The biggest impact area I have noticed with my business is the 33% devaluation of the currency which is currently around .66 cents for one USD. At first I thought this was great as sales were coming in on my USD products and I was making great money which helped pay off my expenses. Then I realised I probably have more expenses in USD than dollars earned such as hosting, domain registration, outsourcing project that were not 33% more expensive thanks to the financial crisis and the devaluation of the Australian dollar.

Now I have also noticed my United States sales on my websites have slowed down or stopped completely over the past three weeks which is a sign of the turmoil in the economy at the moment. Obviously the luxury products like the ones I sell are first to go when budgets tighten up as people are more analytical when making their buying decisions. This presents a strong opportunity for internet marketers with strong salesmanship to dramatically increase their sales even in a recession.

In the United States and too a lesser extent in Australia due to the devaluation of the dollar internet based ecommerce sales will likely increase dramatically. The reason being the internet has a reputation for being cheaper and consumers will likely flock online to save money over shopping at retail outlets. The internets reputation for prices givens your online business a huge opportunity too use offline marketing to attract buyers online and make a ton of money in the process.

Some ways of doing this are:

• Direct Marketing
• Personal Selling
• Promotions
• Viral Marketing
• Public Relations
• Press Releases
• News Paper Advertising

If you offering a legitimate benefit and a solution to a need rather than a want your product and e-business could make a killing doing this right now.

Here are some areas likely to be strong during a recession:

• Make Money/Make Money Online niche entry level products due to employee layoffs
• Professional Services in technology, online marketing, search engine marketing and direct marketing
• Debt Consolidation/Credit Repair
• Baby Products
• Discount Wine/Alcoholic Beverages
• Government developments/infrastructure
• Personal Development (entry level)
• Second Hand Goods/Furniture
• Antiques
• Legal Services
• Wellness Industry
• Bars
• Lotto & Gambling
• Marketing/Management Consulting
• Solar and Renewable Energy

Areas that are likely to suffering during a recession:

• Property Sales
• Loan and Insurance underwriting
• Personal Car Sales
• New Furniture Sales
• Home Improvements (besides emergency/necessity improvements)
• Entertainment industry
• Recruitment
• Online Dating
• Cafes and Restaurants
• Hotels and Resorts
• Airlines (although benefiting currently from lower fuel prices)
• Recreation Gambling (Las Vegas etc)
• Mining/Resources
• Wedding related stores
• Gyms
• Car Parks

I’ll add more as I think of them, feeling free to debate them if you like. Recessions seem to be funny as the traditional money industries resources, real estate and finance slow down and you can make money in other areas or by using counter intuitive thinking. I hope everyone is doing okay, more coming soon.

There are three big nightmares that can occur with dealing with content writers:

Nightmare 1 - Time Issues: Finding poor quality content writers and having to spend a bunch of time rewriting the content so you can put it live.

Nightmare 2 - Money: Having to hire staff, writers or editors to redo the work of poor writers as you have to spend more time and money get the work up to par.

Nightmare 3 - Human Resources: Having to constantly try and recruit new writers as the old ones burn out or start produce poor quality work.

So here are some tips for finding and retaining quality conent writers.

1. Start Slowly

Newsflash: Content management isn’t easy… That’s why people are constantly complaining about Content Management Systems and why they don’t work for their business. When you are undergoing a web content production project you need to plan and outline the content you need created in advance of delegating it or you may choose to pay someone to do market research for you.

Starting small also ensures you are testing writers on one article or a few articles and making sure they are completing quality work. This is a wise idea as if you go and hire a writer to produce a bunch of articles and they all come back really bad then you are left with a mess as often times they won’t be able to rewrite

them any better. This is also why it is important to start small and plan your content production in advance. This is also good because writers usually aren’t the best paid and they need to write a lot of articles to make a living so if you find a good writer you’ll want to have another piece to send them through to create rather than waste their time. If you aren’t organised and use writers sporadically it is likely they’ll drop off onto something else before you’ve utilised them and you’ll have to recruit another one.

Plan and outline your articles at least a week into the future or once a month once you scale up your content production. It is also important you don’t over burden your writers with too rush work early on before you know their capabilities as writers tend to rush to get the work done and end up compromising on quality.

2. Quality over Price

While price isn’t necessary an indication of quality getting dirt cheap $4 or $5 content is usually not the best quality. I have found that you are usually better to pay $8-$10 per 500 word article or $35-40 for a full feature article than to get a bunch of low quality articles written. That said sometime you can get
decent articles written for $5 which are great for Article Marketing but they are few and far between. Just because you are paying more doesn’t necessarily mean they will be any better either thats why it’s important to follow step one and start small.

3. Be Specific About What You Need.

The more specific you can be about what you want written the better applicants you will find and the better quality work will be produced. I often give my writers the top five keywords for the article as suggested topics to help keep them on track. On some projects we have even created templates that the writers have to fill out, it really depends on how specific your project needs are and how to best balance formalisation with creativity. The most important thing is you are constantly testing and refining this process so that you get the desired result written.

Some of tips you might want to use to find the type of writers you desire:

• Native English Speaking Only Writers
• Original work only with all content checked by Copyscape and checked for plagiarism.
• Find out the size and location of their operation
• Get extensive examples from them, in particular it’s best if they are related to your topic
• Find out if they are going to be completing the work personally and if not get assigned their best person/people
• Pick quality over price

4. Provide Keywords

If you plan on using the content for your own website always give your writers a list of suggested keywords. Do not over burden them. I prefer to call my keyword lists, a recommended topics list as a lot of writers get confused by keyword density and search engine optimization and it detracts from their work. As a general rule I give my writers one topic per 100 words per 500 word article and one keyword per 150 words for a longer full feature article. For example if it were a 500 word article and the topic were car loans I might give my writers the following topics:

• chattel loans
• novated leases
• hire purchase
• car loans
• new cars

With that they could potentially produce an excellent piece about the different finance options and tax incentives for financing a new car using different methods.

5. Give Feedback and Help Educate Your Writers to Become Better Writers

This title is self evident however remember you are dealing with both artists and professional writers. If your feedback sounds like criticism it will not be taken well. I prefer to take a approach towards gradual improvement by working with and slowly tweaking the writers work over time to create the best content for your readers. This takes a synergestic approach to mutually working towards delivering the best quality content to your audience.

How can you build a rewarding writer-webmaster relationship:

• Building company culture
• Holding writers to a high standard
• Being highly professional
• Being both compassionate and task orientated
• Sharing your websites/company’s core values
• Choosing writers with high drive
• Choosing writers with a genuine interest in your niche

6. Choose Where You Source Your Writers From Carefully

The most popular locations to source writers from are the following:

• Guru
• Elance
• Digital Point Forums
• Get A Freelancer

Personally I have found I get the best results from Guru yet many like hiring cheap writers from Get a Freelancer or the Digital Point Forums. Elance has a good range of both cheap and high end writers to choose from. While I have found that Guru seems to give me a level of consistent quality that I like the writers I hire there tend to be slight more expensive and may not fit your budget. My suggestions is you post a couple of projects on each and just see what kind of response you get.

7. Create Simple Yet Effective Task Templates

Creating clear and concise instructions is essential to the success of your content building program. I have made the mistake of being both too detailed and rigid as well as being to free flowing and open with writers I’ve hired. Since you expect your writers to work relatively cheaply you do not want them reading four or five pages of instructions before you have tested them. They are paid as writers not readers!

If you cannot fit an instruction on a one page priority task sheet it’s not worth including. I typically create a one page template which includes the topic, keywords, grammatical and writing style instructions, layout and anything else important related to the project such as article sources and any html that might need to be done.

I found that the more comprehensive the instructions I gave the more confused my writers got. I found that being concise and specific works the best.

So there you have it, that is how in my experience I have found and successful used content writers. Please let me know by adding a comment below if you have anything else to add.

He made the comment to me that there must be a lot of money in that
web design stuff because there is constantly the need for updates and
changes to sites. Well yes he’s right there can be a lot of money in
incremental changes to websites yet it’s usually not the web designer
or the company that owns the website that profits from the costs of
constant changes, redesigns and tweaks.

So what are the keys to cutting costs and saving money on unnecessary
redesigns and incremental changes?

Well the most important thing that is often neglected in web design is… wait for it…..

Planning

In my experience most web projects go south due to a distinct lack of planning. Most people and companies are just trying to get it out of the way and do not spend much time considering the purpose of the site and how it will serve them and the user.

Most people are in such an intense rush to get a design down that they do not invest time and money into the planning process. Worse still they go to the trouble of having a site designed without factoring in the
content that is going to be produced for the site or the site structure. In my experience at least 50% of websites if not more are designed before the initial content is written or even usually properly thought you. This is of course both a disaster from a design and search engine optimization point of view.

Planning a website is much like planning a marketing campaign. First you plan what needs to go in the campaign, then you create the copy and finally you send it off to the graphic designer and printer. Well a website is the same, first you have to plan the purpose and end goal for the website, then
create the content, information and multimedia you want for the site, then you send it off to the graphic designer to create a site for you. Thats when the designer is clear can be given very clear directions about what needs to be done and how the content needs to be laid out. Then they can help put together the fancy “Buy Now” buttons, multimedia and other cool features than enhance the value of your site, not before. 95% percent of websites do not follow this simple three step formula of preparation and usually they go and do things the complete other way around.

It is important to understand the importance of the distinct that you must create or at very least prepare and plan content for your website before design the design and website itself. Most businesses are creating a web design and website and then creating their content. Think of the power of the implication of doing things the right way when 95% of businesses are doing things the other way.

One of the fundamental elements of this concept that it is important to understand is that the amount of planning needed is scalable to the size of the project and the sophistication of the market you are entering. It might be as simple as spending an extra 15-20 minutes planning the marketing and the content that will be featured on the website. It could also entail months of competitive analysis, market research, customer analysis, focus groups and other types of user centred design principles. However if you are just starting out this would likely not apply but it’s important to know the big .com companies sometimes spend months and millions developing a new design concept.

When you are planning your new website or web design it is important to make plans around a few key elements:

• The information your prospects or customers are seeking
• The end benefit your prospect/customer desires
• The end action step you want the customer to take (sign up to email list, call a phone number, submit an enquiry, buy your product etc)
• To create a design that fits your business now yet can be tailored and restructured for future business growth or product offerings.

Most people who have found large success online have found it being a “problem solver” and offering people the knowledge or end benefit they desire by providing them with great information or what we usually call online “great content”.  If you build your website around this and the end action you want the visitor to take to enter your sales funnel then you will find success and at the same time will limit the costs associated with perfecting the optimization of your site because you’ve already planned the end action you want your visitor to take when visiting the site.  Just figuring out this important element saves a lot in redesign costs because a good web designer can usually apply this with some basic knowledge about user behaviour and with a little bit of optimization you’ll usually get your site converting well.

I want to stress the importance of considering  future growth and changes to the website as this is the second most neglected element when starting a web design. Some companies and businesses prefer to continuously change and update their web design. Some do it once a year, some every six months, every month, every season,  every major marketing promotion. Now of this are wrong, it’s just a lot most cost effective when you have a basic branded template that you business uses and then have additional areas of the design where the designer can factor it additional elements of creativity to suit the marketing campaign, season, give the site a fresh look or optimize it too improve your sales results.You’ll find most of the big Australian web businesses like Seek, Flight Centre, Melbourne IT, RSVP, NineMSN use this basic concept.

Not only does this help build a consistent brand that your visitors recognise it saves a lot of money in web design costs. So when you are next starting a new website or looking to redesign your existing site remember to take some time out to plan.

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Peter’s Thoughts:You’ve probably already had a big paradigm shift just by realizing the power of this concept. Since most people are working as SEO consultants writing articles and producing content, or producing content for their advertising, affiliate or information product sites I’m sure you realize the power of using the voice of an expert in your industry. Back to Yaro…

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something - experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

Peter’s Thought’s:Guilty as charged, I can verify that I have been on both sides of this pendulum. I want you to think for a moment about how many of these guys you see out there who report everything that goes in the the SEO or Internet Marketing industry. It’s lucrative if you break a big story first, yet even sites like Techcrunch share their news from a position of expertise and authority. Back to Yaro

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts - there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry - the Internet marketing industry - not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche - Internet marketing - and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

Peter’s thoughts: This is a very good point made by Yaro as most of the big launches in the Internet Marketing niche have had differentiation, products like Stompernet, Pipeline Profits, Traffic Secrets either had differentiation or massively leapfrogged the rest of the market. The same applies for any market and it is worth spending a considerable amount of time thinking about this topic. I still haven’t fully decided how I want to do this for this site. Back to Yaro

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things - email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it - making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) - your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion - your stories - and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Peter’s Thoughts: Yaro obviously has a considerable amount of experience doing that as that’s what the whole Entrepreneurs Journey website is all about, his journey. If you go back through the older posts of that site you can see Yaro’s progress from a beginner Internet Marketer to a Blogging guru who makes a solid six figure income. One of the things he did was talk about his feelings and experiences about different things, including both his successes and failures and his blog became hugely popular because of it. Back to Yaro.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

Peter’s thoughts:Thanks Yaro, I am very fortunate that you live in Brisbane and often attend our Blogger meet ups. I have learned a lot talking to and also from my friend Robert Kingston who used to work for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my personal blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

Besides having his own hugely successful blog and websites Yaro also taught Alborz Fallah who I wrote content for on a site called New Brisbane where I obtained my first number 1 Google Ranking for the phrase Press Club Brisbane. Alborz now has a 5 million dollar success story blog CarAdvice.com.au thanks to Yaro’s sound mentorship.

To get more information about Yaro’s mentor program Blog Mastermind click this link:

Blog Mastermind

Web Directories

Web Wombat

Stats:Current PageRank of 4, Web Wombat is Australia’s oldest search engine, Alexa Rank 16 537. The advantages of a listing on Web Wombat are an aged link which Google assigns more trust to and Web Wombat also gets quiet a lot of traffic.

Web Directory Australia

Stats:Current Page Rank of 4, started in 2005, average middle sized directory, decent traffic. Not a must list by any stretch of the imagination but list worth your consideration if you are looking for more local directories.

Down Under Index

Stats: Page Rank of 5, average traffic, feature links cost $20 per year. Only allows .com, .com.au and other top level domains to be listed. Doesn’t allow, pron, gambling or Made for Adsense sites which keeps Directory quality at a decent level.

ITI.com.au

Stats: Current PageRank of 4, 50,000 Uniques per month, wait for a free listing or pay a one time $199.95 fee for listing within a few days. Overall this directory is of average quality and is probably worth listing to if you are looking for Australian based directories but is in no way a must list in the vein of a DMOZ or Yahoo directory.

Search Zone

Stats:A great Page Rank of 6 for Search Zone but not as much traffic as the other directories. Chooses quality over quantity of listings, launched in 2005, need to sign in to create a listing. Make sure you read the guidelines carefully.

Answers Directory

Stats:Page Rank of 5, Answers was a search engine and directory launched in 1996, so links from it are well aged. Most Directory pages have a decent Page Rank up to Page Rank of 5 making it a great site to get a link from. Not the best search engine results though as I found my sites home page listed in there twice and it doesn’t seem to index sub pages.

Gumtree Brisbane

Stats:PageRank of 5, Gumtree is a free online classified service much in the same vein as Craigslist. It is highly trafficked so is a great way to get links and enquiries about your product or services. All ad postings are free and there is a separate sub domain for every major Australian city so you can be assured you are only getting local enquiries and buyers. As with all classified sites though, watch out for Credit Card Fraud, spam and other to good to be true deals.

Aussie Now

Stats:Page Rank of 5, very professional site, with not that much traffic, worth listing your site if you are bored.

Blog Directories

The Australian Index

Stats:Page Rank of 5, a network of directories for Australian bloggers and blogs. A great place to list your blog and find other bloggers. Highly endorsed this directory for Aussie bloggers among you.

Blogs Directory

Stats: Page Rank of 5, the perfect domain to list your Australian based blog at, a blog directory that crawls blogs on the internet and randomly filters out every thing but Aussie blogs in their Google searches.

Australian Blogs

Stats: Page Rank of 5, decent traffic and another great resource to promote your Australian blog at. The choice is available better premium submission for $19 a year or a free listing which will take a little longer and not get you as premium position. If you’ve got a big budget for directory listing you might discover this is the best option for you, otherwise just get a free listing. The website is run by Will Swayne from Marketing Results so you know it’ll be run reasonably well.

Australia Blogs

Stats:Page Rank of 3, decent traffic globally, just a suggestion for submission if you’re bored.

Travel Directories

Australian Tourism Net

Stats: Page Rank of 5, join many other large travel sites, worth considering if you are in the travel industry.

Aust Travel Directory

Stats:Page Rank of 4 with little rank carried through to sub pages, still worth listing if your website is related to Australian travel as a highly relevant link.

Travel Directory

Stats:Page Rank of 3 and seemingly little traffic, again the only real benefit is really a link from a highly relevant local source, for webmasters who are bored or desperate for links.

Business Directories

Hot Frog

Stats: Current PageRank of 6, 1.9 million unique users per month, searched regularly by search engines like Google and Yahoo. Hundred plus Companies added per day. This is probably Australia’s premier business directory and is a must visit for the leads it can generate rather than Page Rank of link value you get from listing there.

True Local

Stats: Along with Hot Frog another one of the heavy weight directories in Australia. Page Rank of 7, loads of mainstream traffic. Basic listings include:

• Basic business details in True Local directory

• Listing for only one category

• Your postcode

Paid listings start around $900 per year and include premium placement on True Local and gives you additional features including direct links to your site as well as listings on Google Maps, Yahoo!7 Local Search, Virgin mobile, 3 mobile, Navman, Virgin Broadband and over 125 websites on the News Digital Media Network.

Is this all worth that kind of money? Well if you are a medium to large corporate business with a decent sized local market it probably is.

Laton

Stats:Current PageRank 4, Laton is a Business Directory that is designed to let businesses promote their products and services for free. It isn’t the busiest or most popular business directory but it is certainly another one worth your consideration.

Come On Aussie

Stats: Page Rank of 5, decent traffic, good PR on the sub pages you’ll be listing on. They maintain a good standard of links that are allowed in their directory and are well worth your consideration.

Enterprise Search

Stats: PageRank of 4, average traffic, both free and premium listings available. Premium listings are quiet expensive at around $400 per year and are not really worth it for most businesses as the directory doesn’t have enough traffic to substantiate that price. To put it in perspective it is more expensive than the Yahoo Directory which is generally considered the world’s top paid directory. On the other hand the great thing about this directory is that the Page Rank carries through a lot of the sub pages that you’ll be listing your site on meaning the link back to your site will have great value than a lot of other directories. Worth listing your site on in my opinion the only draw back is they try and get you to add a link back to their site on your home page. The choice is yours!

Oz E-Biz

Stats:Page Rank of 5, Ozebiz is a Business Directory that allows the promotion of Australian businesses online. Must be an Australian owned business, cost of listing is $5.50 per six months, $10 for a year and $15 dollars for two years. Woudln’t put this one as a must list but at least the fact it isn’t free will drive away some spammers.

Home Directories

HomeOne

Home One is a Directory for sites and services related to Home Improvement, building, landscaping and design. Home One costs $330 per year for one category and $440 for three categories. Each listing comes with your own personally sub domain. If you are in a trade it’s probably worth listing Home One does pretty well in the search engines.

Health Directories

Health Directory

Stats:Page Rank of 5, average traffic, good quality site and worth going the extra mile to get a link from them if you are in the health niche.

Summary

That wraps up my little list of twenty or some local Australian directories, please add more below if you have any… Happy traffic building!

Microsofts Sneaky Google Adwords Strategy

There has been no secret that Microsoft has been trying to get into the search engine market and take market share from Google. Well I discovered that when I searched a few less popular flight related searches that Microsoft aka ninemsn.com.au were advertising on the keywords with the ad copy of: “Flights to Gladestone - Everyday searches with Live Search give you the chance to win prizes”. Now I’m not sure this is the strongest pull advertising but some of their ads seem to have better copy. Clearly there strategy seems to be to rank down the bottom of the adwords results on the first page in an attempt to try and get frustrated Google searches to try and “fall in love with” Live.com.

Is this an effective strategy? Well I don’t know, some might think this is a bit of a Bait and Switch strategy by Microsoft but at the same time it’s also good strategy for a substitute product to adopt. I mean if you are selling soap for example why not advertise on the shower gel adwords and try to convert customers to your superior soap product instead.

There are many other examples of products this would be effective for and ways this strategy can be used. Personally I think this is usually a strategy adopted by bigger companies with more established market share as they look to convert additional customers. The return on investment numbers probably wouldn’t be as favorable for small businesses until their started increasing their advertising spend as directly advertising on their own keywords will yield better conversion in most case.

Thats all for today folks… Keep it classy Brisbane…

Not that I’m old or anything but I can remember using search engines like Alta Vista and Yahoo growing up and they were not as safe as search engines are now. The old hat techniques of meta refresh redirects, cloaking, javascript redirects, pop unders, pop overs, keyword stuffing and the like met your never quiet new you were safe. Quiet often you might go to an innocent looking car site and end up being redirected to porn and having 27 gambling pop ups appear on your screen.

Well search engines have become a lot safer since the dark ages of search however this new AVG feature has taken things to the next level if you ask me. Once you install AVG 8.0 you can now have the option of having AVG scan your search engine results.

Here is the new AVG Search Tool

Google Search Security Tool

So I tried doing some searches in Google for stuff that might come up as dodgy but I have to say Google does a pretty good job these days of weeding out Spam. All I can say is I only wish that AVG brought a tool like this out 10 years ago when there was dire need for one.

Here is one of my pictures of our beautiful city:

Then on Wednesday it was back to getting up the first stages of some of our companies new websites up. If you want to take a look at what we are doing you can go to the IOI Marketing Group and here for a href=”http://www.brisbaneconsulting.com”>Brisbane Consulting. Having the first stages of these sites up now was a big relief as this week I can go back to focusing on our growing online publishing network.

For those of you expecting me to post naked pictures you may be disappointed:

In particular Robert Kingston (you tube video) and Paris (you still have my favourite book!) who are always bugging me for naked pictures… Also I heard you have been too so can you please stop!

In slightly more sour news this week 20 of our sites were hacked by a Turkish hacker after a stupid security error on my behalf let some of our sites vulnerable. Fortunately the attack wasn’t targeted and we were able to recover quickly with limited damages. The incident taught me a few things about using the Wordpress CMS as it’s frequent need to change the write permissions when editing is annoying and bugs in Filezilla made it easier for my lazy self to leave my system vulnerable. Fortunately we have now done some basic internet security upgrades so hopefully our sites will be safe from Cyber Vandalism in the future.

On more positive news this week, this ever popular blog was given a PageRank up date by our friends at Google. They decided to honour me with a PageRank of 1 and as most people know being number is best! Well maybe not in this case but it’s good we at least got something! Perhaps if I wasn’t giving out links as easy as a girl in a red dress gives out there phone number in the Valley on a Saturday night then it would be hire. What can I say I’m the free linking type of guy!

In other exciting news our testing of different services has led us to hire some new content writing services which we are very happy with. The ability of these services has led us to highly recommend them to our clients which is a massive plus for us. This week we hope to make further erodes to bring on more graphic designers and content writers as well as the Australian based company’s we are currently working with.

The great thing is with the high Australian dollar and the use of the internet we can do all this relatively cost effectively so that ourselves and our clients can have a high standard of work completed. Our ability to manage these services gives our clients the added advantage of getting a high standard of work for an affordable price.

In other news I have been checking out the Tim Ferriss Four Hour Work Week blog, as well as Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse’s and I have realized I have to put more effort into building an email list to our blogs and making them have the three P’s, prestige, professional and “pretty”.

I have also been looking for a replacement domain for this one as I have realized the limitations of blogging on our our names domain. I would like to keep this blog to be something more personal about me and also more professional and less goofing around!

I was planning on buying the domain oversexed.com (do not look it’s got adult content) as it was listed on Snap Names as either about to drop or for sale but it was transferred before it was ever released for auction. I was very disappointed as it would have been an appropriate domain for my personal blog (I wish). I then looked at buying AustralianSupermodel.com at auction but didn’t think it was worth the money as even though I am widely regarded as good looking by Google I didn’t think it had the type of viral branding I was after.

Finally to wrap up this week as I look around the Brisbane internet landscape I have noticed some amusing things going on in Brisbane from people who should know better.The people at Ireckon a local web design company have some of the weirdest phrasing in the known universe. They seem to do a great job at search engine optimization stuff and the keyword they are targeting is “web design brisbane” or “brisbane web design”. The probably is they use it in a way that totally doesn’t work (I’ve got some ideas for this if you’re instead.

John Hacking from Search Tempo is doing a similar thing with [brisbane seo] or is it “seo brisbane” I can never remember. I only obviously stuff the pages on this site in a joking way but sometimes these things can go to far. For conversion it is really important to write like you would speak in a smooth and natural way. If you are an IT nerd with limited social skills then it’s important to try and write like Don Juan would speak to Jennifer Hawkins (those rumours about me aren’t true Jennifer!) rather than speaking in a mix of Java and C+.

Well thats another post and another 15, 000 website increase to my website, I should really think of something more cordial to say… “stop stalking!”

I became increasingly aware of this phenomena when I noticed that Live and Yahoo were actually giving me traffic that ended up converting into sales. For those of you who think this is pure dumb luck or coincidence, it has been two months since I noticed this now and traffic still continues to flow from those two sources.

If you are naive enough to think that optimize for Google makes your page optimized for Yahoo or Window Live then think again. I typed into Google one of the keywords I rank well for and my site was at number four at the time (it has since gone to number one). Then I typed in the same keyword string into Yahoo and different one of my sites showed up in the second position for the search string. So I had one keyword and two completely different websites of mine had showed up in the SERP. In case you were wondering, no those two sites were not linking to each other.

On further analysis, Yahoo and Live can produce better results than Google on certain competitive keywords and keywords than are likely to contain spam. Although these two engines do not compete with Google on relevancy as yet, the key advantage that they have is no one is optimizing for them. In fact I just took a look at this blog’s traffic and much more of it comes from Live.com than from Google.com. The simple fact is that everyone is gaming the Google system and trying to rank number one, where as nobody is competing on the other two.

Here is the real reason you want to take a look at your Live.com and Yahoo results.

Traffic Re-Routing

Never heard of it? It is probably one of the most useful traffic methods used by big internet companies especially the likes of Google, Live and Yahoo. Why do you think they install they promote their Toolbars for you to put onto your browser. It’s all part of their method of gaining the ability to re-route traffic to their engine. What often happens when you type a keyword into the navigation bar at the top of your browser without a .com at the end of it, or something even if you do and the domain doesn’t exist you get redirected to a search engine. Basically it’s a game of first to re-route the traffic gets the traffic, it’s a game of milliseconds.

Microsoft does an excellent job of re-routing traffic through it’s network, take for example when it launched Live.com (a great domain purchase). Live.com was previously a poorly used site run by another company (according to my observation of archive.org historical data). On the day Microsoft launched Live.com in the middle of last year it went to the 15th most traffic site on the internet according to Alexa.com. The launch wasn’t really promoted, Microsoft just started redirecting all their traffic there. Microsoft does a great job redirecting traffic through out it’s network of sites. The perfect example of this is if you are a user of their service Hotmail, once you log out, you are redirected to msn.com or minemsn.com.au in Australia which is a massive media network and source of advertising revenue. If it wasn’t for that redirect the MSN network would get considerably less traffic and wouldn’t be able to charge the premium they do for advertising.

Why is Direct Navigation Important?

A while back I remember reading that one SEO consultant in Brisbane was advising his clients to purchase catchy and memorable names rather than generic names. I can only hope he is a domain investor and was trying to bamboozle his competitive and take the good names for himself because that is utterly erroneous. I mean say “Dave” comes to me and owns a successful chain of Pet stores than sell dangerous Australian animals. Would you advise him to get a domain like dangerousdavespetemporium.com or something like petshop.com.au. Well for a start the first one is way too long, secondly nobody is going to ever type that into their browser and the whole business is going to be reliant on search engine traffic. On the other hand petshop.com.au might get 20 or so type ins a week which means traffic will come without having to constantly add to and optimize your pages. The other added value is that owning a generic name like petshop.com.au gives your business a higher profile.

It is estimated that somewhere between 30-35% of traffic goes through search engines, which means there is a lot of people going to sites via type in. I have heard elsewhere on the low that 15-20% of the search engines traffic comes from rerouting type ins that do not resolve to the .com or are mistyped (without someone registering the type of course).

So just remember if Google has got you down there is plenty of traffic around elsewhere.

Today Robert Kingston of Branding Rant sent me an invitation for a new Google service called Lively located at lively.com. While it is clearly to notice they have purchased a very cool domain the entire concept of this development sucks. I’m not sure if it’s because I had development a mid week crisis or was having a bout of man-o-pause but I was kind of annoyed. I mean think of all the good ideas us entrepreneurs have that we can never find the time or money to develop and then some guy at Google gets paid a lot of money to come up with dumb ideas live this.

There is a lot of criticism in the corporate world (i.e. from Microsoft) that Google only has one profitable product and lack the ability to make commercially successful products. Well let me tell you this one is going to suck to, basically the idea is you create a virtual room and invite your friends to come chat in it. Sure Google has created a lot of good products like Google Docs, their keyword tool, traffic estimator, the Google Toolbar, Google Maps and of course Google Earth but then again a lot of them suck like Google Desktop, iGoogle, Google Checkout. The problem with this one is it’s almost rubbing in Microsoft’s face and I’m sure Mr Ballamer and his lawyers are already sharping their teeth. If you do not already know Microsoft run a search engine at Live.com which is growing quite rapidly and Live.com is currently ranked 4 on Alexa making them a force even though Alexa’s statistics suggest search is only one percent of their traffic (hard to believe).

Thats the end of my rant, will be interesting to see how long this development lasts and whether Microsoft tries to sue Google. There are probably no grounds for suing them but I’m sure Microsoft wouldn’t mind doing so just for the hell of it. In a few days I am going to share bit more information on Live and Yahoo.