SEO Information and News Blog

The search engine marketing industry is consistently evolving, sometimes at a pace that makes it hard to believe that search engine marketing services can stay on top of all the latest developments. The one constant for search engine marketing firms, and for the industry in general, is change–usually for the better, sometimes for the worse, but almost always significant. The industry is not for the faint-hearted or those who abhor change. However, savvy search engine marketing firms try to look ahead to anticipate trends. Here are my predictions of issues that search engine marketing services will face in the short term.

I’m back everyone! Although I never really left… The last of the scheduled guest articles has gone live. No doubt there will be more guest articles in the future but my official “break month”, July, is just about over. I’d like to say it was a holiday but July turned out to be more busy than when I just focus on blogging and in fact I can’t wait to get back to where I was a few months ago when I was blogging and running BetterEdit. However I won’t of course be going back, you can’t go backwards in business, I’m moving forward with the goal of creating the time I once had for blogging again.

How you ask? – By building a business.

Yes Rich Schefren really got to me.

I read his Internet Business Manifesto and Missing Chapter. I had some direct email chats with the man himself. I even considered signing up for his $4,995 USD mentoring program but instead opted for his $397 USD per month over 12 months, slightly lower-end program. That’s a big chunk of change for me given my current cashflow, but I think Rich has the steps I need to build the business I want. Plus I really need an Internet business mentor, someone who has been there and done it before and helped many hundreds of other people do it too. In fact I’ve never been so presold for an information product before – it certainly seems to offer the scratch for my itch.

I Know What The E-Myth Is

It’s strange. I’m well aware of the E-Myth. I always thought I was doing things right by hiring/outsourcing skilled professionals to perform the services my business provides. It’s scalable, leveragable and all that. I was an entrepreneur and a business owner, not a technician.

It turns out that yes, I am doing some things right. While the core function of my bread-and-butter business, BetterEdit, has a great team of people who do a fantastic job and keep the business running, this was the only area I was handling well. Pretty much everything else I do to build my online empire is manual labor by me. I am a technician.

It took Rich Schefren to come and apply the e-myth concepts specifically to the Internet business format for me to see what I have been doing. It’s clear I’ve managed to build “self employment” and not a business. Self employment of course is not that bad, I enjoy the independence, and the money vs free time relationship is pretty darn good. I could keep at this probably for a little while longer and stay quite content, but already the signs of why self employment doesn’t work long term are starting to show.

My ability to scale my business is limited by me. I do most of the tasks, including web design, web hosting and all the technical Internet things, I answer every single email I get – I wear the customer service hat – I’m working on joint ventures, I’m doing the advertising and affiliate management, the billing, the bookkeeping, the backups, not to mention everything else that goes on just to keep everything running, like regular writing to my blogs, paying editors, promoting BetterEdit, and of course, keeping my own life in order – groceries, exercise, bills, rent, house cleaning, etc etc etc…Quite frankly I’m been trying to pile more tasks on to an already very tired and well encumbered mule…and things are starting to collapse!

I Haven’t Been Completely Blind

All that being said I was well aware that my current system, or lack there of, was not long term. I was always going to sell BetterEdit or bring in some support staff to remove myself from the day to day maintenance, I just didn’t know which would happen first. I haven’t had the cashflow up until the last six months to justify bringing in help, but the stars have aligned so this month I’ve started training someone to take over the customer service and job management role at BetterEdit. This will in effect remove me from being completely trapped to email monitoring 24/7 and is a welcome relief. If all goes according to plan, when I leave for Canada on September 2nd I won’t be running BetterEdit’s day to day operations.

That’s the first step, and a big one, since I have never had to remove myself from such a high responsibility role before – it’s going to take some adjustment. This part of my operation is ripe for systemization so I hope, with Rich’s help, I will be able to transform BetterEdit over the next 12 months into a well oiled, documented, processed mapped, and systematized machine.

While I can see and understand the principles, I’m not exactly sure of the process or the implementation to get the systems in place, so I’m eagerly anticipating Rich’s blueprints, examples and direction. I’m well aware it won’t happen quickly but once complete it will make my life a lot easier.

Blog Traffic School

There has been no greater indication of my lack of leverage and scale, than how long it has taken me to complete my course, Blog Traffic School. I could have had this course out the door for you all to be studying and benefiting from three months ago, but I’ve been bogged down in getting the technology systems set up to deliver and sell the course. I’ve been researching, learning and testing absolutely everything myself while also creating the course materials. What I should have been doing is focusing on ONLY the course materials, creating the best darn course I could, while I let the tech specialists implement the systems for me. I know what needs to be done, I’m just not the right person to be doing 90% of the tasks I am currently doing.

My intentions now are to start contracting out the tech jobs. I need to pass on the web developer hat to someone more skilled than myself. However the cashflow isn’t there to hire a full time person so I’m going to start by contracting with the idea of building a relationship with a special person. It may take some time to find the perfect partner, but that’s exactly what I am looking for – someone who will grow with me and become part of my business. The initial projects may be on a contract basis but the perks longer term for people that join my team will be significant, and way beyond purely financial – I have a lot experience, information resources and opportunities to offer the right people who are equally committed and motivated to building a real business. The growth and knowledge gain will be tremendous.

Of course the first place I will be looking for my tech partner will be on this blog, so stay tuned all you web developer types – I will have a golden opportunity opening for you shortly!

True Passive Income

By building a team around me and creating systems for the team to follow I can remove the dependence away from me personally on to a system foundation. My time will be focused on where I can create the most value. Skilled experts will do what they do best, get the most enjoyment from and will be well rewarded for it, both intrinsically – from a personal growth standpoint – and financially. I will be rewarded with a scalable operation that I can step away from in confidence knowing that I am not the vital cog the drives the wheel.

That is the real key to long term passive income. While selling e-books, building an AdSense empire, AIS/Virtual Real Estate, Butterfly Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, e-Commerce, information products and all the other various opportunities that abound on the net are fantastic, they are what they are – opportunities. What counts is how you take the opportunity and turn it into a viable business. It’s taken a long time for me to actually act on this sentiment.

I am certainly guilty of opportunistic thinking and taking opportunistic actions. That’s fine, as long as you eventually take one opportunity, focus on it, leverage your own talents and build a system around it to create a business and don’t float from one opportunity to the next. You must not be a jack-of-all-trades in terms of business opportunities or within one operation, where you do everything yourself.

Small Business Branding

I’m excited to say that I have had a number of people apply to become blogging partners for Small Business Branding, and this is certainly one area that I feel is turning towards a “business” framework. I’m currently reviewing all the applicants writing and will be in touch shortly with who will form the team that takes the blog to the next level. I can see this blog potentially becoming a perfect example of where a system creates something greater than the some of the parts.

Long Way To Go

I’m excited to be finally taking steps towards creating a system that I know I need but I also realize there is a lot of work ahead. I simply don’t have the cashflow for this to happen quickly so I need to focus on that aspect of the business. I’m stopping in Hawaii, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal during my trip and in each city I hope to set up poster promoters in major university campuses to advertise BetterEdit. I’m not 100% sure this will work or is sustainable, but so far it’s working for Brisbane and I’m positive for Melbourne as well, although I won’t really know until next year. Once again I expect Rich’s teachings on managing my metrics will help me take better care of my financial situation so I really know where things are at rather than all the trial and error I currently implement for making decisions.

I hope through my experience and my Internet business story-telling I do here on my blog that you also reflect on what you are doing. I’ll do my best to report back how I go with implementing all that I have discussed in this article to you over the coming months, but for the moment I’d like for you to ask yourself this question – Are you building a business?

Yaro Starak
Building A Business

Technorati Tags: betteredit, blog traffic school, business systemization, Rich Schefren, yaro starak
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Blogs and podcasts have joined free demos, webcasts and white papers as the best business-to-business (B2B) lead generation tactics, according to new market research from MarketingSherpa. Sweepstakes are the worst B2B lead generation tactic.

When I originally wrote my review of the AWeber email autoresponder you may remember my only major gripe with the system was the lack of an easy backup facility.

As you would expect from a great company like AWeber (aff), they have listened and added a Backup Data Feature. From the AWeber announcement -

Your opt-in subscriber list and the long term relationships built with subscribers is priceless. Having this data backed up in a safe place can let you rest easy at night.

We backup your account and list data on a daily basis to separate computers at our data center as well as off site locations in a secure encrypted manner. With the addition of AWeber’s backup utility you can now make regular backups of all your account data in less than a minute.

This backup utility will create a compressed zip file you can download which will contain all of your accounts different subscriber lists, follow up messages, and broadcast newsletter messages. To create a backup, login to your customer account and click “Create & Manage Lists” in the upper right corner of the page. Click the “export all” link and select the email address to send the backup notification to.

It’s your data and you should be able to easily get it at any time.

This one new feature has added at least another hour to my month since I used to manually backup every list one-by-one, which was not a fun job.

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By Brad Shorr from Get Real Marketing

How’s this for strategic planning? In October 2005 I left a high-paying job I hadn’t enjoyed to begin a consulting business I hadn’t defined. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now, ten months later… maybe it was!

I knew my practice would involve writing, humor, and marketing, because those are my passions. I knew it would engage small and midsize business, because that’s what I know. But how would it all fit together? Not a clue. So, contrary to conventional wisdom, I decided to skip the business modeling and strategic plan, and just work.

Through guru.com, I found a phenomenal illustrator, Mark Hill, and had him draw a bunch of my business-theme cartoon ideas. I developed ten characters and about a hundred pages of text for a fictitious company, Mold Unlimitedâ„¢. As all this material came together, I pieced it into a Web site to promote business cartooning and sell cartoon-imprinted merchandise. Cartooning emerged as an effective lead-in to stimulate marketing conversations with possible clients.

Speaking of conversation, I networked like crazy, talking to anyone with ears. I joined a couple SMB networking groups. I listened and learned what kind of marketing issues were on people’s minds. I shared whatever insight I could offer, whether or not I thought it might lead to an assignment.

Fortunately, people did start giving me work—white papers, articles, brochures, Web content, email blasts, market analysis—the stuff I’d been doing for years, only now, I wasn’t on autopilot, I was digging in. I even stumbled onto a couple book projects.

On the upside, every assignment was fascinating. On the downside, I was all over the place; every time I explained my business it sounded different; I still seemed miles away from a business plan. Unsettling.

But then, about four months ago, Mark Hill got me thinking about blogs. I’ve been discussing them, studying them, and writing them ever since. Here at last was a focus.

I’m convinced that blogs are the future of business communication. The benefits are irresistible – they enhance customer relationships, attract new customers, boost search engine rankings, provide new revenue streams, simplify internal processes – the list goes on.

I’m finding that SMB’s are quite curious about blogs, but they need lots of help understanding, planning, and executing them. That’s where I can fit in.

My entrepreneurial journey has now reached the stage where I can start to cobble out a model. I’m concentrating on -

• Web content, especially optimized content.
• Business blog consulting for SMB’s.
• Blog management and writing for SMB’s.

I’m encouraged by the response. Most people dread writing, so they don’t. As a result, many SMB Web sites are outdated and poorly optimized, and the company knows it. So, SMB’s are often eager to outsource the content, and that discussion can quickly expand into one about online marketing strategy. More and more, blogs will be integral to the strategy.

Conclusions? I’ve seen many entrepreneurs (and big businesses, for that matter) spend so much time planning they never get anything done. A big company might be able to absorb a long countdown and no liftoff. An entrepreneur can’t.

Clients will tell you where you fit in the marketplace – if you ask them. Yes, defining your business that way takes time and can be a bit nerve-wracking. On the other hand, it takes even more time and sweat to continually change your model because it never meshed with reality in the first place.

© Brad Shorr, Step-Up Marketing, Inc.

Company site: www.step99.com
Marketing blog: www.in-sidemarketing.blogspot.com
Business humor blog: www.corporatecartoons.blogspot.com
Store: www.cafepress.com/moldunlimited

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A few short months ago Microsoft quietly introduced adCenter, their Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising platform. My first impressions of adCenter are relatively positive. Based mostly on the setup process here are my thoughts on the newest player in the PPC industry.

The first and most important step in our research process is to identify the site’s major core terms. We’ve found that by knowing all the main and/or relevant core terms, you’re better able to find all the most important keyword phrases.

By Danielle Rodgers from CloseConnexion

My journey into this crazy, amazing world started about 18 months ago. I like to think of it as a “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” kind of story.

Apart from a brief stint in high school, my background is not entrepreneurial. For the most part I worked in the corporate sector, and hated almost every minute of it. Not that I have anything against the corporate world as such, but I personally could never get the hang of the politics. I found survival required about 10% talent, 90% political skill. I had never aspired to be a politician, so a few years ago I decided to jump ship and started my own little operation helping companies to communicate more effectively with their staff.

I had fun for a while and did okay, but was far from fulfilled. At the back of my mind, I had often dreamt of owning my own business (I sometimes marvel at the action that goes on in the back of our minds!), but didn’t have the first clue how to go about it or what to sell. In high school we had a great accounting teacher who gave us a project that required us to start and run a business. While the other girls tried peddling cosmetics, I convinced my group to start a soup stall in the courtyard, and we had a hungry customer base of students and teachers alike (only to be out-done later by a group of girls who decided to ditch Avon and start a hotdog stand. Lesson #1 – there’s a chance that someone will imitate your idea and improve on it!), so I was toying with the idea of something in food service. The only thing I could get excited about was a breakfast bar, but as much as I love cooked breakfasts it just wasn’t doing it for me. I came to the realisation that unless I had real passion for the idea I wasn’t going to be able to go the distance.

By late 2004 I knew it was “time”. I’ was over being self-employed – for me it was like working in the corporate sector minus the politics; much better, but not nearly rewarding enough. I made a decision to find a business venture and go for it.

Within no time at all a few opportunities presented themselves, but none flicked my switch. Then, through a series of events, most of which were very personal, in March 2005 the “big idea” came to me. I was so excited I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Talk about flick my switch, there was an overload at the main. It took over my mind and my life. It became a compulsion, something I had to do, and has remained that way ever since. It sounds a little bizarre, but I often feel that this project found me, not the other way around.

My “big idea” was to design a board game for singles that would achieve two things simultaneously: firstly it would address the issues that go hand-in-hand with dating, relationships and “starting over” while providing an effective means for singles to get to know each other. Because the issues involved are in fact quite serious, my mission was to make them more attractive and approachable by using a humourous, fun format.

The reason the idea was so compelling to me was due to a combination of my own experiences on the dating scene and what I had observed around me. I became aware that I had been closely analysing dating and relationship patterns and trends over a number of years and wasn’t exactly delighted about what I saw: “a merry-go-round of disasters” is probably one way to put it.

So began my noble mission to help people find their mate and develop better quality relationships! It’s certainly been the most exciting period of my life, and it’s addictive because I’ve never felt so alive.

Without a doubt the thing that has surprised me most is how it’s affected those closest to me. It seems no-one has been untouched. The range of emotions and reactions that have bubbled to the surface has quite literally astounded me, and this brings with it its own set of joys and sorrows.

So my journey has three aspects. Firstly there’s the personal side; how it’s affected me and the people in my life. Professionally, I see two distinct components (which connect and synergise at some point) – the creative process, which was a wild, crazy, exhilarating journey, and then the business aspect. I’m not sure which one is the most frustrating. Did I say frustrating? I mean “fun”… Actually some days it’s a lot of fun and some days it’s just plain scary.

Having just recently launched my business, offering Brisbane singles events, I now find myself face-to-face with the biggest scary monster of all: “Marketing”. Perhaps one of my biggest challenges lies in the fact that apart from being a new business, I have the additional challenge of a new concept. It’s one thing to try and sell something to people that they already “get” and another thing entirely to try and sell something they have no knowledge of.

An amusing conversation I had recently sums it up best. Having applied to sell my merchandise (fun items designed to increase friendliness and confidence) at the Eumundi markets – a favourite with locals and tourists alike – the market manager said to me, “in the five years that I’ve been managing this market I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

The theory is of course to first reach the “early adopters”, but putting that into practice brings its very own set of challenges. Where the heck are they and how do I know?

When I was working as a journalist, a few years back I did a story on a Brisbane-based businessman who started a designer-style café, about 12 years ago now, that specialised in desserts, fresh flowers and the promotion of local artists. He told me how he nearly starved for two years because at that time no-one in Brisbane could get the concept of going out just for dessert. Today they literally line up to get in. This guy has cult status. At the time of the interview he had just opened another new concept store and said he was so glad that he already had an established name so that this time around it would be so much easier to educate his customers.

Although I couldn’t relate to his experience at the time, I admire anything that’s pioneering so I loved writing his story. In recent months his words have come back to me repeatedly and I take heart that just because people aren’t exactly bashing my door down at the moment doesn’t mean they won’t be in future!

I recently received an amusing email from a friend titled “Things Learned the Hard Way”. The last one on the list reads: Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

Danielle Rodgers
CloseConnexion.com.au

Technorati Tags: brisbane singles events, closeconnexion, danielle rodgers
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Google AdSense is fast becoming the preferred way for people to earn an income online. Forget eBay and multiple affiliate programs – Whether you are a work-at-home mom trying to make a little extra cash or an Internet entrepreneur with hundreds of monetized websites, AdSense is truly the easiest way to earn money.

Phil Gerbyshak of the Make It Great! Blog has been a supporter of me and my blogs for a long time. He’s just released his first book, fittingly titled 10 Ways to Make It Great!.

10 Ways to Make It Great! is packed full of ways you can take control of your life, stop having a nice day, and make it great. At the end of each chapter is one or more action steps you can take, TODAY, to Make It Great! Check out http://10waystomakeitgreat.com for more details.

Phil’s philosophy with his blogging, his book and his entire life is about…“helping people crank up their life and take it from good…to GREAT!” – It’s hard not to appreciate that goal. I’ve (yet) to read Phil’s book but I’ve often admired the almost palpable positive vibe that comes from his blog and he’s linked to me a few times so I thought it was about time I returned the favor.

If you want to make your life go from good to great, Phil just may be the person to help you do it.

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