How One Video Dominated Google For John Thornhill Coaching

Hello everyone, and welcome to a fairly overdue blog post!

This week I’m going to show you how a spoof video I created a couple of weeks ago helped me to dominate the 1st page of Google results for a particular search term.

It all started around a month ago when John Thornhill (the eBuwk guy with the funny accent!) asked me if I’d like to promote his coaching program, having worked with him countless times in the past I agreed and started to plan out what I could do to promote it for him.

The most obvious answer, and this I’m sure is what most people would do, is to simply write out some email copy and then send it off to you guys. I would no doubt make a few sales that way, but once the initial mail had been sent, the sales would stop after a few days and I’d have no more sales coming in after that, so I needed to come up with a plan to get a steady flow of on-going sales.

I decided I would first purchase a domain that was related to the search term, and then I’d do a spoof “expose” on the coaching program, providing visitors with an idea of what they would receive when they signed up for the John Thornhill Coaching Program. Central to this page would be a spoof video, and the spoof video wouldn’t just be to provide content on the page….

Before we go any further, here’s the video I created:

Edit: I’ve just noticed that after publishing this post, all the traffic seems to have crashed the Viddler video above, so in the meantime here’s a Youtube link to the video:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct_EAaRs_z8

I’m fully aware that the video is incredibly stupid, but it does the job it’s supposed to. It grabs the viewers attention with the kids voice at the start, and then the crazy Irish lady (Disclaimer: not all Irish people are crazy ;-)), it almost makes you want to keep watching to see what stupidity is going to come next!

I then provide them with a small bit of content, showing the viewer a brief glimpse of the coaching members area, and explaining what they can expect to achieve if they decide to take up the coaching offer. Just as I’m about to reveal the week by week information, I get cut off “By John”, and you are urged to head on over to the site to view the rest of the “expose”.

You’ll also notice that I leave the URL of my webpage on the screen for quite a long time at the end of the video, a lot of people when creating videos, leave the URL on screen for a few seconds and then it’s goes away. The URL at the end of the video is the most important thing, so make sure you give the viewer time to read it!

With the video out of the way, take a look at the screenshots below, they show you the search results for “John Thornhill Coaching” on both Google.com and Google.co.uk. Take a look at how many of the results on page 1 are mine, there are even 4 people paying for Google Adwords ad’s, and I’m out-ranking them with my stupid video!

Here is the first page of Google.com

And here is the first page of Google.co.uk

So now you want to know how I did it?

I actually showed John what I was doing and he said I should document it (as I’m doing now) and then sell it as a $7 report. And as I’m writing this the thought is still crossing my mind, should I give you the information for free or should I charge for it?

You are lucky I’m in a good mood, so I’ll continue with the freebie. If you do feel like giving me a little reward, do check out the “My Offers” category of this blog and see if there is anything on there that takes your fancy!

So, the first thing I needed to do was submit the video I created to a number of different video sites, believe it or not there are actually other video sites out there besides Youtube and Google video.

So I used a service called HeySpread – not an affiliate link, what’s wrong with me today!? 🙂

For around $1 they’ll submit your video to around 20 video directories for you, well worth the very small price you pay if you ask me. With the video is a description explaining what the video is about, and of course, the obligatory link back to my John Thornhill Coaching “Expose” page.

As each video gets added to the video site, it gets crawled by Google and the page gets indexed. In some cases it also indexes the link back to my site – each from a different IP address.

Finally, I “Dugg” both the Youtube video, as well as my “expose” page, again some more back links from different IP addresses.

Not too difficult was it?

With the video, and the landing page I now take up 6 out of the top 10 positions on Google for my search term, and I’d like to bet it will be 7 out of 10 when this article gets indexed.

That’s all for today, but before I go, it would be rude not to point you in the direction of my John Thornhill Expose landing page so you can see what all the fuss is about!

You know the drill by now, any questions, leave a comment, and so on 🙂

Cheers,
Dan

A Day In The Life Of

I was going to write a “proper” blog post for you today, it was going to be the best blog post ever, it would have loads of colourful pictures, loads of funny words, some political satire and a sprinkling of information, but as I sat down to write the post my accountant called and arranged a meeting for the afternoon so I had to put the blog post on hold.

It’s now 6.45pm and I’ve just finished my Tea (it’s what us strange people from up ‘t north call our evening meal) and I know I need to write a blog post, but in all honesty I’m very tired and don’t have the energy to create a full post, so I’ve decided to put together a little tongue in cheek “a day in the life of..” type post.

Being a full time Internet marketer is no easy task let me tell you! So let me take you back to the futur…back to the beginning of the day, and show you what I did.

I woke up at around 8am and went downstairs for some breakfast; I fancied a laugh so I turned on the TV and navigated my way to Sky Channel 509 – Fox News. It was the morning after the final presidential debate and I fancied some “fair and balanced” coverage of the debate, I was actually in luck, they were re-showing the debate in full so I watched “The Maverick” and “The Yes We Can” trading insults until around 9.30am.

At 9.30 I decided I’d better get off my ass and do some work, so I powered up the PC for the day. I always spend the first 1 – 2 hours of the day approving affiliate commissions for the Boomerang List Builder, and answering support tickets and approving new orders for my hosting company, D9 Hosting. The D9 Hosting tickets are an ongoing task throughout the day, but so far today has been a good ticket day!

All new orders were also genuine which is always good! With hosting orders you have to be very careful when processing them, a lot of spammers like signing up with false details and then using our servers to send spam, but going through each new order manually means we have a very good track record for keeping spam away from our hosting. This improves our email deliverability rate, and keeps the servers running as stable as possible.

After the normal morning tasks were complete, I started to set up the payment processor for a new offline service that me and Paula will be launching in the next couple of weeks, it will be something else under the “D9” brand and without wanting to blow my own trumpet I think it will be really cool.

We actually got a call to our D9 Hosting UK phone number yesterday, I answered and it was a nice chap enquiring about the new service, he’d actually stumbled across our “beta” site on Google (I didn’t even realise they had indexed it!) and then wanted the service so much he tracked down our D9 Hosting phone number, so that gave me a kick up the backside to get on and finish the website.

During setting up the processor, I needed to get our “SWIFT” code from our bank, so payments can go into our account. I called up the bank but I don’t think the code the lady on the phone gave me was correct, so I’m going to call back tomorrow and hopefully I’ll get a different person on the other end of the phone.

So with that out of the way, I moved onto another new project, a live chat/help solution for D9 Hosting. I managed to get it going quite quickly, and existing clients should be able to see the live chat button if they log into their client area.

I did have 1 question about the software though, so I went over to the live chat providers help desk and opened up a live chat session. Usually with live chat services, you have a generic picture of a helpdesk agent to look at, but I was taken by surprise when I saw what looked like “The girl next door” looking back at me.

I’m realistic enough to know the actual person on the other end of the chat was probably nothing like the picture…and was probably not even female, but it was nice to see something different from the generic “stock man/woman with headset”. So if you ever request a live chat over at D9 Hosting and the operator looks like Brad Pitt, suspend logical thinking and go with the flow. 🙂

By the time I’d finished playing with the live chat system, it was around 1pm and time for some food.

I had a prawn cocktail pasta salad type thing, 8/10 – it was nice and tasty.

After dinner I set off to the accountants.

He’d just about finished doing my 2007 accounts, but needed some clarification on a few things. Including my incredibly complex/stupid PayPal income and expense details. Apparently it doesn’t help when some things are in British Pounds and others are in US Dollars, oh well, I’m sure he’ll get there in the end.

After an hour and a half with the accountant I drove home and got back to work. Just as a side point, if your car has an AUX input and you have an I-Pod, buy an I-Pod AUX cable on eBay for £1.99 – best purchase I’ve made in a long time!

I got back to the PC at about 3.30 and had a chat with Paula about a few business plans for the future, answered more tickets and actually took part in our first live chat session – it was with Paula but who cares!

It was coming to the end of the day so I started to wind down; I went on Facebook and posted on a few forums.

I then went downstairs at about 4.45pm and watched some TV and did some farm jobs. I then had the evening meal at about 6.00pm, and then came back onto the PC to write this blog post.

Before I started the blog post I went onto iTunes and purchased a couple of new tunes to listen to on repeat whilst I wrote this blog post. I went for a couple of Cher songs, probably not the best choice in hindsight but we live and learn.

That pretty much takes us up to where we are now. The next thing I plan to do is post this on my blog, “Digg” the post. Then I’ll go downstairs and watch Bones and the last part of TNA Bound For Glory. I’ll then come back on here at around 10pm to do a final email/ticket/blog comment check for the day and then head off to bed at around 11.00pm.

So there you have it, a day in the life of a full time Internet Marketer – thrilling isn’t it!

Getting Back My Icesave Savings – Day 2

Another day, and more and more talking but still no action. Tonight we heard some very strong words from both Gordon Brown, and The Badger:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has condemned Iceland’s handling of the collapse of its banks and its failure to guarantee British savers’ deposits.

Mr Brown said it was “effectively illegal” and “completely unacceptable”.

He said Iceland’s regulators had failed “not only the people of Iceland, they have failed people in Britain”.

Earlier the Icelandic prime minister, Geir Haarde, was asked if he felt there was a crisis in relations between Britain and Iceland.

He replied: “I thought so for a few minutes this morning when I realised that a terrorist law was being applied against us.

“That was not very pleasant. I’m afraid that not many governments would have taken that very kindly, to be put in that category and I told the chancellor that we were not pleased with that.”

But he said he had cleared up a number of issues with UK Chancellor Alistair Darling.

The above extract taken from the BBC News website.

I think we will all have to wait a little bit longer to get back our money, but I think it’s reassuring to know that the governemt are actively trying to find a solution to the problem rather than trying to push it to one side.

So far nobody has reclaimed any money, but I still remain 100% confident I will get it all back eventually, the big question everyone wants to know is when?

In the meantime, here’s my suggestion:

We should all club together, if all of my readers put forward just £5, I think we could buy Iceland. I would then propose we turn it into a massive Top Gear studio! 🙂

Reclaiming My Icesave Savings – Day 1

This blog is normally focused on Internet Marketing, eBay and technology based posts, but I happened to have a savings account with the Icelandic bank – Icesave. Yesterday, Tuesday 7th October it was announced that their parent bank, Landsbanki had gone into receivership and had been nationalized. All Icesave customers were unable to deposit, or withdraw money….But on the brightside, I guess we are now all proud owners of a glacier!

Since then it’s been very unclear as to where we stand, so I thought I’d blog about how to get back savings that were held with Icesave.

To start with, let’s take a look at the deposit insurance you SHOULD have with an Icelandic bank: (Taken from the Sky news website)

If an Icelandic bank fails UK customers are protected up to £50,000

Joint accounts will be protected up to £100,000

The first £16,170 of their money is protected by Iceland

The remaining £33,830 is protected by the UK government

If Iceland goes bankrupt, the UK will not cover the first £16,170

Since then we’ve heard that the Iceland Government has no plans to honor the insurance, which this morning caused the UK Government to personally guarantee all deposits in Icesave, and take legal action against Iceland for defaulting on the guarantee. It has also frozen all UK assests of Landsbanki until more information in available.

So where are we at know, and what should we do?

Well, there’s not really anything we can do. Nobody really knows how to go about claiming, or who to make a claim to. I’m sure things will become clearer in the coming days, but for now we have to wait for more information.

What Have I Done So Far?

I’ve logged into my Icesave account and printed off a statement of my account!

That’s all for now, I’ll post again when I have more information.

How To Stop People From Copying & Editing Your eBooks

I spent some time last week testing out some new PDF software, and if it was any good, I was going to share it with you.

Well….it was good!

And it’s something that I get asked about a lot, so I figured it would probably be useful for a lot of you.

Here is one of the most common PDF related questions I get asked:

“How can I stop people from copying my PDF eBooks?”

My answer is always the same – You can’t add protection to your PDF eBooks unless you use the Adobe Acrobat software, that currently costs around £300 – roughly $600.

So in the end, people just use free PDF converters that don’t have any security features and just hope that nobody out there decides to copy or edit their eBook.

But now when I get asked the question, I’ll be able to give a different answer – I’ll be able to point them to the new software I spent last week testing out – PDF Domination.

PDF Domination contains a standalone PDF Creator software package that runs on any Windows PC (Even Vista!), but unlike other PDF creators, it contains a number of security features. Take a look:

– Password Protect Your PDF Document
– Disable The Ability To Copy/Paste Text
– Disable Printing
– Disable Image Copying

There are also the usual features that you’d expect to see:

– Simple User Interface
– Easily Insert Clickable Links
– Integrated Word Processor (No need to spend hundreds on MS Office!)
– 1 Click PDF Creation

So that’s the software covered, but PDF Domination isn’t just 1 software application. It’s kind of difficult to describe, but it’s like a big all in one package that covers everything you need to know about creating a successful PDF eBook.

Everything from how to find a niche, writing the eBook, setting up the sales funnel, automating/tracking sales and so on.

Now personally, I think you’ll probably already know a lot of that anyway – if you’ve been reading my blog for a while you should be an expert!

But, I do think that the software module of PDF Domination is way to good to miss out on. When you compare the cost of the PDF Domination package ($47) to the cost of Adobe Acrobat ($600), you can see why I hold it in such high regard.

So if you are interested in protecting your PDF eBooks, head on over and check it out:

https://elpassoblog.com/recs/PDF_Domination.php

No worries if it’s not for you, but as a lot of you ask me about it I thought it would be worth a share!

Cheers,
Dan