Optimize for Yahoo!. Nice straight forward stuff you can put into action right now!

Interesting little post from Lyndoman about Social Bookmarking and SEO. If you have any spare time it could be a useful experiment.

Free SEO site review from a pro. Read it and work out what you can apply to your site(s)!

A nice interview with Eli from BluehatSEO. With the usual lack of paragraphing from Eli ;)!

A guide from someone I worked with for a bit about reputation management

Some tips for social media success.