I will be doing what I’m pretty good at (I like to think) which is handle the SEO, PPC and Affiliate’s for BigBathroomShop.com, The affiliate program is due to go live in a week or so, so I’ll be hitting some of you up about joining us :).

• Give Up Chocolate
  • Fecking hell, with 5 days to go until I make a toblerone castle at my desk, I’ve gone without it for the year, I’m not going to lie, it has been difficult and I did move to other sweet type things but all in all I did lose some weight

  Do The Great North Run

  • I did this one as well, It was one of the most fantastic experiences I’ve ever had and I urge anyone to do it, however if your gonna do it, do it dressed up! seriously, nothing gets you going like 3000 Geordies shouting “Go On MARIO”.

  Start A Company

  • hmmm I’ll get back to this one in the middle of Jan, my work with stickyeyes took over a bit but I might have things to announce then

2007 was also an amazing year for my other projects, MTGCast went from 800 listeners to well over 10,000 a week, I’m very proud of the podcast and though it gets criticisms and people are always moaning about “transcripts”, I know that I’ve created something popular, thats why its quite hard to write this :), The week of Jan 20th will be my last show as host of Monday Night Magic, there are a lot of reasons for this, not just the fact that I havn’t played Magic properly in ages, I don’t have the time to keep up with the news and the rumors and the listenership has changed a lot in the last year and wants more information rather than good humored banter.. I will still be very involved in the network (since I own and pay for the bloody thing) but on a more admin and server level..

Onto 2008

• Make Secret Project N A Roaring Success
  • More about this in the middle of Jan
• Learn To Semi Play An Instrument
• Lose Some More Weight
• Cut down on the goodies but not give up
  • I’ve proved I can give them up, now can I cut them down
• Sometimes I’ve gotta take my time with things, instead of diving in head first (sometimes good, sometimes bad)
• Do another big thing for charity
• Blog at least once a week (this has to be the hardest one)..

At the moment theres a lot of stuff happening around here, I have a lot of personal sites that really need some attention and work has started to get really busy, I’ve tried not to talk about Stickyeyes on here much because I know the boss and other staff members take a peek every now and then and really didn’t want to put my foot in it (and I came close with my silly seo post ), but when the new site finally launches there might be some of the things I would publish on here going onto there, (I’m writing a post at the moment on the best wordpress SEO plugins that I use).

I’m at this point when I get home that I have so many things to do that I’m not quite sure what to work on first, I’m looking at starting a new podcast, I have 3 site ideas that are underway but need some cash to get coded and tarted up and a fe w other bits and bobs to do, I am hopeful that my order of two flat screen 17″ monitors will arrive tomorrow and they will be great to do work on, (dual monitors increase productivity, I know your reading this Craig )

• Anger
  • They assume I’m the one who has knocked their precious website to #2 in Google
• Confusion
  • They don’t understand and when the next person asks, chips in with “He makes websites”
• Ok”
  • They understand what it is and leave it there or want to know a bit more..

Its completey obvious me to 90% of them they didn’t understand what I do…whilst some people were engaging and asked questions, other dismissed the work I do off hand and marked me as a blackhat spammer stating

“Google has a whole bunch of programmers to stop what you do”

…. not so much? or else these pages on Google’s site wouldn’t exist, let me pull a quite out from one of these.

“However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.” #

and these few are the ones that people hear about, but search IS important, I was talking to someone last night who was spending £200 a day on PPC but nothing on SEO, using the outdated but still used Yahoo Keyword Tool, we could see his term had 40,000 searches a month on Yahoo UK online in Janurary 2007.. if he was in the top ten and got just 10% of that traffic, that would mean 4000 clicks a month on one term alone, with an average CPC of £0.30.

4000 x 0.30 = £1200 a month in free clicks on one term alone..

if we take my podcast network, we recently had an upserge in downloads and we are looking at around 10,000 downloads per week, I really like looking at stats and use a mixture of Heatmaps tracking, server side tracking and Google analytics, you’d expect a podcast network to get most of its traffic from directories and referring sites…. not this one!

55% of all traffic comes from organic search… on longtail terms, sure we are number one for magic the gathering podcast and mtg podcast but those arn’t the terms that bring us the most traffic, its 4, 5 and 6 word keyphrases that do it..

I’m not going to belittle you by explaining the longtail theory but with search and certain niches it really works.. I’m working on a project right now that will prove it because its such a niche area that it’s main market will be.. long tail searches..

SEO has a bad rap at the moment because in the early day’s it was all about “keyword stuffing” and “hidden text”, however the game has changed, the engines have evolved and so has the optimisation, last year I could have posted that SEO is all about TLC

• Titles
  • Make sure your titles are optimised and short
• Links
  • Get good links onto your pages and also have a good linking matrix within your site
• Content
  • Get some good original content, optmised and something that would want to be read by your readers

However now there are just so many other things to consider

• Social Media
• Universal Search
• Local Search
• Competitors sites using blackhat

It’s a funny ol’ game this SEO lark…

Don’t get me wrong its a great advert but to me, nothing special..however the genius comes in when you think of what comes after an ad like this is released, uploaded onto sites like youtube, google video and others and instead of the company asking for the videos to be removed as would have happened 2-3 years ago, they leave them..

The Cadbury’s Gorilla is a perfect advertisement to edit, with no speech dialog just a backing track and a monkey hitting the drum’s you can edit and sync it pretty easy with any piece of music for example

at the time of posting this that video has 232,960 views, but thats not all, you don’t even need the original ad footage

Over 100,000 views and is defiantly one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while, but what do you notice about these videos…

They still have the Cadbury’s logo at the start and end of each video, lets say the average TV commercial costs £0.10 per viewer (this is not based off of anything, I honestly have no idea how much a TV commercial will cost) right now on YouTube I can see around 15 videos featuring the Gorilla and branding, lets count up those views ;

• 899,670
• 190,286
• 132,169
• 665,354
• 232,960
• 102,117
• 412,275
• 1,100,220
• 850,956
• 61,932
• 128,549
• 11,925
• 15,689
• 11,816

Total number of views :4,815,918

Total cost if this was on TV : £481,591.80

That’s an amazing amount of views for just letting people share your work or in the case of some companies, sticking it up yourself, its not just adverts that are on TV that are getting stuck on youTube, at the launch of the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s own PR department got a nice little bundle of joy when a commercial of theirs was not allowed to be shown on television, it was leaked (I believe) and immediately uploaded onto video sharing sites and hit the tech news websites very quickly, whilst I cannot find the original video, there is still a copy on youtube with a lot less views (I am 90% sure the original had around 3 Million views)

I’ve been writing this last one for an hour, I’m on tot he bit where I look at there site and make suggestions as to why they  are having problems or how they can improve, these thoughts are stuck in a document which is “sales up” by our sales executive and sent off to the client…

I’ve been thinking, some clients have no idea what SEO is or anything about it, so they are taking my word as..well bible… I could probably write whatever I want in here and they would believe it to a certain extent, I wouldn’t do that of course but it was a funny thought ; I had a few ideas though

• Google has taking a disliking to the letter L this month, if you have more than 4 occurances of the letter L this will hurt your rankings, for visibility we recommend using the capital I and the underscore for that effect I_, we are assured by Google this is only a temporary measure to stop spam
• MSN and Yahoo have both given indications that if you link to them without linking to Google they will give you a slightly higher ranking than you had before as a way of saying thank you.
• The terms you are trying to rank for only have a small amount of search traffic going towards them, try creating pages that optimise for such terms as “sex”, “viagra” and “rock and roll” whilst these search terms are unrelated you will bring in lots of traffic and are sure to convert at least some of them.