Tim Love
One in the eye for seriousness…
 

Google Black Box

Google Black Box

Google Black Box

So Google is gonna pay people to track their web usage via a little black box. Kind of reminds of the heady days of 1999 and the launch of AllAdvantage – who paid me my very first commission cheque and got me addicted to online marketing.

Who would have thought that Google would be resurrecting ‘Get Paid To Surf’ after the 2000 tech bubble burst?!

Seriously though, who’d take the Google Black Box? I mean in the current climate when people seem to complain at the drop of a hat about privacy invasion, who’d want to have their online usage tracked independently by Google?

Initially the launch of this started according to ars technica, with Google offering adopters of the screenwise data collection program a $5 Amazon gift card for signing up and another $5 gift card for every three months they stay with the program.

Wowser… That’s a $5 sign-up bonus and a whole $20 per year to have your online usage data collated and used by Google! Ok, ok, it’s not gonna be another AllAdvantage, it’s nothing like as financially rewarding! At one point prior to the bubble bursting, I think I was earning $20 a day from my downline of AllAdvantage referred users,all in the evening from the comfort of my home after I’d finished my day job!

Of course there are gonna be people who bite their hand off for this – think those who do the online surveys for pennies and the like; but hell, $20 worth of Amazon gift cards surely can’t be that much of an inticement can it?

But wait, would you look at that… It appears if you upgrade and get a Google Black Box installed when they’re released, you could be in for a $100 sign-up bonus and then $20 per month. They also state that the box is worth $150! Whatever… Like people will be selling it, or trading them on ebay or something? Jeeesh!

There’s also talk about broad ranging changes to the privacy policy, although one wonders what privacy people who sign-up for this will ever hope to get – users apparantly will have to sign in blood and agree to worship Beelzebub.

The article ends with; It’s easy to forget that Google is one of the biggest advertising companies in the world; Screenwise could be a step toward becoming one of the biggest consumer data companies in the world, too.

The rumour mill is whirring with unconfirmed reports that Google also plan to deliver milk down every street in the World, and they will be rolling out an new range of Google Street Map Cars specially adapted for this purpose in late 2075.

Of course the majority of the above is made in jest – apart from the launch of the Google Black Box and the bit about AllAdvantage being the first company to mail me a commission cheque that is. Although the idea of Google delivering milk may well be taken up by someone!

What are your thoughts on the launch of the Google Black Box?

Google Black Box

Posted by Tim Love - February 9, 2012 at 3:47 pm

Categories: Humour   Tags:

Google PageRank Update February 2012

Google PageRank Update February 2012

Google PageRank Update February 2012

It looks like Google’s PageRank update for February 2012 is underway. Despite being sadly neglected during the month of January 2012, this little SEO Surrey blog has seen a jump from PageRank 0 in November 2011, to a PageRank 2 in February 2012. The last Google PageRank update being in November 2011.

Of course, there are some that think that Google PageRank chasing is pointless and doesn’t effect site traffic. But in my opinion, it’s a nice little ‘pat on the back’ from Google, confirming that you’re online marketing efforts are bearing fruit; as well as being a separate and independent ’indicator’ that you’re on track with your SEO and online marketing methods and techniques.

I noticed the Google PageRank update for February 2012 around lunchtime today after a chance visit to this blog after reminding myself to actually do a few blog posts this month!

There’s now plenty of chatter on the various forums talking about this Google PageRank update, with many saying that they’re not seeing anything yet from Google – it does of course take a while for the PageRank update to roll out and filter through the various servers.

I hope your PageRank in the Google Toolbar went up or remained the same. Although to be honest it probably won’t have any immediate impact on your site’s natural search rankings, many webmasters and SEOs take pride in their Toolbar PageRank.

If you’re interested in how I’ve got this Google PageRank increase, take a look at the various banners around my site. These are basically the tools I use for SEO / online marketing purposes – as well as a few others that I may share with you if you join my mailing list on the right hand side of the page.

That’s it for this post on the Google PageRank update for February 2012, at least it’s given me motivation and easy content to write a long needed blog post on today!

Google PageRank Update February 2012

Posted by Tim Love - February 6, 2012 at 3:09 pm

Categories: Backlinking Strategies, DIY SEO, Free SEO Tools   Tags: , ,

Wallace Wattles

Wallace Wattles

“Wallace Wattles”

Wallace Wattles? Who the heck is Wallace Wattles you may ask. Actually it’s Wallace D. Wattles, or to give him his full name; Wallace Delois Wattles.

Wallace Wattles is the author of a book entitled ‘The Science of Getting Rich‘ and it is widely believed that this book was a major inspiration for the more recent take on the subject titled ‘The Secret‘ by Rhonda Byrne. The Secret is widely circulated and is currently available in most major book stores and online – The Secret has even been made into a film!

Wallace Wattles wrote “The Science Of Getting Rich” over 100 years ago, in 1910. In the closing chapter of The Science of Getting Rich titled ‘Summary of the Science of Getting Rich’, Wallace Wattles reveals the ‘formula’. This formula by Wallace Wattles is pinned to the wall by my desk, it reads as below…

<START>

There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.

A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.

Man can form things in his thought, and by impressing his thought upon formless substance can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.

In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; otherwise he cannot be in harmony with the Formless Intelligence, which is always creative and never competitive in spirit.

Man may come into full harmony with the Formless Substance by entertaining a lively and sincere gratitude for the blessings it bestows upon him. Gratitude unifies the mind of man with the intelligence of Substance, so that man’s thoughts are received by the Formless. Man can remain upon the creative plane only by uniting himself with the Formless Intelligence through a deep and continuous feeling of gratitude .

Man must form a clear and definite mental image of the things he wishes to have, to do, or to become; and he must hold this mental image in his thoughts, while being deeply grateful to the Supreme that all his desires are granted to him. The man who wishes to get rich must spend his leisure hours in contemplating his Vision, and in earnest thanksgiving that the reality is being given to him. Too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of frequent contemplation of the mental image, coupled with unwavering faith and devout gratitude. This is the process by which the impression is given to the Formless, and the creative forces set in motion.

The creative energy works through the established channels of natural growth, and of the industrial and social order. All that is included in his mental image will surely be brought to the man who follows the instructions given above, and whose faith does not waver. What he wants will come to him through the ways of established trade and commerce.

In order to receive his own when it shall come to him, man must be active; and this activity can only consist in more than filling his present place. He must keep in mind the Purpose to get rich through the realization of his mental image. And he must do, every day, all that can be done that day, taking care to do each act in a successful manner. He must give to every man a use value in excess of the cash value he receives, so that each transaction makes for more life; and he must so hold the Advancing Thought that the impression of increase will be communicated to all with whom he comes in contact.

The men and women who practice the foregoing instructions will certainly get rich; and the riches they receive will be in exact proportion to the definiteness of their vision, the fixity of their purpose, the steadiness of their faith, and the depth of their gratitude.

<END>

Wallace Wattles and a few other authors from the same period seem to have ‘snuck’ in to my daily reading at the moment. I don’t know whether it’s due to the mindset one seems to have to have in order to succeed at working at home, or whether it’s something to do with the inspiration one gets from reading authors such as Wallace Wattles, but I’ll continue to post about authors / books that inspire me on here and maybe you can get something from them as well!

Wallace Wattles

Posted by Tim Love - December 29, 2011 at 5:06 pm

Categories: DIY SEO, Inspirational Stuff   Tags: ,

The Starfish and The Spider

The Starfish and The Spider

The Starfish and The Spider

I’ve been doing a year end troll round a few links that I had saved in a folder and found a link to the book The Starfish and The Spider. A strange choice you might think,; but hang on one moment and I’ll tell you why it’s in a folder titled ‘interesting’ and why I’ve decided to do a post on the odd topic of starfish and spiders!

It always amazes me when a subject such as online marketing / SEO / social media management etc gains mainstream credence; in this case a book titled The Starfish and The Spider, which is actually being used in course work for social media and computer science students.

What better ‘slap on the back’ can one get that one’s ‘job’ is now considered so mainstream that there’s actually college courses being held (no doubt many have graduated on the subject) on something that I had to learn ‘at the coal face’.

The Starfish and The Spider starts off interestingly enough – in fact if you go to the amazon page by clicking the link, you can read the first few chapters and see that it’s written in a humorous manner and will certainly keep your attention.

Basically in a nutshell, it seems to be the old adage of ‘adapt and survive’. In these ‘not so heady days’ (as there’s now college courses on the subject) of online marketing, those of us who have been involved in it for some time, will realise immediately that in order to survive in our business. Be it offering SEO / social media marketing services to clients, or running the online marketing for a small business, we have to adapt to the quick changing environment that the internet; and therefore online marketing has become.

The Starfish and The Spider even has it’s own wiki dedicated to it!

IT’S A STARFISH WORLD AND MOST PEOPLE DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT

One thing that business, institutions, governments and key individuals will have to realize is spiders and starfish may look alike, but starfish have a miraculous quality to them. Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm.

But starfish don’t just exist in the animal kingdom. Starfish organizations are taking society and the business world by storm, and are changing the rules of strategy and competition. Like starfish in the sea, starfish organizations are organized on very different principles than we are used to seeing in traditional organizations. Spider organizations are centralized and have clear organs and structure. You know who is in charge. You see them coming.

Starfish organizations, on the other hand, are based on completely different principles. They tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communicaton- around ideologies like al Qaeda or Alcoholics Anonymous. They arise rapidly around the simplest ideas or platforms. Ideas or platforms that can be easily duplicated. Once they arrive they can be massively disruptive and are here to stay, for good or bad. And the Internet can help them flourish.

So in today’s world starfish are starting to gain the upper hand.

How can Toyota leverage starfish principles to crush their spider-like rivals, GM and Ford. How did tiny Napster cripple the global music industry Why is free, community based Wikipedia crushing Encyclopedia Britannica overnight? Why is tiny Craigslist crippling the global newspaper industry Why is Al Quaeda flourishing and even growing stronger. In today’s world to answer this it is essential to understand the potential strength of a starfish organization.

The Starfish and the Spider by Rod A. Beckstrom and Ori Brafman explores the phenomenal and unstoppable new power of the starfish organizations and will change the way you look at the world.

Click The Starfish and The Spider to get hold of a copy fairly cheap on Amazon – probably being sold second-hand by some hard-up computer science student, but their loss is your gain!

The Starfish and The Spider

Posted by Tim Love - December 23, 2011 at 2:46 pm

Categories: DIY SEO, Humour   Tags: , , ,

Blog Post Ideas

Blog Post Ideas

Blog Post Ideas

How do you get ideas for posts on your blog… This is a question I’m asked on a regular basis. But the answer to the question of how I get ideas of what to post on my blog isn’t a simple one to explain.

I use a variety of sources to feed my list of topics of future blog post ideas; as soon as I get an idea of a topic that I’d like to write an blog article or post a blog entry on, I immediately (or as soon as I can) create a new post in wordpress, with the bare minimum of details; so I can at least refresh my memory on it at a later date and carry on with it.

I then save this post as a draft, so I can revisit it at a later time if needs be and ‘fluff out’ my blog post idea with further research, and actual content for the article that I’d had the idea to write a blog post about.

But here below are the processes I go through in order to get fresh blog post ideas, if these blog post idea hints and tips also help you go through the difficult process of getting ideas for your blog, or ideas for your articles; then that’s great!

First of all (and I know this is naughty) I always have the Google Keyword Tool page open. I want to be able to check to see if the blog post idea that I have, actually has any search traffic on it, and how ‘difficult’ it may be to rank naturally in the search engine result pages for the blog post idea that I have.

With the Google Keyword Tool open, I then make a few setting changes. I don’t want broad match results. Yes I realise that it looks ‘sexy’ to see all those potential search traffic numbers with the broad match switch on, but change the setting to at least show ‘Exact’ match results as well as broad match results. You’ll soon get used to the lower figures and the Exact match setting will give you a more realistic idea as to search traffic potential that your blog post idea has.

So if I already have an idea of a blog post, but I want to check the search traffic, or potential blog topic titles that may have more traffic than the one I initially entered as my blog post idea; I would run these through the Google Keyword Tool and see what actual search traffic the title of my blog post idea actually has.

Using this method, I can also change my blog post idea title if needs be and go with one that has more natural search traffic, or one that is less competitive than the initial blog post idea that I came up with. But all this is assuming that you actually have an idea for a blog post and you’re not scrabbling about for inspiration.

So just in case you need some inspiration on how to get ideas for articles or blog posts, then carry on reading below.

Ok, before we start with checking the search traffic volume with the Google Keyword Tool, how do we get an idea for a blog post in the first place?

This can be done using a variety of methods, but to get you started and to give you some ideas of how to get your creative juices flowing with blog article ideas, try these.

On most pages you visit you will see an image that appears on the page or near your search bar that is orange and looks like a radio antenna. This is an image that’s clickable and leads to the page you are visiting’s RSS feed.

So for example, if you look to the top of my site’s page on the right, you will see the RSS image - my page’s RSS feed is located here; Tim Love RSS Feed. Now don’t get all worked up that the page you’ve just viewed looks a little like gobble-de-gook. You can subscribe to any site’s RSS feed and then use those RSS feeds to give you blog post ideas or ideas on topic that you could write an article on.

How you use RSS is fairly simple too. If you look my RSS feed page again, you will see that there is a link to click to subscribe to my site’s RSS feed. This will then automatically add the RSS feed to your feed reader and you will see ideas for blog posts pop up in your RSS feed reader automatically for you on a daily basis!

Most people I think have got (whether they use it or not) an RSS reader that can display RSS feeds directly on to their computer’s desktop. In the current version of Windows, you go the start menu (microsoft sign bottom right) and click it, then click control panel, then click appearance and personalisation, then click the desktop gadgets, then click feed headlines.

Any RSS news feed that you have signed up to will now appear on your desktop RSS news feed reader and if you have signed up to all your competitor’s / news sources that cover your site’s specific niche, you will see their news items appearing in the rss news reader. You now have a ready made source of blog post ideas!

The above can repeated with google or yahoo if you use their desktop. Both have the ability to view RSS feeds directly on their desktop – it’s just a case of adding the feeds that you are interested in to the news reader and your blog post ideas will appear. Go to iGoogle, when you’ve logged in, go to Add gadgets, then scroll down and look on the right hand side for the like that says Add feed or gadget. Copy the URL of the feed you want to add. So if it was my site’s RSS feed, you would copy http://www.timlove.co.uk/feed/ into the box. The news feed will then appear in your iGoogle home page.

As a side note, some people believe that by adding your RSS news feed to iGoogle, you will get your pages indexed quicker, because you have made Google aware of your page / it’s RSS news feed, because you are actually requesting them to display it on you iGoogle desktop. Whatever your opinion, it cannot halm you to add your news feed to iGoogle in this way, so go ahead and do so.

Sticking with Google and blog post ideas, if you haven’t already done so, then another place to get article ideas is using Google’s news alerts. Using Google’s news alerts, you can get emails on topics that are currently being posted / discussed or in the news around your niche. You can choose to get these alerts delivered to you by email, or via news feed.

Go to Google’s news alerts and start entering keywords around your site’s niche or topic. Choose what you’d like to be shown – as an interesting side note, you can choose ‘Discussions’ and it will also give you current forum posts and the like on your topic, that you can reply to and therefore also build up useful backlinks to your site by answering…

So get your news alerts set up to cover your site / blog’s niche when using this method to get blog post ideas. Think laterally when entering your terms and you can get news from other areas that may also cover your site; thus increasing the pool of ideas that you could use for topics of your blog posts / articles.

Using the two above methods to get ideas for articles to use in blog posts, both potentially centred around using RSS feeds to make your life easier (but also with Google News Alerts you could have the ideas sent directly to you as an email digest if you prefer) you will find that you have a steady stream of topics that you could use for blog post ideas.

Once you’ve got the idea of what you are going to use for the title of your blog post, it’s then just basic on site SEO.

So once you have the title for your blog post idea sorted, include an image, name the image the same as the title of your blog post – my-blog-post.jpg for example, give the image an alt tag that is the same as your blog post idea title. Write at least 500 words on the topic of your blog post idea (more is better) and include the title of your blog post idea in the content of your post / article. Make sure that title is repeated and bolded / italic’d on the page at least once.

For your blog post idea, do the stuff above (the basic on site SEO stuff) before thinking about doing any off site SEO on your blog post idea title. For off site SEO, I am talking about backlinking strategies and the like, which can be found in the category area of this page over on the right hand side.

As a side note, if you like the image used on the blog post ideas article, it’s a piece of art that is available here.

So that’s it basically in a nutshell to start you off on how to get blog post ideas. As usual, if you’ve enjoyed this post, please do me the honour of using one of the social share buttons below; or even commenting on this blog post idea article!

Blog Post Ideas

Posted by Tim Love - December 23, 2011 at 11:41 am

Categories: Backlinking Strategies, DIY SEO   Tags: , , ,

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