Phew, another busy day. I’ve been working on my presentation for our next Melpies Workshop tomorrow. It’s going to be big. We will be focusing on traffic and I will be revealing some sneaky tips and tactics that I have been learning about from a top affiliate Internet Marketer. He only makes rare appearances on the speaking circuit and tries to avoid the pitchfests. Learning with him is like riding a bike effortlessly – not like the previous course I did which was like Internet Marketing on training wheels!

We are expecting a slightly smaller crowd tomorrow as a few of our regulars are away. Unfortunately, I can’t promise to deliver all the content to those that don’t come. Last time we have away a PDF of the presentation. This time we are rewarding commitment.

Speaking of commitment, we went out to dinner with some fellow Internet marketers on Wednesday night and met up with this really switched on young guy named Ricky J. His enthusiasm was infectious – to be honest he blew me away. Turns out he is a friend of Steven Essa – Voted Best Speaker at the Perth WIS in February this year.

His focus and dedication to succeed at Internet marketing was clearly evident. He then proceeded to advise us that he lived in Albury and had driven 4 hours just to make it to dinner, then he was driving back home. Now that’s a BIG effort.

Through a simple chance meeting (all we did was put ourselves out and go to dinner) this guy has motivated us and renewed my enthusiasm.

We learnt a valuable thing – sometimes you just need to make the effort and things can happen. It’s not all about the Internet!!
Read more on Traffic Tactics and Motivation…

Recently I stumbled across a video featuring Matt Cutts from Google speaking at a WordPress event. So I devoted 45 minutes of my time to watch the video. It was well worth it.

The good news is that Google loves WordPress.  Matt outlined that there were surprisingly only a few things one needs to do to search engine optimize WordPress. He recommended five plugins that he thought were essential for WordPress. Scarily I only use two of them. The plugins are:

• Akismet
• Cookies for Comments
• Enforce www.preference
• Feedburner Feedsmith
• WP Super Cache

I should qualify that the plugins he outlined above did not include some other plugins that I also consider essential – such as the All-in-One SEO plugin. However, it depends on your point of view. I noticed Matt uses the Thesis theme – a theme that I use on all but one of my websites (this one!). Thesis is already jam-packed with SEO features so using All-In-One SEO is probably less relevant.

The video is quick and fast paced.  You need to pause it a few times to fully understand it and sometimes there are bits about Google Tools that he glosses over that I understand but can’t find in Google Tools.  Typical though – I don’t really find many of the Google Tools very intuitive to use.  In any case, some of the tools he recommended were:

• Webmaster console at google.com/webmasters
• Google Analytics
• Feedburner – its very quick but he gives a quick tip on the best way to use this
• Google Website Optimizer
• Adsense (some tips on how to use within your site)

It is well worth the watch. Depending on your level of experience some things might go over your head but I wouldn’t worry too much – the video is engaging and the fast pace means you will be moving from one thing to another pretty quickly.

Note: I should point out that the link on this post to the Thesis theme that both Matt Cutts and I use is an affiliate link. If you click on the link and purchase the Thesis theme, I will obtain a commission from the sale.  I don’t recommend this product lighheartedly – I use this myself and and only recommend products that I believe are worthy of recommending.