Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Gain Higher Ground Podcast!

In this session, I interview niche site expert and SEO expert Joseph Archibald.

Joseph first appeared on my radar in 2010 when he made an extensive post on the Warrior Forum in which he demonstrated (in real-time!) his unique backlinking strategy by promoting a brand new niche site to the first page in Google.

Since then, his SEO strategies have been adopted by many marketers, perhaps the most well known being Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income.

Click here to download the MP3

I wanted to theme this interview on free traffic methods and SEO. However, we ended up covering a number of different topics…

00:00 Introduction
01:41 How Joseph Got Started With Internet Marketing
05:04 Living The Internet Marketing Lifestyle In Malaysia
06:36 Overview Of Joseph’s 30 Day Challenge Warrior Forum Backlinking Strategy
15:57 How Seo Has Changed Over The Years
21:10 Link Building Techniques
32:32 Assessing Competition & Erratic Yahoo Link Data (Market Samurai, Seo Majestic, Seo Elite, Open Site Explorer)
37:58 Advice For People Just Starting Out In Internet Marketing
41:24 The Bing & Facebook Alliance And The Impact For Google
44:30 The Power Of Giving Away Free Content
48:21 Working With Joint Venture Partners
53:30 Future Product Plans & Working With Experts (4-Hour Work Week)
58:50 Advice For Starting & Growing Your Online Business
66:25 Wrapping Up, Joseph’s Blog, his original Warrior Forum Post and his 40 Day Challenge EBook

If you like, you can download the MP3 by right clicking here.

[spoiler]Download PDF Transcript (Right Click)

Rob:        Welcome, everybody, this is Rob Cornish here from GainHigherGround.com and I’m really excited today because we have a very special guest to talk to.  I know a lot of you are very interested in learning more about free traffic generation techniques and specifically using those skills to create and grow profitable niche websites.  Well with that in mind, our guest today is SEO, a niche site expert, Joseph Archibald.

Now Joseph is a really great guy, and if you are familiar with his work online, then you’ll also know that he’s really just super helpful and very keen to share his knowledge and experience.  So clearly, this is one of the main reasons why I wanted him on the show because I think there’s just a ton of valuable information that you’d be able to take away from this.

Now Joseph is originally from the United Kingdom but I guess in the true internet marketing lifestyle, he now lives in sunny Malaysia and he joins us on the line right now.

So, hello, Joseph.

Joseph:     Hi there, Rob.

Rob:         Hi, how are things?

Joseph:     Fine, thank you.  I’m sitting now in the sunshine now as you would do if you’re living in Malaysia.

Rob:         Fantastic.  Well, it’s not quite as warm over here in London, I’ll have to say, but at least it’s not raining today.  So that’s good news.  Listen, I mean thanks very much for joining us today.  I really appreciate your time.  And I know many people and I include myself in this who first who became aware of you through the Warrior Forum which is of course one of the most active internet marketing forums online.  And you did some pretty awesome things there last year in 2010, which I would like to get into and talk about a bit more in the moment.

But before we get there and get onto that, I do know that you’ve been involved in internet marketing fractionally a fair amount of time.  So perhaps to begin with, could you sort of fill us in on a bit of background and tell us how you originally got started in internet marketing?

Joseph:     Yeah.  Sure thing, Rob.  I started off — in a sense, I started off way back in about 2002 or 2003 when I read — I’m sure I read something in the newspaper about some people, not many people, where some people make a lot of money on the internet, as you do.  So I thought to myself, right, okay, I’ve got to get online and fortunately, I did have my own computer by then even though it’s quite some time ago.  So, I went online and I studied and I found out about this guy called Corey Rudl, who was back then about 34 years old but he had a very big successful internet marketing company.  He sold products basically.  He sold them online but back in these days, it was like you can download them I think online but they sent it through the post.  So, that came from the States.  It was like this big thick tome of 3 or 400 pages.  So that was my first sort of adventure into the information side of it.

The problem was back then it was very much html-based and all kind of techie stuff, and quite frankly, my brain doesn’t handle that at all well.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So that went over my head a lot, but I was bitten by that time.  So, in a sense, I kind of moved on a thought, right, okay, I’ve got to do something.  I was clicking onto that.  So, I went into a multi-level marketing.

Rob:         MLM, yeah.

Joseph:     Yeah.  So I did that part-time and I found out about this guy who was my upline, if you like, who was sitting at home making a lot of money by getting people to join his downlines.  And I thought, how the heck is he doing that?  It turns out he was making websites, wasn’t it?

Rob:         Ah okay.

Joseph:     He was — back in these days, it wasn’t too difficult to rank highly in Google and Yahoo, but it was a big thing by then.  So that’s what he was doing and I thought, gee, that would be great doing that but I couldn’t understand how to do it.  So basically, I was a salesman, I was going out knocking door to door trying to sell mobile telephones and landlines to people.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     It was an absolute nightmare of a job.  So, I made a real bad commission but really I didn’t manage to get too far up the tree, but it wasn’t until about 3 — actually 3 years ago, this month, I finally decided to go fulltime into this.  Even I had a parttime business myself.  You know, I just thought this is not what I want, I’ve gone through some pretty horrible life experiences by that time and I thought I need to change, I need a big change.  So, this internet marketing thing, you know, I’d already been bitten by the thought of being able to travel and still make good money and live anywhere around the world pretty much.  So, that really appealed to me and I thought yeah, I’ve got to try and do this and I could really get serious about it.  So, that’s when I really really did start to go under the bonnet, so to speak.

Rob:         Yeah, that’s really interesting — because I think there’s different motivations for people going into internet marketing and obviously money is probably the most obvious one that we get blasted with all the time with all the marketing material.  But actually for some people, it’s not so much the money, it’s more about the freedom or lifestyle.  And certainly for me, you know, the freedom of not having to do a 9 to 5 job is definitely the thing that I value the most.  And I guess this probably sounds like it’s the same for you, Joseph, with, you know, especially with you living in Malaysia, you’re able to have that lifestyle and that freedom that you want.

Joseph:     It is.  Well Rob, you know, I mean you’re familiar with the cold in the UK for 6 months each year.

Rob:         Certainly, yeah.

Joseph:     8 months a year perhaps.  I mean it’s even worst in Scotland where I grew up, and because I’m a vegetarian as well, that doesn’t blend itself to being able to handle the cold at all.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So, I’ve always suffered from the cold really ever since I was a small kid.  So yes, it’s always been a bit of a dream of mine to live somewhere that’s really quite warm and get away from the UK at least for 6 months a year, and then go back to the UK after that, albeit the ideal scenario.  And this year, that’s not going to quite happen even though I’m going to the UK this month actually for 5, 6, 7, 8 weeks, wherever it might be.  But next year, I do intend to start kind of living maybe 4 months in the UK and then 8 months back in Malaysia and just really that could be ideal, best of all with folks.

Rob:         Yeah.  So, I know a lot of people are very interested in free traffic generation, myself included, that’s part of one of the projects that I have with my niche sites, and you did some very interesting work over at the Warrior Forum last year, as I mentioned in my intro.  So, I mean just for people who aren’t familiar, could you perhaps just give us an overview of what you actually did there?

Joseph:     Yeah, sure, yeah.  It kind of amuses me a little bit when people say — excuse me for saying this — free traffic.  You know, SEO is free traffic.  Yeah.

Rob:         Free traffic, it’s vastly common, yes.

Joseph:     Yeah, it’s far from free.  I mean it’s too far spending up to fortune on trying to generate this traffic, but anyway, yeah.  What I did was quite frankly I was having quite a hard time motivating, like not really motivating but focusing on my own business.

Rob:         Yes.

Joseph:     That’s not to an angle now, that was back in May — so I wasn’t that brilliant back then even though I knew how to rank sites, that might sound strange, but it’s not just the case of SEO, not at all, that’s far from there.  There’s a lot more to making money from this game than just the SEO niche.  So even though you can — if you’re good at SEO, you can work for big companies and various things, you can make an absolute fortune, but that’s never appealed to me at all.  I mean yeah, now I do, that’s crossed my mind.  Certainly when I was doing the Warriors, I got quite a lot of people that are approaching me and saying, “Will I work for you?” and would give the thousands of dollars in this site and everything else and I thought, no, it’s not what I want to do.  Is it — that would be a job, you know, the pressure would be on.  I don’t want that.

So anyway.  Yeah, the idea was just to kind of kick my own butt into gear and really focus on my own business and that was the way I thought how to do that because I remember when times gone by when I’ve been having a hard time focusing on things, what I did was I kind of started giving up myself one that made me feel really good and I became more productive because of that.  So I thought, well this sounds like a good idea, why not?  I’m fairly knowledgeable about SEO.  So, I might as well give instead of take, take, take and just think about myself.  So, that’s when I decided right, I want to do it, I’m going to take the big plunge even though it was very very risky and I could have made a total ash of myself just thinking about it.  So…

Rob:         But I tell you — yeah, I mean I have to say, Joseph, I mean I’ve read the thread there and it’s a huge thread.  For anyone who hasn’t read it, I’ll definitely put the link to that under this, in this page below the podcast.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         But you did far from make a fool of yourself.  And in fact, the exact opposite — because people were just so excited because you were actually quoted a 40-day challenge, didn’t you?

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         And you were building a niche site from scratch, from absolute zero, and building up and getting onto the page one.  I think you actually beat your target, is that right?

Joseph:     I think so.  I mean I can’t even remember.  Even though I’m actually — even — but I can’t actually remember what I did but…

Rob:         Oh.

Joseph:     Yeah, I got at the top — ran about top 10 within or a few days of buying the domain.  I mean it was quite incredible, but I think the Squidoo was doing the best at that time.  Actually, that was in the top 10.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So, that’s the part of Squidoo for you.

Rob:         Yeah.  And the other interesting thing about it apart from the fact that you did it for actual live and people could check themselves to see whether where your site was ranking, you really revealed everything, which is one of the great things about it — is you actually just had a quite really innovative way of generating your backlinks.  So, I guess the way when we learn starting out as beginners about SEO, it’s obviously all about driving links and you would go out to maybe create articles and article directories, Ezine, GoArticles and so on.  And then also maybe some Web 2.0 properties like Squidoo and Hubpages, and then obviously create links back to your site to try and gain that authority from Google.  But you’ve actually used some — well firstly used some tools specifically to do that, and then the arrangement of how you set those links up was slightly different as well.  So, could you just give us — I mean I don’t want to go into massive detail because it’s covered in the Warrior Forum thread, but could you give us just a brief overview because it’s a very interesting strategy.

Joseph:     Yeah, I mean it’s not something I had come across before really because it was an accumulation of pretty much stuff that I’d learned from the past couple of years that I was trying to make money online.  So yeah, I mean I tried the LinkWheels and stuff but I’ve never really looked into them.  So, I wasn’t really too concerned by that, but people do compare this to a LinkWheel, but I don’t think it is actually because it’s not really a wheel, it’s a broken wheel, in a sense of very very broken wheel, rugged wheel.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So yeah, the idea was to sell, basically to protect your new website private domain, if you like, from the problems that you have with Google because they’re terrible at downgrading rankings of new sites for any of the old so-called misdemeanor.  So, you could try and protect that site in some way.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So the idea was to sell these anchor sites or buffer layer, if you like, and protect it that way.  So then you just really hit hard on this anchor and that’s fine because it’s such a strong anchor, you know that it can take all the fleck from all your backlinks wherever they might be, they might be articles or blog commenting or forum, profile linking or all sorts of different things, there could be thousands of different links coming from all over the place in a very short space of time.  So, that just really boost up the power of your anchor there and then that power, that linkage, if you like, then goes through to your private domain, and slowly but surely, you’ll find yourself nicely coming up the rankings.

Rob:         Yeah.  So essentially it’s interesting you say about new sites being penalized because that’s something I’ve actually experienced myself, so I know that only too well.  I mean speculation really because none of us really know how Google works exactly but what seems to happen I suppose is you set up a new site and then very quickly drive a lot of links to that site and Google sees that as very unnatural, very suspicious.  So, it would be, you know, drop your rank or put it in its infamous mythical sandbox, which is supposedly the place where bad sites go to, you know.  And the way that you’ve kind of approach this is you said, okay, well instead of driving all these links to the main sites, what we’ll do is we’ll have very respected authority sites linking to the main site.  So, this is Ezine, GoArticles, other big article directories, and then Web 2.0 properties as well, so the Squidoo, Hubpages, and all the rest of it.  And then so you’ve got all those authority sites linking to your main site but then you should lower quality links and a lot of them to those anchors, to those Web 2.0 properties and to those article directories.  Is that essentially the essence of…

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         Yeah.  Yeah, and that’s a very interesting strategy – because like you say you’ve kind of bypassed this problem of being penalized by picking up many many links, some of which are probably low quality which look unnatural to Google.  And this stuff works, I mean you proved that in your forum page and I think Pat Flynn over at SmartPassiveIncome.com actually used this exact strategy to get one of his niche sites, which is on security guard training from nowhere, from actually scratch to no. 1 in Google as well.  So, it’s a terrific strategy and it’s definitely worth reading up on for people.  So, and obviously one resource is to actually go to the Warrior Forum page which took me I think 6 hours to read, I think, Joseph, because it’s so long, isn’t it?

Joseph:     Yes.

Rob:         It’s absolutely page after page.

Joseph:     It’s 22 pages now I think.

Rob:         Yeah.  It’s just incredible.  But and the quicker way is on your site, which I think is — is it JosephArchibald.com?

Joseph:     Yeah, that’s it now, yeah.

Rob:         Yeah.  So, JosephArchibald.com and there’s an ebook available which I’ve also read as well, which is very useful.  So, the information is definitely out there for anyone who is interested in learning about that and I think what you did and what Pat Flynn has done and others show that it’s very effective.  It’s definitely something I’ve looked into for my niche site.

So, one of the other things, moving on a little bit, Joseph, is that you know, as you said in your sort of background intro that you’ve been online for a number of years and I think that’s a tremendous advantage in a way because you’ve been able to be around and seen these kind of changes in SEO and what maybe things, tactics used to work that don’t anymore.  So, one example would be perhaps link exchanges, which probably 3 years ago were still a reasonably effective way of gaining authority, I’ll link to you if you link to me.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         Then obviously Google came out and stamped on that and said, well, know that this is no longer in accordance with our terms and conditions.  And it seems to me that, you know, I started last year in really April 2010.  So, I haven’t had that benefit of experience that you have, but how would you — could you give us an overview of how things have changed and perhaps where you think things are going just on a general level with SEO?

Joseph:     Yeah, what’s interesting that you actually mentioned now, Rob, you know, I mean this link exchange is still very very popular.  Every single day, I’ll get maybe one, maybe two emails from people saying, we’ve come across your site such and such because at the moment I’ve still got too many sites quite frankly.

Rob:         Yeah.  Yeah.

Joseph:     I think you have heard of quite a few of them.  So, I’m still getting quite a number of emails saying, you know, I wanted to exchange links and stuff like that, but I don’t have time to do it.

Rob:         Yeah.  Now, well I’ve had these same emails I think…

Joseph:     Right.  Yeah.

Rob:         … to my new sites which I always just delete because I don’t think there’s any value in those at all.

Joseph:     I don’t know.  I think there is actually.  I think it’s a misnomer that somebody had said that some time old Google doesn’t know current employment (17:50) there some time.  Perhaps some other authority people had said that.  I’ve had a lot of stuff that people have said, then when I tried, it works.  Do you know what I mean?

Rob:         Right.

Joseph:     So, I don’t necessarily discount exchanging links.  I just find for me it’s far too time consuming, but if there’s a way to — I don’t know about automator.  I do really like the sound of automating link exchanges.  I know there are some big automation sites out there that are actually very huge indeed but I had not really drawn into them.  I do feel there could be value in it.  Yeah, I really do.

Rob:         Yeah.  Okay, that’s interesting.  Yeah.  And just more generally, I mean it’s much harder now to get rank in Google than it used to be and perhaps that’s firstly because of the changes Google have made and secondly just for more general competition.  So, there’s more people in internet marketing, there’s more websites and all the rest of it compared to say 5 or 10 years ago when as you’ve mentioned earlier, a lot more technical skills were required to get online.  So — But in terms of the Google changes, I mean do you see things getting harder in the future or is it just the question of kind of shifting your emphasis from one thing that’s maybe stopped working to something else?

Joseph:     Yeah, I mean there’s things that worked for many years and still work really really well.  I know that some people say that article marketing, for example, maybe about four years ago, it worked far better than it does now, but I still find it works very well if you know how to focus your efforts, that it could work tremendously well, you know.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     And so, yeah there’s certainly — there’s going to be a lot of change but there’s a lot of things that would still work regardless I’m sure about, you know, and even though a lot of people say, no it doesn’t work and it doesn’t work anymore, and the vast majority of people believe what is being said, there’s still going to be some guys and girls who are going to use the same techniques and they’ll be the ones that are benefitting from using that.  That’s what I believe because you come across people time and time again, proving ideas and saying, well it doesn’t work.  Well, have you actually tried that or you’re just taking the word of somebody else?  I think we’re all guilty up doing that.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     And we don’t all have time to experiment with this and that and everything else.  But the fact is I think it makes sense to do a little bit of experimenting for oneself because you could be very surprised as to the results that you’ll find.

Rob:         Yeah, I think that’s really good advice and I think I’m guilty of that as well because we all read blog posts and watch videos and all the rest of it on SEO and that’s perhaps a very good strategy.  And sometimes people conclude that tactics don’t work because it’s not worked on one — they tried it one time, you know, it’s just once they’ve tried it.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         And then suddenly conclude that no this is no good again.  But that’s not really a big enough sample size to make a sweep in generalization like that about tactics.  So yeah, I think that approach is very good advice.  So, some of the other tactics, we’ve covered a little bit on article marketing and obviously you’ve said that you talked about on your website, on your blog and in the forum posts and all the rest of it and we’re talking about Ezine, Amazines, Article Dashboard, GoArticles and so on.  And then obviously we’ve got similar amounts of Web 2.0 properties.  And the great thing with those is authority sites.  But sometimes you need a bit more rule power and you need to drive a lot of links, but you’re typically doing not to your main site but actually to these anchors, to these Web 2.0 and article directory pages that you set up.  And to do that, I think you’re very much in favor of using — getting leverage through using software and tools to do that.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         So, could you talk u through a little bit about that?

Joseph:     Sure thing, yeah.  Well what I did was in the Warrior Forum, at that time I was using a tool called Unique Article Wizard, which had worked for me for quite some time.  Even actually in the early days when I first — well, fairly early days — to just push the links straight to my domain and it would dance around terribly in Google but eventually over time, I would actually sit there and merely talk, try to talk.  So I thought, yeah, if I can get that to do that for the private domain, sure they can also work for the buffer layer type of idea.  So, I used Unique Article Wizard a lot of the time for that.  I don’t necessarily use it now but at that time I did.  It’s still a very good tool and I know a lot of people say bad things about it but it does function to me well even though it’s — I know they claim that they send out to 800 directories and stuff and the actual truth of that is most probably a lot — in fact it is a lot less.  You know, I mean…

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     …to 200.  But I thought the fact is, Rob, you know, if it works, it works.  I’m not this type of person who’s going to start or following up every single link.  Is there a (23:17)…

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     Have I — is it — you know, this and that.  Okay, I could spend a month doing that.  I’m not interested now.  I just want to know if the thing ranks my web page before and they can notice.

Rob:         That’s the ultimate test, isn’t it?

Joseph:     You don’t need to waste time fitting around, finding out how many pages are indexed or what else, you know.  So…

Rob:         Yeah and that’s very interesting.  I mean I actually use Unique Article Wizard or UAW as what I like to call it myself for my niche sites and I’ve definitely found that — I mean but I think old tools are the same, don’t they, that they would tell you obviously that there’s 800 sites here but when you come back, it’s probably 200 that it’s actually made the submission to.  But let’s face it, 200 is an awful lot.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         That is a significant amount and it’s definitely worth having.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         But I think yeah also is that you can get variable down in checking links and all the rest of that and it’s useful to make — to do a few quick checks I think just to see if things are actually, you know, you are actually getting published here, there are links being generated.  But in terms of trying to track them all I think is a cluster waste of time and the energy and time that that would take you is much better spent writing another article, submitting another one through Ezine or setting up another Unique Article Wizard submission, for example, to actually base your link path from those tools.

So, UAW.  So, you don’t absolutely use that anymore but have you sort of migrated and moved on to any other tools, which you find work better?

Joseph:     Yeah, I stopped with Blog Blueprint for quite some time.  In fact, I had two accounts for that because it was working really really well until I had managed to Sandbox a couple of my sites using it.

Rob:         Oh, is that.

Joseph:     It’s incredible because I just send a few links back to it and suddenly Google said, oh-oh, delete that.  It’s, you know, I don’t know, Google, sometimes you just wonder about them so far as…

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     Maybe you want there, I don’t know.  Anyway.  So yeah, I use Blog Blueprint throughout the Warrior Forum 40-day challenge and…

Rob:         Yeah.  And sorry, Joseph, but for people who aren’t familiar with that, this is about sending sort of snippets of articles to blog networks.

Joseph:     Yeah, that’s right.  Yeah.

Rob:         And things like article marketing automation as well, I’ve experimented with that so I know that’s a similar concept in that you’re spinning an article, multiple variations are going out to different blogs or on different IP addresses and different domains.

Joseph:     Yes.

Rob:         But that’s actually — the thing I found with article marketing automation is actually that you can’t control the submission rates but you can with UAW.  I don’t know if you’ve tried that service.

Joseph:     No, I didn’t actually.  Nope.  No.

Rob:         Oh okay.  Okay, yeah.  So…

Joseph:     Sorry.

Rob:         No, that’s fine.  That’s fine.  Well that’s when I tried and it’s — I think, you know, I’ve had some good results with it but I think it’s actually quite limiting in that you can’t control the amount of articles that are published at any one time.  So, I know that in your 40-day challenge for example, you were really publishing or submitting several hundred articles on any one day, when you…

Joseph:     Yeah.  Yeah.  I’m doing all that myself.  I wasn’t outsourcing either.  It was a real grind.

Rob:         Yeah, I can imagine.  I can imagine.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And then another one I noticed you mentioned on your blog recently is Build My Rank?

Joseph:     Yes.

Rob:         And have you found that?  Has that been very powerful than the others or you’re still wondering about that or…

Joseph:     No.  Build My Rank is very much like Blog Blueprint and that is you create small snippets of text, if you like, 100, 150, for Build My Rank, BMR if you like, is 150 minimum for a text snippet, 150 words, then you could put in one anchor, in the anchor link.  And yeah, it’s a superb service actually.  It really works incredibly well.  The power of it is easily it quoted Blog Blueprint plus the network itself is very tightly, also very controlled.  So, you can’t actually use any span content whatsoever.  The guys who are in charge of it are very quality control orientated.  So, it keeps the quality of the whole system really high and yeah, so it’s a very good system.  Unfortunately, they changed the pricing.  They put it up from $59 a month to $129 a month, so that was a massive rise.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     But then they changed that again and now $59 for 5 sites per month.  And then it goes — it’s a tier sort of system.  You know, the prices go up for more sites.  So, if you got 5 sites or 10 sites, then it’s certainly worth considering, but the problem is you’ve got to create all your content and you can’t spin articles.  So, it’s a lot of writing involved, or if you outsource, it’s a lot of outsourcing to do.

Rob:         Yeah, well perhaps could you — because we haven’t really touched on spinning so much but this is also okay because we want to be generating — we don’t just want to submit the same article all over the web because Google will see that as duplicate content and probably rank only one of those which it they consider as the most authoritative and its main index and the rest will be sort of demoted to a supplemental index.  So, by spinning, we’re obviously generating a level of uniqueness and hoping that Google will see them as unique articles and therefore rank them all and we can get more link power from them.  And obviously tools like Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation and so on actually allow you to upload some span articles and spin formats.  So, they will just spin out those different articles to various places on the web, whether they be article directories or blog networks.  But you’re saying with Build My Rank, you can’t do that.  So, what would way around that then to actually spin say within your spinning tool the best spinner for example and then copies of those and paste them manually or can’t you do that?

Joseph:     No, it doesn’t allow you to do that.  I try to spin a few articles, I mean very highly, in order to have a 75% uniqueness but they still won’t accept it.  So, I don’t know if you can get any span article and they can know it’s going to be just a raw copy, a raw piece of writing.

Rob:         Yeah.  Okay.  Okay.  And sometimes you get what you get, so perhaps some of these tools which do require a greater amount of work seems like a hassle but you get more back from it.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         So, I think it’s not always a bad thing basically if you see that.

Joseph:     No.  No.  I thought you’re quite right.  Certainly with this tool, there is a case.  I think if you use it for some time, you don’t have to have a whole lot of backlinks to get a rise in the rank, a good rise in the rankings.  I think you’d be surprised actually, so it’s a very strong tool.

Rob:         Yeah.  Yeah.  Really that’s fantastic.  So, we talked about kind of see the article directories, Web 2.0 and then creating lots and lots of links from these leverage tools.  What about sort of higher authority links?  So once with higher Google page rank.  Do you go after those at all?  Obviously you say…

Joseph:     No.

Rob:         No, okay.

Joseph:     Not particularly but with Build My Rank, it is filled with high — or well you know at least the domain that the poster posts on to this fairly high page rank, generally speaking, between 1 and Google page rank 5.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So, I guess there is linkage there.  But as far as I’m concerned now, I’m not too concerned about that because I feel if you’re going to be hunting out these things, you’ll be spending a lot of time trying to find the high page rank.  There’s a lot of waste of time.  So, why not just push to various PR zeros and PR1, you still get, you get a lot of gist from that and you don’t know the next time Google do that page rank update, maybe that PR1 will go to a PR3.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     Do you know what I mean?

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So, there’s no way of telling that.  Or it might come down the other way.  It might be a PR5 you posted on but the next time, it’s down to a PR2.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     So, that’s how you see it.

Rob:         Yeah.  And then we talked a lot about the actual link construction, but if we take a step back and just have a look at sort of the first steps that you carry out before you launch a new site, so in the market research stage really.  One of the things that really caught me out when I first started was competition.  So, I didn’t properly assess competition in my market research stage and then I went into several niches actually when I first started that were just far far too competitive.  So, even if I’ve been an expert, it probably would have taken 6 or 12 months even to actually rank well in that.  So, that’s something I learned the hard way.  I mean how do you approach the issue of competition, Joseph, before you’re actually setting this site up?

Joseph:     Alright.  Well, experience helps a huge amount with this, Rob, you know.  The longer you’re doing this, the more you get to feel the game, if you like.  For example, credit cards, some days, it’s nearly became probably everything and oh there’s lots of money to be made there, let’s find rank in there.  But the fact is to try and rank in credit cards is almost impossible, look up against the big companies and the big brands and you’re not going to have a look in.  So obviously, that’s how entirely, but then you start to look at other niches, so you get a little bit of a feel for them and you try and rank for one or two and then it doesn’t work and you think, right okay, that was a whole waste of time, but in fact it’s not because there’s a whole lot of experience.  So, it’s not entirely a waste of time.  But what I do, I don’t really do very much research.  I kind of — it’s with me and nowadays, it’s very much hard to niche, I’m afraid to say, but what I…

Rob:         Okay.

Joseph:     But what I did in the Warrior Forum was what I spoke about was, you know, I looked at my top 10 in particular and I assessed various things like Alexa ranking of the domain, page rank of the domain, which can or may not make a difference but people say it’s make a lot of difference.  So, if it’s full of PR5, then you’ve got no chance.  Well in actual fact, you’ve got a lot of chances now about the PR at all.  What else, certainly the backlinks.  I mean yes, you’re kind of limited with the tools available to assess backlinks now, so that’s just a guessing game.  You pop up Yahoo search engine and as you said before, yes, it’s going backwards now.  They’re just shutting it down or they have shut it down.  So, you have to look at backlinks and now just it doesn’t tell you anything.  You’ve got to — it’s a guessing game.

Rob:         Yeah.  Well, I’ve actually used — I’m a big fan of Market Samurai which is I guess one alternative to the Google keyword tool.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         But the great thing I really like about Market Samurai is it actually gives you competition data and it allows you to track your backlinks through time, which is a little bit of an inaccurate way of doing things.  But you know, I’ve noticed over the last few weeks and actually before the back end of 2010 as well that the links just were haywire, they were just all over the place.  So, one week they’d shift, they’d shift up to 300, next week it would be zero and so on.  So, I think obviously that’s a reflection of what you say at the link data which we’ve previously relied on from Yahoo and with obviously what’s going on with Bing now and Microsoft and that’s kind of being discontinued.

So, as an alternative to that, I mean there are obviously other services, Joseph.  In fact, I mean I’m thinking of Open Site Explorer, SEO Majestic, SEO Elites, and do you look at any of those for an alternative source of backlinking data?

Joseph:     Not really, no.  I used to use SEO Elite when I bought it but that was in my other laptop and I actually just threw that in the bucket the other day.  I gave that away.  So, that’s gone.  I don’t use that tool.  Anyway, I haven’t used it for a long time.

Rob:         Yeah.  Yeah.

Joseph:     I had looked at Open Site Explorer.  Yeah, that’s certainly better than Yahoo search engine now.  There’s no doubt about it.  It gives you much more detail but it’s fiddly.  You know, I don’t like fiddling around you.  I have to put that website up, then I have to tap in the domain name and then I get all the information down and that’s great but no, I don’t have time for that.  I much prefer the old system, you know, where you’ve got it across the top of your screen, you’ve got all the figures up the top there, you know, the Alexa ranking and everything else if you download the — what is it called – the SEO — I can’t even remember enough — you know, that tool that you get and it’s an add-on tool.

Rob:         SEO Quake, is it?

Joseph:     Yeah, that’s the one.  Yup.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     If you download that, which is a fantastic tool.  Then I’ll tell you all the figures at the top or as you do the search, it tells you the figures as you go through the search.  So, that’s ideal for me if you see it at a glimpse.

Rob:         Yeah.  And that’s actually a free — for anyone who’s not familiar, that’s a free add-on for I think any — I think for your internet browser or say what you’re using, Chrome or Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Joseph:     Yeah, that’s it.

Rob:         Yeah.  Okay.  It’s definitely worth having a look at.  Okay.  Okay.  And just, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the tools and all the rest of it but and in kind of your more advanced linking strategies that you’ve developed.  What would you recommend to maybe someone who’s starting out who probably doesn’t want to start spending hundreds of dollars a month from these tools but just wants to experiment manually.  I mean what kind of approach would you advise them?  Obviously go for lower competition niches presumably, but what else, what kind of approach?

Joseph:     I think that’s very very, unfortunately, Rob, if you go for a lower competition, lower hanging SEO tournament…

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     …I think you’ll probably see results — well, I’m not going to see them necessarily very quickly but you could potentially see results and that’s the key to this game, particularly if you’re just starting out, if you can see some results, just a little bit of return on your investment of your time and if you’re investing money than if you could see like or just one sale even that just gives you, that buzzes up, boosts to, wanting to push on.  So, that’s hugely important because this whole thing is really a mind game.  If you can conquer your own mind and get through the barriers that you set up for yourself everyday really, then you can win at this game, you could crack the nut.

So yeah, when you’re first starting out, it’s fairly important that you do just set your sites a lot lower than what you might think initially you would have wanted to do because you probably came online thinking, oh I’m going to make half a million dollars a year within 3 years or something because I’ve read that in the newspaper.  It doesn’t work that way I’m afraid.  So, you’ve got to set your sites to a very practical level.  It might be just like a search, a keyword that gets a thousand searches per month exact to a global, exact to a local or global rather.  And that’s fine.  I mean if it’s a buyer-type keyword, then you could make some good money from that.  I’ve heard that some people do.  I don’t do too bad, but I don’t — I tend to go for higher searches now but then I know, yeah, how to do that.  So, when you’re first starting, you could set your sites very low and make it very attainable.

Rob:         Yeah, I think that’s great advice because I think what happens with a lot of people is that maybe they have — you know, I think virtually everyone who’s successful in internet marketing probably fails the first time they tried a particular project or whatever and the reason why they’re successful now is because they broke through that and carried on, but you can’t help yourself enormously currently if you actually decide to try and make the first things that you do but not easy wins but much easier for yourself.  So yeah, I mean you wouldn’t go for a massively competitive thing, very important for your own morale to actually be successful.  So, just get very small wins.  Yeah, you’re not going to get rich but that will provide a great platform for you to move on and get to the next level.

Joseph:     Yes, absolutely right.  Yeah.  I totally agree with that.

Rob:         Great.  Okay, that’s cool.  And just more generally, I guess more of an industry question really but again, you know, I’m trying to ask you to critic the feature here which I know is very difficult but I was thinking more about the Bing and Facebook alliance that’s been going on because obviously traditionally with Google, it’s the way they rank websites is really from an algorithm’s perspective.  So obviously, they have their different ranking mechanisms and so on and compete just figuring out which are the best sites to actually put towards the top of their search engine result pages.  But the interesting thing, I think it’s fascinating with Facebook coming in with Bing is that obviously now you’re — you know, you’ve got the possibility for not just the computer algorithmic ranking approach, but you’ve actually got input from maybe people in your social circle.  So, if you’re searching for a particular restaurant or something and your friends like this, like the particular one, then that could be incorporated into the results that the search engine gives you back.

So, do you see that as something that will maybe in 3 to 5 years’ time much more prevalent than the old Google algorithmic approach?

Joseph:     In some ways I certainly hope so.  That sounds like an ideal way to go.  I like the idea of yeah the local search sort of thing which is much more geared towards social side.  That does sound a very good idea…

Rob:         Yeah.  Yeah.

Joseph:     … and if we can — if you can kind of push that onto a much grander scale, not just local but international, and then I think if it can tie in with a certain specific search criteria in the sense that what we currently have, you know, when you search in Google or Yahoo or Bing for that matter, if you put in (43.20) or whatever it might be, then it comes up to the top and it’s got nothing to do with the social scene at all, but you can mix that end with the social scene without getting technical but quite frankly, I don’t know anything technical about it.  But yes, it’s something that us as internet marketers and SEOs should be aware of because market trends will definitely affect our longer term businesses.  So, it’s very well worth keeping an eye on how things are progressing and making up your own mind, just how you think it’s going to progress because it makes you think a lot outside the box, if you say.  You can start to get your own take on things and get your own feel for the game and yeah, it’s very valuable.

Rob:         Okay.  Actually, keep an eye on Facebook and maybe we all have to leave that as a significant part there.  So a ranking strategy in the future at some point is one way of looking at it I suppose.  So yeah, okay.

Well, moving on, one of the other things that I think you’re sort of well known for is sort of just giving away things to nothing, but just helping people out and just being really really delivering a lot of value upfront and I think you eluded to this slightly earlier when you said that you found that that was a good piece for your aim around, you wanted to do more of it and maybe that’s one of the reasons that led to your Warrior Forum post.  But it’s also, you know, without being cynical, it’s also a kind of well-known popular marketing technique to actually not try and just sell things cold but actually warm people up first.  So thinking for example on autoresponders where you’re offering a free gift or someone’s email address and then you would send them more free stuff and really flatter them and exceed their expectations.  And then it becomes a lot easier to make that sale further down the track.  So, is that some sort of a tactic that you would recommend to use sort of over your niche websites as well or your niche website is primarily kind of just this is what we’ve got for sale and trying to sell cold?

Joseph:     But as far as, you know, I’ve been up in using Ebay quite a lot for the past year but I knew for a fact that Google probably would then hit my sites hard at one time because I’ve been doing that across the board pretty much in this type of sites and they seem to have done it to me now.  So, I knew for a fact that was going to happen at some stage, I just didn’t know exactly when.  So, what I’ve been doing in the past 5 months or so is setting up a completely different style of website which incorporates just what you’re saying now, Rob, certainly if I’m setting up — trying to set up a list, an opt-in list, then definitely you’ve got to think along these lines, giving away something free.  For example, just recently, I set up one where I got a writer of mine, a very good writer of mine to write a short Ebay, it’s a 14-page thing, but it’s actually very good, filled with glossy images and various things, and it cost me over $100 but I gave that away for free because I seriously want people to opt in.  And when they do opt in, they see the quality of the stuff.  So they know for a fact that whenever I send an email, it’s going to be topnotch stuff.  So, I’ve got their trust already just from that initial ebook, that free giveaway, if you like.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     It wasn’t for me but it is for them.

Rob:         Yeah.  I think it’s really powerful stuff, isn’t it?  And certainly you’re building a list taking that aspect, although it’s something that I sort of ignored or just didn’t realize how helpful that was for a number of months after I started but it really — the reason why it’s so powerful is because firstly you retain that customer base, don’t you?  Because if people are just visiting your website and then bouncing off or even if they buy something and disappear, they might never come back again.  But if you’ve got their email address, that enables you to continue that relationship and the lifetime sales value and the customer over that long period of time is obviously much greater than if they’re just coming on a one-off visit to your website.  But the second thing obviously is that there is a facility with an autoresponder to build that trust.  And I think that if you are giving away almost your best stuff upfront, it really does over deliver and exceed expectation.  So, people are thinking, well if this is what the free stuff is like, then imagine what the actual products are like, you know, and that’s very very powerful.

Joseph:     I think so, yeah.

Rob:         So, moving on to your other projects.  Obviously, we’ve talked a lot mostly really about your niche sites which something I did as well, so I’m very interested to talk to you about that.  And what other projects are you looking at, Joseph, or that you have running at the moment?

Joseph:     Yeah.  Well, when I first started my blog, which wasn’t too long ago, it’s about 10 months ago or so, I had this notion on my head about joining up forces on the internet to make it on a better place or such but just working with other people to offer them my skills…

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     … very well.  And I know there’s a heck of a lot of pitfalls in doing that and I know a lot of people just don’t believe in it because they’ve probably been burned once or twice and they give up.  Oh yeah, I’ve been burned quite a few times, you know.  People say they will come work and with me and do the SEO for my sites and I say, I don’t really work for people and they say, “Well okay, if we work together and I’ll give you half the share,” and I work for them for a while and then they run away and it’s their website and I get nothing about it at all.  So, I’ve been burned a few times but I don’t want to give up on that thought even though people think I’m actually insane.  I just want to keep going with that because I — firstly, that really really suits me.  This internet marketing business is a roomy old game.  So, I feel certainly for me because I’m fulltime and if so, it would really benefit for me to work with other people from around the world who compliment my skills or who I can talk to about this issue or that issue on a regular basis.  I mean we just put our skills together and they are 3 or 4 times as strong as they’re leveraging off one another, you know.  It’s not just twice the strength there.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     It’s almost like you’ve got 3, 4 or 5 times the strength because you just get on so well together, you just kind of gel together.  It’s not always going to happen, but it can happen.  And for me, I just wanted to persevere into the top and fortunately, I can see, yeah I’ve got — certainly, one of my joint venture partners is superb and what I’ve got running now with him is this I set up, like another challenge if you like but it’s only on my blog.  He’s a young chap called Chris and he’s at fulltime college.  He’s only 21 years old but he came to me many months ago and we just talked about this and the other thing, the email now and again.  And so eventually, I said to him, “Why don’t you just joint venture with me on something?”  So, we did.  I was stuck in minds together and it really kind of worked out.  Yeah, we’re not making any money from it because it’s only a couple of months since we did it but I said to him, why don’t we set up like a new challenge where what we can do is we say right you’re making zero money now but he’s not making regular income at all from his internet marketing but in a year’s time, in 12 months’ time, you’ll be making $4000 a month on a regular basis.  So, that’s a challenge, if you like to get it.

Rob:         And have you thought about sort of getting more consultancy or any mentoring over the people?  Has that kind of rolled into your joint venture?

Joseph:     Yeah, especially — I mean yeah there’s been a lot of people that come to me and saying,  can you teach me or coach me or how but you know, whatever, do an SEO for me or the stuff.  But no, it doesn’t really appeal to me, or we’ll pay you $100, no, no.  I mean yeah that sounds great but it’s become a job for me.  I don’t really fancy that.  I just want to do my own thing.  So yet, you’re quite right, this idea about when somebody comes in and say, “Oh gee, I’m really struggling with this, I don’t really know what to do, I’ve got some money to invest in it and I’ve got some sites and I know a bit about this and a bit about that and I can do a program in this, you know, a graphic work but I just can’t get my act together as far as this SEO is concerned.  Can you teach me?”  And I’m thinking, do I really like the sound of that, you know, yeah, by all means, I can send you a couple of emails and say we’ll do this and this but that’s not merely enough.  Well this is even much more handholding in not normally.

So, the next thing is oh yeah, okay, if this person sounds like he’s got a good idea or she’s got a good idea or whatever it might be, if they just seem like a decent sort of person who’s willing to put in the effort, then I might well strike up a joint venture with them and teach them that way.  That’s very appealing to me actually.  The only problem I have is is only one of me, there’s only a certain amount of hours in a day.  So…

Rob:         Yes.

Joseph:     …it’s difficult but I’m trying my best to set up about 5 different joint ventures in the past couple of months alone.  It’s just getting absolutely insane but I’ve got kind of carried away with a bit.  Yeah, as long as you just kind of say to the person that you’re joint venturing with like okay, you know, I’m kind of busy with so many things.  So, try and be patient with me but we will work together and we’ll be a success together.  Just give it a bit of time and that’s the only people I would have then.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     That’s great.  I’m all for that.

Rob:         Yeah.  And in terms of future products, I mean I really enjoyed your ebook that you put out, but I think you mentioned earlier you were looking at revamping that.  So, you’re doing that.  Are there any other sort of products that you would be willing to talk about on this call, obviously pretty able to reveal everything that’s…

Joseph:     Well this, I can’t be too specific but if I do, then people compliment, that’s something before.  So…

Rob:         Yes.  Yeah.

Joseph:     …Part of the game.  But yeah, I’ve got one writer in particular who’s a qualified medical doctor actually.  So, she knows her stuff inside and out and she’s a great writer and she’s very enthusiastic too.  So, I worked closely with her.  What we’ve done is we’ve developed a couple of well clinic sites now and she’s written for one of those but once I get that ranking, once I start to make some sales in it, then we’ll keep going in that line and develop that brand.  And so, she basically was going to be doing this tackling at desperate market and in the medical health field, if you like.

Rob:         Okay.

Joseph:     And so, that’s actually a strong way to go.  So, there’s a nice little insider technique, if you like.

Rob:         Yeah, and that’s — I think that’s brilliant, Joseph, because what you just sort of alluded too there is I think is you all used to have and there are a lot of people particularly as they’re starting out have is that, saying well you know, look, it’s all very well talking about getting into all these different niches but I don’t know anything about these niches, they’re not my whole base.  So, how do I — I’m not perceived as an expert, I’m not an expert, how do I overcome that?

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         And obviously there’s a number of ways to deal with that.  Actually, Tim Ferriss talks a little about this before our workweek which I’m a big fan of.  But another way is maybe what you’ve then just alluded too — is actually kind of outsource that really and go and find yourself an expert and that can be a way around not being an expert yourself, it also gives you great credibility in that niche.

Joseph:     Yeah.  Certainly, there is one side.  If you’re struggling with money, which a lot of people do and even I do at times, you know, when I spend on something else rather than spending $500 on outsourcing work to an expert, joint venture.  Find somebody with the skills that you want, somebody who’s perhaps sort of like at least a very enthusiastic person in that particular niche and just offer them a joint venture.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     That might sound a little bit too easy but what I tend to find is people who come to me and say, I can do this.  You know, I mean yeah far enough people kind of know me now and it happens quite regularly.  That’s not going to be the same for everybody but why not see and start to have a look around and then contact one or two people in that line and see of course this idea and perhaps you could do and add up together.

Rob:         I think the other thing about that is that when you’re first starting off, I have this as well, is that you do feel like a newcomer and it’s quite hard to have that level of confidence where you feel you could go out and make a relationship with a joint venture partner or even ask someone else’s help.  But I think if you sit down and figure out, I think the key thing is to figure out what you can bring to the table.  So, even if it’s just enthusiasm and hard work, that’s a great asset that actually is quite scarce around in the internet marketing committee.  So, there’s always something that you can leverage and I think even if you’re just starting out, whether it’s the idea or the amount of work that you could push in on a weekly basis — and don’t forget that if you can bring something along that the other person hasn’t got, then that’s where you get that synergy and the whole becomes greater than some of the parts.  So, I think even if you’re just starting out, you can still do this stuff.  Would you agree with that?

Joseph:     Yeah, sure thing, yeah.  As you, you know, if you’ve got the enthusiasm, you’re probably going to get a few knockbacks, but if you keep trying to push, by the end of the day, that’s what internet marketing is about.  You have to keep trying.  So, this is a different avenue in a sense.  And a thoroughly exciting one is where if you can get something off the ground or somebody who’s perceived as an expert in a field to some extent and you could be incredibly successful with it.

Rob:         Yeah, I forgot who it was but I had a great comment once that really hits on with me and it was something like, “the people who I made successful have actually failed the maze.”  And it sounds a little bit counterintuitive to start with but essentially it’s kind of — it’s because they didn’t give up.  Everyone fails but we don’t see that as a — don’t think — take it as a personal indictment to yourself.  It’s just the process.  It’s just the process that you have to go through, that if you posses, and as you say, after working with other people in this example and you get knocked back, then try and learn from that and move on to the next person, eventually you will get what you want again.  So, that’s very good advice.

So, I mean we’re coming probably towards the end of our chat and it’s been great so far.  But before we leave, I mean if you’re talking to someone who was on day 1 of their internet marketing experience, what advice would you give to them for the next week and month in their career just as they’re starting out?

Joseph:     Right.  Okay.  You need to find a happy balance if that’s possible.  I mean for me I never really found that.  That’s one of my problems in life, if you like.  I’m not a much sociable person, so I cannot hide away on a girlfriend or tell you this is well.  You know, I don’t get enough of the social life.  So, if you can find a happy balance in life, then you’ll probably do very well from it.  Don’t just leave labor on the net everyday and every night thinking that you’re going to make more and more money.  It doesn’t work that way.  The fact is I think if you’re fresh, if you keep yourself fresh, you can be so much more productive in such a shorter space of time.

Rob:         Yes.

Joseph:     You know, I can spend 16 hours a day easily, just logging away online here but the fact is probably that 4 or 5 hours of that 16 hours is the key time when I’m getting the most done.

Rob:         Yes.  Yes.

Joseph:     And all the rest of it is just fiddling around and just — you know, it’s not the most productive time at all.  Fair enough, I am still very productive but because that’s just the person I am.  But yeah, if you could just allot 4 hours here, 4 hour there, you can just get so focused on that for a period of 2-hour period or 1-hour period, wherever it might be, and really do some tremendous amount of work in that time.

Rob:         Yeah, I think that’s a really pertinent comment, Joseph, because the thing with online marketing is that there’s so many distractions.  So, you just maybe say you’re writing an article or trying to upload to one of your Unique Article Wizard or something like that or whatever it is and you just see in the corner of your eye an email come in.  So you think, oh I’ll just click on the email and then there’s a video link to some training in that email and you could easily divert it, go off the tangent and spend the next hour just watching some training on the video or something and it’s so dangerous and I think one thing that I found that really works is actually just to shut out everything else.  So, as you turn email off from a place, everything down Skype and Twitter and all of that stuff and just concentrate on the task at hand.

And the other thing that I do is actually go right back to the point that you just made — is that yes you can spend 16 hours a day and actually only do sort of 2 hours work.  Well sometimes get anything done because you’re just sort of messing around.  So, I always like to write down what I’ve actually done, the real tasks that I think will make a difference and then kind of just look at it at the end of the day and ask myself, have I actually been productive today.  And I found that that’s knowing that I’m going to have to do that at the end of day just makes me focused a little bit more when I’m actually working at the computer.

Joseph:     That’s good, Rob.  Yeah.  There’s something else actually that I was thinking about when you were talking on that and that is that definitely when you’re new but even when you’ve been at this for quite some time information overload, there’s a massive problem.

Rob:         Yes.

Joseph:     Yeah, most certainly when you’re fairly new to it, you know, you’ve got to try and learn and there’s an awful lot to learn and an awful lot that you can try and do and there’s an awful lot of rubbish out there.

Rob:         Yeah.  And how do you — I mean that’s I’m still hard-pressed to advise anyone on that because I went through it last year when I started from April and I had months of that where I’d literally go from idea to idea and I just couldn’t — it’s very very difficult to solve the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad because how would you know as a beginner what you should focus on.  Is there any advice there that you could give people?

Joseph:     It is difficult but there is just so much out there and you can get so many emails and it’s difficult to know who to follow but if you can kind of sift through, it’s a bit of a slow process I know but if you sift through to find the one or two key people that you couldn’t follow along with who sound like they don’t just talk the top but they walk the walk so to speak…

Rob:         Yes.  Yeah.

Joseph:     If you follow with them and just really focusing on what they are saying because these are people who share with you other people that they know for a fact are incredibly good at what they do.  So, they’re happy to do that normally.  So, you can also then another contacts who that person who you already trust.  Do you know what I mean?  So, that’s it.  That’s a great way to and it’s also the truth and forget about all the rest and then just focusing on that and forget all the other stuff, you know, I mean I’ve — yeah, at times I’ve had so many emails and everything else and I’m trying to read everything, but surely and surely you just got to stop that and then just get nearly 5 or 6 different people that email you each day by different techniques of SEOs, etc. and that’s a…

Rob:         I think — yeah.

Joseph:     Go ahead.

Rob:         Sorry to interrupt.  I was just going to say that that’s exactly — I hadn’t realized that but that’s actually what I’ve done I think — is that probably three months after I started, I had like Google Reader, the RSS reader, loaded with probably 30 different blogs and websites, internet marketers sending me stuff, and I was trying to literally go through all of it and conceive it to try and find this answer, try and find this magic bullet.  And of course, the magic bullet doesn’t work.  But if you went and looked into my Google Reader by now and my email subscriptions as well, that’s been cut down vastly and it’s just a key number of people, probably only 4 or 5 people really that I really follow intensely and then probably 5 or 10 others that are sort of more preferable, but that’s — it’s difficult to — you know, it’s very difficult to be able to do that from day one, isn’t it?  But if you’re aware of that and constantly trying to filter say what is this kind of information, does it look genuine, can I really use this in my business, or is it just trying to sell me the latest information product with a massively overrated play, then that line can probably help you converge on the right people to guide you through the process.

Joseph:     Yeah.  One other way is to email the person who’s brought the product out or whose blog is or whatever it might be.  If you get a reply from them, that says a lot because these people are probably very very busy, you know.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     I would try to do, I would try to answer everybody who sends me an email.  On occasion, at one or two, I kind of slip through the net, that’s fair enough.  But I am incredibly busy but I always make an effort to try and at least send them a few sentences and try and help out or just say, hi, how are things.

Rob:         Yeah, that’s fantastic.  That’s another good tip there.  Great.  Okay.  Well, we’ve been going for quite a while, Joseph, and covered a variety of topics.  We’ve sorted out about it a little bit but I know there’s a lot to get through.  So thanks very much for your time again.

Joseph:     Okay.

Rob:         If people are — many people would be familiar with you already, but for those who aren’t, who don’t know where to find you on the web, where can they go to actually hear more from you?

Joseph:     Yeah, like the blog you mentioned earlier, my name actually, it’s, you know, JosephArchibald.com.

Rob:         Okay.  And can you spell that?

Joseph:     Yeah.  Scottish name.  Yeah.  Joseph as in J-O-S-E-P-H.

Rob:         Yeah.

Joseph:     And then Archibald, that’s all one word.  That’s Archibald, A for apple, R-C-H-I-B-A-L-D dot com.

Rob:         Dot com.

Joseph:     Yeah.

Rob:         Okay.

Joseph:     I think that’s actually ranked to the top now, yeah.  So, there’s no problem finding it.  It’s ranked at the top of Google probably.

Rob:         Okay.

Joseph:     I don’t really know but…

Rob:         Really.  That’s fine.  And I’ll put a link to that under this podcast anyway, so people will be able to follow through to that as well.  So, that’s pretty — well listen, thank you very much for your time.  I know you’ve been sort of going there for quite a few minutes now.  So, that’s great and it’s brilliant to just talk to you.  So thanks very much, Joseph.  Take care.

Joseph:     Okay.  Yeah, thanks to you too, Rob.  All the best, man.

Rob:         Alright.  Bye.

END

[/spoiler]

Did you enjoy listening to the interview? Please let me know what you think in the comments section below…