Here are five bullet points that caught my attention and what I think they mean to us as we build our websites and businesses. (Obviously, this is all from a SEO perspective.)

1. The Handling Of Anchor Text Scoring

You can see they talk about how they handle anchor text in links. It seems that they have gone back to past ways of dealing with anchor text, which should affect rankings.

If you read anything about how Google looks at words, you will read a lot about the words that surround the words. For example, if they look at the phrase “tiger” they will look at the words around it to know exactly what is meant.

After all, this could be Tiger Woods, or tiger nation, or “being a clemson tiger”, things like that.

So the words that surround the term give it relevance and meaning.

I think that varying your anchor text is really important but having the anchor text of your link surrounded by relevant content is super important. You don’t really want a bunch of jibberish and then your link.

2. Better Indexing of Profile Pages

This talks about indexing profile pages of more than 200 social sites.

I think this just goes to show that social preeminence is really important these days. It’s one reason why a huge part of 2012 strategy is to be more social and build the following that makes me and my site major players in the game.

What is also pretty interesting is how they talk about crawling profile pages. Something that is typically protected. I don’t know what to make it that, but bottom line, being social is going to be big.

3. Improvements to Video Universal

If you don’t know, Video Universal is when a video gets ranked in the top 10 of results.

If you’ve noticed overtime, many of the videos are really old. So Google is hopefully going to posting more relevant and fresher videos. This makes sense and it just underscores the important of constantly creating fresh content.

4. Improvements in Detecting Site Quality

I love hearing this because it’s not new, but it’s ridiculously important.

Your site has to be awesome.

It can’t be a thin junk site anymore. I am testing this now in the weight loss market, but I think one of the best ways to beat your competition is making a bigger, more relevant, unique, site.

I am personally adding new content almost daily to this site. My hypothesis is by the end of the year I will own the number 2 spot at least for a huge keyword. I currently rank 5 to 8 on this word.

If you don’t know yet, the higher you get in rankings, the harder it is to move and solidify a spot.

Bottom line – make your site awesome!

5. Fewer Stale Pages Shown To Users

It’s hard to know what they mean by stale pages. It could be an old page or maybe just a page that does not really get any interaction.

But I think this hits on what many of these bullet points hit on. Keep your site fresh. The older it gets with no updates, the more chances you’ll see it drop out of the index.

What Are Your Big Takeaways?

You probably noticed that many of these hit on very similar issues. I think the biggest things to remember going forwards are:

• Keep growing your site. A bigger site is more powerful.
• Keep your site fresh and market your fresh content socially.
• Get into the social game. You can’t hide behind your computer anymore.

Those are the big things that I took away. I don’t really know what this all means because Google typically speaks in code.

One thing I find funny are all the nicknames for these updates. They are pretty crazy. Check out the full list here.

What would you choose?

• A web-designer?
• A master product creator?
• A master copywriter?
• A master at making videos?
• A master at buying traffic?

What would you choose?

The Most Valuable Skill Ever Is…

Being a master sales copywriter. I guess this is actually a master influencer.

I would guess that most people would probably choose to be a master at driving traffic to your website. That is appealing for sure, but it won’t help if you traffic to your website and it doesn’t come close to converting at a good rate.

You’ll just end up burning a whole in your pocket.

When you can learn to influence and write well, you can then become a master at conversion. With just a little traffic, you can probably make a couple sales. If that is the case, you can then buy traffic like crazy and make sales like crazy. After all, buying traffic is really easy.

It’s the ads that have to be written, the landing pages, and the sales funnel that need to flow.

Here Is The Best Way To Learn How Write Better:

You don’t really need a super expensive copywriting course to learn to write better. The secret is actually free. It just requires time.

1. Learn The Anatomy Of A Sale

If you are completely new to making a sale or how a sale should work, then read some of these books. They all link to Amazon and they are some of my personal favorites.

• Breakthrough Advertising
• Ogilvy On Advertising
• How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success In Selling
• Plus so much more I’ll cover later.

It’s very important to learn more about making an offer, how to write to your product actually makes your prospects life better, and all that good stuff.

2. Collect Great Sales Letters

I prefer to collect great sales letters rather than emails, because they are longer and more complete.But collect letters from all the big marketers like Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy, John Carlton, etc…

There are actually tons of really great writers to collect.

To get these collections, you might have to buy a few courses. But you can get many of Gary Halberts letters here for no cost. If you also search around the Internet, you can find many of them for free from other writers.

3. Copy Them Yourself

Most other people that recommend doing this will probably say to write them out long hand. That means with a good ole pen and paper. However, I think you can type and still get the benefit.

I actually think typing is better if you’re a faster typer. It helps you flow better so you can really pick up on the cadence of the sales pitch.

The point however, copy them over and over again.

The more you do this, the more their style of writing will become ingrained with how you write. You will start to write punchier, with clearer thoughts, and what I call more slick writing. Slick writing is when you finish reading and you can’t even remember reading. That’s slick!

Thirty Minutes A Day To Becoming A Master

So block off thirty minutes a day to write. Let’s do a challenge together. Follow me on Google+. I’ll have a Facebook page up soon.

Let’s write for thirty minutes a day for one entire month. I’ll post up when letter I wrote and the times I did it. We’ll start today and do this for all of April.

Let me know what you think.

I for one would love to see him beat Jack’s records. That would be really fun and a cool thing to tell stories about one day.

When you think of Tiger, you probably don’t think he can teach that many worthy lessons. He is a great example of what not to do when you are the best athlete of your time… ie… sleeping with a bunch of women.

But…

Tiger Has Taught Any Online Business Owner A Valuable Lesson

In one word… Persistence.

There are few things more important that persisting when everything else around you isn’t really working. Here is what I think Tiger had going for him that you can take as motivation for your growing Internet business.

1. A Coach He Believed In

Tiger had Sean Foley and he believed in what they were working on. When all the golf announcers were trashing Tiger for changing his swing again and even tearing down Foley for being a bad influence on Tiger…

Tiger and Sean stayed the course and followed their plan.

You don’t need to join some program to succeed, but it really does help to have a coach that you can model after. For me, it was Steve Clayton of the Commission Blueprint fame on Clickbank.

I liked the way he built his business and what he did made sense to me. So I followed a similar course until I succeed. When all the gurus were sending out emails about how SEO is dead, I kept going and I eventually succeed. You can too!

2. When Things Weren’t Happening Tiger Didn’t Quit

There were so many tournaments that Tiger played in that he played terrible. Think back to Firestone last year I think… he played so horrible it was embarrassing to watch.

Tiger also had more recent tournaments where he played great for three days, but crashed hard on the fourth day. No matter what, he kept telling the media that he was close.

When you are building an online business and trying to make money online, you will find great days and bad days. You will work so hard to get ranked number one for a big keyword only to get knocked down a week later.

Sh_t happens and you can either grow and learn or quit. When you grow and learn, you get better and eventually, you will break through in a major way. In business, you can actually break through many times for success.

3. One Win Is Only The Start

If I had to bet, I don’t think Tiger is sitting by a pool relaxing right now. While I don’t know for sure, I think he is probably practicing and getting ready for the Masters and a good year on tour.

One win and a great moment does not mean you’re done. (But you still need to celebrate which I’ll briefly mention soon.)

When you finally build a website that gets consistent profits, it’s one of the most amazing feelings ever. You have truly built something from nothing that is worth quite a bit.

But that is not the time to sit back and bank everything on that sit or to stop growing it. You have to keep pushing and building more. These days, if you’re not growing, you’re getting passed. The business world is brutal and the most competitive arena around.

Make Sure You Celebrate Though

This deserves it’s own blog post, but make sure you celebrate when you have even small victories. It’s so important that you get your mind in the habit of success. And you don’t truly know success until you celebrate it.

So if you get ranked in the top five of Google or if you finally make your first sale, get out and celebrate. Take your wife or husband to dinner, go play golf, buy a new shirt or something fun.

Make sure you let your brain know that you succeeded. Soon enough you’ll really go after these moments and make success a habit.

It’s going to be fun to see what Tiger can do from this point. I know I’ll be glued to my TV for the Masters. It will be one heck of a show!

(See what a great husband I am! )

In the past we’ve done some podcasts and we usually lost interest and it would slowly die out. It’s really sad because we would get some great comments and people that enjoyed it. That proves the importance of a really good plan so you know you can handle everything you need to do for your website.

We as you have probably guessed from the title, we are starting up the podcast again. This time however, we have a schedule, a backlog of topics, and a brand spankin new microphone.

In the past, we would have always used headsets and while they worked, there is a huge difference.

The Mic We Are Using

I went to Best Buy to get mine because I needed one for Sunday (like tomorrow). They didn’t have as many to choose from. My budget was $150 max and I wanted to spend around $100 or under if I could.

They had a $200 system that looked really good. However, it did seem overkill. I figure that if the podcast gets really big, then we can upgrade if we really wanted to.

I initially asked on the Internet Marketing Super Friends page on Facebook. You should check it out because it can be really helpful.

I ended up buying the Samson Meteor Mic (not an affiliate link). It is on Amazon I think for about $150 but I got it at our Best Buy for only $75!

Great deal!

(All photos were taken with my Ipad2. Just incase you were wondering.)

How The Testing Is Going So Far?

So I have been doing some testing with it and so far I am loving it. You can see from the picture that it sits on it’s own tripod.

I wish it was a little taller. However, that is nothing a few books can’t fix.

All you have to do is plug it in and it’s immediately recognized by both Audacity and Garageband. I prefer Audacity for podcasting. I think Garageband is a little overkill. Plus I don’t really know how to use all the nifty features.

So the setup is stupid easy, as you would expect things to be this day in age. Just so you know, I use a Mac computer, but I would assume the same ease on a PC computer.

What About The Sound Test?

I am very impressed with the sound pickup and the quality so far. My wife and I are going to use it together. So we’ll record our podcast in our office while she sits on one side of the mic and I sit on the other side.

After testing, we can very comfortably sit back and the mic will pick up all the sound really well. I made sure to test my “p’s” my “t’s” and my “s’s” to make sure it does not spike too bad. It all looked really good and sounded really good to.

We did a test where we recorded in the kitchen with the dish washer on in the background. Again it picked up our voices perfectly and for whatever reason the washing machine was picked up too much.

Trust me, our washing machine is really loud.

I’ll do a small update on this post after we recored the podcast so you know how it went. I’ll also link to the podcast if you want to take a listen.

I am telling you one thing, it is making me want to start a business podcast of my own… just to play around with the mic.

We’ll see. Maybe one day.

If you are looking for a good mic to record podcasts, voiceovers for videos or whatever, this is a great one. Check places out so you can get a good price on it.

Again the name of it was the Samson Meteor Mic. This is the Best Buy link… they are having a great deal on it.

That is where I apply my best productivity skills. These are not rituals where you have to change around your entire morning. They are easy to implement no matter what you’re doing now.

1. Get The Boring Done First

For my websites, the most boring things are link building. I still do all of my own link building which means I write a ton of my own content. It’s not that I hate doing it, but it’s something I would rather not have to do. (I’ll be working on outsourcing this and I’ll let you know how that goes this year.)

But the first thing I do in the morning after I eat a good breakfast is get my link building done. I also make sure that if I have anything else that is boring to do, I try to get it done in the morning hours.

However, I do something else that really focuses me on these boring tasks. This let’s me get them finished in record time.

2. Use A Timer To Create Some Urgency

I do most of my typing on my iPad because it’s easy and it helps to increase focus. I also have a timer app that I use.

I set the timer for one hour and then I bust out my work as quickly as I can. While still doing great quality work too.

But during this hour, I am 100% focused and I will not let anything else happen. No phone calls, no Internet surfing, no emails, nothing. Just raw focus on my link building tasks.

This is a variation of what Eugene Schwartz (or maybe Claude Hopkins) used to do. I can’t remember which but he would chunk his time in 30 minute chunks. He would work for 30 minutes then take a ten minute break. Then 30 minutes and then a 30 minute break.

When you’re doing any type of brain heavy work, it helps to chunk your time so you can take short breaks to rest a little.

I hope this one helps you.

3. My iPad Is Key

I have already mentioned it but I never realized how much my iPad helps me doing boring work until I didn’t have it around one morning.

I went to my local coffee joint to get some link building done, in the morning. But I took my laptop rather than my iPad.

What this did was inherently give my brain the temptation to click on email, the Internet, little apps and other stuff. I found my concentration breaking a lot easier.

On my iPad, I use a writing app called iA Writer. It creates text files which are not formatted and I love that. But when you are in the app, you can’t do anything else unless you hit that home button. So you are stuck in the app with nothing else to distract you.

I sounds pretty strange but it makes such a difference in how quickly I can get my link building finished.

Quick Tip:

With my iPad, I use a dock and a wireless keyboard. This way I can type a million times faster. If you have an iPad now, you probably know the built in keyboard is a pain to use.

So those are really the biggest productivity tips that I rely on every morning to get my boring work done. Try them yourself because they help your business make money online.

But also realize that you might change them to work better for you. I have cherry picked and changed tactics to build something that worked for me.

Now get that website built and start marketing it!