Check out this guest post I did over at clickbank’s Blog, and check out our new beginner’s course.  We’re getting great feedback on it!

Haven’t been on the blog much as we’ve been preparing for the big launch.  I’ve been absolutely thrilled with the response.  Particularly the folks that have upgraded from Niche Blueprint 1.0!  What an amazing endorsement of our products…the fact that people are willing to continue to invest…after seeing last year’s version.

Thank you so much for putting your confidence in us!

Niche Blueprint 2.0

When Clickbank wanted to expand into the German, French. and Spanish markets…they asked us to produce the “How to” videos for their new foreign language sites.

With the help of our team and 3 great translators from our Forum, we got the job done in record time.

I’m thrilled with how they came out and thriled with the vote of confidence from Clickbank.

Here’s the press release

Thanks to Brett, Cindy, Paul, and Danny for all their hard work!

Hopefully everyone’s heard about the new “caffeine” update that’s coming to Google after the holidays.

It’s a change to the algorithms that will have some sites see improvements in their search engine rankings…and others..well, not so much.

Wouldn’t it be great to see what’s going to happen?

Well..an enterprising individual has created a great tool that will allow you to type in a keyword phrase and compare where you are now…and where you’ll be once caffeine is rolled out.

Grab the tool here

QUICK UPDATE: This is not Google’s caffeine sandbox that was turned off, this uses the results from one data center where Google has confirmed that caffeine has been rolled out to.

In this economy, we’re all looking for some good news!  One of the questions I get asked often, is:

How is the economic slow down hurting Internet marketing businesses ?

I’ve always answered that I’d rather be in an online business than a brick and mortar.  I can be so flexible with my business and advertising strategies…AND, it always seems like the one area of retail growth is online spending..even in an economic downturn.

Well…that’s happened again.  In a time where all spending is down.  Online retail spending for black Friday was up 11% year over year (Thanksgiving day spending was up 10%)

These are not trivial numbers for sure.

Online remains a great place to be during hard economic times AND good ones.

Source: ComScore

This recent post over at Google’s Webmaster Blog and the fact that there’s a whole new search algorithm (caffeine) launching after the holidays really got me thinking about the future value of comment posting on blogs for SEO purposes.

Let’s just think about it from a common sense perspective.  Although I’m totally oversimplifying, the whole idea of Google is that it shows the most “relevant” or “important” or “most popular” pages that it knows about for a given term. Oversimplifying again, the basic way it does this is to track the number (and quality/type) of inbound links to a page and what that link “calls” the page (anchor text).  So, in general, the more inbound links a page has for a given term, the higher it shows up in the SERPS.  Each inbound link is like a “vote” for the site it’s linking to. (more…)

It amazes me that there is still so much disinformation out there re: Google’s stance on duplicate content.  Myths die hard as they’re repeated over and over I guess.  I get these questions about it all the time.  So here you go…my take on duplicate content.

This information is taken straight from the mouths of Google engineers.

There is no “duplicate content” penalty.  Full stop. (more…)

As promised, here are the contest winners!

From Twitter:   The winner is Mike Stronghill

From our Forums Eldon Beard

Please join me in congratulating them…I’ll be working with them just as soon as they want me to.  Thanks also to everyone who participated.  It’s much appreciated.

I swore I’d never do this…but… Here it goes!

At the end of each year, we like to do some kind of contest for everyone.  This year, we’ve decided that the prize will be a 1 hour coaching session with me (Steve).

We’re going to give away 2 of these, and here’s how you can win! (more…)

There is always lots of talk about what “web 2.0″ platform actually ranks better in the SERPS…and of course , it’s constantly changing as Google slaps Squidoo or Hubpages etc.

Everyone has a theory, but not a lot of people have hard data…until right now that is.

We are quietly building a massive research tool that will allow us to do Internet marketing research like no one has ever done before.

It will literally be game changing..and you’ll hear about it sometime after the Holidays. You’ll also be able to get access to the data yourself…to do your own research…but…more about that later.

We have already been doing some initial analysis and we wanted to share some very interesting Web 2.0 stats with you.

We looked at approximately 60,000 “popular” internet marketing keywords (we’ll explain our population samples better in the future…when we’re ready to share more about our research tool, but suffice to say that these are random keywords that have at least some kind of marketing value…i.e. not “chair” or something like that!)…to see what the level of penetration was for web 2.0 platforms in the top 10 Google results.

(more…)