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Archive From Thursday July 9th 2009: Update #134
This Update is normally published three times per week for opted-in subscribers only. Publisher: Rich Sale. Your comments are always welcome - to respond to anything you read here, please leave a comment.
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Well another Thursday has caught up with us and has brought a real change in the weather here in the UK. Gone are the scorching hot days and balmy nights we are back to warmish sunny/cloudy days and cool evenings. But I have to confess that I am probably to blame because I am off on hockey tour with my youngest this weekend and hockey seems to have a reputation with us of being played in the rain. So I forecast that the weather will turn nice again on Sunday late afternoon!
I had a call from a client today to tell me that they have decided to call it quits and close their business. This is obviously bad news for all involved but strangely the main reason given was not the current economic climate (which has not helped) but charge backs on credit cards. There appears to be little a retailer can do to protect themselves against fraudulent use of cards. You end up losing valuable stock as well as having to refund the real card owner. I always thought that this was the responsibility of the credit card processor. But apparently it’s not.
I think it is a real shame when a growing business has to close. This particular business was one that I helped out for a friend who was running an order fulfillment company (he has since gone to the wall). When they came to me they had spent a lot of money on an online shop but were not getting any traffic from the search engines. It transpired that the site had been built using iframes in a way that pretty much excluded the search engines from seeing the products. I had to tell the owner that they had been sold a bad site and that there was no way they would be able to rank on the search engines in its current form. Of course the web designer/programmer disputed that there was a problem.
To cut a long story short. I ended up providing a new site at just about cost price and have been supporting it at about cost since the site when live about 16months ago. Since this time traffic has risen to on average about 100 visitors a day mainly from Google!.
So it looks like my hard work will not be rewarded. I guess there is a business lesson to be learned here. Never give your services away for free unless there is a definite pay-back at some point in the future.
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On Tuesday I had to give some examples of promotion successes to a prospective client. So I spent a few moments going through the various sites looking for big wins. I was smugly surprised by the ongoing success of many of the sites the best was #8 out of 61.7 million pages on Google.com for the term - property search agents. I put a couple of examples on my blog which you can see here http://bit.ly/18dOMQ .
Now much of my promotion success is down to good keyword research, page optimisation and good link building together with hard work of course 
. The thing is that you need to get all three right if you are going to see any real traffic/business from your website. The good news is that the keyword research and optimisation skill-set requirements to do this are just about static so once you know how to do it you can just keep on doing it to produce results. Sure new keyword tools may come along and make your task easier. But the basic thing you are trying to do has not changed for a few years.
Unfortunately this is not the case with link building. Over the years Google has constantly changed the rules to try and combat spam. So it is necessary to test things out or learn from those who you trust to give good sound information.
One of the trusted few is a guy called Neil Shearing from Scamfree Ltd. Neil has provided some really good and well researched products in the past and has just launched his latest on link building.
Now I almost passed on it because I know quite a lot about the subject. But something made me take a second look and I am glad I did.
The eBook takes you from start to finish on link building and importantly what works and what does not work.
It is all backed up with sound reasoning and a set of 5 videos to help you master the art of successful link building.
Get your copy here http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/linkbuild
The offer may have ended by the time you get there. But it is still very low priced. Sorry but I refuse to promote anything that I have not read/used myself so I have to hold back until I am ready.
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The next part of my affiliate blogging course will be released on Tuesday. You can sign up here for free http://bit.ly/ZH5Dw.
The next newsletter will be on Sunday (if I make it back from hockey).
Remember you can request information from me or request topics just by leaving a comment.
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So until next time
To Our Success
Rich
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