Michael Cheney - behind the I.M. curtain

I got an email today out of the blue from someone wanting to exchange links with one of my websites.

It’s a great idea right?  They link to me and I link to them - excellent.

Well guess how many words they took to tell me in en email that this is what they wanted to do?

270!  That’s right - 270 words explaining the ins and outs of exchanging links with them. They even told me why their geographic position had no bearing on whether I should swap links with them or not!

As if this wasn’t bad enough - every one of my sites has an in-built links directory where people can add their link automatically so the very fact I received an email like this means they’ve not even taken the trouble to look at my site properly!

Lessons Learned

If you are approaching another website owner to ask them to trade links with you, treat it like you’re the postman delivering to a house where a rabid dog lives – GET IN, DROP THE MAIL, GET OUT.  Don’t mess around with lengthy explanations or massive paragraphs.  Just tell them where you’ve placed their link and that you want one back - simple.

And before you even get to this stage - be sure to check out their website first otherwise you might find them writing a blog about YOUR email..

Happy link-swapping..

A lot of people come to me with the same question:

"How do search engines work Michael?"

Well, it’s not something I can answer in a couple of sentences.  In fact, in my time, I’ve dedicated thousands and thousands of words to the subject.  But the great thing is that there’s a free resource out there that can give you an INSTANT overview on how all the search engines and directories fit together.

You probably know already that many of the search engines have relationships with one another and that some provide results for others and so on.

Well now you can discover exactly what these relationships are.  This information will be extremely useful to you because it will help you recognise where you should focus your online marketing efforts and what the entire ‘search engine family tree’ looks like.

This information has been collated by search engine researched Bruce Clay.  You can view his Search Engine Relationship ChartTM here:

http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

Enjoy!

Okay, not quite!

But just two days after launching my book, The Website Marketing Bible, our entire server started creaking under the demand of traffic to the site and eventually keeled over!

At one point the site was ranked number 16,000 in the most-visited websites on the entire Internet shortly before the server became too over-loaded!

Check this snapshot out from Alexa.com’s global ranking system:

Click the image to see the full picture.

This is pretty scary when you think that I have hardly started marketing ‘The Bible’ yet!  New affiliates are signing up every hour and all in all it’s been a really exciting week!

Visit www.websitemarketingbible.com