This week I celebrate my 26th wedding anniversary, I met my wife in my last week of basic training in the Army and then disapeared abroad for 4 months. On my first leave home I proposed, On my 2nd leave I go married. I could count the number of dates we had on my fingers. This was the time before Cell phones, internet skype and instant messaging. communcation was almost exclusivly pen and paper.. (showing my age now!)

I’ve always been impulsive, I walked out of a good job with a bank and went travelling europe with just a rucksack ,£30 and a belief that things would work out fine. I’d got a job sorted in the south of France even before I left London and I literally bumped into a guy with my rucksack,I apologised, got talking and it turned out that his brother owned a bussines near Monaco.

Any way the purpose of this post isn’t to let you know I am the luckiest person in the world but to tell you that sometimes just go with your instincts not what all your research is telling you. I know people who won’t build a site unless Searches = x competition = y and adwords cost = z.

I’ve often given people guidelines like those myself but they are just that..guidelines.

Recently I’ve been ignoring keyword research and just going with my gut instinct. I start by finding good keyword based domain names and take if from there, you’d be surprised at how much fun and how profitable it can be.

For example if you researched a niche and your keyword research tool said it got:

260 searches a month,
it’s got 67,000 competing pages
and it adwords cost are $0.58

would you build a niche around it? (if you answer yes you’d be mad…. based on that research.)

So far this month that very niche has had 695 impressions and I’ve earned around $27 from it. Not bad for a 1 page site I created in about 25 minutes because I “felt” it would be a good one.

Internet marketing is like all jobs/hobbies you get a feel for it over time.

Fishermen do it, they go against all conventional wisdom and fish a particular spot because they feel it’s right , some times they catch a big fish other times they get nothing. Golfers read the line of a putt then at the last minute aim a bit further off the line because they feel it’s right. Sometimes they hole it somethime they don’t.

This week go with your instincts and build a site because you feel it’s a good one not because the research tells you to…. so what if the research was right and you were wrong at least you’ll have a bit of fun trying to prove that you are better than any tool!!

Trust your gut it’s usually right

P.S. I’ve set up a Special Facebook page for my business and internet marketing as it was freaking some of my friends out to see that I actually do do some work occasionally and have a life outside of the local bar!! As a result I’ve lost the followers I’d picked up via my personal facebook page. So if you’d like to get nitified on facebook when i make a post then just click on the networked blogs widget on the right … (it won’t look so weird then that I’m the only person following me!!)

As ever please feel free to comment using the wordpress comment box or the facebook comment box..

P.P.S If you are coming to the London “Lets have a beer” meet up on Thursday bring thermals!

Mark “Dragged Kicking and Screaming into the 21st century!” Thompson

There are only 2 things that count when building links, link Authority and the number of links you have. Link authority refers to how google and others search engines view the quality of the site the links are on and link volume refers to how many links you have.

If possible go for Authority over Volume. Do try to work out approximatly how many links you’ll need to get to the top of the search engines.. there is nothing worse than spending months getting thousands of links ony to find that you only needed 30 or 40 links.

Make sure you know if it’s worthwhile being #1 in google. I have sites ranking #1 that get 5000 visitors a month and make me $30  I have other that get 500 and make me $150 or more. It’s far easier to rank highly if there is less competition for low volume search terms.

Try to avoid a huge influx of links to your site, steady and regular is what seems to work best for me. Also get links from different locations and different styles, having 500 articles on ezine articles is nice but a waste of effort. Use a mixture of links such as social bookmarking, article directories, guest blogging, blog commenting and blog networks.

Become a stalker… find out where the sites ranking above you are getting links from and replicate it… then get better quality links.

Don’t expect to find all your links in the search engines, they won’t show up BUT the search engines do usually know about them.

When you start to get links your sites ranking will probably drop to start with…don’t panic just keep doing what your doing and it will come back higher.

As I said before link building sucks and no one really likes doing it , it lacks the buzz you get from finding a great keyword or domain or the sense of achievement you get from building a site. Luckily you can pretty much automate the whole process if you don’t mind spending money on tools or outsourcing.

I wrote about a free system of backlinking you could try earlier in the year http://mjthompson.net/496/a-free-alternative-to-outsourcing I am still using the paid version of both tools.

However don’t be afraid to pay for solutions if you think they will benefit you, I recently started paying $147 per month to get backlinks to 5 sites,and it’s been so successful I just paid to add another 5 sites to the system. The additional income from only 2 of the sites I added originally was enough to cover the costs of all ten.

Wow that was my 200th post on this blog….never thought I’d write that many when I started!

This is the first tip in what i hope will be a long series. let me know if you enjoy it

In the past I’ve mentioned that if you throw some links at your articles at ezinearticles they will out rank other articles in the same niche and drive more traffic to your site.  Now I am going to take this one step further.

Every Author at Ezinearticles has an rss feed that links your recent articles. You can find yours by using the following format : http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=UserName . Now take that link and add it to sites like twitterfeed.com (which updates twitter) and friendfeed.com . You can now distribute the feed from friendfeed to rss aggregators

Everytime you add a new article at ezine articles a couple of interesting things happen.  Your Ezinearticles feed gets updated this in turn updates friendfeed and twitterfeed.  Twitterfeed updates Twitter and all your followers see your new article,  As will anyone following you on friendfeed and where ever you have added the feed to rss aggregators.

Do I need to mention backlinks again? No I don’t think I do there should be lightbulbs coming on as you read this, these 2 sites are just the tip of the iceberg.

I hope you enjoyed that tip watch out for more ..