Posts from — March 2009

A while back I was given an opportunity to utilize a product for free that in exchange for a blog post about it. I have been putting off the blog post because it just doesn’t work for me. I can’t work the way it asks me to work.

The product is GTDAgenda and from what I can tell it’s great. If I were an ardent student of David Allen’s GTD I would be all over this thing like black on coffee. It did force me to look more and more into what exactly it was, what the GTD methodology is and why it’s so popular and through that I learned more about a subject I didn’t know much on before.

That is awesome, but it’s just not how I work.

I don’t need next actions, I don’t need to group them by where they take place. The only thing I need is a piece of paper and a pen. Write it down, cross it off or do it later when it makes sense to do it.

I regret to say that I didn’t use it much more than a week before I found it to be a pain in the butt to keep going back, changing, adding, etc all the things to the list. Now if I was a David Allen follower and was into theGTD to where I thought it was the greatest system ever then I would have loved it.

My advice to you. If you like GTD, if you find the way that it’s structured give it a go and you won’t be disappointed. If you’re like me and this system is too much work for you to keep up when a pen & paper does just fine then you probably want to try something more like Remember The Milk.

Have you tried it already? What do you think of productivity tools like this altogether?

Thanks for reading.
Josh “Shua” Peters

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There are two ways you can pay a search engine to display your site. One is a touch controversial and the other is a billion dollar industry that was pretty much started by Google. They are paid inclusion and PPC (pay per click).

Paid inclusion
Paid inclusion is anytime you pay the search engine to include you in their results and it’s common among some directories and submission based search engines. With Submission based search engines site owners have to submit their site to be reviewed by an editor and then the editors make the decision that determines whether the site will show up and how it will rank. Some of these sites are free, others are definitely a paid service.

The one nice thing about these types of engines is that if you don’t like your ranking you can always get re-ranked (usually for a fee) by requesting a new review. These types of sites will always display fewer results because they are human based and only added by editors, but they are usually very targeted and are high quality.

Yahoo! is the only search engine that still does paid inclusion for their search engine. Microsoft used to but quite a couple of years ago, and Google has never done it. What ever your feelings on it the the key thing to remember is to find out the guidelines and stay within them if you’re going to use any type of paid inclusion.

PPC (Pay Per Click)
If you’ve ever done a google search (I know, but humor me) and you’ve noticed the ads on the right <Image) that’s a PPC ad. That’s the second way to pay for visibility on a search engine, and when done right they can be incredibly effective.

PPC is the most popular type of of paid advertising. The way it works is that you big for top position based on your keywords and then when people search for your keywords then your ad shows up on the right side of the screen. What makes it so great is that you don’t pay for the displaying of the ad you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your landing page.

Where you spend your PPC money is very important based on the relevancy of the search engine. Currently that order looks like this:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• Ask
• AOL

One thing to remember is that Google has partnership agreements with Ask, AoL, iWon, and Netscape. So your Google Ad Words ads will also be featured on these partners. This increases your visibility even more.

Social Media Marketing is the answer to Paid Inclusion blues
The whole reason that paid inclusion (PI) was even created was for sites that don’t have a lot of text on them or that were incredibly graphics based and so the search engines had a hard time crawling and ranking them. This was created many years ago, but should it still be around, and why would you pay for it? Today you can utilize a vast amount of tools to reach people on whole new levels and enable yourself to be found by your target audience by engaging them where they are.

Any thoughts or questions on this? I’d love to hear them

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

Image by KevinDooley

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It seems like ages since i wrote on my blog, and for that I apologize. The new gig has kept me more than busy and I’ve just been running on empty when I got time for the blog. However, now that we have the campaign now under way I’ll be back to a more regular posting schedule. So without further adieu, here’s some new stuff.

Search engines are one of the internet marketers best friends, yet they are sometimes ignored (crazy I know) or more often misunderstood. So here’s what I’d like to do, give you a quick rundown of search engine basics.

Search engine stats

A little while ago comScore released some very interesting search engine stats that really put the whole shebang into perspective.

Defining Search Marketing
Total world wide searches per month: 61 Billion

• Google = 37 B
• Yahoo = 8.5 B
• Baidu = 3.2 B (China)
• Microsoft = 2.1 B
• KHN = 2 B
• eBay = 1.3 B
• AOL = 1.2 B
• Ask = 743 M

Those numbers are just staggering and search trends keep growing. At this rate Google really will take over the world within a couple years. The big question is though how will you appease your Google overlords? Relevant content is the only thing that seems to make them happy and that all starts with your keywords. Keyword research is something that I have always had a bit of trouble with but thankfully there are a few tools to help us out.

• Word Tracker
• KeyWord Discovery
• Google KeyWord tool
• SeoBook KeyWord Tool
• Spacky KeyWord tool

Now we’re armed with keywords. We know how crazy powerful search is, so now what? Well to better understand our Google overlords we need to ask…

How do Search Engines Work?
Search engines are powered by spiders. It’s true, search engine spiders crawl the internet hopping from link to link like a hobo hopping freight cars. They get their info from the dynamic process of crawling and building a data base (or search engine index) of the information they find. There are 2 things to keep in mind when dealing with Spiders.

• Spiders can see code we don’t see like Meta Tags.
• Spiders pay attention to bolded, header, and linked text and weighs it against the site and destinations for relevancy.

Then, based on things like number of active pages on the internet,  relevancy of website to the search query, page rank, etc you will get your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking. I’m happy to say that I currently dominate the all 10 Google results for Josh “Shua” Peters. It’s unique enough that it wasn’t very hard, but it gives me a good way to stand out from the crowd.

One thing to be weary of is people selling snake oil in the form of quick ranking schemes or people who say they know the Google algorithm for ranking. I’m going to make it simple for you. They don’t. The Google algorithm contains over 100 variable and changes 8-12 times a month so no one but the inner circle of Google knows that information. The best thing for you to do is be relevant, be consistent, create good content, and work on getting some of those juicy inbound links.

Next we’re going to hit up the paid stuff and the submission stuff so stay tune for more on that.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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