Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

This is something I think people struggle with… getting traffic to their sites. At the moment there seems to be no end of people offering you ways to get sites online quicker… they’ll give you templates, site-building software, keyword-research, graphics, ebooks, articles etc etc… everything you need to get sites online in a flash… But what happens then?

I’ll tell you… your site will be ignored unless you know how to get traffic to it.

Do you know how to get traffic to your sites? I mean, really know? Or do you think you know.

If you need a refresher course, or even a great beginners guide, I highly recommend Peter Hale’s Total Web SEO. You get all these quality movies…

Mastering the basics 7′
How search engines rank your pages 11′
Lay strong foundations 10′
Develop your website 9′
Power up your SEO (1) 9′
Power up your SEO (2) 14′
Learn from the professionals 9′
Explode your visitors exponentially 9′

Bonuses
LIVE Website video critique 14′
How to avoid these SEO mistakes 12′
How to avoid duplicate content penalties 6′

…plus a GREAT step-by-step 38-page ebook, “How to dominate the search engines”, written by Peter.

It’s a really tight package, chock full of easy-to-implement SEO tips.

If you’re doing your own traffic generation, click here to start by reading Peter’s ebook and watching his movies.

Is Peter qualified to teach you SEO? I’ll let him tell you…

“I built my first web application for a large international company back in 1996, well before even Google was launched! Since then I have honed my internet skills and now run 15 websites generating over $327,000 in profit each year.”

Over the past decade I thought I’d done almost all of this Internet marketing stuff.

(For those who don’t know… my affiliate program of 16,000+ affiliates has tracked over $850,000 in sales of my own products. I’ve earned affiliate commission checks in excess of $12,000 in 7 days. I can email almost 30,000 opt-in contacts whenever I wish. A few years ago I sold one business asset for $154,000 in cash. The homepage of ScamFreeZone.com has seen over a million page views as certified by a third party tracker. Oh, and the audited accounts of my business show it generated over a million dollars in turnover in the last five years.)

… but after watching Rich’s movie yesterday (twice), I realized I have to change some things… drastically.

So I got up at 5.45 am today and wrote out some necessary changes.

I’ve been playing with Smart Draw (for process mapping) and MindJet (for brainstorming and keeping track of everything in an organized way). I’ve installed Gizmo Project (hat tip to Mike Merz) which seems to be a cross between Skype, an Instant Messenger service and your own teleconference system.

I’m having a blast!

I’m starting to see a new business roadmap laid out before me… it’s really exciting!

If you’d like to check out the same tools, we can share thoughts and tips.

I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever sat and watched a little window on my PC for 90 minutes with such rapt attention before. I was glued to the screen.

I’m going to ask my wife watch the movie, and possibly my son, daughter, guinea pigs, rabbit and goldfish! 

I didn’t plan on it, but ended up making eight pages of notes.

And I hate making notes!

Seriously… if you have ever wanted a real online business, not just a job where you’re self employed in your own business, you must learn how to set up a business properly. After watching this movie of Rich giving a seminar presentation, I have realized that I’m not running a true business.

I honestly don’t know if anyone else teaches this stuff, but if you want to see someone clearly and logically explain the concepts behind setting up and running a business, watch Rich’s free movie.

If you’re already overwhelmed by running a business, watch the movie to find out why, and what to do about it.

If you’re just starting an online business, watch the movie to learn how to set up your business so that you won’t ever be overwhelmed by it.

You can play the movie as soon as you hit the page. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to download, install, unzip, whatever. Just clear some time for yourself, get a notepad and pen, and watch this movie!  (trackback)

Update: the link above now takes you to register for Rich’s teleconference. To see the movie, visit: http://www.strategicprofits.com/ 

Well, I’m a blogging newb as most of you know… so don’t laugh when I say I just registered this blog at FeedBurner.

I grabbed their code and have pasted it into the sidebar… it’s supposed to calculate blog subscribers somehow. Well, if it shows zero for a few months it’s hitting the trash can. We’ll see.

You can click on the little FeedBurner icon to see how they use the content from this blog, or just click here. It’s amazing how many promotional opportunities are available to blogs that aren’t available to “regular” websites.

If you read this post, you’ll see that I use, and recommend Article Marketing… the distribution of your own original articles containing links to your sites across the Internet by webmasters who reprint your articles at their sites.

I’ve just read a great little PDF report called “ The Power Of Article Marketing , how a United States Army Captain pulls 5-figures working his online business only part-time… all while working a full-time job!”

In that PDF is a very interesting strategy for promoting your sites which builds on what I’ve already discovered to be a successful promotional technique. I highly recommend downloading a copy and checking it out. It’s a freebie.

It’s official… I’m roasting at the moment, here in England.

Here’s the temperature forecast from the BBC in Celsius and Farenheit. Looks like yet another day in the 90’s, with the potential to beat the all-time high of 101 F, set in 2003.

Ahh well, I guess it’s nice and toasty. And it allows The Sun newspaper to indulge in a warning that people’s brains could boil.

Rich Schefren opened the doors to his coaching program at 11am EST. Out of 150 places available, there are only 45 places left right now.. just 90 minutes later. If my calculations are right, he made sales worth $525,000 in just 90 minutes.

Staggering.

If you’re interested in checking out the sales page. I expect you have a maximum of a few hours to take a look at what’s being offered. Click here.

Update: all the places were sold in 2 hours and 14 minutes… that’s 150 places at $5,000 each. A total of $750,000 in sales.

Last month I built a site using AdGold Rush graphics and articles as well as Article Underground articles and some articles I had ghost-written. I think that mix will show the site to be totally original, even if one or two people happen to be using some of the articles on other sites. In total I got the site to about 100 pages… including sitemaps and whatnot. 

Yesterday Mike Liebner released two sets of 400 articles for a total of 800 articles. I spent about an hour last night chatting with Mike and talking through the process of putting up quality, long-lasting content sites. It seems like we believe in the same long-term system. It was fun chatting with him.

Today, I searched the new sets of articles for the keyword phrase I built last month’s site around… bingo… 16 more articles. So I put the targetted artices into new pages and uploaded them. Guess what? My site looks like it has grown organically, with more than a dozen new articles added to several different article categories… all closely related to my keyword phrase!

Will the search engines “like” to see a site growing by a dozen article-pages per month? I don’t know for sure, but I think so. And will those pages take long to get indexed by the search engines? Nope… because the original 100 pages are already fully indexed.

Hmmm, now who wants to help me build sites 2,3,4 and 5?

By the way, I think there are only about 30 places left in the current Article Underground membership set. If you want to join, now is the time.

I submitted one original article to several directories on the 8th July.. just nine days ago. The title of the article was not found anywhere online when I searched for it in quotes… it was unique.

Now, when you search for the article title in quotes there are 14,900 matches at Google (see the graphic, left). Wow. I don’t know how many of those pages are linking to my site (which they’re supposed to if they use the article on their pages) but even if it’s only a couple of hundred that should be enough to get my site some traffic and backlinks.

Use article submission to get attention for your sites. It’s like shining a spotlight on them. You can submit your articles manually at different article directories or use software to help you. I use, and recommend, article announcer which has been improved considerably since its initial release to make it a very, very useful tool.

If you’ve been following my interest in getting out of debt, you’ll probably like this article in today’s Sunday Telegraph. Every week I read the views of this economist… what he thinks of the price of oil, the pound/dollar exchange rate, the housing market and lots more. In this week’s column he’s talking about debt… particularly the differences between secured and unsecured debt.

From what I understand, the world has been living in a low-interest rate environment… which has fed the housing market boom and the uptake of cheap loans, overdrafts and credit card deals.

But with the US Federal Reserve hiking rates over the past eighteen months, the European Central Bank boosting rates recently and even the Bank of Japan raising rates from zero (”Bank of Japan, confident of economic recovery, raises interest rates for 1st time in 6 years” - July 14th 2006, Associated Press) , the interest rate scene has changed.

Those people with big mortgages (not uncommon at the current high house price valuations) will be acutely sensitive to increases in interest rates… even more so for people with big mortgages and credit card debit. Central banks need to be very careful in their raising of rates to avoid precipitating a crash… either a housing market crash or a stock market crash if people’s confidence in their ability to repay their debts were to falter. High oil prices (which mean high gas/petrol/diesel) prices will also hit people’s cashflow hard as they filter down.

If higher rates are on the way, paying off as much debt as you can now seems a wise move. We have had it very good, economically, for a very long time. People have saddled themselves with lots of extra debts in a time of low inflation, high employment and low interest rates. Sooner or later the party will end and people who haven’t been paying attention will get burned. On the other hand, change is always accompanied by fresh opportunities…

You know, there are a lot of private label rights (PLR) article sites out there. You subscribe, you get access to a whole ton of articles to add to your sites. But I’ve heard that some are recycled articles, some are bot-generated… so which PLR membership do you choose?

In reply to such a question, Michael Campbell said…

“But sheesh man!!! If you held a gun to my head, and told me that I could afford only ONE membership and HAD TO choose one source for articles, I’d have to choose Mike Liebner’s Article Underground, mainly for its unique blog network.”

Personally, I found it interesting that I built a new site using Article Underground articles, announced one page on the Article Underground blogs and the Google Sitemaps system told me that the page on my new site with the highest pagerank was the one page I’d promoted at the Article Underground blogs. I also saw spiders from the search engines visiting that one page as soon as it was posted at some of the Article Underground blogs. The blogs help with getting pagerank for your pages and for getting indexed quickly.

In short, I agree with Michael. Get membership to Article Underground before any other PLR site.  

I’m writing up a post about AdGold Rush and what Liz has written to members in their latest packet of goodies (which I got yesterday). I’ll have to get the “OK” from Liz before I can publish my post. I hope she says “yes” because this is huge news!

Update: Liz said I can’t tell you guys until after the weekend… she’s still finishing things off. Ahh well, have a great weekend and I’ll return to this after.

Only three months after launching the blog… the first updated Google toolbar PageRank display gives this blog a PR of 5.

I’m happy.

I can now sell links on the blog for $10 per year, or something like that. hehe.

If you like the blog, I’d really appreciate a link to it. Just a plain text link like this would be cool…

<a href=”http://www.neilshearing.com/”>Neil Shearing’s Blog</a> 

(just copy and paste that text into your HTML code or favorite page editor.)

Please let me know if you create a link. It’ll keep me blogging. Many thanks. 

You know what’s crazy? That “neilshearing.com” is a PR3 but “www.neilshearing.com“ is a PR5. Why would the “www” make any difference? I know, technically, the explanation is something to do with them being two different URL’s… but couldn’t Google just add PR3 to PR5 and make the blog homepage a PR8?

I liked this quote from today’s Telegraph…

“People are acting as if they expect to be able to fund a longer and longer retirement with less and less saving.”

Apparently, only 1 in 4 people in their 20’s in England now pay into a private pension, compared to 1 in 3 just five years ago.

I like to return to this theme once in a while… it’s a personal goal of mine to avoid debt (including a mortgage… the big scam) and become debt free (scamfree) as soon as possible. I keep reading articles online and books offline to increase my financial education and avoid all the financial “scams” that people fall for. Believe it or not, I was reading a book by the hypnotist Paul McKenna and even he was talking about how to obtain financial freedom. He was adding up all the bit ticket purchases you make in a lifetime (house, college education for your kids, cars, holidays) and then adding to that the retirement pot of cash you’ll need… and his example came to a total of £1.25 million needed to secure financial independence and a happy retirement. (about $2.3 million!)

Just like I said in this post… we have to stop thinking about a “million” as a lot of money. You may well have to earn that, or something in that ballpark, in your lifetime to pay off your purchases and expenses and retire happily. Perhaps you’re comfortable earning that amount by the time you’re “expected” to retire at 65/67/70.

Personally, I’d like to “retire” as soon as possible. My “scamfree” date is Jan 2008… perhaps a little earlier… and then I plan to build a retirement pot. Why don’t you join me in this crusade?

Other posts about debt… here and here .

I was just reading a report by Adam Maywald, one of the guys behind ebookNiches… the other is Robert Blackstone.

At ebookNiches they provide you with a “business in a box” service. You get 4 re-writable, re-brandable, re-sellable niche ebooks, professional graphics, sales letters, keywords and follow-up autoresponder content per month. All you basically have to do is put the ebook online, hook the sales page to your payment processor and drive traffic to the sales letter. 

Adam claims to be the Search Engine Optimization guy and not a marketer… so he was looking at selling ebooks from a beginner’s perspective.

In an experiment, he took one of the ebooks from ebookNiches and tried to sell it via the sales letter they provide you with. All he did was drive traffic to the sales letter by bidding on the list of keywords for that niche at Adwords. No messing with getting free search engine traffic and waiting to be indexed, getting links and all that. He just plugged in the keywords, bid on them and drove traffic to his sales letter.

The result?

After one week, he had spent $25.34 at Adwords and made four sales at the site. The sales earned him $79.88 (gross) so he earned $54.54 in profit.

That’s a very nice little profit from one sales letter and one Google Adwords ad in one week.

There are four weeks in each month, and Ebook Niches provide you with four niche ebooks to sell per month… so replicating Adam’s results using all four ebooks could potentially earn you $50 x 4 x 4 = $800 per month.

Check out the PDF report here or the ZIP version here to see exactly what Adam did, with screenshots.

I think I could be trying to replicate his results sometime soon. If I do, I’ll share the data with you.

It was school sports day for my son today, so I’ve done very little online. (that’s one of the pleasures of being your own boss… taking time off whenever you want)

If you’re itching for something new to read, there’s quite a discussion still going on about Article Underground here.