Welcome to Think Click Rich
Let’s get the boring “about me” crap out of the way before I begin on the site in earnest…
Erm… About Me (the 2011 version)
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been looking for a way out of the rat race since day 1 of starting what we called “work experience,” (practice for a real job, where they paid peanuts for your hard work) back in my hometown of Cardiff, Wales in the UK. Yep… at the tender age of 15 I was already looking for a way off that treadmill.
Hmm… I didn’t realize how angry I was at the misery of “being employed” until I re-read that!
Moving on…
A Kids Miserable Failure in a Business Venture & a Valuable Lesson
I remember when I was around 16 (commencement of work experience time roughly) I convinced a friend of mine to go into “business” with me after I had read an ad of some sort.
I can’t remember what it said now, or even where I read it, but it must have had a good call to action because days later my buddy and I were sticking hundreds of stamps onto hundreds of envelopes, ready to send off to our new “employer” who would pay us a few pence per envelope, with a stamp attached, which was completed.
We packaged the first batch of envelopes up and posted them off, smug grins on our faces as we strolled back from the post office while chatting about how we would reinvest the profits into more stamps and envelopes once we got paid.
About a week later we got a letter back telling us the stamps were a couple of millimeters out of place… they weren’t paying us. I was most unsettled by this, but my friend was just downright angry and wanted to punch my face in (and I can’t say I blame him. We had both just blown what little money we had on my hair-brained scheme.
My first failure in business, but that day I learned one of the most valuable lessons that life can throw at you:
Don’t try to get rich by sticking stamps on envelopes!
The 2023 version
It’s quite nice to look at the above again and see just how gullible I was when I was a kid, but a lot has happened since then that highlights to me just how gullible (and sometimes wise) I have been in the 10 years in between my writing the above and being where I am today.
Don’t get me wrong… I’m no Neil Patel (who I think isn’t that great at SEO, although he’s the most amazing marketer you’ll ever meet… but that’s another conversation). My forte has become on-page SEO. To be more exact with my personal definition of this…
How do you rank a web page the best you possibly can with no outside influence (aside from the use of other pages on the same site?)
Well, we’ll get there, but let’s do some catching-up first.
If you want the shortcut of my career in SEO, you can get most of it over at LinkedIn, but if you want the gory details of my screwups along the way… it’s all below.
2012-2014
So here I was screwing around trying to learn what was right and what was wrong with the information in the world of SEO teachers. MAN! there were some real bullshitters around back then! Maybe it’s the same today, but you reach a stage when you know if people are ball bags, or if they are switched on to what really works.
The main way I did this was by continuing to follow the people who show you stuff that works and dropping the people that speak out of their arse or give you hacks that work for a short while before getting your site into the realms of fucked, and with little chance to bring it back (although there are legit black hat money-making uses for that strategy, it was never my bag).
Anyway, during this early point in my (at that point) non-career, I learned to distrust anyone who spoke about how well they rank for a specific phrase or “keyword” (in the loosest possible sense in this example). It’s total marketing bullshit!
If somebody ever tries to sell you anything based on the evidence that they rank #1 for something out of X results on Google, you’re following a guru who knows enough to scam you, but not enough to give you the information to actually rank anything.
Go ahead and type in “I bend over for marketers” on Google and you’ll see what I mean. Do you think that many webmasters are actually targeting this phrase or that there is any benefit to ranking for it?
If you want to go down that rabbit hole if you’re fairly new to the whole SEO thing, take a look at the article titled “My middle name is not ‘idiot’“, one of the few posts I’m proud of from my earlier days. It’s ranked #1 in Google for over 10 years and has had zero visitors (or even impressions if you are familiar with Google Search Console) for reasons that should become obvious.
The point is, who you follow and that you understand why you are following them are all very important points!
Are you following Neil Patel for SEO advice?
You won’t get much more than the basics from Neil with regard to SEO. He’s a marketer first and foremost at this point in his career (one of the best no doubt), but I’m sure if you lined me up with him, one-on-one to create an outline for a page that would rank well I could outdo him in on-page SEO most of the time (no disrespect Neil, I would swap places and be the marketing expert any time!)
I’ll tell you who you should follow a little later, but in the meantime, if you follow anybody who has a DR (Ahrefs) of over 70 in the SEO space, don’t try to copy their on-page SEO, it won’t work! Look for the low DR outliers who rank well and copy them. I need to be quite clear here by the way…
I’m not saying don’t listen to or follow anybody who has a DR of over 70… just don’t try to rank for what they do unless you have a DR 70+ site yourself, and even then that isn’t the best way to do things. This needs more explanation of course, but this is just my about page so I’m getting ahead of myself… back to 2012/13.
Kindle
After being lucky enough to chat with a fairly well-known marketer at the time I got hooked on the idea of the Kindle gold rush (a bit late to the party maybe).
There was a problem with this… I wasn’t really much of a prolific writer, and I didn’t have the cash to outsource the writing to others to go down the “I didn’t write this shit, but I’m gonna publish it and profit off it” route (nothing wrong with the latter by the way if the content helps people).
I wrote a few books about WordPress and keyword research which were pretty helpful, but on top of the above, my mistake was not thinking of the evergreen route. Here’s what I published direct from my 2023 “unpublished” list of works in the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard:
So how was my success?
I’ll be honest, the books didn’t do too bad if you consider $50 a month acceptable, but my problems were…
- I picked things that were not evergreen (not too bad, but not the best type of content if you want to be hands-off)
- I picked things that got “dated easily” (not the same as not evergreen – requires more upkeep)
- I tried to do everything myself
So, to explain “easily dated” vs “not evergreen” and how it works in my mind…
SEO is evergreen (hopefully), but how you do it is “not evergreen”, so I had to either update the book on keyword research, unpublish it, or leave it live with sub-par information that readers could no longer use.
Don’t get me wrong, I look back at the manuscript and it was good information, and while I could seriously improve on it with what I know now, it became totally unusable because it relied upon tools that were no longer available or methods that were less than stellar due to new tools coming out.
In a nutshell, “not evergreen” (to me) means it has a fairly long shelf life, but it isn’t “easily dated”. Basically, you can let this content sit in confidence that it will be useful for quite a while.
“Easily dated” easily to my mind is slightly different. You can throw them into the same basket if you want, but “dated easily” is when you are writing about something and you can expect to have to change it within a year or so.
This applies to the book about WordPress plugins. Compare it to writing about iPhones for example, the latest and greatest changes often, and I wasn’t the kind of guy who wanted to go back over old work for the pennies the book brought in.
Depending on what your business is, both of the above are sometimes unavoidable, but if you’re interested in writing and publishing information just to make money, you want to avoid this type of content if possible, particularly the stuff you expect it to be information that is going to be of little use in the near future (easily dated).
Finally, just look at the covers. Fortunately, the KDP step could deal with my shitty Word Doc upload instead of a professionally-formatted manuscript, but the self-made covers likely did my sales no favors at all (although standards for cover art were not incredible back then in general if I remember correctly).
Why humiliate myself in this way when I already have this stuff buried?
When you know what you’re doing it’s easy to look at what others are doing and judge. Those judges have their fuckups behind them also, they just might not remember them. It’s easy to get into the “this shit is easy” mindset when you do it all day, every day.
Bottom line: Get somebody to help and/or teach you if you don’t know how to do something well, and it’s important for sales and conversions, and if it isn’t essential to your business model avoid the information you’ll have to keep updated with the latest new-fangled device/software/information if possible.
TBC