Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

I follow the EUReferendum blog religiously. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the best blogs in the world because of the way Dr Richard North collates a massive amount of information, sifts it, distills it and adds his own personality and insight. It’s a perfect example of how one independent blog can provide more valuable information than a truckload of “mainstream media” websites and newspapers that all quote from the same biased press releases.

Yesterday, Richard announced that he and Neil O’Brien, the director of Open Europe had started a petition at the British government’s website calling on the British government to “respect the result of the Irish referendum and abandon the attempt to ratify the Lisbon Treaty”.

Within four hours the petition had over 7,000 signatures. Within eight hours it had over 10,000 signatures. At the moment, roughly 24 hours since launch, the total stands at 15,507, which is a superb result. If you sort the currently open petitions by size, the “Abandon Lisbon” petition is the third largest.

From a marketing perspective, it’s a powerful case study for the effectiveness of viral Internet marketing.

From a personal perspective, I hope the petition is acknowleged. It would be wonderful if Britain could extricate itself from the “ever closer political union” that most of the people of Europe don’t seem to want, judging by the “no” votes from the Danes (Maastricht, the Euro), Irish (Nice and Lisbon), French (EU constitution) and Dutch (EU constitution) in referenda.

I only wish the Brits could deliver their verdict in a referendum.

update The petition received over 20,000 signatures in roughly two days. It wasn’t enough. The UK government ratified the treaty yesterday, the first to do so since the Irish “no” vote. In theory, the Irish vote should have stopped the EU constitution Lisbon treaty coming into force, but this is the EU and they don’t take “no” for an answer. Perhaps the Irish will be asked to vote again, to make sure they come back with the “right” answer, or maybe the rule on unanimous ratification will just be fudged. Either way, it’s a sad state of affairs.

Has anyone else noticed a new type of blog comment spam where the spam comment directly copies a previous comment on the same post?

You can see an example here…

Notice how the first comment and the last comment are identical?

The first comment is genuine, the last comment is spam, and I’ve removed the link to the website from it.

I’m thinking that this must be automated, but I use a captcha plugin which requests a little code is entered before accepting a comment, so, unless that has been hacked, the person must be visiting the site.

It’s the second time I’ve seen “comment copy spam” at the blog and I’m wondering if it’s a new type of blog spam. Preumably the spammer is copying an earier comment to try to be “relevant” to the blog post.

Is anyone else seeing it?

I’ve been checking out some fellow Internet marketers… people who seem to have well established blogs… but can you believe what you see?

Surely some of these Internet marketers, whose blog posts seem to go back to 2004 or beyond didn’t really have blogs back then?

Heck, this blog only goes back to 2006… because that’s when I started it, despite the fact that I’ve been making money online since 1997.

How did these other Internet marketers manage to start a blog and then back-date it by a couple of years?

From what I can tell, they made posts with historical dates, using their old email promotions as content for the blog posts.

But why?

Well, I guess it makes use of their old content, which may get a click or two when it’s indexed by the search engines… but my guess is that they want to be seen to have a long track-record online. It’s obvious from my previous post that people with a long track record of marketing online successfully are more respected than people who just arrive online and start shouting how wonderful they are.

So… Padding Your Blog With Backdated Content… respectable, or a cheap trick?

What do you think?

What’s next? Twitter tweets from 2001? Facebook pages from 1999? Squidoo Lenses from 1994?

I was delighted to see this quote on Martin Avis’ blog…

“You happen to be one of the few Internet Marketers I really trust, and after reading today’s Kickstart you have come up with another little gem. I have already installed and am using Free Link Finder, and it’s a fabulous tool. Thank you for that.”

I’m hoping the guy is actually referring to “Real Link Finder“, or I’ll have egg on my face.

So far there have been mentions from Martin Avis, William Charlwood and Dr Andy Williams as well as several branding requests and lots of positive feedback from happy users of the software.

It’s great to see the positive buzz about the giveaway, and I’m honored to be in the middle of it. We are fast approaching 1,000 downloads since Sunday!

What makes me even happier is that Paul Smithson, creator of XSitePro and a man who knows more about developing software than I ever will just wrote and said…

“For anyone wanting to create a genuine, high quality, inbound long term link strategy it’s something they should definitely have in their arsenal. I loved the fact that it wasn’t a tool designed to spam appropriate blogs, but was designed to make it easier to make genuine and relevant posts that benefit everyone. Excellent!”

I was just reading this blog post… “Matt Cutts, Why Am I Still Being Punished?” where Donna asks why her blog, which I presume had its PageRank decreased because it ran ads or paid blog posts without using nofollow, is still being “punished”. She says,

“I dumped text link ads. I nofollowed paid links. I javascripted links that might be mistaken for paid links. I canceled my sponsored review accounts. I switched to a different method of monetization (Scratchback) that serves Google-friendly, nofollowed links. (And btw, Google, that put a huge dent in my revenue, just so you know). Finally, after I cleaned up everything that might possibly make you hate me, I filed a reconsideration request about 5 weeks ago.

And I did all that for…what? Did you give me my PR back? No, you did not. Did you even communicate with me to tell me that you still think I’m naughty for some unknown reason? No, you did not. You simply did nothing.”

Matt Cutts commented on her post and said,

“I’m guessing your disclaimer might have been an issue; you still say “This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation… The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog…””

Whoops!

Matt goes on to say that “I chatted by email with the person who looked at your reconsideration request when you submitted it. They pointed out e.g. *link* where you’re still flowing PageRank in a paid post (you mention in the post that it’s a sponsored post).”

Whoops!

And then, “Before I go back to the person doing the reconsideration request, I also noticed this one: *link*”

Whoops!

Donna made the suggested changes and then, “UPDATE: little green pixels have returned”.

Yay for happy endings.

Over the past few days I’ve created quite a few new posts on this well-established blog.

For a bit of fun, I thought I’d check some keyword phrases and see if the blog had got any top search engine rankings.

Here are the results…

Creating Fat Content - 4th
Latest Google Slap -4th
Selling Links Is Profitable? - 1st
Pagerank Slap -5th
Affiliate Elite Hype - 2nd
From Cubicle Slave to the Next Internet Millionaire! - 6th

I didn’t use quotes for any of the searches.

It’s interesting that Google picks up on the blog posts so quickly, and gives them fairly high rankings. In fact, the search engine results are for the individual blog post pages, not for the blog homepage… so those posts presumably have no external links helping to give them a ranking boost… just a link from the blog homepage.

Important tip… pay close attention to your post titles… try to put in potential search phrases, while keeping them on-topic and punchy.

A good example… for the phrase [This is LEFT JOIN problem] this recent blog post ranks nowhere in Google because… those words aren’t in the blog post title.

Dang. There go my hopes of capturing the lucrative “MySQL programming problems” traffic.