Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

What do you think?

Are Digg.com really asking me to type in the word “s e x” as a spam captcha? o.0

Is that legal, or decent?

Should I giggle, or vigorously shake my head and heap opprobrium on theirs?

For Shame, Digg. For Shame!

:-)

Everyone in my house has the lurgy to a greater or lesser degree, so I’ll just wish everyone a Merry Christmas and log off.

For those of you who don’t know, my main project at the moment is getting a whopping Private Label Rights article site to earn the cash I think it should be earning!

(yes, I said… “website… thou shalt earn $100,000 per year… make it so!”)

Actually, I LOVE PLR articles. I love using them to build pages. I love how they’re keyword rich. I love how they hoover up long tail searches.

But, in building a massive site, I’ve realized that I need to get some links into those pages. This is where most people who build PLR sites fail horribly because it takes effort. So, I had a bit of software created to help me obtain links easily. (you’ll get the software for free soon!)

I also had to learn a lot about SEO. I learned from Dan Theis, Aaron Wall, Jack Humphrey, Michael Campbell, Andy Jenkins and lots of other experts. Hence, I’m writing a guide to SEO condensing everything I’ve learned into “bite size” pieces. You can read my early thoughts at this Trulevance post.

It’s all been really exciting and interesting. Yes, I’ve made a few innocent mistakes along the way. Banning Googlebot from my site was kinda dumb. Serving the same articles to Googlebot multiple times when I rejigged the page system wasn’t too smart… but, hey, we all make mistakes. And I’ve learned a bunch from them.

Today I’ve been reviewing Social Power Linking by Jack Humphrey and it contains a huge (HUGE) amount of information about using video and other Web2.0 sites to get quality links and build your own authority sites. Great information. Highly recommended.

More coming soon.. stay tuned…

From my Inbox…
—

Dear Sir/Ma .
We are pleased to inform you of the final announcement that you are one of the winners of the UKONLINE PROMO AWARDS, held on 27th November, 2007. You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of $1,500,000.00

Please contact Claims agent for your claims.
Mr.David Nelson(CLAIMS AGENT)
Email:david_infoagent002@yahoo.de
1. Full Names:
2. Address:
3. Age:
4. Sex:
5. Marital Status:
6. Occupation:
7. Phone numbers:
8. Nationality:
9. Country:
Yours Truly,
Mrs. Becky Owen
online Co-ordinator

–

I’ll get right on it… I could do with $1,500,000. I’m sure that free email account at Yahoo.de is legit and they’ll hand over the cash because I won their competition… even though they have no clue who I am whatsoever!

No, I haven’t gone mad.

If you want more traffic, increase your Trulevance.

I bet you want to know what Trulevance is now, right?

OK, I’ll spill the beans…

Trulevance is a contraction of Trust and Relevance.

Let’s break that down a bit…

Your pages need to be Trusted before they’ll get traffic. The best example of trust is Pagerank. But Pagerank can be manipulated. See the last blog post where Dr Andy agreed with me that links from article directories are now less valuable. Buying and selling PageRank is frowned upon by Google. So how can Google fight back and make sure that Pagerank maintains its integrity? Simple. It downgrades the value of links from low-PR pages, and boosts the value from high PR pages. If you’re outside the “highPR clique”, tough luck… your pages aren’t trusted. If you’re inside the “HighPR clique” congratulations… you can expect a ton of traffic. (ever typed anything into Google and NOT seen a Wikipedia.com page in the results? I thought not).

How else can Google determine trust? Well, what about the age of a domain name? If the site has been around for a decade and not changed ownership or overall content, you can imagine Google would trust it more than a fly-by-night site which pops up, gets a few links and disappears. A lot of people call this the Google Sandbox, where they don’t trust new sites that don’t have good backlinks but I expect it’s more like a fine wine getting better with age. First you have to escape the sandbox, but then your site may get awarded positive points for the length of time online with the same content and overall theme. The longer your site has been online, the better. I have sites from 1997, 1998 and 1999. I know a thing or two about old domains.

Have you noticed how difficult trust is to achieve? You can’t fake the age of your domain… and if you buy an old domain, Google will know about the change at the registrar (because Google IS a registrar)… and even if they don’t pay attention to that, they will notice if you upload your content and the site changes. You also can’t easily get very high PageRank links. This is exactly what Google wants.

The second part of “Trulevance” comes from Relevance. Put simply, this is a combined measure of your off-page reputation, your on-page content and how they match up. If sites around the Internet point to your page as a place for “cookies”, but your page doesn’t mention “cookies” anywhere, you’re going to find it harder to rank for the keywords your page is targetting. If your page is about the Ascari KZ1 supercar, but all the links to your page say “cookies”, Google will see the disconnect and write off your page as irrelevant. Incidentally, this is what happens when you buy an old domain hoping to put your content on it and get an instant ranking boost… there will be a disconnect between all the links pointing to your domain and what your content is about. Whoops. Bye-Bye Relevance.

Off-page reputation mainly refers to the anchor text within links pointing to your site, and the content of the Title tags of those pages. On-page content is what your page is seen to be about… its topic or subject… which is decided by the page title, bold words, headlines, the domain name and words in the URL as well as all the words on the page acting in concert to give your page a subject. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) helps decide what your on-page subject is by checking words on the page against other words it would expect to find from other indexed pages on the same subject… for example, is your page about Apple Computers or Apple Pie… finding the words crust, sugar and oven would indicate the latter.

When the off-page reputation agrees with the on-page content, you get “Relevance”. When you combine Trust with Relevance you get Trulevance… which means Google loves you and you’ll get tons of traffic!

Check out my blog post on “The Truth Behind The Big PageRank Slap” from Nov 7th.

While everyone and his dog was saying the slap was all about penalizing sites that were selling links, I said, “I also believe they hit “article directory” sites and downgraded their outbound links too.”

And what do we see in Dr Andy Williams’ latest newsletter?

“As I looked at more and more examples, I came to the conclusion that links from article sites are not worth the same “value” as they once were“.

Remember… you heard it here first!

Andy has some good tips on how article submissions can still generate traffic and useful links… check them out here.

I’m not sure about the exact situation in the USA, but here in England the same story is everywhere… 1.4 million people will come off “cheap fixed rate” deals in 2008 and will be hit with their mortgage lender’s full variable rate… which is likely to be much higher than their fixed rate deal.

Coming off a fixed rate to a standard rate happens to everyone who has a fixed rate mortgage, that’s the whole point of it… you start out with the low rate but the mortgage lender actually makes their money in the long term when you pay the standard rate. When our fixed rate expired, we just asked our current lender to give us a better deal than their standard rate, or we would take out mortgage elsewhere. Guess what? They said, “OK” and knocked a full 1% off of their standard rate for our mortgage. We ended up paying I think 1% more than the discounted fixed rate, but 1% less than the standard rate. We were happy and the mortgage lender was happy.

(Actually, we were happy mainly because we’d paid off the vast majority of the mortgage during the 2-year fixed rate… and the new, higher, rate would only apply to the “rump” of the mortgage we had left.)

The problem now is that when it comes time to switch to the standard rate, mortgage lenders supposedly won’t be so likely to “cut a deal” with the mortgage holder because taking your mortgage elsewhere has become more expensive… rate have jumped and so have application fees… as lender’s tighten their belts.

Well, that’s the theory and supposedly it was even behind the Bank Of England’s decision to cut rates earlier last week… easing the transition from fixed rate to standard rate. Cliff D’arcy says that “in April 2001, when the base rate was the same as today’s 5.50%, Halifax’s SVR was 6.50%. After yesterday’s cut, Halifax now has an SVR of 7.50% — a full percentage point higher than 6½ years ago!”, and that, “mortgage arrangement fees have almost doubled in the past two years.”

Well, I don’t believe it’s as bad as it’s painted.

Just a little research at fool.co.uk shows us some cheap mortgage lenders still exist. For example…

Darlington 2.13% discount :
5.69% Until 30/04/10 :
Arrangement Fee: £474

Hanley Economic Fixed :
5.59% to 28/02/11:
Arrangement Fee: £649

Those are still decent deals which you can use to justify asking your current lender to match or come close to when your fixed rate deal is about to expire. After all, they will want to keep your business, just as my lender did.

update from the ThisIsMoney website…

“Ray Boulger at broker John Charcol in central London says borrowers should not panic. ‘Only those with adverse credit are having difficulty remortgaging to a competitive deal,’ he says.

‘That’s not to say the market won’t be tougher next year. All borrowers coming off special deals should brace themselves to pay more. But there will still be plenty of good fixed and tracker deals available.’

Borrowers coming to the end of a mortgage deal in the first half of 2008 should start thinking now about their next move. It is vital for homeowners, particularly those with credit problems, to act early and get advice from an independent broker who can search the whole of the mortgage market for new loans.

David Hollingworth at independent broker London & Country Mortgages in Bath, Somerset, suggests talking to your present lender first, as this will give you something to compare new mortgage offers against.

‘If it can offer you a reasonable deal it is worth considering, particularly as staying means there won’t be any need for a new valuation of your property or credit checks,’ he says.

‘But the majority of borrowers should not have any difficulty switching to any deal in the market if they want to take advantage of the best rates.’

Most mortgage deals can be reserved for up to three months and some for up to six months. But Boulger says: ‘ Borrowers who want fixed rates and can afford to wait could get a better deal if interest rates are cut again in the first few months of next year.”

They seem to agree with me. For most people there shouldn’t be much of a problem. Of course you’ll be paying more… your discounted rate ended… but it shouldn’t mean a financial crisis.

If you’ve been following Joel Comm’s latest project, The Next Internet Millionaire, you’ll know how cool it’s been… I loved the whole concept and the professionalism of each episode was amazing.

Well, brace yourself for the launch of the Secret Classroom today at 10am EST.

What’s the Secret Classroom, I hear you ask?

Well, in each episode of The Next Internet Millionaire, an Internet marketing expert gave the students a coaching class. Those experts included Mark Joyner, Armand Morin, Jeff Walker, Marlon Sanders, Mike Filsaime, Perry Marshall, Brad Fallon and Rich Schefren. When you watched an episode of TNIM at their website you only got to see a few minutes of the expert’s presentation… but the Secret Classroom product gives you the opportunity to see all the presentations in a DVD set.

Now, you may be asking how much this DVD set is going to cost… is it going to be another $997 deal? Well, I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised by the cost. I’m not saying it’ll be cheap because it is a premium product… but lets just say that Joel’s pitching it at a price way lower than the $997 I’m sure he could’ve charged for it.

Check out Joel Comm’s Secret Classroom here.

I just took a while to review Ewen Chia’s Super Affiliate’s Club. I downloaded the Super Affiliates Blueprint ebook (quality), checked out some of the tutorial movies (very useful), reviewed the case study (excellent) and looked at the monthly PLR product (yup, that was cool too!)

Ewen is one of the world’s top Super Affiliates. He has over 373,000 subscribers to ONE of his autoresponders! I imagine that when he promotes a product, the whole server and sales system creaks as it tried to deal with the traffic.

I recommend Ewen’s Super Affiliate Club because 1: it’s quality and 2: Ewen knows the Super Affiliate world inside-out.

In his latest newsletter, Dr Andy Williams (creator of the Fat Content course) wrote this excellent comment…

“Without a boss looking over your shoulder, you burden the responsibility of self-motivation, which is why so many people fail to make an impact online. They just give up. Don’t let it happen to you!”

That also applies to anyone starting an online business… you have the “responsibility of self-motivation”. It’s much easier to go and watch the TV… but less productive.

I have to acknowledge marketing genius when I see it… and I see it in this story…

We’re all running around like little worker ants on our Internet businesses… totally overloaded by information spewing forth from the Internet and 10 bajillion Internet marketers continually filling our inboxes… when along comes a report claiming to help us with our attention problems and our inability to focus on blogging, link building, finding JV partners, SEO, product creation, oh heck where was I?

The genius part lies in the fact that you JUST CAN’T SAY NO to a report which is going to help you with your lack of focus. I mean, what alternative do you have to going and reading it? You could say, “Sorry, I’m too busy”. LOL. Busy doing what… a million other things that are distracting you from getting work done? You could say, “Sorry, I’ve made my massive stack of gold coins and dont need your report”. Well, that would be nice, but I’m guessing not many people can say that.

Here’s where you can read the report.