How I (Briefly) Became An Internet Meme…

Published on

Meme sketchA short, lighthearted post while I continue the transition from employment to self-employment…

Earlier this week I shared one of a number of professional headshots I’d had done, taken by the wonderful Peter Rowlands of P & M Photography:

I chose a green background for a few of the photos to coincide with the branding. However I didn’t expect people to make this observation…

Uh-oh. Well you can tell what happened next…

Click to read more!

A Blog 365 Project – 50 Days On

Published on

* Update: Unfotunately WL365 is no more… *

Calendar picIn early April I started a blog 365 project: Whose Line 365, a blog dedicated to sharing a Whose Line Is It Anyway? clip from YouTube every day for a year. As it’s just hit its 50th post, I wanted to go into the reason why I started it and also what I’ve learnt so far from the experience.

Well… the first part – the reason – is as simple as this: I love the show. The blog’s About page reveals how I came up with the idea to do it as a blog 365 project:

I once joked with my wife that “watching a Whose Line clip a day is good for the soul.” As a keen blogger elsewhere, the light-bulb moment happened, and the rest should be obvious!

I’ve had a lot of fun doing it so far. Watching a clip a day – or a few in one go – has been awesome. I was watching clips regularly anyway, so it’s not really that much more effort to grab the YouTube embed code and throw it up as a blog post.

That said, I can’t believe I’m only 1/7th of the way through it all. It already feels like I’ve been doing it forever! Even this early on I feel like I’ve learnt a lot and so I wanted to share my experiences so far as well as advice for those thinking of doing a blog 365 project of their own!

Make sure it’s viable

If you’re doing a blog 365 project that’s similar in nature to mine then make sure that there’s actually enough material to last 365 days. Fortunately for me, there’s a ridiculous amount of WLIIA scenes on YouTube. I mean crikey – I could probably do 365 clips of just Party Quirks scenes alone!

Click to read more!

My First Ever Online Marketing Campaign (Was An Absolute Failure)

Published on

Bob Dylan Fail imageI recently got into a bit of an… umm… ‘altercation’ with a South Wales-based business (who shall remain nameless) via Twitter. They followed me and then sent me multiple copied and pasted @mentions basically saying: “we’ve followed you, so the least you can do is follow us back.”

I politely told them that this wasn’t a good approach to social media, to which they replied telling me that while they appreciated the feedback, they were annoyed at me for doing it in a way that was public (i.e. not via DM or email instead). I informed them that in a social media space, others wouldn’t afford them that luxury (and would be a lot harsher than I was), and reiterated that I wasn’t having a go – I was only trying to help. They then unfollowed me (charming… but quite funny).

But it’s true. I wasn’t having a go. I was trying to help. I was speaking from experience.

You see, my first ever online marketing campaign – years before I got my start in SEO – was for myself, as a solo musician. In early 2006 I released my first CD (Bad River, a 5-track EP) and wanted to promote it online. So I did it via the social media website I was most prominent on at the time: MySpace (my MySpace profile is still there by the way).

Click to read more!

Taking the Plunge: Going Full-time Freelance

Published on

"A free lance" imageJust a quick bit of news…

For over two years, ever since leaving Confused.com in 2011, I’ve considered going self-employed as a full-time SEO freelancer. However, the timing never quite seemed right. But on Friday just gone, I worked my last day at Box UK, which could be my last day in employment for a while. Yep… I’ve taken the plunge. I’m now officially a freelancer – full-time self-employed.

My family have been a big inspiration. My parents have been self-employed for decades, running their own IT recruitment agency, a Spanish rental property business and my dad is also a landlord more locally. I guess you could say that I want to follow in their footsteps.

So… if you’d like to work with me then please let me know. There’s just a brief bit of info about it on this site for now, but soon I will have a separate website for the freelance side of things: MorganOnlineMarketing.co.uk (at the moment it just redirects to SEOno, effectively sending you in an infinite loop… but it’ll be its own site soon).

It’s also pertinent to mention here, as it means that I’ll probably be updating SEOno less often from now on, especially for the next few months, while I get things going. The goal for SEOno was to publish one post per month, and I reckon I can still hit that.

[Knight/lance image credit: Martin Sharman (and before you think “what a weird image choice,” you may want to check out the origin of the word “freelance”… Personally I would’ve preferred to go for the much more cool ‘gun for hire,’ but that might’ve given people the wrong idea about what I do…)]

What’s The WORST Link You’ve Ever Seen? SEOs Share Their Stories!

Published on

Face collage title image

The mighty Jon Cooper of Point Blank SEO fame recently published a sequel to his Creative Link Building post, the latter/original becoming the most popular article ever to be shared on Inbound.org to date.

Inspired by Jon’s posts, I had a light-bulb moment when chatting to good friend and fellow SEO Emma Barnes:

Instead of the best and/or most creative links SEOs had built, what about the worst they’d seen on their SEOing exploits around the Web, whether it be through link analysis or more randomly?

I decided to ask a number of SEOs in the industry about their experiences, horror stories and/or funny encounters. There were a few caveats though:

  • No outing! All examples must be anonymous so as not to implicate anyone specifically.
  • It didn’t necessarily have to be the spammiest link they’d seen – I was also looking for links that had been poorly executed, incorrectly implemented, etc.

When asking for contributions, a few people declined, feeling a little uncomfortable with getting involved. I could understand, given the nature of the content. However when I had the idea, I never saw it as this negative or hateful post, and so I’m hoping people will see it as a good teaching point – i.e. certainly how not to build links! – and also get a few chuckles out of it.

NOTE: Even with the above caveats, it goes without saying that some of the examples are NSFW, so be careful if you’re reading at work! (I’ve labelled the ones that this applies to.)

Ok, so I’ll kick things off…

Steve Morgan photoSteve Morgan
@steviephil
SEOno.co.uk / boxuk.com

As many SEOs will know, you have some clients who don’t want to get involved with the SEO at all (they just want you to do it all for them), but there are those who like to get stuck in and involved as well. I once had a client while at a previous agency who wanted to help out. I won’t say what industry he was in – let’s just say it was household furniture. Anyway, we’d had discussions about our link building process before (e.g. keep it relevant, keep it high quality, etc.) and so I assumed he had a good idea about the good ways and bad ways to obtain links.

A little while later, he got back to me and told me that he’d just bought 100 links! I was concerned immediately. 100 links at once? Paid links?! I asked him for examples – and that’s when I started to panic. 20 of them were on ‘health’ sites (yep, you guessed it: the ‘v’ word)! The funniest was one that had a blogroll containing a dozen links: 11 of them had anchor text such as “buy [pill name]” and “[another pill name] 100 mg” and in the middle of them? One link all on its own, the odd-one-out, with the anchor text: “buy pine furniture”.

Click to read more!