Yesterday I had a major “wobble”.

I’m really moving out of my “comfort zone” and I can see that this is absolutely necessary so I can get nearer to the place I want to be in life.  The problem for us all, of course, is that moving out of our comfort zones is, well, uncomfortable!  Personally, I realised yesterday just how far out of my comfort zone I have to go when it comes to actually generating business out in the real world.

I have, during my entire life, never really faced these fears before even though I identified them many years ago – they have remained unresolved as I managed to “get by” and make a comfortable living as an employee in a field so narrow that I could avoid confronting these problem areas.  Being self-employed means we really do have to face a whole range of fears head-on – there is no “corporate shield” to hide behind now!  I know that only by practising those things I am afraid of will I lose the fear and “expand my comfort zone” – this much is accepted wisdom, but of course just knowing this does not make the process any less uncomfortable!

The thing is, when I face what I’m up against, it’s REALLY daunting – it seems that what I have to do to succeed in my new self-employed life is a bit like climbing a towering, vertical cliff without a rope!  Yesterday it was as if I approached that cliff, looked up at it and wondered how on earth I was ever going to climb it.  I made the mistake of looking at the whole daunting task instead of just working out where my next foothold is.

I think that’s something I need to remember.  Looking at the whole task – like looking up at that massive cliff – just caused me to freeze and think I would never be able to do it.  Finding the next foothold and planting my foot in it – almost a piece of cake!  So what I did yesterday was to really break down the big actions on my list into “footholds” – baby steps that will take me a little bit outside my comfort zone – things that I can JUST DO without thinking about the whole daunting task of “generating business”.  The key to these little steps, for me, is to define them clearly and in such as way that they are small enough for “doing” without any deep strategic thinking.

When I’ve taken one of these baby steps, I’m no longer stuck – I just made a little bit of PROGRESS and it feels nice.  I may have only done a little thing, but at least I did it, and it’s another little step up that cliff!

If you have your own tips that you found useful when “facing the fear” in self-employment, please leave a comment!

Sometimes I look up from my computer when I am working here at home and glance sideways, my attention diverted by a movement outside.  Often, it’s one of the workers in the office opposite, standing outside, talking on a mobile phone, having a cigarette break.

On a bad day, I find myself envying them for a moment – envying the camaraderie of the office; the steady salary; the pension.  Then I wake up to myself and realise that they are effectively in prison nine-to-five every day.  Or at least, that’s how an office career job seemed to me whenever I was stuck in one.  I was dead inside, marking time each month just paying my way, learning little in the way of new skills; getting little consolation during my weekends and evenings.  It was as if someone else ruled the very core of my existence.

So after a few moments of empty envy, when I see these furtively smoking employees I remember how much I am learning, how I am moving forward with my business, albeit hesitantly and slowly – and most of all I remind myself how I am right now taking charge of my life and living it true-to-character, instead of acting out some badly cast role as a servant to some undeserving god.

I’m writing this pretty much off the top of my head.  I’ve literally just got out of bed and switched on the laptop.

I awoke this morning having had a bad dream.  In it I dreamt that I was being bullied and ridiculed by a man who had hired me into a full-time sales job with slick words and promises of how great it would be to work for him, only to find myself on day two of my job in an office meeting, surrounded by about 30 men, many of them decades younger than I, jeering as my boss humiliated me in front of them all, saying that he always suspected I would never make the grade and my first day had proved him right.  He then suddenly grabbed me and said he would show me what he did to people like me, at which point he gave me a “dead leg” and caused me to fall to the ground as everyone laughed.

The reason for me writing this is firstly to break the dream and stop it clouding my day, but also to acknowledge that really this is an embodiment of one of my irrational fears, a fear that I need to overcome.  Since I did a telesales job about 20 years ago, I have a real “thing” about what I think of as “selling”.  Unconsciously I think of selling in terms of cold calling against a daily regime of targets and a threat of job loss if I fail – this describes that job from 20 years ago.  Really, I KNOW that sales need not be like that.  I know that every businessman has to sell to succeed, but my unconscious, narrow view of selling is preventing me from getting into the process and engaging with prospects on MY terms, in MY own inimitable way.

Recognising this problem is a great help, and my dream last night was another prod that reminds me I really need to get some positive sales experience and overcome this problem that really is hindering my business.  Sales for me is really about setting out my wares, showing people how they can benefit from them and bringing about a successful trade in an almost natural way, a win-win way in which both parties walk away happy.  This, I have absolutely no problem with and I know I would actually come to like it, because I genuinely love “trading”.  The pressured sell, when you make enough cold calls to get some of them to stick with some unfortunates whom you happen to catch at a weak moment, that completely turns me off.

So I need to work towards looking at the sales process as the thing I think of as “trading” and not the thing I think of as “selling”, because one conjures up horrors for me and the other I genuinely love.

I know I am not alone in having some sort of block about “selling”.  I would be interested to hear your comments – go on – write one below while you’re here..

It’s been a weird week.  It seems that one of Google’s near-daily algorithm changes has had quite an impact on the traffic I am getting to my websites.  Like many people in the UK, I have noticed a significant drop in traffic since early June.  And I mean 75%.  This seems to have happened in the U.S. earlier – in May, hence the “Mayday” name being given to this update.

Of course, nobody knows for sure what has happened, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence.  I have read about a merchant who has reported affiliate sales down “across the board”, i.e. across many affiliate websites, and I also read about a man who usually earns $1000 per month from his websites; slashed to virtually nil during the past month.

Many more seasoned observers are saying it’s “just part of what affiliate marketing is all about”, changing what you do, putting up with whatever Google throws at you.  But I realised yesterday that, for me, it’s far too high a risk to have all my income coming from this source.  I am only getting just over £100 per month right now, ten months in (well – I was), but I would hate to spend another year getting that to £1000 a month only for it to revert to nil for months on end following a Google update.

So, I have decided forthwith to diversify, and that I can no longer afford the luxury of going after Google’s “free traffic”  full-time and using this free traffic to provide all of my income.  Instead, I will spend 50% of my time on that, and the other 50% on getting/doing freelance work or developing other projects or maybe even experimenting a little (very cautiously) with paid traffic.

This will slow the development of my empire of affiliate sites, but it still means I can spend a good 25 hours a week on them, on average, more than many people have the luxury to do.  It will also mean I will be working towards more diverse income from more than one source, which will be lower risk for my overall business.

I was reflecting on my self employment and how it compares with having a “job” in the “real world”.

I came to the conclusion that when I had a full-time job, it was as if every day was a grey-sky day, when that uniform blanket of dark grey cloud keeps the sun out, forever.  There is a dull normality about it all.  There may not be any thunder-claps or heavy downpours, but there is never any bright sunshine to warm the soul either.

By contrast, for me self-employment has been like an extended period of unpredictable, unseasonal and very unsettled weather.  When I look at my affiliate marketing website stats and see that my latest precious new website has captured no more than 10 visitors in a month; when I write a carefully considered comment on someone’s blog only to press submit and get the magic word “discarded” in big black letters; when I carefully apply to an affiliate scheme only to log into my Commission Junction account  and see my application in the “rejected” list – these things are like bad-weather days, cold, rainy, windy, stormy days.

Conversely, when I make a big sale (as I just did today), it’s as if the sun of affiliate marketing has suddenly come out from behind those black SEO clouds  and all is well in my little self-employed world for a few moments as I bask in the warmth of my little successes.

So which do I prefer?  Oh come on, you know me by now.  I would HATE to go back to the grey life; a life of endless sun-less days with no hope of a sunny spell.  Give me the turbulent, changeable climate of self-employment any day.

Conversion Rate Boost for Top Ranking Keywords

Well, I have been playing with the new version of Webmaster Tools and it’s really something.

The three new pieces of information that are really exciting to me are the number of impressions for a keyword; the average rank for the keyword and the clickthrough rate for a keyword – in a given period.

This is exciting stuff.

The ranking/clickthrough/impressions data is especially useful to me when I have a site under test because say I have a microniche site with a theme keyword ranking average position 4 in a month, with 500 impressions in a month and say 50 clicks. In theory, once I get to know the average conversion rate for a targeted site at a given ranking, I could extrapolate the data to forecast with some accuracy what I can expect to achieve when the site gets to no. 1.

And herein lies the first eye-opener!

Aside from any inaccuracy with the “impressions” number, and there seems to be some, the big revelation is the conversion percentages.  To date I have been using the old AOL table from 2006 to determine what percentage of traffic a site could expect to receive at no.1, no.2 etc.:

Now, though, judging by what I see in Webmaster Tools for my sites, it looks as if this old data, based on averages for all sites whether targeted to a keyword or not, is really not appropriate when it comes to forecasting the clickthrough percentage at a given ranking for targeted, focussed, Thirty-Day-Challenge-Style microniche sites. Recent examples from my stats seem to confirm an example in a new training video on this subject on Thirty Day Challenge Plus, which I cannot quote, but if I take an aggregate from all the data so far I get these very approximate expected conversion rates:

OK so it’s early days, and these results are VERY ROUGH and based on a TINY sample, but this looks very exciting. On the face of it, this means that I can expect much higher conversions from targeted niche sites than the old table led me to believe.

Note how the total is way over 100%.  This is likely because the highly relevant, targeted pages involved really do pull in the traffic far better than the global average page for that keyword – something that I, and many others, overlooked since that original table appeared in 2006.

If, through use of Google Webmaster Tools, we build up enough case history in the conversion rates at a given rank for targeted sites, this will lead to big changes in the assumptions we make.  For example, at present the Market Samurai tool, which I love, applies a 42% multiplier to expected traffic to give “SEOT” which is expected traffic at number 1.  This is in line with the 2006 AOL data.  It will be interesting to see if the tool is changed in time to reflect what we will learn.

Please let me know your views on all this by leaving a comment below.

I have just analysed the performance on 17 of my Thirty Day Challenge-style microniche sites to see how the actual traffic stacks up against the estimated traffic that I got from Market Samurai or the Google keyword tool (it’s all Google data anyway).  I had read that often the actual traffic is less than the estimates, and from my analysis, it seems so.

Before looking at the results, I want to clarify that I calculated MY traffic estimates by starting with the actual number of unique visitors now, taking into account the site’s current ranking for its keyword, and thereby estimating how much traffic the site would get at the ranking that I reckon I could achieve (usually no. 1).  This adjustment is made by using the well-known table that I believe came from AOL in 2006 (it seems we still have nothing better!)  that shows what percentage of traffic a site is likely to get in each of the top 10 slots in Google:

This means for example that if I have a site that’s getting 50 unique visitors at no. 2, I can hope for, say, 175 when it gets to no. 1.

So, based on the numbers, adjusted using this table, I reached the following rather interesting conclusion:

On average, these 17 sites, ONCE THEY ARE RANKED AS PREDICTED, are estimated to get unique visitors for the main keyword equating to ONE THIRD of the exact match SEOT and ONE SIXTH of the phrase-matched SEOT shown in Market Samurai (whose numbers are in turn based on the Google Adwords tool).

Of course, 17 sites don’t make an in-depth study.  However, it’s based on real evidence and I will definitely be using this when it comes to estimating return on investment as part of the keyword research phase.  I’ll also recalculate the numbers each month to see how they change.

Well, I got a shock this morning when I tried to access the Google Keyword Tool from the Google KeywordToolbox, here:

http://www.googlekeywordtool.com/

because it’s all changed!

Google Keyword Tool Changes

It looks as if the local search numbers are now based on a 12-month average rather than the last month, and the whole GUI is all more slick than before.

You can also filter the results by categories.  Even down to product level if you like.  Could you do this before?  I certainly never did.   You can also limit the results to those that contain individual words from the keyword phrases.   Not only that, but there’s a handy link on each keyword to Google Insights for Search.  Now, maybe some of these features were in the old version, but I for one never saw them so either they are new or I’m only just noticing them now that they are “in your face” on the left of the screen.

All in all it looks great.  I am only hoping that everyone sees what I see and that this is not some sort of dream I had, because I had not read about it anywhere else.  Having said that, I’ve been off the keyword reaearch for a week or two.

One thing I haven’t got to the bottom of yet – and it could be important, is this sentence that appears just above the keyword list:

“Sign In with your AdWords login information to see the full set of ideas for this search”

I need to find out what more you get when logged into Adwords, or more to the point, what you DON’T get by NOT logging in…

Looking at my EzineArticles stats this morning, a flash of inspiration hit me.

I have submitted a lot of articles to EzineArticles now, but the success rate of people visiting them and clicking through to my sites varies a lot.  However, there is something of a pattern forming.

The first thing to say is that my rubbish articles do rubbish.  Few people read them, and virtually nobody clicks through to the underlying web site I am trying to draw attention to.  OK, fair enough.  I must not write rubbish.

It gets more interesting though..

The next class of articles are those that are what I would call self-contained, where you read it, and you have everything you came for.  A good example is the safety guide.  You know the thing “Steam Iron Dangers – Don’t Fall into These Traps”; or “Folding Snooker Table – Avoid These Hidden Hazards”.  The thing about these is that once a reader reaches the end, your invitation to “visit folding-snooker-table-today.com for more information and some amazing bargains” is pretty empty – because the reader found your article by searching for safety tips – probably.  He has all he needs thank you very much, and has no reason to visit your site.

This brings me to the third class of article.  This is the one I am aiming for from now on.  It’s the sort of article that’s a real “hook” or a “teaser”.  I have found that things like “Folding Snooker Table – A Beginner’s Guide” have worked well for me, assuming of course that the object in question is something that people are interested in.

The point is that this sort of article is giving people a start in the subject; giving them the information and confidence that they need before they can choose and buy a product that perhaps they have not bought before.  Having read such a “primer”, it’s a very natural step for the reader to capitalise on this new-found confidence and click on the link to see some examples of the product on your niche site.

In a nutshell, it’s about sowing seeds rather than giving a bouquet.  Seeds are a starting point; a bouquet is the end.

Oh dear.

Back in November I wrote a post entitled “I Really Don’t Know Life At All” – and since then I have received a lot of people here who are looking for the lyrics of this great song by Joni Mitchell, properly called “Both Sides, Now”.

So, if that’s what you’re here for – there’s a link to the lyrics below so you don’t feel cheated, but why not have a look around while you’re here?

I Really Don’t Know Life At All / Both Sides Now Lyrics