I’ve been wrestling with this for some time now but I’ve taken the decision to close Twenty Steps.

The simple fact is that I’ve not got the time nor motivation to keep the site running as a going concern. My life has moved on from where it was when I started this three years ago and, if the truth be told, keeping the site active has become something of a chore.

I’ll outline all the reasons and the next steps after the break but, if you can’t be arsed to click on the Keep Reading link, I’ll thank you for taking the time to stop by and wish you well.

OK. So you’re still with me. Good.

Deciding to close Twenty Steps wasn’t easy for me but it all boiled down these three things:

1. Lack of interest in subject matter
2. Spam
3. Change of personal focus.

Lack of interest in subject matter

Blogging itself has moved on since I launched this site. I outlined a lot of this in my post Why Blogging Is Like The Norwegian Blue. In my opinion, the one man blog is no longer as relevant as it once was.

A lot of the blogs I used to read that were authored by one person either no longer exist or now feature guest writers.

I covered 3 topics on this site (blogging, making money online and search marketing) and the fact is that they now bore me shitless. I can’t find the motivation to write about them any more.

With one or two notable exceptions I no longer subscribe to any of those make money online blogs. It was the same old crap regurgitated from one to the next. Ultimately the way these guys were making money was to get you suckers to buy the latest fad via their affiliate links. Over time I lost all respect for them as their thinly veiled sales pushes became less palatable.

I’m not saying affiliate marketing is dead. Quite the opposite. However writing about ways to make money through affiliate marketing leaves me cold.

I’ve never purported to be an SEO. In fact I’ve referred to myself as a searchspotter on a number of occasions. Sure I make money by offering SEO style services to some of my clients but I was more interested in the methodology behind SEO and, to a certain extent, the people who were the movers and shakers in the field. That’s changed as I see more and more people jump on the SEO bandwagon and, crucially, a change in attitudes in the people I once respected. The SEO sphere has become a bitchy place that I want no part of.

Besides, why waste my energies on writing about these 3 topics when I would be more gainfully employed actually doing them?

Spam

The sheer volume of shitty spam comments I’ve been getting here over the last few months was one of the straws that broke this particular camels back. I thought I would maybe find the motivation to continue writing but I began to resent Twenty Steps because it was taking up my time editing/deleting/flagging all the spam I was getting.

Maybe it was my own fault in enabling DoFollow (something I have now removed) and for trusting in people to play the game. I won’t make that mistake again.

Email spam, comment spam and social media spam are getting worse. I launched into a rant on Twitter this evening because I saw the phrase “RIP Harry Patch” was trending. Harry Patch was one of the last remaining WWI veterans who passed away today, in case you didn’t know. Well the majority of the tweets I saw using the phrase were parasites using his death to market their shitty websites or services.

How much more fucking disrespectful can you be?

I’ve had all sorts of crap masquerading as legitimate comments on this site since enabling DoFollow. I’ve had idiots posting comments from the same IP address using different email addresses and different spammy affiliate sites who then send me hateful messages via the contact form because I’ve deleted their comments.

Keep going, fellas. You’ll soon kill the goose that lay the golden egg.

I’m seeing more and more blogs/sites that require user registration to leave a comment or are simply not offering the option at all.

Change of personal focus

I’ve had a real problem juggling my balls for the last 12 months. That’s not a medical condition, before you ask. No, as any long term reader or someone who took the time to read the old About page will know, I combined blogging with my film work and client work. Over the last year I’ve found that I’ve spread myself too thin and something had to give.

I’m not going to become an online recluse or anything like that but I am certainly going to scale back my online operations. I had too many sites that I was simply not investing enough effort in to make it worth maintaining. That’s not just websites I owned, I’m talking about social media platforms, forums, online communities.

My online persona was becoming a watered down version of me that I no longer had the time nor inclination to fix. Well that’s got to change.

Next Steps - Me

I’m going to be selling off a number of my domain names and sites on Flippa over the coming months. I’m going to be cancelling my accounts with a lot of the social media sites I was previously an active member of. I am going to focus on the areas that I have a genuine passion for.

I guess in a lot of ways I’m looking to rebrand ‘me’ online. A lot of my thinking is covered in the link above but I don’t believe that I can be me whilst trying to be multiple version of ‘me’.

I’m probably going to scale back my online activities (with the exception of Twitter. I Goddam love it!) and focus more on my writing and film based work.

Ultimately I guess I want to stop being a slave to the Internet and go back to enjoying it.

Next Steps - Twenty Steps

Over the coming weeks I will be deleting a number of the more personal posts. The ones that relate directly to me. After that, well I’ve just renewed the domain name for another year so the site will remain active for that time. I’ll no longer be accepting comments on the site. If you want to get in contact then do so via the contact page.

Is the site up for sale?

After I’ve deleted the personal posts then yes. Yes it is. How much? Make me an offer. I’m not going to go into figures here. Drop me a line if you’re interested. The site has been quoted on a number of mainstream publications and still gets a lot of love from Big G (despite the recent bitch slap) and some of the social sites. As an example the last 48 hours have seen 2k+ StumbleUpon visitors for a two year old post that ranks 3rd out of 120 million. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

In Closing

I’ll be honest and say this hurts. For a period of time this blog meant the world to me but, like a lot of relationships, the infatuation passed and I could see it’s faults and even though breaking up is hard, I know it’s the right decision.

I want to thank a few people here. My old business partner who has previously been referred to as Bill but who is really Richard for introducing me to the concept of blogging for money. Damn you, Richard! My online buddy BlogBloke who, despite his often curmudgeonly approach to making money blogs, still stood by me. To Andy Beard for being the only person from Poland who didn’t leave me comment spam. To Michael Gray for writing the excellent article on How To Shut Down A Blog. To Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker for not only proving that bald is beautiful *koff* but for being the only two “gurus” that I actually pay any attention to after three years in the field. To Rand and the guys at SEOmoz for being an invaluable resource although the outing needs to stop, m’kay? To Danny and everyone at SEL for being my #1 source of all things SEO.

And most importantly to all of the people who have come to this site over the last three years.

It’s been emotional.

I’ve written about it in the past, seen it happen to a lot of other folks and suffered a brief drop in green pixie dust in the past but, as of last week, I have been officially bitch slapped by Google.

My toolbar PageRank has been removed and I am one step away from the dreaded grey bar of Doom.

The question is: Am I bovvered?

Well after the initial disappointment, the answer is no. The effects of losing toolbar PageRank are negligible, as far as I can see. During SlapFest 07, a number of people saw little or no change in the performance in the SERPs. It’s early days for me but I’ve seen no change in search referrals to the site. Besides, let’s look on the bright side.

1. I don’t have to read any more blog posts about PageRank updates cuz I’m not bovvered anymore
2. All the weasly DoFollow comment spammers will leave me alone as I’ve got no more juice to give

If the situation changes and I start to see a drop in search referrals then I will most certainly be bovvered but, right now, I am not.

So did any of you get slapped last week? Seen any changes to your search referrals as a result? What about you folks who got dinged in SlapFest 07?

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The online world is awash with stories about Twitter and how it’s going to revolutionise the way we interact on the Internet. No matter where you look, Twitter is there in your face. Newspapers, radio, TV, your grandmother. Everyone is talking about Twitter.

As regular readers will know, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon comparatively recently and, in the comments to that post, people have asked me how I was getting on with it and, crucially, whether I was making any money on Twitter.

Now if you’ve been reading my occasional ramblings on Twenty Steps for any length of time, you’ll know that one of the underpinning foundations to this site is that I blog the mistakes I make trying to make money online. Don’t presume that since I haven’t posted anything for a while that I haven’t made any mistakes. Quite the opposite. I regularly fuck up. I just don’t tell you every time it happens.

However on Wednesday 13 May 2009 I did something so monumentally stupid that it warrants a blog post.

As you may or may not know, I work in the independent film industry and I’ve been working on a zombie movie for the last few years. I once posted a request for stuff for the movie and got a lot of really good people helping me out including the guys at Digg, Mashable, Delicious, SMX, Aviva, SEO Chicks, Modern Gent and ePromos.

Today, I decided to launch an Amazon aStore for the film. The way I see it is that any independent film needs to find ways to fund their movies. The film establishment aren’t going to help you so why not look for alternative ways of making a few dollars? So I trot off to my Amazon affiliate page, create an aStore and publish it. Once I check to make sure everything is working OK, I decide to announce it to the world via the recently created zombie movies Twitter profile.

Here, in no particular order, are the three things I right royally screwed up on.

1. I didn’t use a single keyword, #hashtag or anything that people might be likely to use to search for on Twitter. Outside of the handful of people who are following either me or the movie page, nobody will ever see that tweet
2. I linked to the blog post about the launch of the store rather than the store itself. I thought I was so clever using the “zombieshop” part of the shortened URL that I forgot to actually link to the shop itself
3. I decided to tweet at 7.55pm UK time. 7.55pm=11.55am some US time. 5 minutes before the scheduled maintenance that had been advertised on Twitter all day which led to Twitter being unavailable for the next hour or so.

What a complete and utter clueless fuckwit I am. You’d think that after tinkering with online marketing for the last few years that I would have got the hang of it by now.

You’d be wrong.

In all of my…ooohhh…let’s see…four months of using Twitter, I’ve not seeded my tweets with many affiliate links or been overly aggressive about promoting any of my blog posts. The one time I do it, I screw up.

How many clicks have I had from that one post?

8

I got more clicks from a link about a homosexual elephant than I did from this one attempt at using Twitter to market something. Still, in the spirit of Twenty Steps I have learned a number of things today.

Firstly make sure you check to see when Twitter is going down for maintenance. You might want to hold your best stuff back.

Secondly, look beyond your immediate audience when composing a tweet. Y’know, like you do when you’re writing your web copy and stuff.

And finally, no matter how much of a twat you think you are, there are always opportunities to prove you’ve been underrating yourself.

BONUS REASON

Sometimes 3 reasons just isn’t enough to illustrate why I’m a clueless numpty so here’s another one for you:

4. Rather than do the sensible thing and schedule this post to come out around midday UK time on Thursday (i.e. when anyone might be up to read it), my Kronenbourg addled brain thought it would be a splendid idea to hit publish at 4am, send a tweet and then crash out for 7 hours of alcohol induced coma. Needless to say when I threw woke up this morning, the traffic to the post was less than inspiring. In fact it was less than 1.

Lesson - drinking and blogging do not mix well together. Step away from the keyboard, you drunken bum.

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As part of my continuing mid life crisis project to streamline what I’m doing online, I’m pleased to announce my new blog MikeyBee.com.

You’ll notice that a couple of blog posts from here have been moved across to the new site (Do You Suffer From Internet Schizophrenia and Ryanair: Bloggers Are Lunatics and Idiots). The more observant of you will also notice the Twenty Steps sidebar has been tidied up with fewer categories. The uber observant will also spot that around 50 old posts have been deleted.

Why?

Well as I said in my last post, I’m wanting to take Twenty Steps back to basics and cover the original three main topics - search, blogging and online marketing. Anything which didn’t fit into these categories either got shifted around or got binned. In the case of the two blog posts moved to the new site it was because they were fresh enough to still be relevant.

Moving forward, I’m going to be a lot more focused about what I write about here. If it doesn’t fall into one of the three topics above, it won’t appear on Twenty Steps - I’ll probably write about it on the new blog so if you think you might miss my thought provoking *koff* posts about online life, subscribe to MikeyBee.com so you still get your fix

I’m planning to revamp this site using the excellent Thesis theme by Chris Pearson. I’ve been a long time fan of his WordPress themes and, having played around with Thesis on the new site, his latest one seriously rocks.

I’m also considering reviving the original Challenge. You know. That stupid idea that you only need to double a dollar twenty times to make a million? Nothing definite as yet but I guess I got a bit misty eyed when going through all the old posts about it so we’ll see, eh?

Will I be posting more regularly here? I would imagine so. Now that I’m back into blogging mode with the new site there’s a good chance that some of that might just spill over to Twenty Steps.

Now, where have I heard that before?

Well that’s got to be the longest title I’ve ever written but it captures what I’m after relatively well. You see I’m looking to start a new blog and want to move across some of the old posts from Twenty Steps to the new site. Over the last three years, this site has become something of a brain dump of all things web based and I want to take it back to being focused on the original three main topics - search, blogging and online marketing - and how they fit together.

What I’m looking to do is take off any unrelated content and move the best of the old articles to the new blog. Not only does this make Twenty Steps fresher, more focused and more relevant, it also means that the new blog is launched with ‘new’ content without me slaving over a hot keyboard for weeks on end writing pillar articles. This appeals to my lazy side

From a search engine perspective I know I’ll lose any PageRank from these old posts but, to be honest, that doesn’t bother me too much. It’s not like I’ve got a lot to lose anyway…I’ll be 301′ing the old URLs to the new site. I know this can take a month or two to filter through but I’m happy to take the initial traffic hit for the longer term benefit to both sites.

So the requirement is this:

A way to move selected categories and/or posts complete with comments from the old blog to the new blog

Now an obvious way of doing that would be copy the entire database across to the new blog and simply delete the stuff that I’m either ditching because it’s crap (I know, I know..difficult to believe but one or two posts might fall into that category) or is staying on Twenty Steps. In theory this works but there has to be a better way of doing things which is why I’m putting this one out to the WordPress experts out there.

So if you know of a simple and painless way of moving individual categories from one WordPress install to another, please let me know through the comments.

After months and months of avoiding it like the plague, I have finally done it.

Yes. I have joined Twitter.

I’ve been watching the Twitter story unfold over the last 6-9 months and, to be honest, thought it was all a bit of a laugh. I mean, how on earth can you possibly say anything in 140 characters that you can’t say in a proper blog post? Besides, I was having something of a blogging hiatus anyway so why should I consider it?

I guess the reasons to give it a whirl are because, no matter how much I avoid it, Twitter is here to stay. Well, for the moment, anyway. As someone who likes to try and keep his finger on the pulse of what’s happening on the Internet, it seems crazy that I’ve left it so long. Besides, as part of my long, hard look at online branding, it made sense to secure my name before someone else did.

I have an unusual surname so why should I worry? Well I know of at least two other guys in the UK with the same name as me (yes - I have Googled them both) so I figured it was time to start twittering…or tweeting…or twatting…or whatever it’s called before they did.

I’m off to read up on Twitter etiquette and what have you. In the meanwhile, please feel free to follow me on Twitter and watch me fumble my way around. Who knows? I may even update Twitter more than I do Twenty Steps…

Follow me here: @MikeBusson

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I’m a bit embarrassed I didn’t clean the place up before you came. Nobody told me you were coming otherwise I would have got rid of all the cobwebs and empty beer cans and maybe put out some peanuts and some light refreshments. I’d have definitely written some new bloody blog posts, that’s for sure!

Oh well, in the absence of any new stuff perhaps you’d like to have a mooch through the archives? I’m guessing that you’re looking how to get on the front page of Google so perhaps the SEO section might be of interest? There’s a nice one in there about how I doubled search engine traffic in 5 minutes, some interesting stuff about link building, 10 tips to improve your search engine ranking and a list of search engine friendly directories.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a wander around, maybe even subscribe to the RSS feed. Who knows? I might even write a new blog post this side of Christmas

You never check your stats every hour just to see your hits
There’s no creativeness coming out of your finger tips
You’re trying hard not to show it (baby)
But baby, baby you know it

You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Oh, that blogging feeling
You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Now it’s gone, gone, gone
Whoa-oh-oh

Your dashboard shows it’s months since you last wrote any new posts
You know it’s been so long, you’ve forgotten the name of your hosts
Your RSS figures dropping (baby)
And baby, it’s all down to you stopping

You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Oh, that blogging feeling
You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Now it’s gone, gone, gone
Whoa-oh-oh

Baby baby, you’re running WordPress 2.2
And you no longer comment like you used to do
You had a blog..a blog..a blog you updated every day
So don’t..don’t..don’t..don’t let it slip away

Baby (baby), baby (baby),
I beg you please..please
I read your blog (I read your blog)
I need your blog (I need your blog)
So bring it on back (So bring it on back)
Bring it on back (so bring it on back)

Bring back that blogging feeling
Whoa, that blogging feeling
Bring back that blogging feeling
Cuz it’s gone…gone…gone…
And I can’t go on…
No-oh-oh…

The argument is that by applying the “nofollow” attribute to generic pages (i.e. About, Contact, Privacy Policy, etc.) that you’ll prevent link juice from being applied to pages you’re not concerned about ranking in the SERPs and, therefore, pass more juice to the more important pages on your site. For a more detailed explanation, have a read of the SEOmoz article on PageRank sculpting.

I’ve never really seen any evidence that PageRank sculpting led to a significant long term increase in search engine referrals. Even Rands post on their own PageRank sculpting experiment mentions that some of their clients saw little or no improvement and whilst I agree with Michael Gray that no company needs their terms of service in the SERPs, I’ve always questioned whether it was a worthwhile exercise.

Today Google published an article entitled Importance of Link Architecture where Maile Ohye says the following:

It’s not something we, as webmasters who also work at Google, would really spend time or energy on. In other words, if your site already has strong link architecture, it’s far more productive to work on keeping users happy with fresh and compelling content rather than to worry about PageRank sculpting.

So basically what Big G are saying is that there are better things you can do with your time than fannying around with “nofollow” attributes on your internal links.

What about you? Have you tried PageRank sculpting using “nofollow”? Has it worked for you or was it a waste of time?

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Over the last year we have seen an explosion in the number of websites which allow users to watch TV shows online. Almost every week TechCrunch highlight another new company offering online video on demand. VOD is big business and is undoubtedly going to be an integral part of the future of broadcasting.

So why is it that UK TV companies are persecuting Firefox users?

Back in August of last year I wrote about the launch of the BBC iPlayer. I mentioned at the time that I found it incredible that something as ground breaking as the iPlayer (the BBC were the first to launch online TV in the UK) was incompatible with Macs and the Windows Vista operating system. The Beeb eventually upgraded the iPlayer and it now works on Vista but is still unavailable to Linux or Macintosh users. They offer streaming video to Linux and Mac users but this is where we start to hit problems.

Watching streaming video on the iPlayer in Firefox can be a frustrating experience. It regularly freezes, skips or just simply times out. When I use Internet Explorer the viewing experience is generally fine. I don’t think I’ve had any problems using the iPlayer in IE.

Moving on to the competition, I tried to use the ITV Catch Up service for the first time last month. A friend of mine had appeared in the TV show ‘Who Dares Sings’ and I wanted to watch his performance. Trust me, it’s not the kind of programme I’d normally watch but since Jonny Cat was singing, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Well what an absolute ball breaker of an experience that was. Unlike the BBC iPlayer which uses embedded Flash to play the TV shows, ITV Catch Up insisted that I install Microsoft Silverlight before I could watch any of their TV shows online. Now I’d installed Silverlight a few months earlier to watch the Live Mesh demo so why did I have to install it again?

Anyway I reinstalled Silverlight and still no TV. All I was getting was a prompt to install Silverlight. Despite repeated attempts I was unable to view anything via Firefox but as soon as I opened up IE it worked just fine.

Now according to Microsoft, Silverlight is “a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web“. Well that’s all well and good unless the browser happens to be Firefox and the platform happens to be ITV Catch Up because it’s as buggy as hell. As with the BBC iPlayer, the ITV products freezes, skips and generally misbehaves in Firefox but works fine on IE.

So far, so bad. The two main UK TV stations don’t play nicely with Firefox so how will the others fare?

Don’t even get me started on Channel 4. Their online TV service 4oD requires software installation for starters, is not available to Mac users and only supports Internet Explorer. You cannot use 4oD with Firefox unless you have IE installed on your computer. A lot of Firefox users have uninstalled IE from their machines so the only way for them to use 4oD is to reinstall Microsofts crappy resource hungry buggy web browser otherwise no Channel 4 for them. Just how ridiculous is that? You cannot view streaming video via your browser. You have to register and install the 4oD player which, incidentally, causes Windows Firewall exceptions.

All of this to watch the occasional episode of Countdown in the hope Carol Vorderman has a wardrobe malfunction and shows us her nips.

As with the ITV product, the only reason I initially used Demand Five was because a friend of mine was appearing in a TV show and I’d missed it. Given my experience with ITV, I wasn’t looking forward to it but I was pleasantly surprised. I had an initial gripe that I had to register and provide my email address but, after that, everything was plain sailing and much to my surprise everything worked perfectly in Firefox. No cranking up IE just to watch TV online. The service worked just fine using my Vista PC and the Firefox browser. I didn’t have to compromise anything to use the service. However, as with all of the other services, Mac users are fresh out of luck. It’s a Windows only product.

How ironic that the least watched mainstream UK TV station was the only video on demand service that worked nicely with Firefox.

The final UK VOD service I’ll briefly have a look at is the recently rebranded Sky Player. Previously packaged as Sky Broadband and Sky Anytime on PC, the guys at Sky decided to rename the product so that it sounds nothing like the online TV product marketed by their big rivals at the BBC.

*koff*

Anyway it’s another service which requires downloading and installing a standalone player. As far as I can see wading through the information on the site, there is no streaming video content available through your web browser. It’s the Sky way or the highway.

I was considering installing Sky Player just so I could give it a fair shot but a quick search on Google for Sky Player problems returned way too many results for me to even consider it. Add to that that unless you’re a Sky subscriber there doesn’t seem to be a vast amount of content available unless you’re prepared to pay for it.

Does it work with Firefox? I don’t know for sure but, again, a quick Google search for Sky Player Firefox problems suggests it doesn’t play nicely with the browser. And Mac users strike out again, I’m afraid, along with Linux users and 64 bit Vista users.

UK Online TV - The Conclusion

Basically if you want to watch online TV in the UK and you’re a Mac or Linux user, you’re fucked. It’s not going to happen.

If you’re a Firefox user you’re not much better off. It seems that the main five UK broadcasters are intent on ignoring nearly 30% of the online community by making their streaming product only available to IE users. Sure you can watch stuff using Firefox but the user experience sucks.

Microsoft’s browser market share is 72.2% and falling (Source - Computerworld). Just in case you’ve been on another planet for the last few weeks, Google recently launched the Chrome browser and you can expect that to chip away even further at Microsoft’s market share so why are the TV broadcasters focusing exclusively on the ailing browser?

In the UK, the BBC iPlayer stands head and shoulders above all of the other competing services and has improved consistently since its launch. However why is it only Five’s offering that works seamlessly with the Firefox browser? Folks complained to the BBC about the lack of Firefox support back in August 07 so why have they not addressed the issue fully? Why have ITV chosen to make it nigh on impossible to watch TV shows using Firefox? Why did Channel 4 bother at all?

Online TV in the UK has come a long way over the last 18 months but it will ultimately fail unless it embraces non-Microsoft software.

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