Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I made it safely to Brisbane flying through and stopping in Vancouver and Hawaii from Toronto. It’s a long trip. It never ceases to amaze me how I can have lunch in Vancouver, then dinner in Waikiki and breakfast in Sydney in such a short period of time all thanks to the miracle of airline travel.

On my day off in Hawaii I had dinner with a long time blog and forum friend, Erik Vossman, who presently calls Waikiki home, living with his girlfriend in a small apartment on the 38th floor of a huge building (what a view!). Erik wrote a blog post about our dinner, which was held at the picturesque Duke’s Restaurant down by the beach. Thanks for the great meal Erik - and it’s my shout next time!

You might know Erik as the guy in charge of the BlogTown Press blog network.

I’m very happy to be back in wonderful weather in Brisbane - all of 27c today. I’m presently living at my mother’s house and will spend some time at my father’s house too (they have been separated since I was 7, but remain good friends), until I sort out my own place. The plan is to head to a mortgage broker and property investment agent, and probably an accountant too, and figure out how much I can borrow and what is the best way to invest my money. There are so many variables to consider I really need the advice of some experts, but unfortunately all of this is going to take some time so I won’t have a proper home for a while.

Of course none of this will impact my blogging. Given I had ample time up in the air traveling I wrote a few articles for this blog and starting this week I have a two part series coming out on how to outsource your blogging, continuing the theme of my blogging as a sustainable business model series.

In the meantime, here’s some links to pass the time:

• Gobala Krishnan is an Internet marketer from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who I’ve followed for a while by reading his blogs. His Easy WordPress tutorials and blogging tips blog has been a sponsor of my blog for a few months, and I also read his personal blog, GobalaKrishnan.com.

  Just recently Gobala put together a lengthy post outlining his journey in Internet marketing, which is a great read if you want to see the path a young Asian Internet marketer has taken to get to where he is today, making a full time income online. This sort of post is exactly what I recommend every blogger does to help build a loyal following of “friends” who read your blog because they find you interesting. I mention this strategy in my blog traffic tips newsletter series and Gobala has implemented it perfectly.

• Christian Montoya recently had one of his blog articles make it to the front page of Reddit and Del.icio.us, driving a ton of traffic. However all was not as good as it seems and you can read exactly how beneficial the exposure was to his traffic and RSS feed subscription count in a follow up article Christian published that includes lots of nice graphs and statistics. The article is called - A look at short-term traffic.
• You may recall I wrote a couple of posts about Alexa - How Does AlexaRank Work And Should You Pay It Any Attention? and How To Boost Your Alexa Ranking In One Easy Step. If you haven’t checked your AlexaRank stats lately you should click your Alexa widget and take a look. You will find new AlexaRank data showing you what countries are responsible for your traffic and what your AlexaRank is in each country. I’m happy to report that this site is in the top 2000 sites in Australia, if you are inclined to believe Alexa traffic data of course.

That’s it for now - enjoy your weekend everyone!

Yaro

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I’m sitting in my hotel room in Hawaii at the moment. I’m about to head to the airport on my final leg of my journey back to Australia. I can’t wait to get back to Brisbane and catch up with everyone.

Rich sent an email to his affiliates today about some new videos he released in the lead-up to the launch of his latest coaching program. He’s using the phrase “Startup to Freedom”, which I think aptly describes what he teaches and is certainly what most people in business would like to achieve. Freedom is certainly my business goal.

If you are interested in systematizing your online business and are considering joining Rich’s program the videos are worth watching.

You can check them out here:

Startup To Freedom Videos

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Recently in the private forums Rich Schefren provides for his Strategic Profits clients there was a discussion started about search engine optimization.

The topic initially began with two questions. The first was about whether non-Google search engines penalize sites that advertise with Google AdWords (false) and the importance of having an “aged domain” and how it relates to number one rankings.

I became interested when Darryl Peddle, who claimed employment at Yahoo!, entered the discussion and offered some great SEO advice. I asked Darryl for permission to republish the tips from the discussion, which I provide below interspersed with my own opinions based on my SEO studies and experiments. Darryl also has a site called Rank Study.

SEO Advice From A Yahoo Insider

This from Darryl regarding the first question about advertising on AdWords and the possibility of penalties from other search engines as a result:

As an employee at Yahoo I can tell you that advertising on Google will in no way affect your rankings in Yahoo… that’s completely inaccurate. Why would we reduce our quality by dropping relevant sites and advertisers?

This regarding aged domains:

Regarding the aging domain. This is information that is available from the latest Google patent. And yes domain aging is becoming a solid way of determining a sites long term value and quality score. It is just one of many (100+ factors), but it’s becoming more important nowadays.

Top 16 SEO Tips

Here are some tips from Darryl, followed by my own opinion and feedback.

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It seems like I post one of these every week lately. This time I’m heading back home, with a brief stop in Hawaii. I’ll be back in Brisbane Friday evening and it sure will be good to be home - although, I need to find a place to live yet to truly feel home.

I’ve had a good time in Toronto the last six months and traveling around a bit in North America too. I’ve met quite a few new people, which is definitely the highlight for me. It’s great to know when I head back to this part of the world, which no doubt will be soon enough, that I have friends to look up.

For now it’s back home to work on finally launching Blog Traffic School. I’m building a team when I return home to support and help launch the first product. It’s pretty clear I can’t put out as high a quality product as I want to without the support of a team, which is my focus as soon as I return. If you want to be involved in an Internet product launch and you are in Brisbane, give me a buzz and maybe you can help out and learn a bunch about Internet marketing along the way.

I’ve got a few SEO related posts coming out this week that I think you might enjoy. I’ll attempt to get them published via hotel net access during the week.

See you soon Australia!

Recommended Links

In the meantime, here’s some links to keep everyone busy:

• You have probably already noticed the spike in RSS feed counts occurring across the blogosphere, which hit here at Entrepreneurs-Journey too, almost doubling my feedcount. I must say it’s nice to know I’m talking to 3000-4000 of you every day. The adjustment is as a result of Google finally publishing feed statistics. I first found out about it from Adnan and Trader Mike also has a good write up about it too.
• Dave from the MODE blog asked me to contribute to his group blog post - Career Success is Just a State of Mind. You should recognize a few of the other contributors as well. Take note Dave has implemented a nice traffic strategy here by asking for brief contributions from a variety of bloggers. He built a nice article by combining the work of many bloggers and while not everyone who contributed will link to him, some of them will, like I just did :-). Dave also has a good post for all you ‘The Secret’ fans in response to the recent Oprah coverage - 8 Secrets to Business and Career Success.
• I have to give a shout-out to my mate JR at the Seeds for Wealth blog. He’s blogging like a mad man, really putting in the hours and pumping out the content. He may have gone a bit too far with his post - John Chow and Yaro Starak Together On Valentines Day?
• Any of my fellow WordPress bloggers who use the Ultimate Tag Warrior and MyAvatars plug-ins should make sure they have the latest versions. After upgrading to WordPress 2.1 my tags started disappearing and you need the updated version of Ultimate Tag Warrior to fix it, although apparently it doesn’t fix the problem for everyone. The first version of MyAvatars, the plug-in I use here to include MyBlogLog avatar images with comments, had an issue where commenter’s email addresses may have been available in the HTML code, which the spam bots would eat up. Make sure you upgrade MyAvatars to fix the problem.
• I’ll end with a quick tip for some great podcasts. Many of you probably already listen to ShoeMoney’s podcast Net Income on Webmaster radio, but you may not realize how many other programs there are. Check out the full range of Webmaster Radio episodes and I’m sure you will find something of interest - Just avoid SEO Rockstars - I’ve never heard so much rambling in my life

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Education Through Observation

During the weekend as I attended the Rich Schefren conference I took notes. I’m not a huge note taker, I generally sit back and absorb and find that the knowledge rises from me in the future when required, however when you receive a lot at once I do like to take some notes for particular key points to really ram them home.

I also had one other motivation to take notes - I wanted to share with you guys and girls some of the biggest take-aways from Rich during the weekend, here on my blog. There are some great “hidden” tips in the advice below and I’ll have some more for you in part 3 of my recap of the conference coming up soon.

A Note About Criticism

I’m about to mention some criticisms that were circulating at the event as I talked to different people. As you will read in a moment I believe, while Rich won’t be super happy with how the weekend played out, he won’t be overly upset either. As he stated, this seminar was better than the first he did for his elite clients and no doubt the next will be even better.

Rich always practices what he preaches, and even though he may have not delivered exactly what he planned to over the weekend, I expect most of his clients will stay with the program and will continue to appreciate and benefit from what Rich offers (I certainly will). This in itself is a business lesson, which I will elaborate on in a moment.

I don’t want you to think that the problems that occurred at the seminar reflect on the quality of the content. Rich hasn’t nutted out all the kinks in the delivery of his program yet and to realise his end goal it will probably take several years - it really is something very innovative and ambitious - I’m not even sure if it possible. For the moment he offers great education and experiential lessons for anyone interested in Internet business.

I for one am very glad that I am on board with Rich and Strategic Profits now so I can watch the evolution of the company. The real value for me comes from watching what Rich does and seeing how his clients react and how the market responds. If you want to see how a guy can go from zero-to-six million plus in revenue in under a year, hire a staff to manage the business for him and see the exact marketing techniques to achieve this, Strategic Profits is ideal.

For me a lot of the core materials Rich teaches are not new because I’ve been studying business and online marketing since I first entered university and discovered the Web in 1997. It’s always good to have the foundations reinforced, to be reminded of what works, and I often need a kick in the pants to take certain actions, which a course like this provides. I certainly find the whole experience motivating, but in my situation seeing how Rich does what he does best - generates huge cashflow in a very short period of time and then constructs a business that runs without him - is the truly powerful experience.

For others, for example my mother - Zahava Starak - who attended the event with me as a guest, are still learning the keys to successful online business, so the program content is crucial, and that’s where the materials Rich provides through his online system are most beneficial.

I don’t know absolutely everything about business and every now and then Rich injects a nice little nugget of knowledge or an example case study that teaches me something new and valuable. For many these nuggets might be worth thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours of freed up time.

In the Beginning It’s All About You And Cashflow

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