A quick update, because I am angry at the software company that I bought rank tracking software from. Rank Tracker is part of the SEO Powersuite software. What they don't tell you when you buy it (and it is over £200 so not cheap) is that the day after your six months support ends the software stops working unless you sign-up for thei "Live! Plan" support package for another $50 a year. I like the software but don't like being held to ransom and forced to pay a subscription that wasn't clear when I bought the product. The software is dece nt but the business practices are frankly dishonest. 

I have no problem with paying for updates should I choose to, and if it was voluntary then I probably would. However making the software refuse to work if you don't by the update is underhand, sneaky and a terrible way to treat your customers

Steer clear of the cowboys at link-assistant.com and go elsewhere for SEO software.

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I have been trying some article marketing again. Using SEO link vine one of severl Brad Callen products that I have used over the years. With it you can write articles and get them published on the blogs of people who are looking for content. It also has an article spinning facility which means that you can set the articles up with synonyms and alternate chunks of text and titles so that the article looks different enough for the search engines not to count as duplicate content. Will see what the results are. I have been using the article marketing to promote the watch specialist site which I set up a few years ago and allowed to sit there (Google has an age penalty), now is time to promote it. So far best selling brands have been Tokyo Flash watches as well as Krug Bauman watches. The next step for the watch site is to try using some price comparison sites as well as listing on Amazon to see if those sales channels work. Will let you know the results.

A lot has happened since I last got round to writing a post. Simply been too busy to blog. I have had another daughter, Ella to add to Lara who was born last year. Within a couple of years have gone from the freedom of childnessness to the joy of fatherhood and a full sized family. Loving it.

On the internet business front. TieSpecialist.com goes from strength to strength. We are selling a lot of wedding accessories such as waistcoats and cravats. I have done very little link building or search optimisation but we still rank top 10 on google for silk ties and bow ties and wedding stuff. Sales have doubled over the last year and we seem to be building a decent percentage of regular users.

I also set up the www.watchspecialist.net website a year or so ago. I have done very little with it, because in my experience you need to have been around for a while before the search engines take you seriously. Now that it has a reasonable age I will start working on getting links so that it starts to appear in the search engines. I did a bit of research using Googles keyword research tool (part of adwords). It lets you find keywords that have less competition but generate decent traffic. For Casio watches the best ones for me seem to be black casio watch and casio watch bracelet. We sell cheap metal watches by Casio and Seiko amongst others so hopefully sales will start to kick-in.

The cheapfootyscores.com website that I have with my cousin Tim, continues to slowly build. It has an incredibly high conversion rate - almost 20% of visitors sign-up for the Premiership SMS football scores text service. The trouble is getting enough visitors. It seems that not many people use text message services to get their football scores any more. Or at least we haven't found a way of getting thousands of them instead of hundreds. We are top 5 on Google and spend money on Adwords but the site is still doing no more than breaking even.

It has been way too long since my last post. Sorry, just too busy - not least with getting my wife pregnant. First child on the way in February. In terms of internet entrepreneurship, things have been more mixed as I will explain.

Tie Specialist is going well, continues to make sales and hold positions in the top ten of Google. We have added wedding waistcoats, cravats and wing-collar shirts to the product range and they are selling well. We have updated the website engine to make the site work better, which was a painfull process with a bunch of bugs that took the site off-line for a few weeks. Sometimes if it ain't broke don't fix it. I have come to the conclusion whilst doing the accounts that AdWords does not work well enough for us outside of the Christmas selling peak. The cost of AdWords takes all of the profit we make from sales generated through it and I have found that our profit is higher in months where we stop advertising even though sales are down. The only exception is the run up to Christmas when conversion rates more than double and AdWords becomes cost effective for selling silk ties as gifts.

Art Specialist has a much tougher time. About June this year the ranking on Google plummeted from Top 10 to 400+. Since then I have tried everything suggested by the SEO firm who provided links (It's Cold Outside) but to no avail. It is still stuck way down the rankings. I have now got rid of It's Cold Outside who's links where low quality and I think Google may be treating them as a spam technique and punishing us accordingly. I will find out over the next few months if ranking increases now I have stopped using them. AdWords is also problamatic for art - the conversion rates are very low because people like to browse a lot of art before buying. On the positive side our customers love the paintings and often recommend us to other people or come back for more. I have also added new product lines DNA art portraits and abstract contemporary art canvases to the oil painting reproductions and portraits painted from photos.

Over the last year I have added another couple of niche websites to the collection :

A website that is built by my cousin Tim that sends SMS text message alerts when your football team scores Cheap Footy Scores.com. This site has a very high conversion rate of 10% to 20% and a repeat purchase rate of 80%+ so AdWords works well, the only issue is getting enough visitors to grow the customer base fast enough.

I have also set-up another niche retailing website selling watches for men and ladies from designers such as Armani, Triumph, Kahuna, Lacoste, Seiko and others Watch Specialist.net. I have found that a website needs to be at least a year old before Google takes it seriously so I have set the site up with a good catalogue and watches and just let it set there and mature. This Christmas season I will start to promote it more aggressively as watches make good gifts.

Finally, I set up a website for the cafe and sandwich bar that my brother in-law and wife run in Covent Garden, London. The website is aimed at businesses in Covent Garden, Strand and Trafalger Square area who want sandwiches delivered for business lunches and is called Garden Sandwich.com

Well it is a busy month on the internet marketing front. Another new website launch coming up to tell people about. This one has been in gestation for a couple of years. My cousin Tim has had a basic website working for a couple of years that provides football SMS texts for goals and scores. It has been handy to get cheap texts every Saturday but it has taken ages to get round to finishing off the website so that we can open it up to the general public. Most of the UK SMS football text services are very expensive, 25p a text and lots of texts for each match often the starting line-up, every goal and sending off, half-time score and full-time score and even manager's comments afterwards. If your football team is in high scoring matches it can cost you a couple of quid each week. We think we can do a cheaper solution, rather than using premium SMS messages sent through the phone networks at 25p each, our solution allows people to pay by credit card/ PayPal and this lets us use cheaper text services and sell the service for just 18p a text. You can find our SMS football UK service at Cheap Footy Scores. We also let people completely customise how many football texts are sent. For example if you have a season ticket then you can set our football SMS service to just send you goal alerts for away games. We should get the marketing text finished over the next few weeks and then be test marketing it with pay per click, I will post the results here and keep people posted on how the service is going.

I have just introduced a new product to my oil painting website Art Specialist that I thought would be worth a post. The field of genetics is moving very rapidly and in the last few years we have started to see consumer applications for genetic fingerprinting and analysis. There are now several services for analysing your DNA to understand more about your ancestors or to screen for new diseases. I came across another new application recently, DNA fingerprints being used to create artworks and immediately thought this would be great for my site. You can see examples of the DNA art for contemporary oil paintings here. I now have a deal in place with a testing laboratory, the way the process works is straightforward ; the customer swabs the inside of their cheek and sends the sample to the laboratory. The lab turns the DNA sample into a genetic fingerprint in one of several styles - you will have seen DNA fingerprints on CSI or crimewatch. My artists then paint an abstract work of art by copying the fingerprint in up to three colours of the customer's choice. The result is a work of abstract contemporart art that is utterly personal, unique and interesting. If you are a couple we can even do a painting using both DNA fingerprints. After use the sample is destroyed so that there is no privacy implications. I am now testing to the market to see if this service will sell, there are a couple of companies selling DNA fingerprint art but the others all simply screen print the image on to the canvas I believe we are the first company to actually hand paint it. Come back to the blog to find out how it is going and what the demand is. Have a look at DNA art oil painting section of Art Specialist.

My silk tie and art websites are starting to perform reasonably well so my thoughts are starting to turn to the next website in the stable. My website people have just added a watch website to their range of ready to go sites so I have just started one up. Selling designer watches from Armani and D&G and called Watch Specialist. Watches are a decent niche, fairly competitive, but worth a try. I have found that it takes a year or so for things to really take off on Google. Google uses link age as part of it's algorithm, so it means that any website under nine months old can never make it to the first page of a competitive search term. So even though I am not planning to put serious work into this site for another few months, it makes sense to get it set up now, get a few links from decent page rank sites (link my other ones and this blog), add it to a couple of directories and that should make things happen much faster once I start to seriously develop it.

I will keep the blog updated to let people know how I am getting on. A couple of quick learnings so far. After buying the site I checked out a couple of the watch brands. Armani and Dolce & Gabana I knew, but there was also another brand called Claude Valentini that I had not heard of. A quick search on that name threw up a bunch of information on what a rip-off that brand is and some very dodgy marketing practices and upset customers. I deleted them from my site straight away, nothing will destroy the credibility of a shop faster than selling dodgy crap. I am going to concentrate on the decent brands. It does show that it is worth doing your homework before adding other brands to your site.