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.

In my previous post on Link Wheels I gave an overview of how to set up a link wheel, but without providing a list of Web 2.0 properties you can use or how I go about it.

So here is a list of Web 2.0 properties to get you started, but you can also use anything else such as WordPress MU blogs.

Just a work of warning – some of your spokes will be deleted by the site administrators. When that happens simply use the content on a different Web 2.0 property and make sure the link wheel remains intact.

To start your first link wheel you first need to decide whether the link wheel will link directly to a page on your website, or to another Web 2.0 property which will act as a buffer – typically hosted on a Squidoo lens, Hubpages or Blogger.

Once you’ve made that decision you need to write some content related the page you want to promote and decide how many “spokes” your link wheel is going to consist of. You can simply add that content to each spoke in the link wheel, write slightly different content for each, or spin the article to create unique content.

Now you simply pick a Web 2.0 property at random, add the content and include a link to the page you are promoting, and use a social bookmarking tool such as Traffic Bug to make sure the search engine find your content – see the first article in the link wheel series for more details.

Next, pick another Web 2.0 property; add content; add one link to the page you are promoting; add a second link to your previous spoke; add to Traffic Bug.

Rinse and repeat so you have 4 to 7 spokes in your link wheel, then edit the first Web 2.0 property and add a link to the last so that the wheel is completed and Pagerank spread evenly though the wheel.

The process is relatively straightforward to outsource and can be done much cheaper than the link wheel services being currently advertised.

If you’d like a link wheel to be created for you check out my new link wheel creation service.

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.

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.

You’re always hearing “you just need to follow my course and you’ll make $10,000 an hour lying on the beach” from internet marketers, and no doubt doubt some people do make a fortune that way.

However, for most of us it isn’t that simple and even with apparently simple step by step guides, there is always something missing that can’t be written down – it’s called experience.

So, it doesn’t matter how many courses you sign up to, newsletters you read, or SEO forums you participate in – most of which are a waste of time IMHO anyway – there is no substitute to actually rolling up your sleeves and taking action.

By acting on those internert marketing courses you are doing you are getting real experience – even if you find out what doesn’t work.

But where do you begin? Who is right?

Probably as good a place to start is with the 30 Day Challenge. And there are some great reasons for taking part:

• It’s free
• It takes you through the process step by step
• There are loads of people doing it, so plenty of opportunity to get advice
• You gain experience
• If you’re successful you make your first $10 online

But what else?

• Download Affiliate Masters Course – it’s free and a good introduction to affiliate marketing.
• Learn about linkbuilding from James Martell’s Backlinks Workshop. He talks a bit too much, but the PAD method does work.
• Listen to Internet Marketing This week. Some great info in a free podcast, although it is slightly irregular.
• Sign up for Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge Plus. It isn’t free, but he knows his stuff.
• Sign up for Immediate Edge. It also includes 30 Day Challenge Plus, it is for advanced internet marketers with a price to match, although I would also say that I haven’t seen much useful info from the Edge for a while and may cancel unless they start delivering useful content but it does also have an automatic social bookmarking tool that is very useful.
• Outsource your directory submissions with Directory Maximizer – a great cheap service from India.
• And while you’re at it do the same for your social bookmarking with Social Maximizer.
• Outsource your content with Need An Article. Sometimes the quality isn’t so good, but often it is excellent. And it’s a bit over $5 per article.

There are probably some others I’ve missed, but that’ll do for the moment.

However, remember what I said at the beginning – the most important thing is to take action – if you’re not going to do anything it is a waste of your own time and money if you sign up for any of those, even if they are free. And once you’ve started taking action, keep on at it, outsource the bits you are weak at or hate doing, a bit each and every day until you see some kind of result.

So don’t buy an internet marketing course ever again unless you’re prepared to do some work.

The results speak for themselves, but check out the organic traffic from Google on this site. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it is a personal hobby niche and I’ve gone in pretty deep since April/May 2004. One of the keys to its success is the number of natural backlinks it has received.

If you ‘d like to me to help your website gain results like these then please get in contact – just leave a message below.

One of the problems with “marketing”, and the reason for so many definitions is that different people mean different things by it. The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”, which being an offline marketer in my previous life I agree with.

Typically marketers break down “marketing” into the elements of the marketing (or tactical) mix, often known as the 4Ps:

Product
Price
Place (Distribution channel – in info marketing this is the website)
Promotion (Marcoms)
- Advertising (PPC, SEO, sales pages)
- PR (pre-selling, press releases, article marketing etc)
- Sales (telemarketing, field sales etc)
- Word of mouth (viral marketing)

In service industries there are 3 more Ps that are often used (the extended marketing mix):

People (any person involved in the process, including customers)
Process (the process involved in buying a product from the customer’s point of view)
Physical evidence (branding, packaging, web design etc)

What many people mean by the term “marketing” is promotion, or marketing communications (marcoms). This is the process of actually getting the marketing message to the target market segments through advertising, PR and sales.

However, the main thing is to follow the right process, which is to identify a specific want or need; how to satisfy that want or need; identify and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the competition; and identify what you can do better or different.