Matt Cutts was asked how to start a web business with just £10.  What would you do?  Take a listent to Matt and then read my answer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpCw7KvOvwA

Matt suggests buying a domain name and hosting which he figures the cash will last a month and then promote affiliate offers to make money.  Wrong.  Sorry Matt – hope Google works out for you.  Here’s my recommendation from actually making money online for more than a decade.

Don’t spend any money at all.  Ten is too small to matter anyway.  Instead, use free hosting on Blogspot, WordPress, Hubpages, Squidoo, Facebook and Twitter to pump out content around a niche, create a following, and monitize your traffic with affiliate offers.

More-or-less what we teach in Link Liberation 2.0 🙂

Visit Dan and me (and Andrea too) at The SEO BrainTrust for more information.

Just ran across this on Tim Ferris’ blog :

The Billionaire Productivity Secret and the Experimental Lifestyle

“How do you become more productive?”

Richard Branson leaned back and thought for a second. The tropical sounds of his private oasis, Necker Island, murmured in the background. Twenty people sat around him at rapt attention, wondering what a billionaire’s answer would be to one of the big questions—perhaps the biggest question—of business. The group had been assembled by marketing impresario Joe Polish to brainstorm growth options for Richard’s philanthropic Virgin Unite. It was one of his many new ambitious projects. Virgin Group already had more than 300 companies, more than 50,000 employees, and $25 billion per year in revenue. In other words, Branson had personally built an empire larger than the GDP of some developing countries.

Then he broke the silence:

“Work out.”

He was serious and elaborated: working out gave him at least four additional hours of productive time every day.

All of us that are driven to achieve ultimately arrive at the notion of “focus” and how best to optimize our time. Clearly laundry, cleaning, dishes and shopping of (way!) off the list, but what is the trade off between being in front of the computer – on the ever expanding behind! – instead of sweating for an hour?

Until I have done what Richard has done, can honestly argue with his answer?

You think writing articles is hard?  How about 50,000 words in just 30 days?  That’s what a punch of folks do every year durning November.  Even Matt Cutts is giving it a shot.  Content really is not that hard, you just have to decide to do it and get it done!

“For November, I’ll be participating in National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo.” The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Does it sound like too much to do? Well, ask yourself: what’s the worst that could happen? The worst is that you write a little bit and then don’t finish. That’s not the end of the world. In fact, it’s better than not writing anything.”

Read Matt’s full post at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/30-day-challenge-write-a-novel

LASER BEAMS BEAT FLASHLIGHTS

Think in terms of laser beams instead of flashlights. Instead of lighting up all of Page 1 with a whole bunch of rankings, think about one key phrase at a time because No. 1 is so much more important than anything else.

The focus of a laser beam is what creates power, right? A laser beam actually puts out far less wattage than a flashlight, and yet it can burn through a wall. You can always outshine your competition with greater focus. All you have to do is get one No. 1 term (one search term that matters, of course) and you’re probably making more money than they are if they’re not at No. 1.

Ten top 10 rankings is a flashlight. One No. 1 ranking is a laser. Sequence what you do in your SEO so that you go after one No. 1 ranking and you beat it to death. When it’s No. 1, you then go onto the next search term, protecting what’s already at No. 1 as you go.

Always focus on beating No. 1. Don’t stop at No. 2 or No. 3. If you stop at No. 2 or 3, and say “good enough”, you’re giving up just before the finish line. Don’t stop till you’re No. 1.

So here are your ten mindset reminders all in one spot where you can refer to them if you find yourself slipping back into your old ways:

1. It’s Not About You
2. It’s Not Magic
3. Rankings Define Right
4. Rankings Don’t Matter
5. No Money In Measuring
6. Mr. Busy Wins
7. Knowing is Not Doing
8. Too Hard is Just Right
9. Twice 70% Beats Perfect
10. Laser Focus

Don’t memorize these. Instead inculcate them. Change your wiring so you don’t have to think about it, so that it becomes habit.

MISTER BUSY WINS – UGLY NOW BEATS PERFECT LATER

A poor job now beats a perfect one later. Quantity generally beats quality, so get busy. But wait a minute! Busy at what? Busy at the right stuff. No good change occurs until you take action. Bad change, well that occurs all on it’s own. It’s called entropy. If you just sit still, things will go bad really quickly.

Wrong action therefore is usually better than no action at all, assuming that it doesn’t involve drugs or flammable substances. So get busy. Be ugly. Get rich and then clean it up. But start with busy.

Busy doing what? Well this one is one of the biggest questions we hear in the guru business on the Internet marketing circuit and I’m willing to bet your friends are asking the same question as well. The answer is two fold.

First off, knowing is not part of doing. To know is not an active verb. Study is not work. Yes, you need to study and know enough to get started, but don’t get so wrapped up in studying and learning that you never get around to the business you are studying for. By all means get busy studying at first, but once you’ve studied enough that you can get to work, then stop studying and get to work! You can come back to studying once you are making some money and need to take your business to the next level.

Secondly, the web is made of pages and links. There is nothing else, so whatever your study leads you to get busy doing, if it doesn’t result in creating more or better pages or more or better links, then it really has not much to do with SEO.

Don’t over complicate this. Look at the people beating you in rankings. I bet they have more pages, more links or more of both. SEO success is not a case of “working smarter instead of harder”. What’s required is to find the smart ways that enable you to work harder.