A Year Reading Seth Godin

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well I say a year, but really it’s only 9 months, but I’ve still got a few books to read and I’ve only got 3 months to go (plus I’ll be reading the new Discworld shortly after Christmas – whether someone buys me it or not *hint hint*).

Anyways, I can’t believe how much I have learned – despite my previous knowledge of Internet marketing techniques and my business degree. Seth takes a concept, pulls it apart and analyses it and then puts it back together the way it should work. From coming up with great ideas, to spreading the word about your business to fixing your site so it is more user friendly – he really can apply himself to anything.

For those of you who don’t know Seth Godin, he is the founder of Squidoo and he was previously in charge of marketing at Yahoo (not sure what his title was, but he was at the top). I think all his books have been Amazon bestsellers, and he’s sold millions of books.

Anyways, if you’ve not read Seth Godin, or if you perhaps have and weren’t impressed, I’d like to recommend the books I think are worth reading:

To be honest though, some of the ones I didn’t find so useful, may actually be very useful for you, so it might be worth getting them all!

By the way, all those links to Amazon are affililate links, so if you do buy them I will get commission :) But really, you won’t regret it!

Anyways, if you would like to watch a video of Seth, try this one (I’ve only watched part of it, but it was pretty interesting)

How a Spammer See’s the SEO Cycle

Posted by David Whitehouse

My colleague Paul has recently done an excellent diagram that communicates how SEO works, so I thought I would adapt his and do one to explain how spammers think SEO works:

spammer-seo-cycle

Free Is Not the Future

Posted by David Whitehouse

So I did some work for someone earlier this year, all entirely for free. I didn’t know them, but they were local (from Leeds) and I thought I’d offer to do a little bit of work for them in return for perhaps a link and a testimonial – but mainly for the experience.

Anyways, I did a full analysis of their website and made some excellent recommendations on how to get more traffic, and more importantly, targeted traffic. I wrote up a report with all my findings and recommendations, and I am sure if followed it will lead to increased sales. I’ve attached the graph of their visits for November 2009 (I’m not going to mention who this site is, so this will remain anonymous):

God this is an embarassment

God this is an embarassment

Here is my gripe, I regret doing the work for free, big time. They haven’t implemented the findings, they haven’t written me a testimonial and they haven’t given me a link (despite asking twice). It just goes to show how little some people know about SEO and how little value it can be given. The biggest loser of all is of course my client, by now they would be getting significantly more traffic and many of them would be leading to sales – oh well. No more free stuff for anyone (except of course my friends)!