The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is one of my most highly recommended “must read” business/lifestyle books. Whilst it’s extremely applicable for online entrepreneurs it holds great value for anyone who wants to streamline their life to create time for what’s really important.
The book is all about lifestyle design and focuses on how to maximise working/career/business success whilst living the life you dreamed; you know, the one you told yourself was the reason why you got up in the morning, the same one that motivates you to grind through your day at work so you can afford that holiday or early retirement.
I mentioned above, it’s particularly relevant to online entrepreneurs (given that our business can be conducted anywhere in the world) but it hugely valuable for anyone ho what’s to know what’s truly possible when it comes to coordinating an automated business. And before you say, “but I’m currently working a 9 to 5 for someone else” let me assure you this book was written with a broad audience in mind, which includes you.
Core 4HWW Concept
The core concept of his book centers on Tim’s DEAL strategy of define, eliminate, automate and liberate.
- Define – define what exactly you want.
- Eliminate – eliminate distractions, focus on being effective not efficient through the use of 80/20 principles, learn to say no, learn to operate on a low information diet.
- Automate – setup automated systems, outsource what you can’t automate and remove yourself from the production process.
- Liberate – pursue frequent mini retirements rather than end of life retirements, leverage your relative income versus your absolute income.
Tim tackles the traditional myths of how work should be conducted and has opened up the eyes of hundreds of thousands of readers to the possible of lifestyle design.
Overall 4 Hour Work Week Review
As I have already mentioned my recommendation is that this book is a “must read” for everyone and I give it 5/5.
The tag line of this book “A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” says it all. The book is all about keeping it simple, and not simple from your perspective, keeping it simple from a non tech-savvy average user perspective and designing the site for them.
I’ll start this book review by saying, if you deal with making or managing websites this book should feature on your shelf. That said, it’s a much more valuable read for if you’ve only been in the web design or internet marketing game for a year or two. Whilst I wouldn’t call it a beginners guide, a good portion of what you will read, you will have already read elsewhere.
I read the second edition (2005 version) with the original being published in 2000. I think web usability and design has come quite away since late 2005 but the concepts are virtually the same, even if the examples are now aging a little.
Though being honest, the fact that I have been involved with designing websites and conversion optimisation for a few years now, I personally found the gaps between reading new usability insights made reading tiring at times. However when I did stumble upon some nuggets of information it definitely “made me think”.
The book itself is beautifully laid out with great use of images and subtitles allowing you to to digest the main points easily and facilitates scanning.
All in all I give it four out of five and as mentioned above this should be staple reading for anyone engaged with making or managing websites.
Basics of Link Building in under 500 words.
Building links to your site is a vital part of SEO. Links from other quality sites is a key indicators search engines in determining your site’s quality and relevance.
Important Aspects of Links
- Anchor Text – Are used by search engines to determine page topic.
- Who Links To You - Search engines value links more from relevant sites that are authorities on the respective links topic.
- Where Links Are Located – Prominent links within content are more valuable than links tucked away in the footer of a page.
- Number Of Links On The Page – Links are more valuable from pages with only a few outbound links as opposed to pages with hundreds.
- Quantity – The more quality links pointing to your site the better.
- Diversity – Search engines see natural link diversity as a sign of quality whereas repetitive link building strategies are seen as trying to manipulate search rankings.
Main Methods of Link Building
- Directories – Submit your site to relevant directories.
- Comments – Leave comments on related blogs.
- Forums – Post links in topics and in forum signatures on related forums.
- Article Submissions – Submit article to article directories with links to your site within the article.
- Guest Post – Guest post on blogs with a link back to your site.
- Email Requests – Email relevant sites that might consider linking to your site.
- Exchange Links - Only trade links with reputable and relevant websites.
- Start A Blog – Add links to your site within blog posts.
- Press Release – Craft press releases to build buzz and links.
- Buy Links – It’s against Google’s guidelines, but many link builders do it. Be discrete.
- Offer Incentives – Don’t systematically “buy” links with offers; just subtly incentivize linking to you.
- Review Competitor’s Link Profile – Then attempt to obtain links from the same places.
- Use Hubpages & Squidoo Like Services
- Utilise Social Bookmarking
- Create Link Bait – Produce content that will motivate the linkerati.
- Create Widgets, Programs, Plugins, Products, Quizzes – People link to useful things.
- Setup “Link To Us” Pages – Offer banners, badges, cut and past HTML code snippets. Making linking to you easy.
- Embed Links Within Syndicated Content – Your syndicated content should at least link back to you.
- Optimise Internal Navigation – Search engines factor anchor text of internal navigation links as well. So add keyword rich anchor text within navigational links.
Link Building Warnings
- Avoid rel=”nofollow” – Links with the attribute rel=”nofollow” won’t be valued by the search engines.
- Avoid Pages That Aren’t Indexed or Crawlable – If the search engines can’t find or crawl the page the link won’t provide any value.
- Avoid Javascript – Search engines have traditionally had trouble indexing javascript.
- Build Links To Sub Pages As Well – Don’t just build links to your homepage.
- Don’t Link Spam – Search engine algorithms are always refining and spammed links will eventually being devalued.
- Don’t Trade Links With Loads of Irrelevant Sites – Link exchange systems with irrelevant sites will get your site penalised.
- Beware Of Redirects – Many don’t pass link value.
Ultimately, building quality content makes any link building campaign easier as people are more likely to link to you.
This post is a part of the Best SEO Company website review series. It contains reviews of 10 SEO company websites that ranked well for the search term “SEO Sydney”. To review other city results please visit:
- Sydney SEO Company
- Melbourne SEO Company
- Brisbane SEO Company
- Perth SEO Company
- Adelaide SEO Company
- Gold Coast SEO Company
Top 5 Organic Search Results for ‘SEO Sydney’ – Company Website Review
SEO Sydney : 
Despite the benefit of the exact match domain name, this site is very simple and integrates the major elements of SEO. Things they could have done better include; make better use of title tags, add internal links within content and built a larger link profile. Overall it’s reasonably well optimised from an SEO perspective. From an internet marketing perspective their design doesn’t facilitate converting organic traffic into leads and they should focus on greater conversion optimisation.
SEO Sydney Blog : 
Site didn’t load properly when this website SEO review was being conducted. That’s normally a bad sign. From what is visible, they are employing some reasonable SEO, but they lack a significant link profile. Their ranking for “SEO Sydney” is most likely being significantly supported by their keyword rich domain rather than great SEO.
SEO Works : 
These guys looks very good with good SEO of all the major ranking elements in addition to a well featured local listing (see below). The only things detracting from their score is arguably the excessive use of links on their homepage and the under utilisation of their alt tags. From an internet marketing perspective a point of concern is their over-focus on SEO at the expense of conversion optimisation.
Just Web : 
This firm seems to be much more focused on web design than SEO. They are integrating a lot of flash and have spammed loads of links into their footer, which isn’t a great SEO nor a long term strategy.
SEO Sydney Services :
This is a pretty simple site design (which is often better when it comes to SEO). Though they have keyword stuffed the crap out of their meta keyword tag which is a risky strategy given that the major search engines have confirmed they don’t give any weighting to meta keywords anymore. They also haven’t utilised any header tags within their content and lack inbound links. Their ranking for “SEO Sydney” is most likely being supported by their exact match domain name.
Top 3 Local Search Results for ‘SEO Sydney’ – Company Website Review
NetStarter :
Being the first site being listed in the local listings is a great achievement. Though the SEO of this site is lacking. It’s inundated with flash elements and these guys look to be much more about web design rather than SEO.
SEO Works :
SEO Works was already featured in the organic section of this review but has also managed to be ranked second in the local listings which is a great achievement and is a good sign that this SEO firm knows what they are doing.
D SEO : 
A very simple and small site. The site doesn’t make good use of the title tags, keyword integration or image integration. The internal navigation is not ideal either. Though the biggest problem is the sheer lack of inbound links!
Top 2 Sponsored Links Results for ‘SEO Sydney’ – Company Website Review
Arrow Internet Marketing : 
Ironically this SEO company is actually located in Melbourne yet they are ranking first in the Google sponsored listings! The company’s website has good SEO, though may have over optimised their site at the expense of simplicity and conversions.
Web Marketing Experts :
Once again another Melbourne SEO company has outranked the Sydney SEO companies in the sponsored search results. Their onpage SEO isn’t great; they use too much flash and have a poor internal linking structure. However it’s likely the sacrifices in SEO are more than compensated for with a higher conversion rate (which is was businesses are really interested in). In addition to this they have a very large link profile allowing their site to rank well organically despite this review being due to their sponsored listing.
When it comes to hiring SEO companies most businesses find it difficult to distinguish between quality SEO services and the smooth talking salesman. Unfortunately SEO is quite a refined art where the principles are simple, but if these simple principles are applied to the wrong degree the results won’t be improved search engine rankings rather the delisting of your site from the rankings. So it’s vital you hire an SEO expert or company that knows what they are doing.
If you are in the market for an SEO company I highly recommend reading our 21 Signs a SEO Company is Bad at SEO before you start reviewing candidates.
In addition to the above article I’ve decided to try and shed a little bit of light on some local SEO companies via a website SEO audit on SEO companies that claim to be SEO experts.
So why do an SEO audit on SEO company websites? It’s a simple case of seeing if these SEO companies practice what they preach and in some case see if they are even aware of what SEO best practices are.
SEO Company Website Review Process
So what I’ve done is a search in Google using the term “SEO Location” and selected 10 of the websites that have ranked well when searching for that term. So for example I entered the search term “SEO Brisbane” (a term all Brisbane SEO companies should be aspiring to rank for) and have chosen to review the first five organic rankings, the first three local listings and the top two sponsored results.
It’s important to note that given that these SEO companies made the list of SEO websites to be reviewed says that they must have been doing something right to be among the most prominent sites when searching for the popular SEO keyword phrases. Nonetheless some of the results are quite interesting, and they are outlined in the posts listed below:
- Sydney SEO Company
- Melbourne SEO Company
- Brisbane SEO Company
- Perth SEO Company
- Adelaide SEO Company
- Gold Coast SEO Company
Please note the following:
- There are SEO companies in Sydney that aren’t included as they haven’t optimised their site for the term “SEO Sydney” but they should have.
- This list was derived using Google International. Results may vary based on search preferences and location.
- The companies have been listed in the order they appeared on Google.
- I have also commented on likely conversion optimisation performance of the site given that it’s not all about getting traffic.
Following on from our Best SEO Companies series, I thought it appropriate to talk about how you can spot a bad SEO company.
- The SEO company contacted you via email, phone or mailer despite their supposed skills with search engine optimisation!
- The SEO company offers “instant” or “quick” results. Above board SEO takes time. One caveat would be in instances where your website already has an extensive link profile in comparison to the competition, but poor onpage SEO. In these rare cases some ranking improvement can be achieved quickly. In the vast majority of cases SEO campaigns often take many months.
- All the SEO company talks about is keyword integration, keyword density and inserting keywords into meta tags. Keyword stuffing worked well a decade ago, there is a lot more to SEO these days.
- They avoid the topic of link building (or worse still don’t offer any link building within their packages). Building links is where SEO’s earn their worth.
- Their link building campaign is just directory submissions and trading links with hundreds of irrelevant sites. These sorts of links aren’t of great value in the eyes of Google.
- The SEO company tries to bamboozle you with statements like “we’ll submit your site to over 1000 search engines!” The vast majority of your search engine traffic will come from a handful search engines which have probably already indexed making search engine submission redundant.
- The SEO firm always talks top 10 and tries to impress you with the idea of being ranked in the top 10 for three word phrases – Read Google CTR – A good SEO firms will compile keyword reports and will work with you to select keywords to target based on a combination of value, potential traffic and present competition, and should be aiming to rank as high as possible (hopefully first).
- The SEO firm guarantees everything unconditionally. At the end of the day Google is an entity unto itself. So no one can honestly guarantee anything and when they do they often are just guaranteeing worthless results.
- SEO firms that talk about “Google PageRank” too much or make promises about improving your PageRank. The reality is PageRank is trivial when compare to achieving good rankings. That should be the focus of the SEO firm.
- They don’t think anything other than SEO is worth investing in. SEO is just the first piece (albeit a big piece) of an online marketing strategy. Quality SEO firms will be willing to discuss other aspects of internet marketing such as conversion optimisation (great when used in conjunction with good SEO) and complementary marketing campaigns like PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing; even if they don’t offer those services themselves.
- Many SEO firms want large retainers for work already completed. Make sure if you are paying a retainer that they are still continuing to work and develop your SEO campaign (ie continued link building, content development, new keyword phrase optimisation etc).
- The SEO firm doesn’t have a proven track record or isn’t forth coming with their previous client portfolio that shows current top 1 rankings for valuable two word phrases.
- They are unwilling to explain how they SEO sites. SEO isn’t rocket science, so they should be able to explain it to you in layman’s terms. Those that aren’t willing might be hiding their black hat SEO strategies or the fact that they don’t know anything about SEO.
- The SEO company implies that you won’t have to change at least some of the content on your site, add additional content or that the content on your site isn’t important in maximising the benefits of SEO. Content is what Google sends people to you site for – it’s an important part of any SEO strategy.
- The SEO firm say it’s only important to optimise your homepage. Whilst the homepage optimisation often proves to be the most fruitful that doesn’t mean employing good SEO on the rest of your site won’t achieve a good ROI.
- The SEO company implies there are no risks to SEO. Search engines do apply penalties to sites and even deindex sites that attempt to game their ranking systems. Whilst the search engines are advocates of website owners using good SEO practices, however there are grey areas when it comes to SEO.
- The SEO firm doesn’t rank well in major search engines for their own company name. Seems crazy but there are SEO consultants out there that don’t even rank in the search engines themselves. I often suggest when looking for a local SEO that simply searching for “SEO Location” is a great place to start. So for example if you live in Sydney search for “SEO Sydney” and look at the top 10 ORGANIC results.
- People within the SEO company don’t participate in the SEO community. The search engines like Google are refining their algorithm all the time and most good SEO’s will have at least some involvement in SEO/webmaster communities to some degree.
- They want to charge per keyword. Whilst this wouldn’t instantly imply someone was a bad SEO, but the vast majority of good SEO companies just don’t operate like this.
- The SEO company says they can achieve good rankings irrespective of the competition. Competing for search engine rankings is pure competition. At the end of the day only one site can rank first for a search term, and if there are millions of sites competing for that term then ranking for it is going to be difficult to achieve.
- They contacted you. Once again the point of SEO is to get people to visit your site and contact you. There is also a huge shortage of “good” SEO services out there and the SEO’s worth hiring aren’t out there scouting for more business.
Basics of Email Marketing in under 500 words.
Email marketing is essentially direct mail marketing using email. Its advantages over traditional direct mail marketing include; lower costs and higher ROI, improved tracking capabilities, better database segmentation, faster delivery and response rates.
Email marketing is a simple, cost effective platform for business to stay connected with its established customer base. Building targeted email lists is one of the most sustainably, profitable ways to market online.
Email Marketing List Building
- Feature Opt-in Forms Prominently – Subscribers are valuable. They’re signing up to hear from you regularly.
- Provide Incentives to Subscribe – People need reasons to take action. Couple free reports, discounts, benefits etc for subscribing.
- Use Double Opt-In – Ensure subscribers want to be listed. It also weeds out bot registrations.
- Get Their Name – You’re building a long term relationship. So knowing their name is important.
- Tell Them You’ll Protect Their Privacy – Then actually do that.
- Leverage Joint Ventures – Advertise your mailing list to readers on similar mailing lists.
- Refer-a-Friend – Offer bonuses to subscribers who refer friends.
- Add Customers – Customers already like your products/services. So suggest they sign up.
Email Marketing Campaign Tips
- Keep Emails Relevant and Offers Compelling – People only want relevant and valuable information and offers.
- Personalise Email – Use personal data, like their name, in emails to improve response and reading rates.
- Test Headlines – Headlines are about getting the email opened whilst hinting at what’s inside. Test various headlines. Focus on benefits.
- Beat Spam Filters – Symbols and words like “$$$” “FREE” “MLM” will get your email filtered.
- Welcome New Subscribers – Say “thank you” in your welcome email. Be friendly, reiterate benefits, set expectations, ask to be white listed, link to additional resources.
- Use Autoresponders – streamline email delivery and relationship building with autoresponder.
- Deliverability – Use reputable email marketing services who can deal with ISP issues.
- Optimise Preview Pane – Many people use preview panes. So put what’s important first.
- Frequency – Keep in contact without being overbearing. Try every 4 – 14 days. Keep your mailing schedule consistent and each email valuable.
- Track Everything – Bounce rates, open rates, CTR, which links were click, etc.
- Use Email Segmentation – Helps keep emails relevant and targeted.
- Use Landing Pages – Direct visitors to the relevant page. Replicate graphics of the email on the landing page and prefill forms where possible.
- Timing – Send emails at times most likely to be acted on. Not when readers are busy or inundated with other emails.
- Be Personable – Don’t be corporate. Readers delete corporate junk. Use your name and a conversational tone. Don’t always be selling. Build trust then “recommend”.
- Test Everything – Headlines, images, calls to action, link placement; everything.
- Re-Engage or Remove Inactive Subscribers – Remove once proven non-responsive.
Email Marketing Warnings
- Make Unsubscribing Easy – It’s better someone unsubscribes that report you as SPAM and you get blacklisted.
- Email Compatibility – Provide both HTML and text based emails.
- Don’t SPAM Subscribers – Opting to receive emails from you doesn’t mean SPAM irrelevant junk. Readers will unsubscribe or worse – report you as SPAM.
- Don’t Buy Email Lists – They’re poor quality and there are legal implications.
And that’s Email Marketing in 500 words or less. Please leave your questions and comments below:
Basics of PPC in under 500 words.
PPC (Pay Per Clicks), like it sounds, is a form of website advertising model where you pay for each click on your ad (visitor to visit your site).
The biggest PPC network is Google AdWords. It’s largely a keyword based auction system, where advertisers bid on how much they will pay per click relevant to specific keywords.
Major Benefits of PPC
- Instant Results – You can have a PPC campaign up in a matter of hours.
- Pay For Performance – You only pay when someone visits your site
- Highly Targeted – You can target searcher searching specific terms, languages, in certain cities or country, at certain times of the day.
- No Site Changes Needed – If your site is ready you can drive traffic to it straight away.
- Budget Controls – You can limit your campaign spent to a few dollars or tens of thousands.
- Ranking Controls – You increase or reduce your bid price to change your ad ranking.
Optimising Your PPC Campaign
To effectively utilise PPC for Google AdWords you should implement the following:
- Match Types – There are three keyword match types, broad, phrase and exact. Try and use “phrase” and [exact] match to better target relevant searches. Broad match gives very untargeted results.
- Negative Keywords – Makes sure your ads don’t show for irrelevant search results which will cost you money and reduce ad CTR’s. Eg if you sell used cars and are targeting the term “use car sales” you don’t want your ad shown when someone searches for “used car sales jobs” do you?
- Separate Keywords Into Adgroups – Improve relevancy of your ads by grouping major related keywords together.
- Always Test Ads – Try different calls to actions, USP’s, keyword integration, use of price, capitalisation, etc.
- Use Landing Pages - Make it easy for visitors to get that information, product or service they want once they have clicked your ad. If you send them to your homepage and they can’t instantly see what they are looking for they may leave frustrated.
- Optimise Your Landing Pages – Always test and refine your landing page (Google Website Optimizer). If you can increase your conversion rate relative to the competition you can justify higher bid prices.
- Set Goals and Track Everything – PPC is expensive so track conversion through goal setting and Google Analytics so you know exactly what your ROI is.
- Use Location Targeting – If you live in Sydney and want to buy a used car, are you more likely to click on an ad that says “Used Car Sales” or “Sydney Used Car Sales”? If in doubt test.
- Content vs Search Network – Separate content network campaigns from search network campaigns and test the ROI of both.
- Quality Score- Google wants to display relevant ads for its users as well as make money. So make your ads and landing page relevant to the search terms your targeting. Increase your CTR as much as possible.
And that’s PPC in 500 words or less. Please leave your questions and comments below:
Basics of SEO in under 500 words.
Search Engine Optimisation is exactly what it sounds like; optimising a site for search engines to read, understand and index. For Google, Yahoo or Bing to rank a site, they must first be able to read the site and determine what topics it’s relevant to.
Search engine ranking algorithms are complicated in theory factoring a huge number of variables, but in practice only a few have a major influence.
Major Elements of SEO
- Keywords – The most important factor in rankings; the presence of the keywords on the page you want to rank for. Where possible they should appear in the title tags, meta tags, heading tags, content, URL, images. That said you will find more success aiming to rank for popular 2, 3 and 4 word phrases because there is less competition for them.
- Links To Your Site – Links are how search engines determine site quality. Links are like votes. If someone links to your site search engines interpret that as them endorsing your page/site. Like all democracies, the more votes (links) the better.
- Anchor Text and Relevance – Those voting for your site (linking to you) express what your strengths are with the words (anchor text) they link to you with. So a link using the words “great cooking tips” to a search engine says your site has “great cooking tips”. If that endorsement came from another popular cooking site it’s a much more respect opinion than if that endorsement came from any old site.
- Domain Name and URL – Major keywords in your domain (or page URL) tells search engine your site (or page) is about that topic.
- Lots of Quality Unique Original Content – Search engines’ purpose is to connect their customers (searchers) to good quality content. So more content means more terms search engines will find and rank you for, but remember quality counts. So write for humans first, then optimise for search engines.
- Age and Trust – The older your site is the more search engines can trust you, because it proves you’re not some fly by night SPAM site. As you build more links over time search engine trust in your increase and they’ll allow you to broaden your content and still be ranked well.
- Site Navigation – Internal links are still links according to search engines, though not as valuable as external links. Your site navigation should utilise your major keywords, link to all your major pages and be easy to navigate. A sitemap can help search engines crawl your site.
- Images – Optimise your image alt tags to improve both your page optimisation and generate extra traffic through search engine image search features.
- Tracking – This won’t help improve your rankings, but it will provide important information about the search terms people used to get to your site.
- Don’t SPAM – Search engines evolve and eventually eliminate SPAM. So don’t keyword stuff you pages and SPAM links all over the web. Just provide quality content that would be valuable for their searchers. That’s what they want; so work into their agenda.
And that’s SEO in 500 words or less. Please leave your questions and comments below:
So many people talk about what’s most important when it comes to the success of a business website and internet marketing campaign, but like most things in life it all boils down to one thing.
Providing value for your visitors through cost effectively solving their problems.
People have problems. We all have problems. Every one of us pays good money to solve problems, whether it’s buying groceries to eat or buying a porsche to build esteem, we pay to have our problems solved every day.
Truly successful businesses, products, people, websites, etc all do the same thing – they cost effectively solve people’s problems.
Example of Cost Effective Problem Solving
Google costs nothing but connects people with the information they want in seconds – talk about providing massive value. Amazon is a one stop shop for thousands and thousands of products, which can be delivered at discount prices directly to your door without leaving the comfort of your own computer chair.
Many of you reading this are subscribed to this site because of the valuable content I cost effectively provide you. Of course the information on this blog is free in a monetary sense, but it costs you a couple of moments of your time and attention with each post and that’s worth something to most people. This is the very reason why I’m committed to providing truly valuable information because I know everyone who has subscribed to this blog highly values their time and if I waste it I’ll lose them as a subscriber.
Communicating You Provide Great Value For Money Is Key
It’s always good to reflect on the simple fact that money never leaves the consumers hands unless they perceive they are going to get “value for money”. So before you SEO your site, before your optimise conversion paths, before send your marketing emails, first make sure that you are providing “great value” in the eyes of the consumer by cost effectively solving problems that are important to them.
Knowing this, you need to ask yourself, when a visitors comes to my site can they quickly and accurately conclude that you are going to be able to help solve their problems at a good price? Because if they can’t you just lost yourself a potential sale/lead/subscriber/ad click.
It’s one thing to be able to solve people’s problems, but you win sales by being able to “cost effectively” solve people’s problems. This principle is the life blood of business. People have problems, but in the majority of cases they can solve them themselves, but of course this would be highly inefficient if a business can solve the problem for you more cost effectively.
So remember that the foundation of the success of your business website’s marketing campaign is centred on you being able to communicate to your visitors that you will cost effectively solve their problems.
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