Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Interesting… I hadn’t seen this before…

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This is one of my infrequent “real life money” posts. Today, in the Telegraph online we have this claim…

“Home repossessions are expected to soar after the Bank of England took the shock decision yesterday to raise interest rates by a quarter of a point to 5.25 per cent.”

Oh, C’mon now! A 0.25% increase in the Bank of England base rate, slightly earlier than expected (and it was expected to happen in February) and suddenly we are hearing that repossessions will “soar”.

If people are tipped over the edge by a 0.25% increase in their mortgage interest rate, they really should get a better grasp of money. I mean, a lot of people who took out mortgages in the last two years will be on highly discounted rates, so they are paying less for their loan than most people. Anyone who’s discounted rate has expired (usually after 2 or 3 years) will have got used to their monthly payments and should be able to cope with the 0.25% change.

On a £100,000 mortgage (roughly $200,000), an increase from 7% to 7.25% (standard rates, which are to be avoided anyway by shopping around for a better deal) the monthly increase is £16 (roughly $30).

Who’s financial position is that increase going to ruin?

Lots, if we believe the Telegraph and there are to be “soaring” repossessions!

If you really want to see how “soaring repossessions” happen, check out this PDF from the Bank of England and see the graph on page two. You’ll see interest rates rocketing, causing huge pain and housing market slumps. In 1990, rates were as high as 15% having climbed from under 8% in 1987. In the last five years they’ve change from around a low of 3.75% to a high of 5.25%.

I didn’t own a house in 1990, but my parents did, and I remember it well.

Perhaps that’s one reason why I’m keen to pay off my mortgage so quickly… and I mean quickly… by September.

Ok, so what’s with the post title? Have I lost my mind?

No. I’m trying to make sense of a conundrum.

Let me share it with you…

I know Keith Baxter. He’s the marketer behind ModernClick.com, a website bringing together advertisers and affiliates. I believe it specializes in Pay Per Lead (CPA- cost per action) programs.

Keith’s main company is Gibble LLC.

Keith recently released the report “Giving PPC the finger” which I mentioned at the blog because I didn’t like the lengthy sign-up process or title. The style of the report giveaway was like that done by “The Death of Adsense” (Scott Boulch) and “The Death of Internet Marketing” (Mike Filsaime) in that they paid people to distribute the reports.

OK, so “Giving PPC The Finger” by Keith Baxter promoted his ModernClick service. Makes sense, right?

Scott Boulch’s most recent report, “The Autopsy” promotes a site called ClickFlipping.com whereby you can supposedly make money by referring leads to companies and get paid per lead. If you buy your clicks (from Adwords or other Pay Per Click search engines and sell them as potential leads to other companies, you’re “click flipping”.

The company running ClickFlipping.com appears to be Archimedes Lever LLC. But the company mentioned at the bottom of the “Terms and Conditions” page on the ClickFlipping.com site is, ahem, Gibble LLC. Also, in the T+C it states…

“Payment for services to Archimedes Lever LLC must be made in US Dollars. Charges for services at Archimedes Lever LLC are processed by the one shopping cart system and all charges will appear as Gibble LLC”

So, my question is…

Does Scott Boulch exist, or is he a pseudonym for Keith Baxter?

(a comment on this blog asks “How is Keith Baxter(modernclick) really associated with Scott?”. Although, the actual blog post itself, by the blog owner, contains this… “Scott is a good friend of mine and I have helped give him advice on what he’s doing with click flipping”. So perhaps Scott does exist?)

(and another comment on a forum says, “I could be wrong but I’ve got a hunch that the author is really the illustrious Keith Baxter and not Scott Boulch.”)

Has Keith Baxter pulled off an incredible marketing ploy by promoting ModernClick directly using one viral report authored by himself, and also indirectly via a different viral report authored under Scott’s name?

Actually, ClickFlipping.com promotes an opportunity where you buy in at $997, then pay $297 per month to use software which tracks your ClickFlipping campaigns and automatically lets you know which keywords are profitable… so there’s probably a lot of money to be made selling the “opportunity” as well as the fact that it, most likely, encourages you to use ModernClick.com for your campaigns.

I can see that starting ModernClick would require a great deal of initial momentum… after all, advertisers want to see affiliates and affiliates want to see advertisers. But, if Keith has done both of these viral campaigns, from different angles, to effectively “launch” the ModernClick service then, quite simply, it’s genius!

note: I tried three phone numbers (one was an answer phone where I left a message, two were unavailable) and sent two emails, one was refused, one bounced as over the limit) to try to get Keith’s comments for this post before publishing.

Mike had some interesting things to say about Google’s Supplementary Index in an email he sent out recently, and how it relates to Private Label Rights articles…

“As an Article Underground member I have long supplied you with tips and suggestions on how to make your article pages more unique. In most cases, simply adding an introduction, middle commentary and closing summary are enough to make a web page unique enough NOT to trigger any filters. The problem often is NOT the article content but rather the “bolierplate repetition” of blocks of text on many pages, often because of templates.”

Hmmm, I’m not sure I agree with that. I think Google probably ignores most of the HTML template code. My guess is that Google strips the HTML coding and looks at the content on each page. If that content is mainly the same as content from other pages, Google will only keep the Most Relevant Result in its index and shunt the other pages into the supplemental results. So, if I’m right, it IS the content of the page that’s the decisive factor.

Mike goes on to say…

“The key is to avoid blocks of text that are repeated too often. So, spend a few minutes on each article adding sentences and changing a few words.”

So now we’re agreeing that the articles are the problem? I’m confused.

Actually, I think what Mike is saying is that the templates may be the main problem if you don’t remove “giveaway” signs such as “put your Adsense code here” and “put your links here” which, if left unchanged, will appear on all of your pages as “footprints”. Then, the actual articles may be a secondary concern and you should personalize them to avoid the Supplementary Results tag.

What do you think? Are your sites in the Supplementary Results Index? Are they still getting traffic, as Mike claims his pages are? (and I know some of mine are too!)

< — Actual data with categories and tallies!

Linda and I spent several hours pouring over the data generated by the Wizard survey.

I’d like to share the results with you…

I sent the email out to about 30,000 people asking for their feedback. The mailout generated 1,641 page views… not bad considering current email deliverability issues… especially the amount of email that gets filtered out as spam or junk before a visitor even takes a look.

So 1,641 page views were generated. From those page views, I got 658 survey replies. That’s a ratio of almost exactly 40%. I’m not sure if anyone refreshing the page would count as multiple page views or not.. or if repeat visitors were counted as multiple page views. It’s likely that there were many fewer actual “visitors” than “page views”… so the conversion rate of people answering the question could be much higher than 40%… perhaps as high as 50%. Either way, it’s a great result.

People were asked to list the top three areas they needed help with… so the maximum amount of answers would be 658 x 3 = 1,974. Some people didn’t provide three answers, some replied several times, some were “junk” answers to get to the free product. But, discounting all those unsuitable responses, we still received 1,325 distinct replies.

Those 1,325 answers were tallied according to category. In the end, there were 142 different categories which covered all the 1,325 replies.

So there are 142 different aspects of making money online people want me to help with!

I’ll do my best.

Obviously, some areas were much more popular than others… so they’ll be my initial focus.

For people who are totally new to the Internet and want to build and market one website, you can’t beat Site Build It by Ken Evoy. For a low annual fee you get an “all in one” system which includes a domain name, site hosting, a total marketing system and support forums.

You get to do almost everything from building your pages, designing your site logo, submitting your pages to search engines and directories as well as running your own newsletter in your web-browser. You can sell e-goods or even physical goods from your site if you wish… or monetize your content with Adsense or affiliate links.

SBI has grown tremendously since I last mentioned it, several years ago. It was good then… it’s amazing now!

A great example of how impressive SBI has become is the latest marketing technique they use to promote it. The team at SBI have taken video feedback from dozens of happy SBI owners and compiled them into a phenomenally powerful marketing technique.

If you’re a beginner, trying to make money online, watch these videos and see what other people are doing with SBI. The “all in one” system may be what you’re looking for to get started online.

If you’re more established online, you can still learn from this smart marketing campaign. Consider how you could use the principles behind the marketing to promote your websites and products.

You guys rock!
I sent out one email asking you what help you’d like if I could just wave a magic wand and help you make money online in 2007.

One day later, I have well over 500 replies. I printed them out (yes, I’ll read them all!) and have 38 pages to read with about 14 replies per page.

So I guess I’ll see you all in June!

Thanks to everyone who replied. I’ll do my best to solve some of the major problems you mentioned in the next few months.

When I mentioned Pipeline Profits a few days ago I was probably a little harsh. It didn’t seem like a game for Internet marketing beginners. You’re buying leads, so you can quickly be spending a lot of money. If you don’t get the system just right, you can quickly be losing a lot of money.

Compared to building sites cheaping and making money from Adsense or affiliate programs, buying leads has big potential to go wrong. Not only could you lose money, but if you get spam complaints, you could lose your whole business.

Having watched the third video (not an affiliate link), I noticed that they talk about how critical it is to quickly get your email into the hands of the person who signs up.

They mention the difference between seconds, minutes and hours. Getting the email (with more information about what people opted to receive) into their hands in seconds or minutes may mean a successful campaign. If you wait hours your campaign will suffer. If you buy leads that are days old, they’re effectively useless.

I can see the logic behind that. You are avoiding spam complaints by saying “you requested this info seconds ago”. That’s much more likely to be accepted than emailing people days after they signed up.

So perhaps I was a little harsh in my previous post. I couldn’t see how buying leads could be effective. I could see the possibility of it going very badly wrong… especially for beginners… and especially after reading Eric’s experience.

But by acting immediately on the lead, I can see how this could be successful. I would still say it’s very risky for beginners, and I’m not going to jump on the promotional bandwagon, but I can see how my initial assessment may have been too harsh.

What do you think?

I’ve put on my Wizard’s Hat and am asking people what spells I should conjure up to help them make more money in 2007.

In return for people letting me know what they need help with to make more money in 2007, I’m offering “Product Creation Secrets” as a free download.

If you want to let me know what help you’d like, please visit this page.

Please leave your thoughts about this survey. Did it make you laugh? Cry? Did it make you happy to get a free quality product?

Thanks to Mike Liebner of Article Underground for bringing this to my attention.

If you read this post from the official Google webmaster’s blog, you’ll see their latest comments on duplicate content.

In a nutshell they say that they can and do see duplicate content and will only show the Most Relevant Result (MRR) to people searching at Google. They already do this if they find two results from the same website… the MRR is shown as a regular search result, and the second page is show below, indented. Now we can expand the definition of MRR to apply to all results using primarily similar content… from the same domain or different domains. The MRR will be shown as a normal search result, and all the others will appear as “supplemental results”.

This attitude ties in perfectly with the post I made yesterday on the Supplemental Index. Basically, if you use content on your pages which Google has seen on other pages, only the page which is seen as Most Relevant Result (MRR) will be displayed in the Google Index, with the rest being listed as Supplemental Results.

So, be warned. If you use content available elsewhere (articles, long RSS feeds, merchant’s datafeeds, press releases etc) your page will have to be seen as the Most Relevant Result (MRR) for that content, or you’ll be buried in the supplemental index.

Fortunately, for PLR articles, the number of people receiving the articles is limited. Better yet, most people don’t do anything with the articles… so it’s fairly easy to be seen as the most reputable source for articles from quality PLR sites.

Of course, you could always write “unique and original content” (like on this blog) and make Google a very happy bunny.

By the way, Mike seems to be concerned that the duplicate issue may apply to templates, privacy policies and disclaimers. I don’t think that will be the case. Google refers to “substantive blocks of content”, which I would assume to mean several identical paragraphs (what Google called “boilerplate repetition”).

You should only have one privacy policy and one site disclaimer anyway, so that’s not an issue unless you’re putting those on every page you own. As for templates, I would expect the actual content of the page to be counted, but not the page layout code. After all, there are probably hundreds of thousands of pages built by XSitePro and other HTML editors. Google won’t simply penalise pages for being built by a webmaster using an HTML editor.

So, consider your page content… that’s the primary factor which could get your pages “hidden” in the supplementary index. To avoid that, add unique content to each page, or become the Most Relevant Result (MRR) for that content!

Some pages from a new site I’m building are in the Google index… or are they?

They show up as “Supplementary Results”. Which means they’re in the “supplementary” index… the “other” index… the pages that Google shows when it has nothing else to show.

As they say,

“A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.” source

So what can we deduce from the fact some pages have ended up in the supplementary index?

Well, this is by no means fact, but I would guess that to be in the supplementary index, a page would have to match these criteria…

1: The pages are fairly new (days, weeks or a few months old, not years)
2: The pages have very little Pagerank (few inbound links)
3: The pages probably have content on them that’s found on other pages.

I wouldn’t expect this blog post to appear in the supplementary index because, even though it’s new, it will appear at the top of the PR5 blog homepage and it’s 100% original content.

So how do you get your pages out of the supplemental index?

I would try increasing the Pagerank of the page itself so that your page is the one seen as most important for the content on that page and, if possible, add some original content to distinguish your page from others.

What do you think?