We have now used TubeMogul to upload our "Diarrhoea Out of Control™" video to 11 different video hosting sites.  Some of our other videos are also now available on one or two other video hosts apart from YouTube. Today I'm going to go over our search engine rankings, with particular emphasis on the rankings of our videos.  I'll also update you on the fun and games we've been involved in over on the Warrior Forum.

Most exciting of all is the fact that we have at long last generated our first income!  Our PayPal account still reads $0.00, but our Revver account shows "Current Earnings $0.14" Mighty oaks from little acorns grow

If you haven't come across Revver before, it is one of the video hosting sites that TubeMogul can upload your videos to.  Unlike YouTube and most other such sites, Revver attaches advertisements to your videos.  If anyone clicks on one of your ads you get a share of the revenue; a sort of AdSense for video, if you like. Hence our extremely modest, but undoubtedly non-zero, income.

Onwards and upwards to the Warrior Forum.  Two complete topics in which I have made a number of posts are now completely invisible.  One remains, but is now locked, with no further posting possible. Since it seems as though the only way to ensure one's comments hang around for more than a few hours I have started my own topic over there, entitled "Internet Marketing With No Money Down™ ?".  Please feel free to come on over, make a post or two of your own, and join in the fun!

One commentator on the Warrior Forum opined about our "Long tail keywords… what a joke".  I was forced to agree.  It causes me much childish amusement to discover we are currently top of the Google rankings for long tail keyphrases such as Frank Kern Sucks, Mass Control Sucks, and Surfing with Frank Kern. (By and large the same applies to the other search engines too)

If the commentator meant to imply that we are unlikely to become millionaires on the basis of those rankings then I have to agree again.  What of keyphrases that might conceivably convert into income at some point in the foreseeable future?  Well , we are now on the first page of the Google rankings for Affilate Video Brander Review, and our news release to imnewswatch.com is at number 3 AND 4 for just Affilate Video Brander.  On a Google video search we are now number 3 AND 4 for affiliate video brander. Last but most certainly not least we occupy the whole of the first page and a fair chunk of the second for our new brand Diarrhoea Out of Control™!

If you examine that link carefully you will see that each of the videos we uploaded from TubeMogul are ranked seperately.  No duplicate content penalties in Video Heaven! Forget about SEO as you have known it up until now.  From this day forward Video Search Engine Optimization rules! OK?

As part of the launch of our innovative Diarrhoea Out of Control™ Marketing System, and to highlight our SEO skills, I did a "Surfing with Frank Kern" publicity stunt over on the Warrior Forum at the weekend.  It seems to have stirred up a bit of a hornets nest, and currently the entire thread is nowhere to be seen.  Now you may think that toilet humour is beneath a serious internet marketer, but there is a very serious point to this, which hopefully you can discern from some of the other posts on this blog.  Fortunately I had camtasia working when I made the first post.  The resulting, fair quality, video can be seen below: 

The link which caused me such amusement is:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&q=diarrhoea+out+of+control

Does it still work for you?  Is it amusing? Is it and/or the video enlightening?

P.S.  This post was first published at 09:05 GMT. It is now 10:45 GMT.  We are already at number 4 in the Google natural search rankings for the keyphrase surfing with Frank Kern and number 7 for Frank Kern Surfing.  Would you like to know how we did that?  Sign up for our newsletter!

P.P.S. As I hinted at over on the Warrior Forum yesterday, in the topic which you can no longer see, I used TubeMogul to upload several copies of the above video to different video sites last night.  Click on my "toilet humour" link again now.  Are you beginning to see any light at the end of the tunnel?

P.P.P.S It is now 15:27 GMT.  I've been trying  to get on the Warrior Forum for ages to say good morning to our fellow surfers from SoCal, but there seem to be some problems.  Earlier it said "Temporary Closed Due To A Security Issue". Now it tells me "Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126' - Include file not found - /forum/Default.asp, line 40 - The include file 'config.asp' was not found."

This may be slightly outside our current remit,  but in another capacity I just bought the recently relaunched Affiliate Video Brander (Wealth Warning! - That is an affiliate link). Imagine, if you will, that our reviews are admired throughout the Internet Marketing fraternity for their honesty and thoroughness, and that we were offered a review copy free of charge by Eric Holmlund and Michael Nicholas.  Here is our verdict:

Affiliate Video Brander Sucks

We created a video to demonstrate why we say this so bluntly.  Filmed partly on location at the Traffic Heaven Secret Headquarters, and partly screen capture, here is the first rush:

I don't know about you, but for the last few days my inbox has been bombarded by people promoting Affiliate Video Brander. I wonder if any of them have actually tried using it? Now I'm also getting emails from marketers enticing me with all the wonderful extra bonuses I'll get if I buy from them, as long as I can wait until January 30th, when everyone who has bought resale rights is allowed to start selling their own version of the product. 

The resale rights licence states that "WHILE THIS SOFTWARE HAS BEEN TESTED AND PROVEN TO RUN ACCURATELY, IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF ANY USER OR COMPUTER INCOMPATIBILITY ISSUES, THE RESELLER ASSUMES COMPLETE LIABILITY" so I guess that means the buck doesn't stop on Eric or Michael's desk after January 29th.  It will be very interesting, not to mention entertaining, to see how this one develops over the next few days and weeks.

P.S. I clicked the "Publish" button about 10 minutes ago.  This page is currently ranked 114 in the Google natural search rankings for the keyphrase affiliate video brander and is at number 20 for affiliate video brander review.  Our new YouTube video is ranked at number 6 on a Google Video search for affiliate video brander

Kasia and I have spent the last 10 days in Poland, the first night in Warsaw and the rest of the time in Lodz. We'd booked an apartment which came complete with a broadband internet connection, so we could keep blogging over the festive season.  However the apartment proved  to have one or two problems with regard to the other purpose for which we needed it - sleeping.  It was right next to a restaurant, and therefore both noisy and smelly!  We changed to a much more pleasant apartment which was due to have broadband connected before Christmas, but by time we left on the 29th TPSA had still not got the phones working, let alone the broadband internet or TV over IP.

With the conspicuous lack of consistent posting we've fallen back somewhat in the Google natural search rankings for some of the keyphrases we are targeting.  For example we have dropped back from 9 to 16 for traffic geyser michael koenigs, and from 61 to 96 for traffic geyser.  For Secret Classroom we are down to 167 from a peak of 85.   Google has decided to rank a totally different page yet again.  This time it has settled on the full blog, rather than an individual post.

However things have improved considerably for our own brand. Although this website has dropped back to 26 from a peak of 19 we are now firmly on the first page of the Google rankings for Traffic Heaven via a couple of different routes.  Our Traffic Heaven YouTube video is now at number one, and our one page website at trafficheaventhemovie.com (which currently contains a grand total of 46 words) is at number 5.

For some strange reason we have also moved up to number 5 in the Google rankings for blogger gurus.  Actually we would feel far less embarrassed if Google decided to list us on the first page of a search for WordPress gurus, where we already seem to be at number 79 on AlltheWeb and 87 on Yahoo.  This is slightly surprising in view of the fact that this post contains the first ever reference to the word "WordPress" we have made on this site.  I guess it has come about because there is a link to WordPress.org in the "Register" section on every page on the site.

More videos from us soon, including a couple from Poland.  Watch this space!

It's now just over an hour since I posted the article about Traffic Geyser, and I've set SEO Elite off to do it's thing again.  Where do we stand  on the natural search rankings now?  Well we are moving up for all sorts of keyphrases on a variety of search engines.  Now I know that I have a weird sense of humour, but it for some strange reason it causes me great amusement to discover that we are currently  ranked 17 on AltaVista for "blogger gurus" (without the quotes)  and 21 on AllTheWeb for "adsense gurus" (again without the quotes).  This is hugely entertaining, but is not really very likely to put bread on the table.

I have a feeling that it will be ultimately more relevant that my recent post is now ranked by Google at 16 out of 796 on a search for traffic geyser michael koenigs.  Interestingly this is a few places ahead of Joel Comm's own YouTube review of Traffic Geyser. We are also in position 101 out of 238,000 for just traffic geyser.  To round things off we have also inched up to 104 at Google on a search for Secret Classroom.

On the traffic front Google Analytics reports that we got a few clicks on the natural search results yesterday, a lot of which were undoubtedly just us testing things.  We also got 13 referrals from the Warrior Forum.  A tiny trickle of traffic is a whole lot better than nothing at all!

To the best of my knowledge total sales still stand at $0.

We've now got SEO Elite configured to check what progress we have made in the Google natural search results for a variety of keyphrases.  Yesterday we just wanted to know if we'd been indexed, which happened very quickly.  Today we want to know where we stand for keyphrases that people might actually type into their Google toolbars when trying to find out more about the Secret Classroom course.

Things can change very quickly this early in a campaign, but at the moment on a search for "Joel Comm Secret Classroom" (without the quotes) Google ranks us at number 29 out of  9,930.  A search for "Secret Classroom" (again without the quotes) puts us at 108 out of 798,000.  Total sales (that I am currently aware of) stand at $0!

Google isn't the only search engine on the planet. I guess you've probably heard of Yahoo! and Microsoft? They have their own search engines and you can also give them a helping hand to discover that your new blog or website exists.

In the case of Yahoo I went to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. If you're not already a Yahoo member you'll have to sign up first. With that done the procedure is similar to Google. I typed in the full URL of this blog (http://wwwgurus.blogspot.com) and clicked the "Add My Site" button. I then clicked the "Authenticate" button and scrolled to the bottom of the page to find the verification meta tag. Copy it, then paste it into the blogger template in the same way as for Google. I had a problem when I tried to save the updated template. Blogger complained that "Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed". Compared to the Google meta tag, it looked like Yahoo had forgotten to put in a "/" just before the last ">". I typed that in and saved the template again. This time Blogger was happy. I returned to Yahoo and clicked the "Ready to Authenticate" button. Yahoo was happy too and informed me that "Your site is pending authentication". Finally I let Yahoo know about the site feed. I clicked on the "Manage" button next to the blog URL, typed "feeds/posts/full" into the empty box and clicked the "Add Feed" button.

Microsoft's search engine is catchily entitled "Live Search". In a post on their blog Microsoft say "we aren't ready to start consuming sitemaps quite yet". At least this makes the task a bit quicker than for Google and Yahoo. To give Live Search a bit of a helping hand indexing us I went to http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx. First I had to fill in the captcha box to prove that I'm not a computer, then I typed the blog URL into the box at the bottom and clicked the "Submit" button. Job done!

I did all this three days ago, and it seems to have had some effect. We are now ranked 28 on Live Search for the keyphrase "web gurus". We are even ranked 873 for "Internet gurus". Google now have us ranked 258 for "adsense gurus" too.

I have now got our website at http://www-gurus.com up and running (as you can now see!). At the moment it consists of just a home page and a single blog post (Not any more - Ed), which for some strange reason looks remarkably similar to one of the posts on our original Blogger blog!

Technorati has found this new blog too. Since the new site has a link to the Blogger version we now have a Technorati authority rating of 1.

Another search of Google today reveals we are now number 1 for "wwwgurus" (out of 33). It's always nice to be top of Google for your own name, at the very least. We have also gone from nowhere to number 47 (out of around 2,530,000) on a search for the keyphrase "web gurus".

Now it's safe to say that there aren't too many people on the planet searching for "web gurus", but it does at least give an idea of what's possible if you target long tail keywords. There are however enough people searching for a "web guru" for the Google AdWords keyword tool to reveal that there are at least a few advertisers targeting that phrase, and to give those advertisers traffic estimates.

(Note that the link above is to the public version of the Google keyword tool.  You need to open an AdWords account before you can see all the advertiser information)

Around 4 hours after submitting the sitemap Google webmaster tools said that it had successfully accessed both the sitemap and robots.txt, but still maintained we were not yet indexed. I've just checked again and we are now indexed! Google insists that it last crawled the blog on August 5th, and the cached version is marked as having been retrieved on 5 Aug 2007 at 10:53:48 GMT.

We currently stand at position 6 on Google.com for the keyword "wwwgurus", but appear to be nowhere in the top 1000 for any other relevant keyphrase. Interestingly the same search reveals that the domain wwwgurus.com was deactivated 0n December 29th 2006 and expired on March 23rd 2007.