Over the many years I’ve been developing websites and working in Search Engine Optimisation I’ve developed a number of scripts, tools and bookmarklets.

Inspired by Small business advice from Jason Fried 37signals, then reading Getting Real and with a pricing structure influenced by
Pinboard I decided to release the Online Sales Webmaster Tools as monthly paid subscription.

I’ve already got more than 50 tools and bookmarklets in the offering and I have many more to publish. The price increases with each new subscriber so it pays to get in early.

These tools are forged in the “less is more” mold, so if you find you outgrow them and need more, consider the SEObook Community & Tools or Raven SEO.

In the meantime, the Online Sales Tools will do pretty much all you need as a webmaster at a low monthly cost. Note that the annual fee is less than the cost it would take to pay a programmer to develop just one or two of these tools.

Get your subscription here: Online Sales Webmaster Tools

On the 28th of February I was sent the message that the domain was to be deleted that day. I still waited and on the 1st of March I renewed the domain.

As of the 3rd of March Google reported the domain as grey PR (using the SEO Book toolbar) and no cache date. Searching for the domain name (which is a unique phrase) and my domain wasn’t returned.

Now it’s the end of the month, and I’ve searched again. The domain is returned as the second result and the Page Rank now appears as PR1 with a cache date of 3 weeks ago.

The domain remained a PR3 after the January Google Page Rank update so the drop unfortunate and looks like it was recalculated after the expiry. As regards the cache, as the domain still gets no content love from me so the date is reasonable.

I was absolutely delighted to be included in a fantastic free eBook “Web Strategies for Small Businesses“. The book is a compilation of small business tips focusing on multiple Internet strategies. I provided the “Building Web Success – Optimizing Online Conversions”, but there’s good stuff there too!

• Getting Ahead on the Web – Strategies To Make More Of Your Time Online, featuring comments from Aaron Wall of SEO book.
• Understanding the Basics of Local Search – Optimizing Your Local Business Listings with Vedran Tomic.
• Should My Business be More Social Online? – The Role of Social Media in Your Small Business – Aaron Wall
• Visual Communication through Web Design – Strategy and Psychology of Web Design with Melvin Ram from Web Design Company Net.
• Strategic Linking for Success – 3 Things to Know About Linking from Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link.
• Drive Net-New Sales Revenue – Don’t Overlook Paid Search Marketing by Geordie Carswell from PPC Blog.

The eBook is free for download to visitors of AdvanceMe.com, a leading merchant cash advance provider in the United States.

Boutiques.com is a personalized shopping experience, brought to you by Google, that lets you find and discover fashion goods through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers — celebrities, stylists, designers, and fashion bloggers. Boutiques uses visual technology to help fashionistas discover and shop their look and creates the opportunity for designers to showcase their collections and latest inspirations online

Firstly I noticed that despite getting top fashion bloggers on board to develop shops, they don’t have the good grace to follow the links out to them. Over here with Karla of Karlas Closet shop, you’ll notice that the link to karlascloset.com is nofollow. Surely if Google have recruited someone to create a shop they must trust them? The great and the good Google can’t be hoarding page rank can they?

Click to see code.

However, whilst it’s obviously been under the hands of a good e-commerce designer, Google haven’t thought to pass it by someone at the SEO team. A friend at Clothes noticed they made a fundamental launch error and left noindex, nofollow in the robots meta tag.

What effect does this have? At the time of writing there is not a single page from boutiques.com in their own index.

A couple of things would have helped here:

• A launch checklist.
• Checking out pages using my seo bookmarklet.

It’s good to know that even the biggest development teams on the web can make simple errors!

Update:
Clothes.org.uk have now posted Google Invites Top Celebrities to Join Boutiques.com But Won’t Let Their Own Search Engine In.

The difference seemed to be that they previously had the https version indexed.

The reason for their increase in ranking could be:

1. They are no longer splitting the page rank / link equity to two versions of the URL.
2. The https is slower to load and if Google are indexing that, it can impact the rankings.

The hawkers of the products promise something for nothing. To just flick a switch to massive wealth from passive incomes. Get rich whilst watching the Superbowl!

It’s all horseshit.

The schemes I see are spammy in their very nature, they are promoted in hyped up ways and often rely on techniques from the black hat world. They loudly proclaim their use of Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter and other social media websites. Using their billions of visitors to make it seem possible that thousands will flock to your site – if you buy the right tools and build the right network.

They’ll suggest squidoo hubs, hubpages, blogger, wordpress.com and much more to interlink your pages in all sorts of convoluted and useless approaches to link building.

Somehow the creating the masses of content is easy and instant. Sometimes it actually is with tools that pull in feeds and blend them into sites with video content, news articles and perhaps even a space for you to add a few words of your own.

The Video Frontier

Other techniques encourage the next wave of the Internet. The “gurus” encourage making videos and uploading them with yet another low price high impact tool to upload the movies to hundreds of video sites. Naturally all web 2.0 entrepreneurs have good camera technique, is interesting to watch and listen to, and more importantly has something worthwhile to say with an unique vision and voice.

“Entrepreneurs”! That in itself is a lie. Sitting on your arse and following instruction from the latest “Great White Hope” guru hardly makes you an entrepreneur. Making $100 a month whilst spending $500 keeping up with the ebook-info-whores is hardly good business.

One thing to ask is why do people share these tools and ideas? Why would they really make it easy for you to take the bread off their table? For $97, $77$ – no just $57 if you act now. Offer not to be repeated, spaces limited.

They offer it because it no longer works. It probably worked briefly. And in creating their new take on old idea they probably wrote everything down knowing precisely that in a month or two everything would go pair shaped, but then they’d have an e-book to sell showing their success.

It’s still all horseshit.

In advertising systems that are currently working they are inviting Google to kill them. Painting a massive target on the back of everyone that uses it.

If I were to publicise a system that I used to generate thousands in revenue quickly and easily Google wouldn’t want the system to last. Why? Because quick and easy normally equals spam. Furthermore, inevitably a technique will be taken by some individuals who will ramp it up to extreme degrees. Instead of building one site with a few dozen pages and be content with a hundred extra bucks a month they’ll build hundreds or thousands of sites with tens of thousands of pages. A technique that worked in low levels is now making massive footprints. If these low level quality pages are ranking, you make Google look stupid. A wise business decision from any want-to-be entrepreneur is not to make Google look stupid.

But the aim is not a lie. I can make $100 a day and it is easy. It’s easy because I put in years and years of work into web development. I saw what worked. I put years and years into building automated tools that did little to nothing long term. If I had developed a site with tonnes of authority that would be a different story. I wasted other years in playing the social media game. As musicians say, “I paid my dues”.

Here’s what works.

Decent content on a trusted domain.

More so, decent content on a trusted domain on topics people search for and for phrases advertisers pay for.

Decent content, not stellar, not exceptional, not even good. Decent is all that is required. If you go above and beyond decent into good then all the better for you. Nothing much on Ehow is above decent and frankly a lot of it is rubbish.

Build a website, get people linking to it. It starts to rank. You start to earn money. That’s pretty easy isn’t it? Easier than having dozens of Web 2.0 properties all pointing in circles to your money site. Easier than generating dozens of pointless and mostly unwatched videos. You want money that way, spewing out content? Then join Demand Media and earn $15 an article or $200 for a video assignment of 10 videos.

If you’d rather my technique of building something for you, something that lasts beyond the next phase of Google’s ever evolving algorithm then read on. If you’d rather pay $97 for an ebook or access to a members only VIP club that will teach you the secrets to untold wealth. Well, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

The simplest way to monetise a website is AdSense. It’s plug and play for the most part. You probably already have an account. If not, go and get one first. Other advertising programs are available, but they generally don’t pay so well. http://www.chitika.com/ is another if you can’t get into AdSense

Beyond AdSemse is affiliate marketing and selling links. Selling links will likely get your site burned in the long run unless you are good at it. Affiliate marketing takes more work and planning, after you have a couple of decent informational sites under your belt you should look to move up the value chain and get into affiliate marketing.

Part two of this post will detail a couple of methods to really generate $100 a day. It’s not quick and easy. It takes time, investment and bloody hard work.

• #1 gets 42% of clicks, #2 get 12%, #3 8%
• What difference would being number one make to your business?
• If only it was that simple:
• advertising
• indented listings
• "one box"
• "ten pack"
• maps
• images
• video
• and other stuff! Combine to complicate rankings and reduce CTR.

• Have you asked for a link today?
• Match the title tag of the page to the phrase you’re targeting.
• Headings – Use H1 to target your main phrase.
• Sub Headings – Use H2 and H3 for other variants.
• Description – Have a compelling meta description to encourage click through on the SERPs. Consider this advertising copy.
• Content – include further versions of your keyphrase to cover more "long tail" options.
• Perpetual motion – continuing to build content based on success and opportunity based upon analytics and conversions
• If you’re local, add your address.
• Speak to your customers – ask for links, reviews and testimonials.

• Speak your customers’ language: is your "widget" a "thingy" to your customers?
• Don’t keep on doing something because it’s always been that way. Look for new angles and opportunities.

• Free tools
• Google Adwords
• Google Insight
• Google Trends
• Wordtracker

• Who ranks?
  • High Authority sites
  • Massive Corporations
  • News organisations
  • Domains that exactly match the keyphrase
• How many unique inbound links do the top results have?
  • Look for unique number of Class C subnets in Majestic SEO
  • Examine the anchor text of the links
• Are the top results spammy?
  • Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
  • The three Ps of internet marketing – Pills, Porn & Poker – require a different tool set and methodology and mindset to more conventional marketing.

• Start to measure
• Google Analytics
• Piwik – Open source Web analytics
• AWStats – Free log file analyzer for advanced statistics.
• What to watch
• Six Web Metrics / KPI’s To Die For | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Building Web Success: Optimizing Online Conversions, Part One: Goals and Tracking
• Don’t forget to look for opportunity to improve upon success

• Calculating Your Conversion Rate
• 16 Web Design Tips for Higher Sales
• Techniques to improve your conversion rate
• Ask for the sale
• Focus on highlighting benefits, versus features. (Thanks to Wine Guppy for the reminder!)
• Read The Big Red Fez & Don’t Make Me Think
• In a nutshell – Rank higher, convert more = print money.