Internet Marketing Fun » Kane

The impact of the latest Google Caffeine changes

Kane — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:58:49 +0000

On June 8, 2010, Google officially completed development of its new “Caffeine” indexing algorithm. Many marketers were left wondering, “How does this impact me?” Well, I’ve done a fair bit of research and here’s what I’ve come up with…

50% fresher results – Google actually says “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.” So that sounds like they’re now indexing more pages than ever, which means more competition. Not good!
Less chance of dominating Page 1 – Now, more than ever, Site Authority plays an important part in rankings. So if you previously had your main site, plus a Squidoo lens, plus a bunch of articles showing up on Page 1, there’s a good chance you’ll no longer have such a smattering of listings. Chances are that some of the big players like Amazon, About, Wikipedia, etc have taken over your spots.

So what methods should a marketer use in this “new world” so that Caffeine has more love for you?

Use old domains (obviously this is easier said than done…but if you have the chance take it…)
Backlink inner pages too (not only the home page) – Google now sees each page as its own entity moreso than before. So just because your home page has a ton of backlinks no longer means that link juice will automatically flow through to your inner pages.
Regularly add fresh content (which is preferably unique).

My thoughts

I’ve noticed many, shitty, 1-page, “Made For Adsense” sites drop in rankings after the latest Caffeine updates. My take on this? Great!

It’s embarrassing to be an internet marketer when it seems like the vast majority of our kind serves no purpose other than to flood the interwebs with useless spam. So if Caffeine means the public will see less of this crap and more useful search results, then I’m all for it.

Outsourcing Myself – Article Submissions

Kane — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:59:11 +0000

My VA, Gerlyn, next worked on submitting an article I emailed her to around 30 different article directory sites.

Here’s the report she gave me afterward (the white box is just covering up personal info).

Since I’ve never used SENuke myself, I’m not sure how easy or fast it is to use. However, I’m a bit suspicious that I’m not being billed for actual time worked, because it seems to me that 4 hours to submit 30 articles using software is WAY too long.

Not quite sure how to broach the subject without offending anyone, though…

Outsourcing Myself – First Task Complete

Kane — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:43:09 +0000

My 2nd VA, Gerlyn, spent her first day (4 hours…since I only have her half-time) doing Web 2.0 profile backlinks using SENuke. She then emailed me a report (spreadsheet) listing the pages and keywords she targeted, as well as the 100 or so URLs that were created.

Not bad for the first day and < $8 out of my pocket! It’s also a nice feeling knowing that when you’re asleep or at the bar…there’s someone on the other side of the world continuing to get things done.

Outsourcing Myself – Language Barrier

Kane — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:29:24 +0000

I emailed my new VA, Jemelo, to ask him a few questions and here’s his response:

I’m sure you already know my name, the following are the answers to youre questions sir.

1. i am available through email and chat only.
2. i can’t do phone calls to someone in north america.
3. The SEO software that we have is SENUKE.
4. yes sir i am working 20 hours perm week.

what kind od SEO task i will be doing for you sir?

I am looking forward for your responce.

Since I’m looking for someone who can do a bit of article writing, and content editing, I decided his English wasn’t quite up to par. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not terrible…heck I’ve seen much, much worse from outsourcers…it’s just not good enough for my needs.

So I emailed First Page Web Search and told them about my dilemma. They were completely cool with it and offered to assign me a replacement VA that had better English.

A day later, enter “Gerlyn”. She seems better from my initial conversation with her.

For her first task, I wanted her to use SENuke with one of my client’s sites. Since I’ve never used this software myself, I asked her what it could do as she wanted some direction.

SEnuke can make automated backlinking, social bookmarking, linkwheel, article submission, rss feeds submission, video submission and keyword research. This can make the work fast as it is automated.

Perfect. So I gave her a list of page/keyword combinations via a shared Google Doc as well as 5 articles I had saved from a previous campaign. Gerlyn said she’d get to work ASAP.

For my next update I’ll talk about how Gerlyn did on her first task with SENuke.

Outsourcing Myself – Took The Plunge!

Kane — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:33:08 +0000

After much deliberation, I decided to hire my first Virtual Assistant (VA) from First Page Web Search.

As the site says to do, I emailed “admin(at)firstpagewebsearch(dot)com” to request a part-time SEO VA, which costs a super-affordable $37.50 for 20 hours a week.

The company owner/manager, Jake, replied:

Right now, we do need one week confirmation payment. This covers the two days trial and 5 days work. This is a policy we implemented since we had previous clients who runaway after the two days trial. We hope you understand. If in case you’re not happy with the service, we can arrange a new VA or we refund the whole amount.

Please pay using the link below:

(PayPal link removed)

I will then forward the VA contact details after we receive the payment.

So I completed the PayPal transaction and the next day received this email:

The “New Client Pack” had the following 3 files, which are pretty self explanatory. The “Welcome Kit” is just a 1-page PDF with contact info for “First Page Web Search” departments.

So far so good! My next update will be about my first impressions and communication with my new VA named “Jemelo”.

Outsourcing Myself – Decisions

Kane — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:26:38 +0000

Time Tracking & Analysis

So I’ve religiously logged my time for a couple weeks now (using a desktop widget from Paymo.biz), and come to the following conclusions -

I waste too much time switching between tasks. I need to focus more on completing things before moving onto something else
I waste too much time with social media. I need to outsource Ping.FM, Facebook friend maintenance, Twitter follower upkeep, etc.
I waste too much time checking email. Rather than checking my personal and multiple business accounts 50x per day, I should set a schedule and check maybe 4-5x.
I waste too much time doing internet shopping / research. Whether it be a gift for my mom or a new laptop for myself, I always feel the need to find the best value product out there, and spend hours doing so. I can definitely outsource some of this research.

Virtual Assistant Providers

I’ve also been busy research sites / companies to hire a Virtual Assistant (VA) from. Here’s the options that I’ve come up with -

Job posting boards

Craigslist Manila – http://manila.craigslist.com.ph
oDesk – http://odesk.com

Outsourcing companies

Your Man In India – http://www.yourmaninindia.com
Get Friday – http://getfriday.com (sister company of Your Man In India)
Catch Friday – http://catchfriday.com
First Page Web Search - http://www.firstpagewebsearch.com/

From my research the job posting boards are time consuming because you have to interview people, and you also don’t want an individual because they’d be a single point of failure in your business (ie. if they got sick a lot of stuff would stop getting done).

First Page Web Search is by far the cheapest of the outsourcing companies, and even though they specialize in SEO VA’s, they can do solely admin work too, I’ve already asked them. Only $300/month for a full-time VA! So that’s where I’m currently leaning…

Outsourcing Myself – Intro

Kane — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:45:03 +0000

I’m determined to become more efficient and effective with my time.

I’ve come to the realization that I waste WAY too much time on things like:

Checking email (hundreds of times a day)
Customer support
Internet window shopping (doing tons of research before deciding what to buy)
Forum reading
Social networking (Facebook, Twitter, other Ping.FM sites)
Blog posts for niche sites

Most of these things can and should be done by someone else, so I can free up my time to do more important things. I’m not the only qualified person in the world to do these tasks, although sometimes I trick myself into thinking so

So I’ve decided I want to hire a Virtual Assistant.

My plan is:

Log my time in detail for a couple weeks to see what can be outsourced or eliminated or managed differently
Write a list of VA-appropriate tasks
Hire a VA for a trial period (from a company, not an individual…as they’d become a huge bottleneck in my life if something were to happen to them)
If they don’t work out, find someone else, and if they do continue giving them work.
Make damn sure that my instructions are super clear and adjust the responsibilities and authorization (financial accounts) they’re given over time.

I’m already in the midst of doing #1. I’m using the site Paymo.biz with a timer widget that lets me switch between tasks easily.

I’ll continue to post about my outsourcing experience, so hopefully others can learn from my mistakes…which I’m sure there’ll be many of haha.

The best Google position checker – Traffic Travis

Kane — Fri, 28 May 2010 05:19:05 +0000

If you’re like me and obsess over how your sites are ranking with the search engines, you’ve likely been looking for a tool that’s fast, user-friendly, and reliable. You may have tried some of the various FireFox plugins that are slow, buggy, and not good at tracking historical ranking changes. Or perhaps you’ve tried one of the many websites that offers a Google position checker service but were disappointed in its speed and lack of features.

Well look no further…

Meet Traffic Travis.

Here’s how it works:

First, you setup a “Project”. This requires entering the name of the site you want to track, it’s URL, the search engines you want to use, and a list of keywords. You can even enter competitor’s sites to see how they compare against your keywords, over time.

Next, you click “Start Update” and Traffic Travis goes to work. Very quickly you see results coming in. Whenever the current ranking beats the previous best ranking, a row is colored yellow. And similarly, when the current ranking becomes worse, a row is colored blue. Pretty handy for easily seeing where you stand.

Finally, Traffic Travis tracks all your historical ranking data. You even get a cool graph or can print/export the data to BMP / HTML files.

If this was all the Traffic Travis could do, I’d be satisfied.

But it’s not…not even close.

Here’s a list of other features, some of which I haven’t even tried yet:

Keyword research
Backlink checker (also shows PageRank, noFollow, anchor text, and IP of each backlink…pimp!)
PPC analysis
Page analysis (how good is your on-page SEO?)
SEO analysis (how competitive is certain keywords…for the top 20 listings in Google)

Last but not least, it just feels solid. As a software developer, I can recognize good code when I see it. For whatever reason, in the internet marketing world there’s a lot of bloated, slow, buggy, and visually unappealing…shit. But Traffic Travis is sleek, slick, and sexy. It’s no wonder that it’s had more than 100,000 downloads on Download.com and is considered by many to be the most popular SEO application EVER.

Well what the heck are ya waiting for? Go get the best Google position checker (and bask in the glory of all the extra features you didn’t even know you wanted)!

Awesome WordPress plugin for Facebook

Kane — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:50:25 +0000

Once and a while a WordPress plugin comes along that I consider to be a “game changer”. The Like plugin is one of ‘em.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/

One of the great things about Facebook Pages is that they can become viral. It may take you a month to get to 100 “fans” (I guess they’re now considered “people that like your Page”), but you could easily reach 1000 in the next week and 100,000 a week after that. This is due to the Facebook engine that automagically suggests Pages to your friends, and your friends’ friends, and so on and so forth. And of course it helps that many Facebook users are addicted and will click “Like” to anything they see.

Well, the Like plugin helps to make your WordPress posts and pages viral too!

See the buttons at the top and bottom of this post? Those are from Like.

One super cool feature is that it works with the new Facebook Open Graph API which makes it very easy for developers to integrate Facebook applications into websites. I suppose this is furthering Facebook’s goal to take over the world…but you could at least join them for the ride and get more visitors on the way!

Here’s what the plugin settings look like:

As you can see, it also hooks up to a Facebook application, although I haven’t tested this myself yet.

So what are ya waiting for? Download and install this wicked plugin and join the viral train.

LastPass owns

Kane — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:43:27 +0000

If you’ve ever been frustrated with trying to remember passwords for hundreds of websites, across multiple web browsers and multiple computers…there’s finally a bulletproof solution.

LastPass is a kickass free browser plugin that allows you to save web account information (username/passwords) and retrieve them from any computer. All you ever need to remember going forward is your LastPass password, hence the name “last pass”.

Why does it “own”, you ask?

Works on multiple platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac
Works with every browser
Way more secure than storing passwords on your local PC using the embedded password manager that comes with IE, FireFox, Chrome, etc.
Super easy to use!
Also comes with auto-form population
If you’re on vacation or using someone else’s computer, you can retrieve your passwords…such a time saver
Auto-generates secure passwords, so you can start using crazy complicated and unique passwords for every new site rather than using the same password repeatedly like most people currently do

Check it out! I’ve recommended LastPass to a handful of close friends already and they’ve been very impressed, so I’m confident you will be too. It’s not often that a free application comes along that is genius and something you soon wonder how you ever lived without.

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