Back in February 2010 I spent a weekend in Valencia to meet up with Graham Hunt and Dom Goucher, two fellow Brits living in Spain who I’d met at Ed Dale’s “Coming Come” conference in Manchester the previous November.

The weekend was partially social (Arctic Monkeys gave a free gig) but partially about brainstorming some new business ideas, especially since we were lucky enough to join Ed’s mentoring program for a year.

When brainstorming some ideas for a new business we struck upon the idea of promoting Market Samurai to Spanish internet marketers, and soon set up a website with information about find profitable niches – Market Samurai España.

While the version of Market Samurai you download is still in English, Graham put some videos together in Spanish to explain how to use it to Spanish speaking internet marketers.

The interesting thing about this process was finding out how to go about SEO in Spanish. If you’ve ever followed the 30 Day Challenge (or The Challenge, as it’s now branded) you’ll know about the “symphony of four parts” and while that is directly applicable to the Spanish speaking market we did find a particular problem with link building.

There are thousands of article directories, web 2.0 properties and blog networks to post content in English. However, the opportunities to do the same in Spanish are far smaller, the tools to enable easy backlinks just don’t exist.

The preferred keyword tool of many internet marketers is Market Samurai, which is only available in English, although it can target any linguistic/geographic market. There don’t seem to be any keyword tools (or herramientas de palabras clave in Spanish) actually in Spanish, which is where our website helps out, and it has been relatively successful in doing so.

By working on this website we aim to have the best information on finding profitable keywords – palabras claves – in Spanish despite none of us being a native Spanish speaker and from there see what other tools can be applied to the Spanish market place.

Sunday morning I was watching TV prior to the F1 GP at Valencia and “playing around” with my iPod (if it were an iPad Ed Dale would have wet himself with joy). For some reason I started to look at a particular keyword related to a market I’m already in and it hadn’t shown up on any keyword research I’d look at before.

I delved into it a bit using the Google keyword tool – Market Samurai isn’t (yet) available on the iPod/iPhone/iPad – and Google Insights using the Google Trends method first exposed in the 30 Day Challenge of a few years ago.

I was stunned to see the amount of traffic and competition – basically nobody is targeting it. See the screenshot from Market Samurai (which I just did on my PC):

Don’t believe anyone who tells you all the good niches are gone. Now, I don’t expect this to convert massively, but it should convert something. And the average order size is €276, so that multiplied out over the year is going to add a few K to the bottom line, thank you very much.

At the time I wrote some content (on my iPod) and ranked in the top 10, although it has dropped back to the third page now. So yesterday I bought to new domains relating to the top and bottom listed keyword phrases above. I’m now ranking at #5 for the bottom result – 595 searches per day and 7,750 competition, yet a SEOV of $252.40!!!

See how profitable sport in TV can be?

By the way the 30 Day Challenge has been renamed The Challenge – it starts today, takes less time each day but more days to complete. Check it out to learn more cool internet marketing stuff.

Dan Thies has just released week 5 of Plan B, his free internet marketing course. In it he takes you from the basics of creating a website with “Magnet Content” that establishes yourself as an authority on your theme. In the latest lesson, which is available as a video or a downloadable PDF, he discusses finding news sources and writing quick articles that reference third party sources.

It’s interesting to compare with what Ed Dale is currently teaching and Dan even talks about chunking time down into blocks of 25 minutes just like Ed does – the pomodoro technique, or – as Ed calls it – Critical Focus Time.

Read “Plan B Week 5: Sourcing & Creating News” on SEO Fast Start – and make sure you check out the precious lessons if you’ve missed them so far.

Ed Dale tweeted a link to a blog post about the 5 CFT Challenge a few days ago, so I thought I’d add my own experience.

At the tail end of last year, before setting of the Ed’s Manchester conference I went through the 30DC process and got it down to six hours spread over a week.

So here is how I’ve got on so far with the 5 CFT Challenge, with each CFT consisting of a uninterrupted period of 25 minutes where you really go for it – Critical Focus Time, if you really want to know.

27th May – CFT 1

• Pick a market
• Find a keyword that works (but don’t be fussy due to lack of time)
• Pick some category keywords
• Register a domain
• Write the classic beginner draft

1 x 25 mins
1 x 15 mins

OK, so that took quarter of an hour longer than it should have. Bummer.

28th May – CFT 2

• Write a 5 minute articles for spinning
• Create WPD blog with plain template
• Edit yesterday’s article and put on blog
• Index the article (Twitter, Propeller, Digg, Stumbleupon)

1 x 25 mins
1 x 20 mins

And that took 20 mins longer than it should have…

31st May – CFT 3/4

• Edit AMA article and submit (Article Marketing Automation)
• Set up Google Reader to monitor the niche
• Draft article for AMA next week (CFT 6)

1 x 25 mins to edit and submit AMA article… still need to set up Google Reader and write draft article for AMA. I only signed up last week and it is a really good service. I’m not that easily impressed, but despite the sales page which didn’t really do it for me the product itself is excellent.

So, I spent 25 minutes there and I have 25 minutes to set up Google reader (2 mins) and the rest to write a draft article. Shouldn’t be a problem.It does show how fast you can research, set up and promote a website though and while 6 hours was pretty good, this should be down to around three in the end.

At the weekend I was down in Valencia where I met up with the rest of the “Spanish Crew” (above), who I met at Ed Dale’s conference in Manchester back in November. While there was a social element to the meetup and we went to the MTV Arctic Monkey’s gig, a lot of it was spent discussing a project that we’ve been working on for the last 10 days or so.

Now, while we had planned on starting a project together, as we definitely have complimentary skill sets, an opportunity came up the week before last that was too good to ignore. And so we’ve had hours of Skype conference calls in which we’ve really knocked out ideas into shape, looked at different possibilities, knocked holes in our ideas, re-thought them, pushed them, prodded them and kicked them into shape – now simply known as the big plan.

While the big plan is top secret – we have run it past a few people and yesterday received an extraordinarily positive response – it got me thinking about how I got to be spending so much time working on this project and the key steps that led me here.

Part of it is lifestyle design, although I didn’t know it at the time. But it goes back further.

When I was first exposed to the internet in around 95/96 I saw huge possibilities and knew it was going to change everything. So, after playing around with it for a while and getting a company webs site set up I decided I wanted to work for an ISP – that didn’t quite happen initially.

Then, in December 1997, I met a fantastic girl from Barcelona and I soon became an easyJet frequent flier. By April 1998 I was working at Demon Internet where I eventually became Product Manager for ADSL prior to its UK launch; and then to Bulldog Communications, which paid fantastically well, but was the worst job I’ve ever had.

One thing the Bulldog job did allow me to do was save like crazy; in May 2001, after working there for 8 months I quit and on August 12th 2001 I moved to Barcelona. That sounds like a big step, but in fact moving to Barcelona was easy – the difficult thing was taking action and actually telling my boss that I was quitting.

Not having a job lined up – or even any idea of what I was going to do next – I was playing around with websites again. In January 2002 I received a phone call from the sales director of a hotel booking website – he wanted me to include a link to his site on my Barcelona related site in exchange for commission on any referred sales.

Since it was easy to do, I added the link and thought nothing of it; at least not until the next month, when he phoned me to tell me I’d made 4 sales!

That was the point I knew I could make a living online

Fast forward to 2007. I’d suffered badly from combination of luck and my own mistakes. I’d been earning some pretty good money, but had been wiped out when Google gave my main website a penalty that knocked it way out of the results.

After flailing around for a while I tried Adsense Arbitrage, which worked well, but I knew it wouldn’t last; and when I saw people being kicked out of Adsense I decided enough was enough. Once again looking for some way to replace my lost income, I signed up to Stompernet SIMPLE. It cost me $1 for a month of internet training; I really dived in and signed up for the $97/month program afterwards.

While SIMPLE had some serious flaws in it, I was introduced to Ed Dale through it. Although I didn’t follow the 30 Day Challenge in August 2007, I did follow what he was doing; and in September 2007 I joined Immediate Edge run by him and Dan Raine.

The next big decision was to attend Ed’s “Coming Home” seminar in Manchester at the end of November 2009. While I was there to boost my knowledge of internet marketing, I was hoping to make some contacts; in fact, while the content was excellent, the biggest benefit was in the contacts – that’s why I was in Valencia last weekend, currently the last link in a chain that began with me finding the internet in the mid 90s.

So, what’s the key?

Good question. I’ve had good luck and bad; made good decisions and bad; felt elated and downtrodden; and it’s been hard work, but it’s been fun.

Above all, while I have had to change direction or modify my plans, I have never given up.

Since it’s almost Christmas I suppose you’re thinking peace on Earth and goodwill to all mankind.

Better get this out the way then!

Schadenfreude

Remember kiddies – revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

OK, I was lying the other day – Ed Dale did NOT eat my hamster. And he isn’t evil – at least as far as I know. Dan Raine on the other hand… * Anyway, put on your anti-NLP shades** and certainly don’t buy anything from this blog.

Getting things done – the problem with working at home

If you work at home like I do then you’ll know that how hard it can be sometimes geting anything done and that is compounded by the distractions available in this online world. Your good intentions can be completely sabotaged by taking a “quick” look at this website, clicking through to that website and by the time you know it it’s nearly lunchtime and so not worth starting anything just yet anyway.

This has been a MASSIVE problem for me in the past, but thanks to the easy availability of outsourcing anything I know isn’t going to get done I pay for; however, there are always things I need to do.

So how do we get the things we know we need to do done and avoid the distractions? Turn off Twitter; close down your email client; stop chatting of Skype.

That gets you so far, it’s true. But what about those tasks you are resistant to? The ones you don’t want to start, but experience tells you once started you will be able to get done? The ones you’ve tried to start but just sit staring at your monitor, knowing that there are plenty of hours in the day and it’ll get done later. Or tomorrow. Or whenever.

Let me tell you a little story

We spend every August on the coast with limited internet access (although that has got much better thanks to Vodafone). In fact I spend 5 or 6 weeks away from home during this period; which coincides with one of my really busy periods.

Luckily there isn’t too much to do in terms of customer service – last summer I took to answering my few customer service emails on the beach – but I do need to keep an eye open. Also, last summer I made the mistake of doing some SEO work for a client over this period. While the strategy was already in place and most of the work was outsourced, I did have to do a few things.

So, once every few days I would have a concentrated session on a laptop. And I was surprised to find out how much I could do in an hour as long as I was 100% focused.

I realised it was because of the time pressure – I wanted to do holiday stuff, not work, so I did it as fast as possible.

When I got back to Barcelona I started to plan my day to create artificial time pressure:

• Immediately start work for 2 hours on a long term client job and one of my long term projects.
• Once that was over do email.
• Go to the gym or swim for 2 hours.
• Work on a project for 90 minutes before lunch (15 mins)
• Unstructured time to catch up on internet marketing, secondary projects, play time, and experiment.

That means that before lunch I’d done 3 1/2 hours of solid work. It may not seem like much, but it was a huge leap in productivity.

And so I was interested to hear Ed Dale talk about the pomodoro technique to aid productivity and get things done.

The first time I tried it was Saturday night in Manchester. Back at my hotel I had a couple of hours to relax, get changed and have dinner, before meeting up for drinks with Dan Raine and the gang; and there was something I needed to get done that weekend if possible.

The task was quite simple; I’d written some stuff a few years ago for another (non IM) website. The website owners now publish a magazine and wanted to rework some of that content and so pulled out relevant bits from 3 or 4 articles I’d written for them; all I had to do was make sure the content worked in its new context and write some filler and bridging content.

I’d looked at doing up while on the train from London to Manchester – I just couldn’t face it. It’s not a big job, but the kind of job I like to put off.

Anyway, I was at my hotel and decided I’d never get it done in the time available. And then I remembered the pomodoro technique that Ed had mentioned (“Pomodoro” is Italian for tomato – Google it if you want to know why).

It’s pretty simple; set a timer for 25 minutes and work without distraction until the timer goes. When it does, stop what you’re doing, take a 5 minute break, then re-set the timer and work again.

The secret sauce

In almost exactly 25 minutes I had the job done and emailed – by creating time pressure I was able to get the job done. So simple. The secret sauce to productivity is… tomato sauce (BOOM BOOM)!

And now I’m back in Barcelona I work in chunks of 25 minutes – this blog post is now four minutes into its second 25 minute pomodoro session. It seems simple, but it is highly effective, so I’m definitely going to use it to boost productivity and move my game up to the next level.

Which is just as well because I’ve got so many ideas from the Coming Home seminar – and some great contacts – that I really need to be able to get more done.

And what about the Coming Home seminar?

OK, so in how many ways was the conference worth €500?

• Learning about the pomodoro technique was worth €500 alone!
• I got drunk with Dan Raine. Seriously, how cool is that? And I’ve got the photos, so I’m expecting lifetime free membership of Immediate Edge ***
• Like Lisa Hartwell I hadn’t realised how tough it can be working online, and got a €500 boost. Sometimes you just carry on doing what you’re doing with nobody around who really knows what you do (my other half does, pretty much, although she’s never actually done it and I’ve seen her out-talk an SEOer at SEO!!! – but talking it isn’t the same as doing it).
• The quality of the people I met was unbelievable. I’m not too much into networking events because  I get a stack of cards that I never bother following up with, but I’ve got some great contacts with people who seem to be just as keyed up about getting stuff done AND I think I can work with AND have complimentary skills to my own – now that sounds like a team!
• Direct access to Ed Dale, Dan Raine et al – how much value do you think there is in spending time with them and really grilling them with questions? The kind of questions you would never see in an IM forum, let alone get a sensible answer…
• And I almost forgot – the seminar content was great. I even learned a load about Market Samurai, which I thought I knew inside out (and it was great talking to Eugene Ware on Saturday night). And if you attended the conference and weren’t already using it Eugene said in his first presentation that you just needed to go and talk to him and he’d set up a a free licence for you. What a pitch that was ****

Now, I know I am pretty much an Ed Dale and Immediate Edge evangelist. I know that what I say is biassed. I freely admit to being an Immediate Edge affiliate. And you can bash me for that if you like.

But, am I doing anything unethical or illegal?

NO

Am I ashamed of doing what I do?

NO – I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.

Am I a scammer?

NOPE – I deliver what I say I will and I have thousands of happy customers.

Is Immediate Edge suitable for IM beginners

ABSOLUTELY NOT. And while we’re at it steer away from 30 Day Challenge Plus unless you’ve gone through the entire FREE course first.

If I write an ebook about my cat do you think I’ll be able to make a fortune and kiss my job goodbye?

Actually, I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. Find something people actually DO want to buy – that’s the key to success.

Can Ed Dale and/or Dan Raine – or any member of their team – walk on water?

You know – that’s a good question. I never thought to ask/force them at gunpoint to try it even though we were in a bar right next to the canal. HOW DUMB AM I? *****

Disclaimer – lame joke alert!

Sometime people don’t get my humour, which has had massive (but unintended) consequences for at least one big internet marketing launch, so I’d better spell it out despite the fact there is no launch that I know of. Well, maybe Xmas – now who thought that one up??? – and I’m pretty sure I can’t derail that

* Not as far as I know. But he might be.

** I know next to nothing about NLP. So there.

*** Joke about the free membership – he did get seriously drunk though.

**** A FREE pitch. Wow that’s what I can tough marketing.

***** You knew I was kidding. Right?

I’m just about to head out the door for Franz Ferdinand, but I’ve been super busy this week after getting back from Manchester for Ed Dale’s seminar and there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to write down my thoughts yet.

However – I am working on a project that came right out of the seminar, which I want to test in practice and then make available for a few dollars. If you attended the seminar then I’m let you have it for free and I’ll run it past a few eyeballs to make sure it makes sense before releasing it.

What is it?

Think flippa

Just back in Barcelona after visiting Manchester for Ed Dale’s Coming Home seminar. Great content, great people, loads of new contacts, tons of stuff to try out and direct access to Ed and Dan Raine. It was way above my expectations and I’ll go over it more once I’ve got my feet back under the table.

A quick up date on the 30DC style site I started on November 12 – it is now ranking at #10 and getting some traffic. But more importantly the top ranking site has lost its double listing and so I rank #2, #3 and #10 on three different sites as well as a Squidoo lens at #7.

This is starting to look like domination!

How long can that #1 site hold its position for?

OK, I know, I know… my blog looks like it’s dead. Well, I’m still alive but busy on a variety of other projects.

This month I’m heading to the UK. Hopefully see my brother’s new sprog (if it’s landed) and then up to Manchester for Ed Dale’s “Coming Home Tour”. It’s three days of internet marketing, so I’m really looking forward to it and making some new contacts.

Hotel and flights booked… so here I come.

Speaking of which – I’ll be staying at the Premier Inn Deansgate Locks from Thursday, if anyone wants to meet up for a curry and a few beers then get in touch. I don’t know what time I’ll arrive in Manchester yet because it depends on whether my brother is working or on paternity leave and whether I meet a client in London first, but I that is just details.