Blog Blazers Free Shipping Until Xmas!
Because of everything that’s happening with Amazon, I’m going to go on a lurk and offer free shipping for the book Blog Blazers until Xmas when you buy it directly from the official website (for Canadian and US orders). For international orders, until Xmas as well, shipping will be reduced to $5. In other words, I’ll cover your shipping costs.
I’m doing this because I’m very annoyed with this Amazon “Temporarily out of Stock” issue. I just don’t want to put anything in the way of you getting and benefiting from your Blog Blazers book before Xmas. The best part is that you don’t have to wait on Amazon to get free shipping. And you don’t have to buy $25 worth of books to get that free shipping!
So if you haven’t already bought Blog Blazers, now’s the time. This is special free shipping offer and it’s only going to last until Xmas!
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How to Generate Traffic to Your Website – David Scott Kane Review
Earlier this week David Scott Kane from The Recursive ISV wrote a very in depth and detailed review of my ebook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website. And quite a review it was. Thank you Scott for the very kind and positive words!
Some of the highlights include:
I’m going to state at the outset of this review that this book has the good stuff!
You gotta love a review that pretty much starts with that previous sentence! And if that wasn’t enough of an endorsement, the next quote from the review sure is:
I just believe that credit should go where credit is deserved and I believe this book is a must have for every micro ISV and indeed many who consider themselves ISV’s.
Like I said earlier, it is a glowing review. If nothing else, the fact that he values one chapter as enough reason alone to buy the ebook, well…
To my mind Steph’s chapter on this is worth every cent of the eBook alone. This is something I’m always harping on about here and something most ISV’s and micro ISV’s fail epically at.
What’s more, the conclusion is extremely positive:
The book covers a heck of a lot more too. I’ve been working with websites since 1995, yet I still found gems in this book.
I also found things I knew but had forgotten and some things I wasn’t in agreement with – but was able to take away and give more thought to.
Don’t assume you know the SEO game and are able to skip this, even if it only makes you take a fresh look at what you’re doing it’s certainly worth every cent of the $14.95.
Frankly I can’t wait to read his next book, coming out in November, on blogging.
I’ve really only scraped the surface on what’s inside Steph’s book. So in conclusion, yes I recommend it, highly. Read it, use it and improve yourself and your business of software.
As you can see, Scott gave my ebook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website a very glowing review. Thank you.
And in case you missed the link earlier, you can read his full review here.
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Off-site SEO is More Important than On-site SEO
Don’t believe me? Ever hear of the term Google Bomb? This is where enough people point to a specific website using the same anchor text (the highlighted text that’s underlined in a link) to override what Google thinks the website is about.
The classic example is Miserable Failure which George Bush experienced a while back. Unfortunately Google has corrected this and it no longer works, so I can’t show it to you live.
But it doesn’t mean it’s not possible elsewhere. Actually it’s very possible and it happens all the time.
For example, you can have a perfectly optimized website “mesothelioma” (a renown keyword for it’s high CPC – Cost Per Click – value), but if everyone linking to your website says you’re about something else, that something else will overrule your SEO efforts. Google has realized that although you may think you about a specific topic (or maybe you’re just trying to game the system), if everyone says else wise they’re probably more accurate than you. And Google will therefore adjust what it thinks your website is about according to what everyone else says it’s about.
Which is good and bad. It means that your website can be about multiple keywords just by having links to it with different keywords. It also means that although you might optimize your website for one particular keyword, the search engines will recognize it for several other keywords which is great (assuming of course that they link to you with the other keywords).
It also means that you can get a double whammy by optimizing your website for the keyword(s) that most people link to your website for because you’ll be matching what the world thinks you’re about. That’s a good thing.
The key thing to remember is that the way people link to you is more important that your on-site SEO efforts, especially as your website gains momentum. Yes your SEO efforts are still very valuable, you will need this to be at the top of the search results. What I’m saying though is that it’s not that critical to have your website 100% SEO optimized (if that’s even possible). If you can get 70%-80% of the way there, that’s probably good enough. You’ll get to a point where you’ll be getting diminishing returns on your on-site SEO efforts, where you’d be better off spending your time getting high quality links to your website.
PS: If you’re interested in learning more about On and Off-site SEO, check out my ebook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website, in which I discuss this and many more SEO topics.
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50% Discount on How to Generate Traffic Ebook!
Ever since the ebook appeared on Bits du Jour, I’ve been considered reducing the price by 50%. I also have to admit I just haven’t had the appropriate time to allocate to marketing the book, what with Interview the Pros (the traditionally published book I have coming out soon) and the upcoming major release of LandlordMax.
In any case, I’ve just reduced the price of the ebook by 50% tonight. I’m going to give that a try, at least for now. I don’t know how long it will last, so if you’ve been on the fence nows a good time to take advantage of this offer. I definitely will never reduce the price lower than it is today. If anything else, once I have some time to really market it, the price will likely increase.
Considering how affordably priced I thought it was before, now it’s an even greater deal. It’s now less than the price of going to a movie with a popcorn and drink!!! You can’t beat that. Check it out now!
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How to Generate Traffic to Your Website – Andy Brice Review
Earlier this month Andy Brice of Successful Software wrote a review of my ebook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website. The following is a quick highlight of Andy’s review:
“On the whole I think it is a very good introduction to marketing websites. At 136 pages there is plenty of ‘meat’ and a good balance between depth and breadth of coverage. Steph illustrates many of the topics with his own real-world experience with landlordmax.com.”
You can read his full review here. Thanks Andy for taking the time to review the book.
For those of you who are just hearing about this ebook for the first time, you can read the first 21 pages free here. You can also find several more reviews here. And if you’d like you can purchase it right now.
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How to Generate Traffic to Your Website – Mark Gladding Review
Mark Gladding founder of the company Tumbywood Software which sells the software Text2Go, a nice little program that will convert almost any text to audio, reviewed my ebook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website. You can read Mark’s full review of the ebook by clicking here.
Some of the highlights of his review include:
The book is based on Stephane’s experiences over the last few years of marketing and promoting his software company online. This makes the content highly relevant to myself, as I strive to improve the marketing of my own software product Text2Go. I found the examples and statistics quoted in the book fascinating.
The material would also be relevant to anyone starting a small online business, not just a software business. I’m sure the issues are the same. Limited time, little to no marketing budget and 100 tasks all competing for your attention.
Stephane covers an impression range of traffic generation techniques in his book, the highlights being SEO, content generation, freebies, blogging, Google Adwords, press releases and social networking.
I found each topic was covered to just the right level of detail. As you can imagine, separate books could easily be written about each of the above topics. However when running a small business you don’t have the time to become an expert on every possible online marketing strategy. Stephane provides enough information on each topic to get results. Each of the major topics also includes excellent references to more indepth sources of information.
Stephane’s writing style is clear and easy to follow. The writing is illustrated with plenty of interesting graphs and screenshots.
He concludes the review with:
In conclusion, How to Generate Traffic to Your Website contains a wealth of really useful information that’s well organised and clearly presented. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to other small online software and non-software business owners. At $28.95 (or a couple of hundred Google PPCs) the ROI will be very quick.
Something else that’s especially interesting (this is not in his review but was communicated through emails) is that Mark converted the ebook to speech using his software Text2Go and listened to it on his iPod commuting to and from work. How great is that!!!
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49% Discount – Today Only
The ebook I wrote (How to Generate Traffic to Your Website) will be on sale for $15.00, a huge 49% discount from the regular price, on BitsDuJour.com. This discount will be available ONLY TODAY so if you haven’t already purchased it, nows a great time!
The book has gotten many great and raving reviews, of which you can find some of the highlights below. Above the highlights, you can also click on each of the reviewers signatures to read their complete and full reviews.
In addition to this you can read the first 21 pages here for free to see for yourself what the book is like. This sample of the ebook includes the full detailed Table of Contents and a decent portion of the first chapter on SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Here are some highlights from the many reviews I promised:
It’s remarkably in depth. I’ve only read some of it so far, but what I’m most impressed with is the breadth of the coverage. It pretty much hits on everything someone starting a commercial website needs to think about.
As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth – here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why – presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV – LandlordMax – and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.
The SEO chapter in particular is must reading for any microISV because it focuses on techniques that work today – not 5 years ago – and because it gives you for the time invested a solid set of strategies to start acting on now. MicroISVs seldom have the luxury to dive to the bottom of any of the many subjects we have to deal with.
[…] To my surprise I found that Steph has done an indepth analysis of the traffic generation process and the sheer volume of topics covered in the ebook itself, reveals the amount of research Steph has done to accomplish this book. […]
Honestly, each section and category in itself could’ve easily made into another E-Book and believe me there are lot of e-books out there which deals with only 1/220th of what Steph’s written about in thie ebook, but sells for a higher price.
Steph’s done an amazing job on this ebook, and his hardwork is very evident from the research done, the topics and the sheer depth of information present on each topic.
I can assure you that this is NOT an ebook that will contain information that you’ve already read elsewhere.
Every page is simply worth the money you pay. And it’s cheaper that all those “I’ll teach you everything in two minutes” kind of books. […]
[…] Stephane has actually put a lot of work in the book, making it very easy to read, simple to find what you’re looking for and packed with some serious information about driving traffic to your sites. […]
We consider ourselves pretty savvy, but Stephane’s book has made us look at a few of the methods descibed from a different angle. We’re not saying its all new and revolutionary, we’re saying its got everything you need to know to start increasing your traffic, drastically. […]
Besides tons of written information, Stephane has also made sure that visual examples are placed throughout the book, to make sure you know what he’s trying to teach you. […]
Stephane absolutely knows what he’s talking about, and a lot of this is also coming from his personal experiences as a webmaster. We’ve got nothing bad to say – in fact, looks like we’re going to have to redo our own ebook in the making.
But the selling point for me to get this eBook was the fact that it wasn’t like all those spammy-type eBooks out there. It gives you realistic and proven tips for the long run, rather than the short term deal. Again, the fundamentals that people often overlook. Matter of fact, I have seen quite a few eBooks and all of them tend to only be a few pages long, but not How to Generate Traffic to your Website. This eBook goes into so much depth that it tries to fill as much information within the 138 pages. And so far, every single page has been useful information for me.
So, for all of you guys looking to make money online, you need to build traffic to your site first and foremost and I’m going to go on record and guarantee that this eBook is going to help me in more ways than one.
One of the highlights of the book for me was the sense of balance and perspective that is shown. For example, it’s possible to endlessly tweak your Adwords campaigns or your onsite SEO. However, Stephane repeatly emphases the point that you need to look at the ROI of your time. I also think the fact that he’s not advocating a single traffic generation technique means that he’s not afraid of recommending you weigh up each technique when deciding on how to make your next improvement. One really useful tip he makes is to play to your strengths. For example if you write great content for your blog and you enjoy it, then do more of that rather than trying to become an expert in another technique such as Google Adwords.
[..]In conclusion, How to Generate Traffic to Your Website contains a wealth of really useful information that’s well organised and clearly presented. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to other small online software and non-software business owners. At $28.95 (or a couple of hundred Google PPCs) the ROI will be very quick.
Don’t wait, today’s a great day to bring the traffic to your website to the next level by buying the ebook How to Generate Traffic to Your Website. You won’t get a better price, and it’s only available today at this amazing 49% discount of $15.00. You can buy it right here and now by clicking here.
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How to generate traffic to your website – Dat Money Review
Jason from DatMoney.com very positively reviewed my latest ebook “How to Generate Traffic to Your Website” earlier this month. If you haven’t had a chance to come across it yet, here are some of the highlights from the review:
“I mean, we all can’t know everything; we have to start from somewhere, right? And although my methods do help build traffic, just by reading the first 30-40 pages of this eBook, I was in shock on how much I have missed out on.”
Further on he states:
“But the selling point for me to get this eBook was the fact that it wasn’t like all those spammy-type eBooks out there. It gives you realistic and proven tips for the long run, rather than the short term deal. Again, the fundamentals that people often overlook. Matter of fact, I have seen quite a few eBooks and all of them tend to only be a few pages long, but not How to Generate Traffic to your Website. This eBook goes into so much depth that it tries to fill as much information within the 138 pages. And so far, every single page has been useful information for me.”
However the best recommendation is that he “goes on the record and guarantees” the ebook is going to help you:
“So, for all of you guys looking to make money online, you need to build traffic to your site first and foremost and I’m going to go on record and guarantee that this eBook is going to help me in more ways than one.”
Thank you Jason for such a glowing review! And it’s great to hear you got a lot of value out of it.
You can read the first 21 pages of the ebook for free here, which also includes the full Table of Contents. The ebook costs only $28.95, and you can buy your own copy right now by clicking here.
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How to Generate Traffic to Your Website – Free EBook Sample
Yesterday I released a sample (the first 21 pages) of the EBook I’m selling “How to Generate Traffic for Your Website“. In it you’ll find the complete and detailed Table of Contents, as well as the beginning of the first chapter (SEO – Search Engine Optimization).
Like I keep saying over and over here on this blog, you need to try different things to see what works. If you don’t try you won’t ever know. For LandlordMax we offer a free 30-day trial, so why not with an EBook? Except instead of a time based trial, you get the beginning of the book. In this case you can read the first 21 pages before you decide on buying it.
Something else to mention, I’ve had some people approach me expecting the book to be an advanced book about online traffic generation. This book is targeted for people who have just started to those that have an intermediate level of skill and knowledge on traffic generation. It will give you a really solid foundation on which to build. To quote Bob Walsh from 47Hats.com:
“As someone who knows a fair bit about these topics, I found Steph’s down to earth – here’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-why – presentation very complete. His chapters on SEO, AdWords and press releases were some of the best material from a microISV’s point of view I’ve seen to date. Steph pulls from both the experience of his microISV – LandlordMax – and other sources to illustrate and illuminate his points.”
If you haven’t already checked it out, you can read the first 21 pages of the ebook here. And if you’ve already read the sample and want to get the rest, you can buy it here.
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Your Website's Response Time Will Affect Your Google AdWords Campaigns
Everybody understands that it’s important to monitor a website for uptime, after all if your website is down you’re down. But it’s not as simple as that. You also need to monitor your server’s response times. That is the time it takes from the time you request a webpage to the time loads in your web browser. The longer the response time the worse the user experience. No one wants to wait for a page to load anymore, we’re no longer living in the dial-up modem era.
And for those of you who use Google AdWords, you’ll really want to pay careful attention to your website’s response times. Google has recently indicated that a website’s response time will be incorporated into the Quality Score. And any affects in the Quality Score will therefore affect the eligibility and minimum prices for your ads!
The key to monitoring a website’s response time is to get an average from multiple sources on a continual basis. You need to take the average response time throughout the day to compensate for when your server is handling more requests, and thereby responding slower. You also need to measure the response times from different sources because some paths on the net may get bogged down for reasons unrelated to your web server’s performance.
So how do you this cost effectively? I recommend using a website monitoring service. For my company LandlordMax we use Pingdom, and we’re extremely happy with them. What initially attracted us to their service was Pingdom’s blog, which I recommend reading if you have a chance. There’s lots of great material in there.
In any case a good average response time should be well under 500 ms per request. You can find our uptime and response times graphs for LandlordMax below:
As you can see there are always some issues. In the first graph, the uptime graph, our website was down for a total of 5 minutes for the month of March. Although we want 100% uptime, it rarely happens, not without excessive costs. To be honest, until you really monitor your website you probably won’t realize the real uptime. A lot of people are surprised when they see these graphs! They never really thought that their websites were ever down. But if you think about it, OS patches often cause a 5 minute outage. Even with load balancers you can go down for a bit as you tweak the load balancers themselves.
Another great benefit with these types of service is that they will contact you when your website does go down. They’ll contact you, depending on your preferences, by email, by text message, and so on. For us we’ve got it checking our server every 5 minutes, so I personally know within 5 minutes by text message when our server goes down. It’s great peace of mind!
But going back to our discussion about response times, on average our (LandlordMax‘s) response times are about 200 ms. That’s great! We’re very happy with this. We had a couple of glitches were the response times exploded to 1 second, but overall it’s a very good looking graph. And even 1 second is better than many many websites out there.
On Pingdom’s blog, they’re kind enough to provide some graphs to show the dramatic differences in response times some websites have experienced. The following shows a very significant difference in response time starting at 4pm. Based on the blog’s comment, the difference in response time is because they switched hosting services.
And here’s another graph from Pingdom which shows what a dramatic difference optimizing your webpage code can have on your response times:
Obviously there’s a lot you can do to optimize your website’s response times. It’s worth monitoring, especially if you use Google AdWords!
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