Doug has just announced Doug Richard's Mentoring Club, which is a project we’ll be working on together to provide expert advice and on going support for Startups and Small Businesses. We’ll provide practical, pragmatic, effective advice in everything from ecommerce, sales, marketing, web design, raising finance, public relations, social media marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. etc.

Now, here's the thing: we're launching with just 100 seats . . . so if you want to sign up (for just £ 95 + VAT/month), do it now!

A quick overview of what we’ll offer

We will deliver new information, resources and support to our Mentoring Club members every week.

• Twice a month we'll offer a Morning Conference over our Live Learning interface which will allow Doug, and other speakers as required, to address selected questions from members of the group in real time. Group members will also have an opportunity to connect with and support one another during these meetings.
• Twice a month we'll deliver a Podcast that covers issues and questions not addressed in the live session. The podcast will be authored by Doug and others as required by the topic of their questions.
• Additional support will be provided via email or via an online forum.
• Quarterly, we'll offer a closed conference for our members and selected guests which will focus on one business critical theme like sales, product development, financing, marketing, working with investors, etc.
• We will be offering more benefits over time . . .

We believe this structure will allow us to meet the needs of our members, and it will allow our members to become sources of support and information for one another. Entrepreneurs and small business owners can do a great deal to give one another the opportunities that build great enterprises, that is why we're doing this. Now remember, there's only 100 spots, we've already sold a good portion of that to the attendees here, so you should, if you're interested, sign up as fast as soon as you can!

Doug Richard’s mentoring club is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So SES Hamburg is close, very close, and if you haven't bought a ticket yet, you can win one here! There are three reasons, according to Matt McGowan, to come to SES:

1. Constructive feedback on how to improve your website's visibility in the Search Engines - more relevant traffic, more sales
2. Immediate feedback on how to improve your website's look and feel, resulting in improved usability and increased traffic levels - more conversions and sales
3. New case studies, new interactive sessions with a longer Q&A, new speakers - same focus on education!

Now these are fine reasons, but they're a tad bit boring too... So: if you come up with three better reasons to come to SES Hamburg, you'll have owed yourself a free full entrance pass! Judges will be Matt McGowan, Marcus Tandler and myself. To enter, just drop your three reasons in the comments!

Win a ticket for SES Hamburg! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

But this isn't really new is it? And it's not only about the display URL policy either... It's about hijacking a good page / domain to get a good quality score, and using that quality score to make sure you get cheap clicks on your bad landing pages (with high CTR's, I bet)...

Trust me, this has been going on for quite a while, and it's done for all sorts of reasons outside of this one: cloaking to be able to use flash landing pages, to serve high quality pages to Google and high converting pages to customer's, etc. etc. You'd think Google was aware of this by now...

Cloaking for AdWords is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So that's 1 or 2 clicks a day... Now check out the stats for css3.info on that term, which holds the #1 and #2 position, with sitelinks:

6,600 visitors where using the term css3 as or as a part of their search query, and clicked on the organic results for css3.info in the last month. That's 220 a day. So either the ratio of a #1 and #2 ranking with sitelinks vs. an AdWords ad is 110-220 to 1, or the data in the traffic estimator is crap...

Traffic estimation with Google’s traffic estimator is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I'm very excited to be going there and already have a few meetings set up, such as meeting with Chris Winfield from 10e20, finally seeing eye to eye with Avinash, and I'll be going to the Internet Marketers of New York charity party on tuesday evening, if alone to meet up with Michael Gray. Are you coming? If so, want to meet me? Let me know in the comments!

SES New York: who should I meet? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Basically, if you're an experienced SEO or SEM, you can make loads and loads of money by combining your knowledge with affiliate sites. There's a big growth as well for companies doing full service online marketing, including affiliate management, like Kris Jones's PepperJam does...

Onetomarket doesn't do affiliate management yet, but it's something I'm going to be advocating, as that would allow for a good integration of search and affiliate, which is in the best interest of our clients.

Combining SEM and Affiliate Marketing is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I was at the Dutch Search Marketing Congres yesterday, quite a nice day and I had some fun talking to other people in the business. One thing annoyed me though: some folks kept whining that AdWords was getting more expensive every year... What annoys me most is this: someone will come up to me, we'll talk a bit, and he'll tell me that offline he pays € 80,- for a lead, and using AdWords their cost per lead is € 12,-. He was profitable with both, but of course he preferred the AdWords leads.

After telling me that, and me congratulating him on his nice way of using AdWords, he starts complaining that AdWords prices keep rising... Now, if you can be profitable with a cost per lead of € 80,-, chances are, someone else can too. So someone will start bidding more for the same keywords, getting a cost per lead of € 14,-, and still make money. You will start bidding higher, etc. etc. etc. get it? You know what that's called? Economics...

If you can't make a profit from it anymore, and someone else can, you're doing something wrong. That's why you shouldn't just throw money at AdWords. You have to digg deeper in your stats: how much clicks do you need to get a new client, where are you losing people that come to your site etc. etc. If you're the best at doing that, you'll find that in the end you won't mind paying more, since you're still making a profit. If you can't do that optimisation yourself, hire someone to help you with it. In the end, it will earn you money.

That's the principle of a free market economy: people will keep entering the market, until just costs are covered, an no profit is being made any more. The message: get in to AdWords while it's still cheap, have fun with it, and learn from it. But don't whine about prices going up, as long as you're still making a profit from it.

Note: I'm not the first one to say this, Danny Sullivan has been saying that search is underpriced for quite a while, as you can see on this report on SE Roundtable, amongst others.

[tags]adwords, google[/tags]

Paid search is too cheap! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

David Temple and Andy Beal asked for feedback and what I'd learned from this experience, so here are my thoughts on the whole thing.

In the end, I ended up second, traffic wise, but since the winner was also in my week, I didn't make it to the finals. Perhaps in the next contest, they could include a wildcard for the overall most traffic drawing article, so you'd get five articles in the judges round. Now there's to things I regret, not doing in this competition, and there were some issues that made it harder than I thought it would be.

The first thing I should have done, was submitting earlier. I entered in the last week whereas I had been working on the article for the week before that. Had I finished earlier, and done the same for the traffic, I would have easily entered the final round. Yet I didn't. The second thing I regret, is the fact that I didn't get more friends to blog about me. I could have done more traffic out of that, yet I thought that the few very well-read blogs I'd put a mention of the article on would be enough.

There were some other things I tried, the most important one being Digging the article. How naive... Of course I wasn't the first to think of that, and because of that (at least that's what I think...), MarketingPilgrim had been banned from Digg... I had 50-something friends ready to get the digg started, so this was a real setback...

But hey, no more mourning, no use to that, I did quite ok on the traffic side, and I had some fun with it as well. Now I have thought of a two things that would be nice for the next contest, in which, if allowed, I will enter again. Here they are:

• Include a wild card for the most traffic driving article that doesn't make it to the finale otherwise.
• It would be cool if the competitors could see stats during the week my article ran, had I seen those, I would have increased my effort.

To boot, I have a question for Andy: I'd like to know what spam preventions you took... I had been thinking of simply 302-ing some of my websites to yours for a few days, had I done so, I'd probably won the first round...

[tags]contest, sem, seo[/tags]

What I’ve learned in the SEM scholarship contest is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!