Dave Dunn

By chance I stumbled upon an interesting video by the head of  Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. The video opened my eyes to how most SEO strategies that are peddled on the internet are a complete waste of time. Infact it has made me review my approach for ’some’ things. Less analysis, more action. (Which is always a good thing).  Let’s just get on with it then eh?

Needing to post a DVD of files to a client and pay some overdue bills I decided to go to the Post Office early on this morning. Killing the proverbial two birds and leaving the rest of the day clear to continue with my marketing. My girlfriend was to drop me off on her way to work and I planned to walk home taking a few photos of the surrounding countryside.

We live a few miles out in the country, having recently moved here from the hustle of a busy city. The peacefulness kind of suits us both and we feel more relaxed for it. But the area is new to us so I thought I’d take this chance to do a bit of exploring off the beaten track. Grabbing my camera I laced up my army walking boots, anticipating a little bit of mud.

After I had done my dues, I began the walk home. It’s a reasonable walk, about three and a half miles, and as I set off I was enjoying a chilly but sunny morning. I had looked on Google maps earlier to get a rough bearing of the direction I was heading. There was a factory site just off the main road, and it was beyond this I was to walk through the woods alongside a brook. Following it upstream I would be back home in no time. Easy.

As I entered the woods I felt a sense of clearing in my head. It is often when going for walks that you can get a chance to gather your thoughts. It clears the mind. Gives you a chance to distance yourself from the usual routine and enter a more creative state. Joggers experience a similar thing. (It is connected with the theta brainwaves and how a repetitive exercise can bring about a different state of mind)

I began thinking about my plan for the day and how my marketing efforts were going… how I’m finally putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Suddenly the sun begins to vanish and the sky turns gray. As it does my feet quickly sink into deep mud, almost sucking my boots off. I was quite surprised. While I had anticipated some mud, I hadn’t quite expected this.

Lifting my feet out I walked onwards, cursing myself for not having the foresight to realise the ground would still be boggy from the last few months of rainfall.

Then a drop of precipitation. “Great! Now I’m caked in mud, and it’s going rain” Yet I was too far into the woods to turn back, so I continue onward. Walking, I enter an open field and the ground becomes less and less stable, until I am hopping from one clump of grass to another…. I felt foolish for continuing and it surely must have been a sight to see…. A man hopping through a muddy field with no sense of direction.

I decided I should head for some higher ground. As I did I noticed a fresh footprint. Someone had recently been here before me. Feeling a sense of relief, I followed the trail of footsteps to dryer ground and back onto the trail home.

My mind came back to my progress with online marketing. I reflected on my journey over the past year, how it had began by heading into the unknown. A journey starting with a joyous, maybe naive enthusiasm. A rough route mapped out with sparse planning. Yet I soon became stuck. In turn this led to frustration, madly hopping from one idea to the next, until I didn’t know which way to turn. Thankfully I had now found footsteps to follow and I had a plan and a sense of direction. A direction in which my success lies and one I can call a path home.

You see I have recently been following a course called Simpleology. This course has allowed me to sort through the clutter in my life and put things in order. It has allowed me to find my strengths and my weaknesses and disciplined me to only spend time working on things that are important to my business.

Simpleology is a system. A system that will get you into the routine of only doing the most productive tasks each day.

If you have spent countless hours working on something with no result, then Simpleology will allow you to strip all that bare. Back to the very core of what you are trying to achieve. Will define your targets and allow you to ‘hit it, until you hit it’.

Maybe you are lost in the woods with your business? Perhaps up to your boots in the marketing mud or even hopping from one idea to the next with no sense of direction? Seriously, you should be checking out what Simplology can do for you.

And to make it even better Simplology is free. It doesn’t cost a penny to sign up. No ‘risk free trial’ or any of that nonsense.

Of course there is a marketing back-end to the system. Mark Joyner, who created it is a marketing genius.

(He wouldn’t just give away something this valuable if he didn’t know how to create sales further down the line. He’s not stupid)

What is most important here is the core system of Simpleology 101 is completely free. And besides which, simply signing up and seeing how Mark Joyner pieces together his marketing machine is a lesson in itself.

(And you don’t get many lessons like that for free either)

If you really are not convinced it will help you, then just sign up anyway, come back here and let me know. I will personally help you through any aspects of the course that you don’t understand.

Click here to sign up for Simplology 101 now. It could be the most productive thing you do all year.

Thats right, it’s not. I havn’t been on this blog of over a week. Not from lack of interest, just lack if time. It’s tough out here in the real world. I’m trying to get my stuff organised to the point of success, and that takes focus. So in the meantime I’m gonnna simply leave you a link to SOMA FM, the best goddam online radio in the world. Til the next time, adios…..

Perry Belcher is an Internet Marketing anomaly. He appeared on YouTube around the end of 2008 with some interesting concepts in using social media for marketing and an apology for his past endeavors; defrauding consumers with fake healthcare products. Controversial he may be, his ideas on social media managed to reach a wide audience with his use of….social media.

Some of his videos are infact very entertaining, and this one I found particularly useful for organizing daily tasks and ideas. However I have added my own twist. Watch the video and then check out linoit to take this concept to another level.

The ingenuity of this video though is that it was part of a carefully orchestrated plan to sell a high priced course in social media marketing. Don’t doubt Perry’s ability to use NLP techniques to pre sell you with his wacky brand of internet marketing.

In order to make my WordPress installations run as smooth as possible I devised a checklist for when I set up a new blog. This is a great starting point to ensure the blog is search engine optimized and reasonably well guarded against spam attacks amongst other things.

1. Fantastico. To make the wordpress install as quick and painless as possible I will go to my hosting accounts Cpanel and select Fantastico. From there I will simply install WordPress directly on the server. If you don’t have a clue how this Fantastico business works then take a look at this tutorial for using Fantastico to install wordpress on your website. Even better there is a video at the bottom of this page.
2. Theme. I have often spent hours trawling the net looking for a theme, but there have been some great looking themes available from within the WordPress install lately. One of my current favorites is the Arras Theme. This is a highly configurable magazine style theme that can be used to make a basic blog look like a highly interactive website.
3. SEO. One of the best methods for improving the SEO of the blog is to use this nifty FREE traffic getting software by Jeff Johnson. This basically performs some tweaks that will make SEO for your blog a piece of cake.
4. Plugins. Once you install the SEO software you are presented a list of plugins to install that are required to make the tweaks. I usually install all except the ’sociable’ plugin. For this I use AddThis WordPress plugin. I also add the Google Analyticator plugin. This will allow you to enter your Google Analytics tracking code so you can analyse where your blog traffic is coming from. ‘There are thousands of extra plugins that can be used depending what you are trying to do with the blog. More on the extra ones I use later.
5. Akismet API key. This is a very important step. You need to have registered an account with wordpress.com to get your API key. Once you have it enter it into into the box on the akismet page in your blog admin area. This will track spam comments that are posted. One time I neglected to activate the akismet and the blog came under attack from spam comments at a rate of 1 every second. There were over 17 thousand spam comments pointing to viagra sites. I had manually go into the SQL database and delete all the entries.
6. Optimize The Blog. Using Jeff Johnsons blog software I optimize the blog. This will fix up any tweaks that are required after installing any plugins. Also enter in your blog headers and keywords using the SEO for wordpress plugin that was installed.
7. Fix Permalinks. The optimizing that Jeff Johnsons software does include changing the permalinks to/%post_id%/%postname%/.

   I prefer the format

   /%category%/%postname%/

   as this includes more words for the search engines to pick up. Maybe I’m being a bit over the top with my SEO, but post id only gives us numbers instead of words. Please note that once you optimize the blog again using Jeff Johnsons software it will change your permalinks back to the post_id format. This will lose any inbound links to existing posts in the category format.

Once all these are done I’m pretty much ready to start posting and will add custom plugins and widgets as required depending on the blog.