I have Nothing To Say

I’ve got nothing to say, so what should I do?

I feel guilty for not writing anything on the blog for the past few weeks, but without anything of value to write about, I’m stuck.

I’ve had a few JV offers that I may or may not talk about in the future (have any loyal readers or mailing list subscribers noticed how long it’s been since I promoted anything to you?), but nothing that really warrants me spending an hour putting together a blog post containing silly pictures with even sillier captions.

So what I’m going to do is use this blog as the WordPress gods originally intended, I’m going to just randomly jot down a few things as they come into my head about life as a full time marketer and a 25 year old (it was my birthday last week, where were my presents?) company director.

As you will probably already know, I run D9 Hosting with my business partner Paula Brett, and back at the start of the year we had a big meeting to discuss some changes that we’d been mulling over for a while.

One was to look at getting some technical support help in, as I was getting somewhat over run with support tickets, and the 2nd was to look at our entire network infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with the existing network, as I’m sure customers reading this can confirm, but there were a couple of nagging issues that could have caused problems in the future had we left things as they were.

So we decided to go ahead and hire some technical support staff, and also started to research options to improve our network.

To cut a long (boring) story short, we ended up moving to a new datacenter in Florida that should (fingers crossed!) allow us to offer more services and provide us with a more stable network – if you are a D9 VPS or Hybrid customer, keep an eye on your mailbox in the next 10 days or so for a cool new feature we are bringing to you at no extra cost!

We first hired our new staff in June, and spent the next couple of months training them, and we also completed the DC migration at the end of July/start of August, but during that time both me and Paula were incredibly busy, and worked stupid hours. I think for a few weeks my shift hours were 9am – midnight!

But I didn’t mind, and I think this is quite an important point.

I actually enjoyed working those hours, because I was working at something I enjoyed doing.

Since the staff training and migration has been completed, the work load has gone down again. The staff are answering support tickets, and the servers are now running smoothly in the new DC, and payments from the 6,000 websites we host are coming in daily, so basically you can say that I’m “living the marketing dream”.

I have a profitable business running on just about auto-pilot.

It’s the thing people dream about, well, I’ve lived the dream and I’m now going to shatter it for you.

No Matter How Much Money You Make On Auto-Pilot, Doing Nothing Is Soul Destroying!

Of course, just my opinion, but for the past couple of weeks my workload hasn’t been enough. The money has been coming in from both D9 and my other marketing stuff, but I’ve been well and truly bored out of my skull – it hasn’t helped that I’ve torn my groin so can’t play football for 2 – 3 months, but that aside, I need to work!!

I was actually so bored yesterday that I went on an 8 hour wagon trip down to Sheffield and back….and noticed that a lot of new wagon (lorry) trailers now have curved rooves to streamline them in an attempt to save fuel, which I thought was a somewhat ingenious idea.

Whilst writing this I’ve remembered a saying my Grandad always used to say, I used to think he was crazy, but he’s right:

Busy Days Are Happy Days

No matter how much money you have, you still need to do something to occupy your time. Look at all the millionaires in the world, if they wanted to they could sit back and do nothing all day whilst they continue to make money on auto-pilot, but they don’t, they prefer working.

I appreciate I may be coming across as a bit of a jerk, I know there will be a lot of you reading this who’d love to be in my shoes but as I’ve said before, it’s just my opinion and I’m standing by it, having everything run on auto-pilot whilst you sit back and relax is a really soul destroying way to live your life, the brain needs some sort of stimulation every now and again!

Luckily I’ve snapped out of “bored” mode now, and am working on setting up a VM master and then converting some existing nodes into slaves as part of our new VPS/Hybrid ideas, so that should keep me busy for the next couple of days. After that I’ve got an eCommerce website to do for a regular web design client of mine, then I may even pull my finger out and create a couple of new sites of my own.

So thankfully the quiet time hasn’t lasted too long, THANKFULLY!

What do you reckon, is the “make money on auto-pilot” dream as good as it sounds when it becomes a reality?

….Or have I just won an A* for writing a load of old bollocks 🙂

The Part I Played In Destroying The Global Economy

After a lot of soul searching I’ve come to the conclusion that I played a part in destroying the global economy.

Yep, Freddy Mac Daddy and Fanny Mae (Quoted from @TurnerDigital) have got nothing on me.

So what have I done to be associated with such good company, have I been short selling company stocks, lending money that didn’t exist in the 1st place to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back even if they lived for another 150 years, or something far more Dick Dastardly?

Well, here it is, my public admission, in true AA style:

My Name Is Dan Thompson, and I’ve Stopped Buying Things

Not things completely, I still eat and wear clothes, I also still buy random gadgets and crap T-Shirts, but over the past 2 years the amount on Internet Marketing products I have purchased in almost 0.

I say almost 0 because I’m sure I purchased something last year, but as you can tell, it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me.

So with my new “anti buy stuff” attitude, I’m slowly destroying the economy, the money I’d be giving to Marketer x for their brilliant new “How to rank 1st on Google whilst eating pizza with Cameron Diaz whilst she does Donuts on a remote air field in Southern England” is no longer going into their pocket, and in turn that money isn’t going to their local crack dealer, and that money isn’t then going into their local McDonalds….or wherever crack dealers eat nowadays, it’s a vicious circle.

If everyone was like me, imagine how much worse the economy would be.

But why have I stopped spending money in the IM niche, I used to spend money when I 1st started, so why stop now?

Well, I’ve come to this conclusion – since I’ve stopped buying all of these big launch eBooks that contain “an unmissable new secret that’s so secret I may have just made it up to sell this overpriced PDF” you’d have thought my earnings would have evaporated to nothing, I mean if I don’t use this amazing new technique then I’m clearly going to fail.

But that’s not the case, I still make as much, if not more now than I ever did when I was buying every IM product that I was offered.

Those initial products I purchased to help get me on my way were great, but there comes a time when you have to stop following instructions and think for yourself. I’ve realized that there’s only so much information you need to get started as an online marketer, so once you have that basic understanding the only thing that’s stopping you is yourself, if you have a basic understanding of how things work then get out there and put your plans into action, free yourself from the shackles of overpriced crap!

It’s like driving a car, when you first start you read up on the theory behind it all, and you then go for lessons, and eventually you take your test and are allowed out into the big bad world…..full of horse riders, cyclists and caravans……

Once you’ve done the theory and passed the test, you start to drive on your own, and if you make a mistake you learn from it and know not to do it again.

So basically what I’m getting it, is that once you’ve got the basic understanding of everything grasped, and your hosting and auto-responder in place, is it really worth buying anything else?

I can understand purchasing products and services that make your life easier – graphics, PLR articles, “make your life easier” software, and so on, but if you are a competent marketer already, do you really need any more theory guides, wouldn’t you be better going off and researching something on your own – and then you could be the one selling your “secrets” 😉

For example, last week whilst foraging through the internet, I noticed that a highly popular script in a particular niche that I’m active in has no rampant affiliates promoting it, so I can get in there and make affiliate sales on the script, and also some hosting sales on top of that – hosting is a fundamental part of the script.

And to promote this, I’m not going to use a top secret technique from an eBook, I’m going to do something that I’ve tried and tested over the years and that I know works:

1. Create website where I share my experiences of the script with the readers, and post a few “how to use it” guides

2. Drive traffic to the site via organic Google results, as I’ve shown you how to do umpteen times on this blog

3. I’ll get affiliate sales from the product, and sales from the hosting

4. Bingo, job done!

5. Total cost of project – $8 for the domain name

I haven’t actually created the site yet, so I may be setting myself up for a humiliating fall, but I’d like to bet that if we come back in 6 months time, the website will have made me at least a few thousands dollars, none of which would have been possible if I’d have still been reading my way through a badly written PDF telling me “what I must do to succeed”.

End of minor controversial blog post, I think there’s a point in there somewhere, if not, just have fun looking at my illustration of a car driving into a wall, notice how I remained un-sexist by not implying the sex of the driver.

Bye for now,
Dan

1 Nugget That Not Even The Colonel Knows About

Following on from my last mega-post, I’ll bring you one final nugget of information that I’ve picked up on my travels. It’s one of those things that people love to speculate on, but nobody really has a definitive answer to it.

So what is the mysterious question?

Here you go:

Q: Does The Geographical Location of a Server Effect Search Engine Rankings?

A: Yes

**The End**

What’s that I hear you cry, you want proof?

The video below provides you with all of the proof you need, it’s a video made by Google for their Youtube Google webmaster channel.

*Any eager beavers reading this as soon as it’s been posted via the RSS feed may need to wait for the video to show. I suck at embedding Youtube videos on WordPress posts for some mad reason!

**Turns out the video works, but it covers up some of the links in the nav bar, but I don’t think any of you really use them anyway

So to summarize, if you run a site that is specifically targeted at a certain market, you stand a better chance of ranking well in the search engines if the server your site resides on is located in that country.

But lets not take the videos word for it, Google may be pulling a devious little trick on all us nerds, lets put it to the test.

Go to Google.co.uk (The UK Google site) and search for something along the lines of:

wellies free delivery

If you then check out the domain names that come up on the first page of the Google results using the Network Tools Express search, you’ll be able to see the geographical location of all of the top sites is the UK.

You can search again for something like:

plumbers in sheffield

And you’ll see that this time we have a lot of local business results from Google that appear, if you do the Network Tools search on a few of the domains, you should find that the sites hosted in the UK achieve a higher listing than those hosted in the US and elsewhere.

So if you currently host a site that targets the UK market on a US server, you may well find that a simple server move would increase your, or your clients search engine rankings.

You don’t have to just test it on Google.co.uk, feel free to try your own local version of Google and have a look at the geographical location of the server.

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Select Your Preferred Server Location During Checkout:

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I’ve turned into the devil, I’ve turned an informative blog post into a plug for D9 Hosting, but come on, if you are going to take my advice you may as well get the hosting from me as well 😉

As I’ve been writing this post, another SEO myth that needs dispelling also came into my head, but I think I’ll leave that one for the next post – unless you all leave a comment telling me that these “nugget” posts are crap, in which case I wont bother.

So next week: Why spending loads of money on “different class c IP” hosting is a waste of time, and again, this is backed up by Google.

Just before signing off, here’s a chance to take part in a D9 Hosting/Internet Marketing fantasy football World Cup league. It’s free to play, and as well as the prizes provided by Fifa, we (D9) are offering existing customers 50% off their next hosting bill, and 50% off your 1st hosting bill if you fancy joining – all you need to do is win the league.

If you are new to Fantasy Football, here’s a quick overview of how it works:

• You have a “transfer kit” which you use to buy players

• Each player will earn you points every time they play, by scoring goals, keeping clean sheets, getting an assist, etc. (They’ll also lose points for getting sent off!)

• The points are then added up, and added to your team’s score.

• You’ll play in a league against myself, Paula, and other D9 customers

• There are also prizes provided by Fifa, including a brand new car, football shirts, and more

• It’s totally free to play!

So even if you have no football (soccer) knowledge, pick a random team of players and who knows, you may just get lucky!

It’s all a bit of fun and we’d love to see you in the league 🙂

Instructions on how to enter are below.

1. Sign up for free account at:

http://www.fifa.com/theclub/index.html

2. When you’ve signed up, log into your account and click on “Games” and then the “Activate” button under “McDonalds Fifa World Cup Fantasy”

3. You can then log in at the Fantasy Football site: (Bookmark this URL!)

http://en.mcdonalds.fantasy.fifa.com/

4. You can then go ahead and select your team

5. When you’ve selected your team, you can join the D9 league by clicking on “My Leagues” > “Create/Join”

And then enter the following league code to join our league:

187968-44949

The closing date for the 1st round of games is the 11th June, so try and get your team registered before then, and good luck!

Fantasy Football Tips

1. You’ll most likely find yourself running out of money, so my tip is to pick a solid foundation of 12 or 13 quality players, and then make the rest up with really cheap players from the teams that don’t have much of a chance – you only pick 11 players to start the game so start with your quality players and leave the cheap ones as substitutes.

2. Your captain earns double points, so select your star player as the captain

And that’s all for this blog post, but before I go, here’s a recycled post from 4 years ago, call me un-patriotic but the gist of it remains the same 🙂

https://elpassoblog.com/why-england-have-no-chance-of-winning-the-wold-cup/

Over and out,
Dan

A REALLY GOOD AND INFORMATIVE BLOG POST AWAITS YOU

I’ve done the title in ALL CAPS to make this blog post seem really urgent, interesting and important. I haven’t written it yet so I have no idea if that will be the case, but at least it gives me something to strive towards.

I’m still not 100% sure what I’m going to write about, I’ve been way behind with blog posts recently but in the absence of my nuggets of gold/bull poop I’ve come across some interesting tit bits whilst stumbling around the Internet. So I think I’ll share them with you, and you can tell me if you agree, or god forbid, disagree!

Nugget 1: Meta Keywords & Descriptions – As Much Use as a *humorous metaphor goes here”

Since the dawn of time, people have been hung up on keywords and descriptions when it comes to optimizing their sites for the search engines.

Back in the good old days (pre-Google), this was a wise thing to do, the early search engines would base their results purely on the meta keywords for a web page. So you could basically spam the hell out of the keywords and rank for any given term with very little effort.

Since Google entered the search engine market and started to implement their algorithms, meta tags have become less and less important. People still say you should use them….but they just don’t carry as much weight as they used to.

After much (about 20 minutes) research, I say that’s a nonsense, in this day and age you may as well not waste your time putting them in there, but wait! I have 2 bits of evidence to back up my almost slanderous claims. I present to you the following your Honour:

Evidence 1

Do a search on Google for “John Thornhills Marketing Masterclass”, and you’ll see results similar to this:

The first result in Google takes you to www.johnthornhillmasterclass.com which is the “official” domain for the product, BUT take a look at the source code.

There are no keywords or meta tags to be seen, there’s also no content on the page at all as far as the search engine bots are concerned, just a video and an opt-in form. Yet that site out ranks all of the competition sites, which all contain nice fancy keywords, descriptions.

So is everything you’ve ever been told about SEO one big lie?

Maybe, who knows!

But I know what you’re thinking, of course John’s official domain will be top of the list. When people are searching for “John Thornhills Marketing Masterclass” Google wants to bring back the most relevant result which is going to be the official domain.

Evidence Verdict: Circumstantial

Evidence 2

When you are doing research on how to get to the top of the rankings, who better to ask than a professional SEO company?

So I did a quick Google search and typed in “UK SEO”, the results that came back can be seen below.

There are over 30 million broad results for that term, so you’d think the site that ranked number 1 must be some sort of SEO monster, and surely they must know what they are doing. So go ahead and click on the 1st result (which for me is www.davidnaylor.co.uk), and then look at the source code.

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. No meta keywords or descriptions, but still out ranks all of those sites that do have them.

Evidence Verdict: Conclusive

Nugget 2: Server Location Does Matter

I think I’ll save this nugget for next week, there’s only so many SEO nuggets you can digest in 1 blog post, especially if those nuggets are made from chicken and come from McDonalds, 36 is my record.

Nugget 3: A Lot Of “Internet Marketers” Are A*Holes

Did I get that right? We don’t really use the A*Hole term in the UK, so I don’t know if the * is needed or not, some American readers please put me out of my misery – misery may be the wrong word, but I’ll allow it.

But anyway, it’s a sorry fact that a lot of people online are vermin, harsh but true. I’m sure the majority of you reading this will have come across these people, and some of you will have been “burned” (not literally?) by their scams. They’ll go something like this: (This is based on a phone call I received, so I’m guessing I’m not the only one)

Dan: Hello

Phone guy: Small talk

Dan: Small talk

Phone guy: So, how’d you like to make money online

Dan: I’d love that so much more than words can express

Phone guy: Cool, we can help you with that by coaching you

Dan: Ripper (I was pretending to be Australian)

Phone guy: What’s your credit card limit

Dan: £5000

Phone guy: Cool, let me call you back

Phone guy: Hi Dan, I’ve gone through your requirements and we can turn you into Donald Trump for only £4995

Dan: Sorry, I’ve never forgiven him for splitting up with Ivana

*puts phone down*

They’ll actually target vulnerable people (not that I’m vulnerable, but I must have somehow ended up on a lead list!), ask them for their credit limit and then take it all away from them in one swoop for some BS coaching program, anyone that does that “for a living” deserves to be called an A*Hole as far as I’m concerned.

But anyway, does this nugget have a purpose or am I just venting frustration? IT HAS A PURPOSE!

Not every marketer online that offers coaching is an A*Hole, one person that falls into that category is Dave Nicholson.

I’ve known Dave for years, and I can tell you one thing about him – he likes Breaded Mushrooms.

Breaded Mushrooms are like kryptonite to A*Hole marketers, wave a mushroom under their nose and they’ll be able to outrun Usain Bolt.

But in all seriousness, anyone who has ever dealt with him will be able to confirm that he’s a stand up guy, and that he’s one of the good guys. I’m not going to try and sell you the coaching (I’d be stupid to, it hasn’t even launched yet!) , but I will provide you with this free 24 page report that he’s written, that shows you “The Real Truth About Online Marketing”.

Click on the image below to read, or right click on it to save to your computer, no opt-in required!

Nugget 4: My Faith In Human Kindness Restored

I’ll finish off (don’t cheer to loudly) by telling you a little story that happened to me over the weekend.

On Saturday I was out on an end of season football……for want of a better word – pub crawl.

On Sunday I realized that I’d either lost my wallet, or it had been stolen. It contained a bit of money, my credit/debit card and my driving license. So I quickly cancelled them all and ordered a replacement license.

I phoned round all of the taxi firms, and pubs that we’d been in but none had seen it. I tried to think where I had it last, and remembered that I must have had it in the taxi, or how would I have paid him!

But another call to the taxi company proved fruitless.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning, and a package drops through the letter box. I open it up and it’s my wallet, complete with all the cards, driving license, and the money.

There was no note in it, so I can’t be sure who sent it. But I’m assuming it must have been the taxi driver.

I thought that for him to take the time to go to the post office, and send it back, without taking any of the money inside was a very kind thing for him to do, and it’s restored my faith in human kindness.

So a lesson for you all, treat taxi drivers with respect, you never know when you may need them!

Signing off – at last!

Dan

Marketing Masterclass Payment Plan – DON’T Take it!

Just a quick post for you today regarding John Thornhill’s
Masterclass coaching program. If you head on over to the sales page
today, you’ll notice John has added some payment plan options, so
if the lump sum is too much, these will be great for you.

BUT…..

DON’T take advantage of the payment plans before emailing me, I
*MIGHT* be able to do a cheaper deal for you. That’s all I dare say,
but “nudge, nudge, wink, wink”, contact me for more details – nothing
like a cryptic post to start the day off 😉

My bonuses are also still live, so if you want a discount, and all
of my bonuses:

http://johnthornhills.com/marketing_masterclass/bonuses.php

Just use the contact link at the top of the page to get in touch with me.

And all of you that are asking if I’m going to get an iPad? I’ll just wait till
they come out with a sleeker version… the iTampon 🙂

Regards,
Dan

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