If you haven’t heard of Ittybiz or seen part two of my SEO School review a few weeks ago, I’ll spare you the drama – it was on the market, off the market (uproar!) and now it’s back (double uproar!).  It’s worth the uproar.

I could say blah, blah, blah about it and offer you all kinds of gee-whiz bonuses if you buy it, but that’s not on today’s menu.  Instead, here are some hard, cold results since I read (and applied) the book.

How Much Did My Newfound Knowledge Gain Me?

Ok, keyword traffic to my site is up significantly since I read this book – almost 50%.    Now those with bigger blogs may say 1461 keyword visits in a month isn’t that big, and to that I reply, “Kindly take it up with Chuck Norris.”

Keyword traffic up?  Check.  But more importantly, were sales up?  Hell, yes.  More than doubled, as a matter of fact.

Aside from the raw numbers, how did I fare when it came to some of the keywords I’ve been trying to optimize?  Below are some Google Analytics screenshots for 3 of the keywords that drive my blog revenue (that is, bring in the monies):

Keyword #1 – Up 57.89%

Keyword #2 – Up 525%

Keyword #3 – Up 550%

PS – for those of you without a lot of SEO background who are wondering why my keywords are blacked out, that’s because you don’t want to publicize keywords you’ve discovered convert well (otherwise your competition will use them).

The Big Sales Pitch

Yes, if you click this here link to buy SEO School I will get a little bit of change (which I don’t see anything wrong with, since hey, I’ve spent some time hammering out these reviews over the last few months).  But more importantly, you can see some change by getting more targeted keyword traffic to your site. And that means more monies.  For you.  So buy SEO School and tell ‘em Dave sent you.

I Promised You Chuck, Now Here’s Your Chuck, Dammit

Ok, so here’s the story.  Rumor has it that Chuck Norris demanded and affordable entry-level SEO product after seeing Aaron Wall’s high-three-digit price for his SEO program.  And so rather than roundhouse kick that high-priced product into submission, he put his foot down so hard it shook the earth, and by “put his foot down,” I mean, “wiggled his pinkie toe.” (He’s that good.)

The resulting shockwave caused earthquakes all over the globe, but more importantly, sent a life-altering message to Naomi Dunford: “Get that damn SEO book on the market before Chuck comes for you.”

You see, Chuck doesn’t ask twice.  And now SEO School is back on the market, and you can get it here.

The end.

Disclaimer: I know the author (Naomi) personally, which is good, because I’ve called her for a lot of follow-up advice on what I’ve learned in the book. But I only provide reviews on this blog for tools I use on a regular basis, so what you read below is based on experience, not fluff.  All links below are indeed affiliate links, but I think that’s fair given I’ve spent 2 hours working up this review for you, right?

This Book Isn’t For You … OR IS IT? (Dunn – Dunn -  Dunnnnnnnnnnn!)

If you’re an SEO master, this book isn’t going to teach you anything new.  This book is geared towards people who don’t have a whole lot of SEO knowledge to begin with. Which is funny, because there are layers of knowledge, and we don’t always know what we’re missing.  For example, I have some good knowledge of how to write SEO optimized articles (which I do a lot as a freelancer), so I feel fairly experienced in that area.  But after reading SEO School I realize I didn’t know much about optimizing my site itself.

So this book was a good read for me – and it may be for you as well if you don’t understand some of the finer points about optimizing link text, link position, “meta” and other stuff.  I sorely needed that on my blog, and this book was very helpful.  After reading to the end of SEO School, I made a lot of changes on my blog, and I’m already seeing an increase in traffic for keywords that are important to me.  Nothing insane (it’s only been a week), but it’s trending upward, which is exactly what I want.

Where This Book Can Really Save Your Ass

If you’re new to site optimization, the idea of mastering SEO can be intimidating.  There are people out there with $1000 home study courses packed with endless hours of all the things you have to do to rank #1 for your keyword serach terms.  I never really considered doing much SEO on my site because I didn’t want to devote all that time to learn the ins-and-outs of Google’s secret rules for ranking well … especially knowing that Google can will change it rules anytime it feels like it … and all that studying might be for nothing.

I’m not going to spend 50 hours honing my SEO skills.  It’s just not in the cards for me.  But what I really like about SEO School is that it let me get a huge SEO payoff with just an hour’s reading. How? It goes step by step through the most important thing an SEO beginner needs to know: how to stop making the simple, innocent mistakes that screw up your SEO in the first place.

Not too long ago I was speaking to a number of well known bloggers and one of them said, “I’m not Dave so I don’t know his keywords, but it seems to me he should have higher search traffic than he does currently.” I was thinking, “Yeah, tell me about it …” and frustrated that I didn’t know what to do.  But as I read through SEO School I began to see things I was doing with my site that seemed innocent enough, but that were putting an unintentional damper on my rankings.  Things that I didn’t think were important, but were.

What I Got Out Of This Book In The First Read-Through

Without giving the content of the book away, I’m going to break down the things that I was able to improve after reading SEO School.  It’s too soon to give definitive numbers as to how it’s working out, but I can tell you that I’m already seeing an increase in the search traffic I’m getting for the keywords related to my Becoming an Early Riser program.

Here’s what I’ve learned from SEO School:

• How the type of site I’m running determines the type of search terms I want to rank for. This is important because I was previously trying to rank for keywords I can’t hope to compete with at the moment – now I know how to pick more effective keyword phrases for the type of traffic I want.

• Why the keywords I didn’t think I wanted are actually better off for me. This was hard to deal with at first, but it makes sense when Naomi explains why this is the case.

• How to research (and learn from) my competition’s SEO tactics. This is something i didn’t do, because I didn’t have a good strategy for doing it.  Now I do.  Bwuhahahaha ….

• How to ethically influence the SEO effects I’m getting from other people’s sites. This wasn’t rocket science – but it did clue me in to a simple way to get a lot more “Google juice” from people who reference my site.

• Smarter ways to use my title tags, meta description, and page URLs. Not much I can say here without giving it away … but this stuff helped me a lot.

• How to optimize where links appear on the page (and what kind of links appear). I didn’t think this mattered much.  Turns out it matters tons.

Three Things To Consider Before Buying This Book

As strongly as I feel SEO School is well worth the $39 price, there are a few things you need to know before picking this up:

• Naomi swears like a sailor throught the entire book.  If you read her blog (Ittybiz), this is no surprise to you.  Some people might be offended by this; most people won’t.  She’s not “offensive” in anything she says, she just narrates the book with the same straight-up tone she uses in her blog.  I love it.

• This book does not teach “black hat” SEO.  if you’ve never heard of that term, basically “black hat” SEO involves tricks and scammy, sleazy stuff to game the Google system for instant high SEO rankings – basically the dark side of the force.  You can take over the universe using the power of the Dark Side, but sooner than you expect it, Google will cut off your hand with a lightsaber, blow up your fully operational battle station and bring balance to the Google force.  SEO School focuses on “White Hat” SEO, basically the good stuff that makes Google like you because you are playing by the rules, and Google will reward you with yummy search engine traffic and a promise to never let George Lucas destroy your childhood by producing three unbearble “prequels” to your website.

• This book will not make you rich overnight.  No book will.  But many people just can’t get that through their heads.  So if you get to the end of SEO School saying “hey, this doesn’t tell me how to be #1 tomorrow, dammit!” then you’ll just have to get over it.  What this book will tell you is how to get better results than you’re getting now.

And better results than you’re getting now is sweet, sweet stuff.  Even George Lucas can’t screw that up.

Tell Naomi that Dave sent you and download SEO School right now.

Note: A fuller, meatier review of SEO School will give you more info than this preliminary review post.

“SEO Tips For Beginners” would be the perfect title for home business rockstar Naomi Dunford’s search engine optimization e-book, but that title wouldn’t have nearly enough cursing in it.   It’s a great (and entertaining) read if you’re not sure how to get started with SEO and you don’t want to blow a huge wad of cash hiring a consultant.

That said, this book isn’t intended to make you the master (or mistress) of SEO.  What it does promise to do, however, is to:

• teach you enough of the basics that you won’t make stupid mistakes that kill your search engine rankings, and
• teach you enough of the basics to start doing the smart, simple things that will get you better rankings moving forward.

I’ve read through this 52-page e-book this week and I can easily say that:

• I now see the stupid mistakes I’ve been making (and have started fixing them), and
• I know know a solid handful of basic techniques I didn’t know before that will help me rank better for the terms I want (i.e., the terms that sell my audio programs).

I intended to have a kick-ass review all ready, but this week has treated me, as Norm Peterson put it, “like it caught me in bed with its wife.”  So you’ll have to wait ’till next weekend for a more exhaustive review, and like I did with my Freelance Smackdown! series, I’ll do some play-by-play of how my search engine rankings improve as I use Naomi’s SEO School book on my blog.

Bottom line: Buy the damn thing, or at least check it out. I’m glad I did.

G’nite -

Dave

The answer is, emphatically, Hell yes.

Of course, you have to understand I’m a little biased when it comes to this recommendation. You see, I’ve been following Brian Clark’s blog, Copyblogger, from it’s early days (less than 600 subscribers) to now (30,000 subscribers). More importantly, I’ve been following his directions on how to write persuasive copy, and it’s paid off in spades:

• I’ve landed on the Digg.com frontpage 4 times
• I’ve learned how to make posts that people love to comment on
• My sales copy has improved (and so have my sales)

So when Brian announced Teaching Sells, I went ahead and ordered it, sight unseen. You just reach a point where you can trust the quality of material enough to simply get your hands on it.

What Is Teaching Sells All About?

The short answer is that Teaching Sells will show you how to do the things that Brian himself did to build a powerful and successful online presence (and revenue stream). The program is actually a collection of web-based courses, downloads and forums that let you not only soak in the information, but talk about it with the authors (and other Teaching Sells members) as well. This combination of course material and conversation is called an Interactive Learning Environment, and really increases how much someone can get out of the material.

Disclosure: Here, I’m biased again, having spent 4 years working with one of the bigger e-learning vendors and another 3 1/2 years working with a cutting edge 3-D simulation training startup company. I’ve seen firsthand how much more effective training becomes when you can interact with it, either by choosing your learning style (reading / audio / learn-by-doing) or simply talking to people about it.

The members area sums it up like this:

• Teaching Sells is your step-by-step guide to getting started in the future of paid content today. These initial five courses will provide you with a complete methodology for building interactive learning environments that sell.

What Are The First Five Courses?

Keep in mind that there are additional course modules (think of them like book chapters) added throughout each week, so the course is always growing. But so far, the current lineup looks line this:

• How To Create Content That Sells
• How To Effectively Market Interactive Learning Environments
• How To Create Killer Multimedia Content With Quick And Easy Tools
• Seven Profitable Business Models For Interactive Content Developers
• Your Blueprint for Building Membership Sites with Open Source and Low-Cost Software

New courses that start this week (along with their descriptions) are:

• Educational Marketing: Persuasive Promotional Content That Prompts Action
  • Our advanced promotional topics will teach you how to use free reports, blog posts, teleseminars, webinars and viral videos to persuade with “under the radar” educational marketing techniques.
• Advanced Positioning and Creative Adaptation Strategies
  • These advanced marketing topics elaborate on one of the most important parts of the Teaching Sells approach (and marketing in general). Discover how to differentiate yourself from the crowd and creatively put a fresh spin on even tired topics.
• Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Niche-Focused Membership Sites
  • The initial Teaching Sells training teaches you how to build robust “flagship” membership sites. Some of the business models we reveal in the core training require the ability to quickly churn out multiple membership sites in multiple niches, and these topics show you how to make that happen.
• Multimedia Storytelling – When the Medium is NOT the Message
  • These advanced content topics teach you cutting-edge techniques to creating audio/visual content that knocks people’s socks off and keeps them happily subscribed. Even better, it’s all done with the tools you learn about in the core training.

Where I’m Going With All This

I’ve been wanting to create a subscription-based online training system, and Teaching Sells came along at just the right time. Fingers crossed, in 60-90 days my partners and I will have it rolled out. Teaching Sells has saved me a lot of time by laying out a lot of the how-to information that would have taken me a good amount of trial and error to discover. I don’t mind paying for someone to clear the path ahead of me, and in all honesty you shouldn’t be, either.

In fact, here is the single question you should be asking yourself:

• Am I interested in having people pay me on a monthly basis to learn from my expertise?

If you are, then Teaching Sells can show you how to get there. Now, aside from the fact that I was pre-sold on this program by almost 2 years of quality training via Copyblogger, I would have bought on the strength of these three questions (which you should also ask yourself)

• How much is my content worth?
• How much money do I want to make selling my content?
• What’s a more profitable use of my time: Creating new content, or splitting my time between creating content and learning how to sell it (from scratch)?

It was a no-brainer business decision to me, and as long as the value I’m getting from my subscription to Teaching Sells far outweighs the cost, I’ll stay subscribed. Because I’m not some Brian Clark fanboy – I just like investing the money to learn things I don’t want to research so I can spend more time doing what I love to do and earning money from it.

Take Action: Learn more about Teaching Sells by clicking here right now.