Glenn Canady Ruined My Christmas
I’d just finished my first session with Vicky. It was the 18th December 2003 and I had a LOT of work to get through. Luckily I had 2 weeks off for Christmas and I was determined to get through as much as possible, as quickly as possible, so that maybe I could have Christmas Eve and Christmas day off.
I’d been told to get 100 keywords associated with my main keyword or phrase. I’d used Wordtracker and the Overture inventory tool to find my keywords and I was happy with the words that I needed to focus on to bring in the most traffic. One niggling worry that I had though, and it was something that I had mentioned to Scott, was the fact that because I had not been provided with a dropshipper for the product of my choice (they promised me that they would find me one) I had been forced to come up with an alternative product. The problem as I saw it was that I could only really deliver this to the UK market.
I was concerned that to get my $8000 back, AND make the sort of money that I was told Glenn Canady’s Gorilla Website Marketing Course was likely to make me, the UK market on it’s own might not be big enough. Here I was looking for keywords in a global arena when my target market was just a small corner of it.
I think it was Churchill who, when talking about the British and Americans, described them as being 1 nation divided by a common language (or something like that !). When doing my keyword research I certainly found this to be true. A US phrase would have lots of traffic, whereas the British spelling of the phrase would have nothing like as much. Which do I go for ? I was told to go for the ones with the most traffic. Scott said he had sites that were focused just on 1 state in the US and he was successful with them, so he didn’t see my Global vs UK market situation a problem. I figured it had to be, as my market was a fraction of the size. BTW - I am in no way blaming Scott for any bad advice. His job was to go through the web site constuction, not the marketing.
I was picking up keywords from systems (Wordtracker / Overture) which were displaying figures for global usage. There seemed to be no way of identifying or isolating what the market just for the UK was searching on, or what the volume of those searches was.
I’ve contacted Wordtracker to see if I was missing a trick with this global vs UK issue. They tell me it is something they are aware of and it may be addressed. It does seem to me that anyone just marketing to the UK really is either working in the dark or working with potentially irrelevant figures when it comes to keyword analysis. If anyone knows of a way of doing keyword analysis, using something like Wordtracker KEI, JUST on UK searches then please contact me as I would love to hear about it.
What still gets me today is that NOBODY saw the global vs UK thing as an issue. It was never taken into consideration, and NONE of the marketing was ever adapted to take it into account. I have learnt a lot of things from the mistakes that I believe were made by ABDevelopment and Glenn Canady’s Website Marketing Course. There is information that they I feel they SHOULD have given me before I even had my first session that they failed to give me. Basic information that would possibly have made a bit of a difference. The fact that they didn’t even see or mention these things really raises some big questions in my mind about the competence and suitability of the people running these courses.
Here was Vicky’s advice to me for training Zeus and finding potential link partners :
< ====== Start of Paste ======>
Chris,
Assignment recap: Make sure all settings in tools, and options are completed in Zeus. Train your Zeus as much as possible, to increase the smartness rating as much as you can. Click on the EZ train tab to do this option. The more you teach it, the more it will find potential link partners related to your theme. Manually enter in keywords using “manual keyword teacher,” and assign to “very unique” category.
After you have trained your Zeus you are ready to find themesites. Click on the “find” icon on the left. Make sure you have no other programs running, and a suggestion would be to run your Zeus at night. Click on the lightning bolt button that says “find web sites.”
Run your Zeus until it finds about 50 themesites, and STOP by clicking the same button you did to start it. In our next session I will discuss how to approve the themesites, and categorize them correctly. Have you category names ready by then.
Tip* You can train your Zeus with the keywords of your potential link partners. Select a keyword that can be related to your theme. Type this keyword into Google toolbar. Screen through the TOP 10 and visit each site. Click on View, Source when you are on their homepage, and write down their meta keywords. Program these in “manual keyword teacher tab”, and assign to very unique.
To add potential link partners click on the train icon, “websites to visit tab.”
This will help Zeus find more link partner sites than competition.
Let me know if you have questions, and I will talk to you on Monday 12/29/03 @ 2:00PM my time, 9:00PM.
Vicky @ AB Development
GorillaWebMarketing
< ====== End of Paste ======>
First thing next morning I set about following Vicky’s advice. One thing that I noticed straight away was that the Pro version of Zeus WAS considerably more stable than the free version. I experienced the odd problem, but nothing like the amount of problems I’d had previously had with the free version.
My biggest recollection of this period is getting up early every day and working solidly hour after hour, slogging away at Zeus, just trying to get the damned thing trained. I’d start about 6.30 - 7am and go straight through to about midnight (obviously taking toilet breaks etc !). I was becoming more and more frustrated.
I had been told to keep the whole thing tightly themed, but just getting any words what were vaguely related seemed to be proving extremely difficult. I had been told to keep training it until the ’smartness rating’ was as far across as I could get it. The problem was that the ’smartness rating’ didn’t seem to be so smart.
I could go on at great lengths about the fruitless hours that I spent just trying to get this thing trained. But I won’t. Instead, here is the email that I sent to Vicky on Christmas Day. It was sent at 6pm. I’d spent almost the whole day slaving away at the PC just trying to get Zeus to perform in the way it was supposed to.
< ====== Start of Paste ======>
Hi Vicky,
I don’t know when you are working over Christmas, but hopefully this
will get to you before our session on Monday.
I am having real problems with getting Zeus to return decent, useable
keyword phrases using the EZ Keyword trainer. I have been at it for
several hours over a 2-3 day period and getting nowhere.
It loses the keyword smartness rating on the EZ keyword trainer page
when the program is closed and restarted. So, trying to get to 2/3rds
of the way to genius is going to be virtually impossible as it sometimes
loses any progress from the last time I was using it. This, combined
with the seemingly spurious and irrelevant words it returns are making
things extremely difficult.
Let me give you some example to illustrate what I mean. I have typed in
‘black cohosh’. Zeus returns ‘photography’, ‘fly fishing’, ‘web design’,
‘games’,'arts and crafts’ etc., but nothing related to the herb black
cohosh. If I type in ‘ovaries’ I get stuff about lung cancer, prostate
cancer, body building, and colitis. ‘Estrogen’ returns organic
gardening, alzheimers, dental health etc. I could go on, but I think
you get my point. It just seems to be unrelated, irrelevant nonsense
that Zeus is giving me. I don’t know where it is pulling this stuff
from. If it is from the ZeusCollective then I have already seen that it
seems to be polluted with people linking to anything, whether it’s related
to their topic or not.
My question is, how do I get around this ? How important is the
‘keyword smartness rating’ ? Can I achieve the same thing by just
manually entering the keywords ?
What is the link between the figures that the ‘ keyword smartness rating’
displays and the numbers shown for keywords at the bottom of the screen ?
For example, the keyword smartness rating is currently saying ‘6 single
keywords, 36 phrases’ but the figures at the bottom of the screen say 7
unique, 85 very unique, and 92 keywords so far.
I’m certainly putting in the hours with this software, but it’s driving
me round the bend ! Obviously getting this working is
critical to my success, so I’d be grateful of any help you can offer.
thanks
Chris
=====
< ====== End of Paste ======>
So that was how I spent my Christmas 2003. $8000 down and a miserable Christmas. Thanks for nothing Glenn Canady and ABDevelopment !