Internet Marketing Strategies and Marketing Tips by Neil Shearing

What do you think… would you like to know the basics of SEO… I mean the TRUE basics and not the “guru fluff” that people with zero knowledge of SEO pass off as “the hidden truth”?

I’d like to get my hands on a short, to-the-point ebook which explained, clearly, the basics of SEO.

It seems to me that there are “fluff” ebooks and articles on the one hand, and real-experts on the other… but the real experts seems to go on and on and on with hour after hour of video or hundreds and hundreds of pages of waffle and arcane detail. OK, they’re the experts, but sheesh.. could ya consense it into less than 50 pages please bud?

Am I on the right track, here? Does anyone feel the same way?

Right then. I’m going to distill everything I’ve ever learned about SEO (real SEO, not the junk I’ve learned then discarded) into a short, sharp, punchy ebook… and I’ll get in ready in time for Christmas!

My recent product, Passive Cashflow Secrets, was made using Camtasia 2.0.

Now Techsmith are giving away version 3.0. Why? Because they want you to upgrade to version 5.0!

Hey. Who needs version 5.0? Like I said, I was quite happily using version 2.0 for my latest product.

Grab version 3.0 and it should do everything you need to produce high quality Flash movies.

Just click here to download the file, and click here to request an unlock key.

Techsmith are also giving away Snagit unlock keys. Click here to request one. You can download the Snagit application here (note, that download is NOT from the Techsmith website).

Why do people not “get” how to make money online?

Nowadays, it’s simple.

Back in 1998, when I sold a text file (yeah, this was before ebooks!) called “How To Make Money Online”, it was also simple.

You create a product, you sell it.

People who desire your product, buy it.

Bingo. You’ve made money.

I’ve just read a blog comment from a guy who has spent $20,000 on Internet marketing products and has nothing to show for it but a big hole in his bank account.

That’s mind-boggling to me.

Look. The Internet has been around a long time. You don’t need to “invent” everything, like was happening back in the 1990’s. Just look at who’s making money and mimic them. Note, I didn’t say steal their web-pages or products. Just legally and ethically model your business on theirs.

Heck, model mine. I’ve probably sold over a million dollars worth of digital products online. I would say “definitely”, but I can’t be bothered to add it up. I’m one of the laziest Internet marketers. I release a product every other year… and still work for myself full time… and have almost paid off my second mortgage in 6 years.

How hard can it be to make money?

Just be a bit less lazy than me and you’ll do fine.

I was referred to a website selling “how to do SEO” information. They claim that they get great search engine rankings… OK, fine.

But on their sales letter they show a screen-capture from Google for the search construction auditing firm and say they’re first and second out of 2 million results… and they did it in less that six weeks!

Oh, C’mon.

Surely, by now, everyone knows that those results will include any webpages with the words, “construction”, “auditing” and “firm” on them. If you search for “construction auditing firm” using quotes, to determine who’s actually using or optimising for that phrase, you get EIGHT results… and two are from the seo company… so only six were competitors!

Why do I care? Because it’s fairly misleading… and in any case, I’ve done better myself. Years and years ago, you could search AltaVista for Business Opportunities and the ScamFreeZone homepage was the second organic result and also the third organic result for Home Business… phrases which were slightly more competitive, even back then, than “construction auditing firm” is nowadays.

You know what never fails to amaze me… that after 10 years making money online, I’m still learning new things and tackling new challenges on a daily basis.

Yesterday it was wresting with the concept of “wget” and “cURL” in order to get my Smart Site scripts working on customer’s web-space via cron…. oh and also trying to decide what to do about the database replication between my two servers failing again.

Today I was trying to find the cause of a “burning plastic” smell in my office. It turns out that the Power Supply Unit on the computer I use to do most of my work was emitting the smell. Not good. So, to cut a long story short, I changed the PSU for one from an old machine I no longer use. Problem solved. Notch up yet another thing I’ve learned to do just to help my online business run smoothly.

Actually, I’m still waiting for the day when it runs smoothly.

A few piccies…

Well, I didn’t take off Adsense ads from my pages, so I guess the earnings from Kontera have to be seen in that light. Even so, I’m quite surprised at how low the eCPM is.

(eCPM is earnings per thousand page impressions)

After 4,000+ page impressions the clickthrough rate is above 5%, which shows that people are seeing and clicking on the ads, but the eCPM is under $5.

My Adsense eCPM was about $19 and that seems to have gone down to about $15… but if you add the Adsense and Kontera earnings, I’m getting just slightly more… about $20 eCPM.

I guess the Kontera ads will be staying. Despite the low eCPM, they offer some extra content to visitors and have slightly boosted the overall eCPM. I’ll be checking the stats again after a longer period of time and see if the same holds true.

Adsense have just changed their system…

“we’ve just changed our text ads slightly to help reduce accidental clicks. In the past, users could click on both the background and full text of an ad, but now they can click only on the title and URL of a text ad. By allowing users to click only on the ad title and URL, we aim to decrease accidental clicks, better aligning visitor behavior with their intent. Overall, the decrease in accidental clicks will keep users on your website, interacting your content, until they intend to click on an ad.” link

I’m surprised that was important. After all, if you clicked somewhere between the title and url of an ad (ie the actual ad description), you were almost certainly intending to click… which only leaves the “white space” around the ads to generate unintended clicks… that white space is no-longer clickable.

I guess that will decrease some accidental clicks… which is a good thing because even though Adesens publishers will lose a few clicks, the actual advertisers will be willing to pay more per click because their visitors will have definitely wanted to click, which should balance things out for publishers.

Did you spot the deliberate typo? Good.

I’m testing Kontera ads over at my RefreshArticles.com site. See this example page on Internet advertising. The words highlighted within the article are Kontera ads, which will earn me cash if clicked on (not when someone puts their mouse over the ad, but just if they click).

I think the Kontera ads will add value to each page because the articles are otherwise devoid of links. Being able to add “contextual links” with just a simple bit of javascript was appealing to me.

Whether they make me any more money or not is an interesting question. I guess time will tell.

I regularly get emails from people asking to buy text links at http://www.ScamFreeZone.com .

Why?

Perhaps because it’s been around since 1997. Perhaps because it was once PR7 (for a short time). Perhaps because it ranked very highly for “home business”, “home business opportunities” and even “business opportunities” in the past. It probably still ranks highly for less competitive phrases. Perhaps because I have very few links on the page, so each link carries quite a bit of PageRank.

I don’t know.

Nor do I care.

I’m not selling links.

Go and build your own PageRank.

What the heck is Neil Shearing Tube?

It’s my page at YouTube.com.

I’ve picked the new Guiness Tipping Point Domino advert as my Featured Video because I thought it was pretty cool and I loved how the objects got larger and larger. According to the Telegraph website…

“The advert took a week to film, with some of the sequences having to be reshot up to 15 times. Setting the dominoes on the table at the start of the advert took a team of three experts two days, but it took just 14 seconds to topple.”

Check it out by clicking here.

I could well be releasing some “marketing tips” videos soon… so you may want to subscribe to my videos!