It seems the pagerank update is completed - I have seen an increase in all of my sites and a fair few others:

criTix (this wonderful business blog) - 0 (I never used it) to 3 (pretty good)

Several of my affiliate sites went up - 0 to 2/3

Wheels-Near-U - 0 to 3

RankRace.com - 0 to 4 (anyone want a pr 4 domain/site?)

Several web design projects I expected to remain on 1 forever went up also to 2’s and 3’s.

Seems to me that this update has been very favourable - what I thought was going to be a complete stampede of minus’s worked out ok.

• 3p adword clicks - chasing the long tail monster
• Pagex - Bolt on SEO tools
• Planning web dev centralisation - making your files, classes etc centralised for ease of use

Too many people think seo is the end all of internet business. To what extent should we agree with this idea? should we put google before our customers to get more customers? never if you ask me, but its very easy to fall into the trap of doing things because you are used to them, even if they are not effective or even useful.

SEO is great to learn because essentially its the art of providing a good easy to understand site with good unique content that is of some worth. But its far to easy to get caught in the game. Yes using amazing seo skills can get you millions of viewers but no not hugely easily. The art of seo has exploded in line with online business and now is populated by a fair few million seo practitioners, but how far should we go?

It is possible to get huge amount of traffic, from lots of different places. You can gain better positioning in the serps, get dugg a few hundred times, become facebook fantastic - but the first is the only really stable producer.

Going niche is the obvious choice for those who can - but what if you require the top spot for an insanely competitive keyword/phrase - do you go niche for a few hundred similar phrases or work on that one mass keyword - its a sum up to be made by you.

Ultimately the more competitive the business probably the more time need be devoted to seo and sem techniques. If your in a fairly non competitive market you may only have to provide a good website to your seo dude or company and leave it with them for a few weeks to set up good seo practice, keyword alliteration and then your done. But if your after “cars” it will take a whole lot more to make it up there.

Day in day out you will probably need to provide 5-10+ brand new pages of keyword rich, new, original, appropriate content. Backed up by well designed pages, a long standing domain, customers that chatter endlessly about you elsewhere online and a monsoon of backlinks that could carry donkey.com to the top.

Personally I try to go for a balance - some weeks I will push things more than others, on low budget weeks I might do nothing but create good content or further work on making the current pages more appropriate. To compete with the “cars” serp big boys it probably would take a budget of 60k a year - mainly to pay 3 people to do the work!!!

But in the end does seo mean £££? It takes a lot more than just good seo to get the money in. Remember to make a good site with functional ways to convert clicks to customers and customers to £££. Sometimes its better if we don’t all just follow google around looking for our dish of customers and we just go and get them ourselves!!!!

How often do you use forums? PHPbb lover? Myself I am registered at Digital-Point, Site-Point and a handful of niche forums. But is the day of the forum still relevant? Do we still have time for forums?

With the global hype of the blog system and the development of wordpress, blogger and the whole blog ideology perhaps forums will fade away and become another fall out software that worked well in its time. I doubt that will happen completely but I see numerous business’s placing more belief in blogging than in forum administration.

I suppose if you compare the two, blogging is a more self centered approach to the same issue. Blogging says ‘I am an expert and I am more interested in what I have to say’ or ‘I have something to give - come see’ whereas forums are intended to be more communal. So perhaps its in that, that we choose our preference. If we seek communal chatter we hit forums and if we seek expert advice we seek blog articles? This isn’t right - we don’t. But perhaps blogging allows bigger stars to be made, with a fine line between people that read and comment and bloggers the roles are emphasised?

I would say that forums are a mine of useful tips, they allow networking and communal discussion in a way that no blog system/blog network I have seen can do.

So I suppose we blog and forum post for differing reasons and results, and personally I will continue to do both. But if the whole world has a blog - who’s going to read them all?

• Subscribing people to your blog - conquer the email blogosphere
• Organise your online Reading - tips and tricks to spending no longer than nescessary reading
• Ditch the coffee - get me some lemon Juice!!!

- Benjamin Morrell. Morale is key to business, key to successful teamwork, key to creating a good family environment. But instilling it is although not easy - worth the time and consideration. A man with a good attitude is worth a million men with bad attitudes. Get the morale up, keep it up and complete on your promises. Your business/family/team will function well above average.

Now don’t get me wrong I had a misspent youth, in one year I spent over 1200 hours on a first person multi player shooter (some of you may know it) named Counterstrike source. Xfire the gaming messenger was the deliverer of that life culling statistic (it only monitors your gaming hours when on it - so god forbid the actual figure!) To start on the list of games I completed, owned, rocked and played would be a long list of wasted time so I will shuffle on.

Games are big business, 10 years ago they were there, great at the time but in comparison to modern fps titles they were drops in an ocean of content. Of course Hollywood has been along for the ride - but then when hasn’t Hollywood been involved in big money media’s?

The unseen market I mean to discuss now is that of online gaming. Its big, it combines the network aspects that founded the thing we call the internet with the fibre of fun. It is addictive, consuming and insanely entertaining and only really beginning to become dominated.

Gamers are techy people, so if you wanted to sell techy stuff, particularly online - there’s almost no better audience to target. But on the 5 gaming clan sites I just checked out, all you can see is game server hosting banners and these forums are abused let alone used. So acting as an affiliate marketeer I see that gaming related sites could produce well.

With a bit of cash you can compete on a serious level in the gaming market, powered by the fact that there’s a world of clever, active and lifeless gamers - and there’s without a doubt millions online now. They provide cheap labour, effective administration and great up to the minute content. Start a gaming community, let them manage it and move on to another?

Ok I got completely side tracked there…more on this another time..

Starting with a plan is always the best way - whether you name your exit strategy early or plan on handing it on to your team its good to know which way your going to take each business you enter.

Good successful business strategy however is not what the mass markets achieve. If you take buying and selling online - websites. The bricks and mortar of the internet, a huge proportion of them are started as hobby sites, sites to just be there - you don’t get houses that were built just to be there!

But then I suppose online sites don’t need to be business’s. They can be cost effective hobbies - great for the hobbyist that likes his anonymity and interior situations. But when it comes to exiting their beloved site what happens? they sell it - but because the internet is a sea of sharks and pirates with very little stable ground chances are the site with mediocre visitor rates and ad turnover will sink to the depths of coding coral. But alas this doesn’t have to happen, clever entrepreneur’s and semi-pro pirates can offer a reasonable price.

To be honest - why shouldn’t they? The problem as I see it is that the mass democratisation of the tools that power the internet mean that it houses both business, sharks and kids - all in the same pool. The business’s want their slice of the cake, the sharks want all the cake and the kids just want to view the cake on youtube.

So pay attention entrepreneurs, because theres money in hobby sites, especially as you can get them for next to nothing! - Subscribe now to hear how I turn a range of hobby and small niche sites into a profitable base for my main projects. Some call it flipping, I call it flipping awesome.

• Organise your online reading - don’t get swamped by RSS feeds and lost in blogs - organise your blog reading!
• Web Development: Planning an internal Search Engine
• Early Starts Late nights - how your time schedule could make or break your business

I get through a fair amount of online reading, whether the format is blogs, ebooks, general webfodder or books relating to the net. I tend to primarily read about business on the internet, how the big players made their money and how people are making ends meet using essentially 1 huge network. So a mixed bag covering business, technology, buying online, selling online, entrepreneurship and eVentures.

• SEO for wordpress - Great plugin that will re-write your titles in a more google friendly manner
• W Revenue - Sound advice from someone who knows what they are talking about in business and the net
• Johnathon Volk - Another business blog worth a look
• Dosh Dosh’s Link attack - similar to this but a great list of online business and blogging advice
• Wired does Alex Roy - The crazy gumballer drives across america - fast - worth a read if you watched gumball

That’s it for this week folks!

Clicks are effective viewers, completely targeted and ready to be entertained. You pay google, yahoo or one of the other world dominating company’s to dice up their success and give you a billionth of a billionth of the result.

It almost annoys me that I use google adwords, although with competition as strong as it is you need to use all the tools available to you. Anyway I was not part of the now legendary 1p a click generation - I was online then I was probably just doing something less useful - like command and conquer or writing qbasic. But I am online now, trading and making money. So to get these bums in seats, get people there and looking, snag them into using my sites I use a range of tools - one being pay per click. Pay per click is not by any means my favourite type of advertising. Its effectively well over priced in comparison to the other alternatives, should you know where to look. But for new projects I usually allow a certain amount of play money and some of that gets thrown down the google hole.

But to get the most out of your pay per click, that is spend 6p on a good viewer as a pose to 30p is not actually that hard. First I would recommend diversifying. If your target audience is not essentially british (mine usually are but if yours are not) then you have a vast amount of choice in pay per click sellers.

I would recommend trying a variety of different ppc operators to see which works most effectively for your target audience and keywords. Definitely start with Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing (£60 free coupon if you click this link :D) and Looksmart.

For me Looksmart provides very cheap traffic, although I am not to sure at this point how relevant it is in comparison with more british targeting equivalents. Yahoo IMO is quite expensive but only relatively.

Google Adwords - if your not paying attention will be very expensive - prepare to pay 80p per click in a mass market for open keywords and still only hit 2nd place. However I suggest the following to get much cheaper adwords clicks (works with all ppc):

Long tail your keywords - that’s it - simple you say - well yes actually. By longtailing my keywords I am now paying 2p-8p for 2nd/3rd/4th position, more specific relevant clicks. This works in most markets, but requires some time and a regular adjustment. Essentially you want to create 3 or 4 word lines in adsense - e.g. instead of “used cars” you want to get “2nd hand cars in uk” - Depending on your localisation (or Hyper localisation) you can then intersect your locations to provide you with a huge list of 3/4/5 word keyphrases. These longer keyphrases will be used less often but as a result will be a lot cheaper. Spend the time to set yourself up with huge long tail lists of phrases relative to your target.

Here’s how I recommend going about getting cheaper adwords clicks:

• Get a database or list of your products/locations/keywords/descriptives. I say get a database because its a lot quicker if you do so.
• Create a php (or whatever language) script to write you keyword lists. Aim to have each line use at least 3 words. Phrases like “used cars west london” rather than “used cars”, other good examples would be “second hand cars west london”, “cars for sale west london” etc.
• If you have a good list of locations you may end up with a very long list of variated keywords. This is only good, just don’t create 20mb files - that’s too many.
• Stick them into google and run them in line with your current broader ads e.g. run “used cars *AREA*” as one campaign in google and another campaign with just the keywords “used cars”. The used cars one will likely get as many hits as you could want, but at a much higher cost. The more long winded list will achieve modest numbers but for a 2nd position it will cost you pennys.
• Do this with all your static keywords, ones that don’t change with time.
• Monitor them - Some will work well others will be no shows, but eventually almost every one will probably be typed in, depending on how long tail your going! Adjust the bid prices in as much detail as possible. If you have lists of thousands build this into the php script to output the bid value on the line *bid*.
• Sticking at double the minimum bid of 3p or 4p will usually get you top 3 position in my experience (with long tail adwords.)

There are numerous advantages to this, but depending on how much your spending it could be more cost effective to just use the broad term. Factor in your hourly wage in creating the files.

If you manage some low cost per clicks - Post them in the comments here - what’s the lowest cost per click you can get in google adwords?

Just 4 quick essential points to remember when running a website - fairly random but essential points for today! Part of a series looking at essential aspects of running a successful website.

1. Create lists - Email subscriber lists help you build your business, lists of people to rep about your business/promote too, lists of what you need to fix/create/re-design, lists of people/ip’s you don’t want on the site, spam artists!

for example we have had spam from 6 different IP’s in the last 5 days, but using .htaccess we can essentially block them for life:

deny from 209.47.94.52
deny from 211.172.225.137
deny from 211.174.63.148
deny from 24.166.249.218
deny from 76.214.29.123
deny from 218.234.21.33

Only problem is that they could be using pooled ip’s or dynamic ones at least - so its best to check them up before they go on your list!

2. Used good opensource software, add plugins - Its good to use opensource software to run a website, wordpress, phpbb, gallery2, oscommerce are all excellent examples of quality releases that will take all of the pain out of running a website. But almost as good as the software for a link is the contributions from the community’s that surround them. SEO mods are plentiful and you can get mods for wordpress that will turn your blog from a blog into almost anything!

3. Write your own additions, plugins, addons - Your opensource software is great - but there will surely be some improvement you can add, but make sure someone hasn’t already done it well as a release. Submitting additions to the community can only help move your website along.

4. Be outrageous - the loud, crazy, quirky all stand out online - ‘another business blog’ won’t attract half as many people as ‘Blogathon - why jesus wore dresses’ (or similar.)

That’s it -four random but essential tips to running a website/e business!

• Organise your online Reading - Use google reader, firefox bookmarks and be free from wasted reading time
• 10 Steps to submitting your site for a start - ten quick steps to getting your new born site about
• Sandmonkey - Wordpress theme that doesn’t quit

Stuck and wanting a quick good email subscription manager I turned to forums - and found Feedblitz, after going through the long setup I am fairly happy with the results.

By simply sticking your email in the box to the top left (on homepage) you will be able to subscribe to my blog - Great or what? No more rss readers or bookmark finding - just subscribe and your done - a great way to get a good interesting post a day!

I would recommend Feedblitz too, definately does what it says on the tin, as I get a less modest number of subscribers I might even insert their little widget