MarkAttwood.com

At my recent blogging/SEO seminar I went to great pains to explain what I called “the dark side of blogging”.

In a nutshell, I tried to explain my own personal experiences of how when writing and publishing under your own name can have huge benefits, it can also attract the attention of people with a lower IQ who can not only misinterpret your innocent and honest ramblings but also use the personal information you provide to attack you.

This is most serious, and one of the reasons I toned down my initial enthusiasm to talk about my family on here. It was used against me in the vilest of fashions by what I can only refer to a “scum”.

On top of that, I’ve also had to put up with online attacks from other SEO “professionals” hiding behind twitter anonymity. (If you are reading this: I know who you are. All the negative energy you are throwing out is coming right back ‘atcha, you fool).

It’s a real shame, because most of the people who read this are wonderful, caring and often brilliant. If you’re one of them I can only apologise for the fact that I’ve had to censor myself.

This morning, I had the joy of reading yet another brilliant and hilarious post from the mind of Drayton Bird. Take a look at it here.

Read it yet?

The funny thing about that post is that the author of the blog in question was at my seminar.

I did warn you

P.S. To find Drayton’s blog, I googled him and found an amusing lesson in SEO. Does Drayton realise he has optimised one of his pages for the phrase “Drayton Bird Ass“, I wonder?

I know it’s probably short for “associates” dear reader (or maybe there’s a whole other side to Drayon I’ve not seen yet?), but it does also bring up another point: don’t have too many characters in your page title. When you see the “…” at the end of a page title in google results, that means that page is not optimised (which is often a great indicator of how easy a market is to break into).

Followers of this blog know that the people I follow are only the best of the best. Drayton Bird is one of those. Described by David Ogilvy (The King of Madison Avenue) as “Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone else in the World” and author of at least two of the very best books on marketing you could ever read, Drayton posted a blog posted today I couldn’t help but comment on.

He said “I got a tweety message from a guy who wants me to follow him. His description of himself read: “ISMA founding member. Certified Social Media Specialist”.

And when something that’s been around for about ten minutes starts having “Certified Specialists” you’re in real trouble. Who certifies these specialists? Another six guys who think, “Hmmm. If you’re “certified” – well, that sounds great, doesn’t it? Up go the fees, right.”

You can read the full post here.

It got me thinking about a meeting I had with someone who runs an SEO company who asked me about whether I thought there should be an SEO Association – something to set standards in the industry. He then went on to prise information out of me about how I do SEO (to which I answered with a load of misinformation because I could smell a rat as soon as I walked through the door) and then went on some sort of personal vendetta against me. And I was really nice to him! There’s nowt queer as folk though, is there?

My initial reaction was the same as Drayton’s. If someone is going to teach you something, coach you, or do something for your business (or life), make sure they can actually walk the walk.

It’s also why I do not ever want to have a “Google Qualified Blah-Blah-Blah” badge. What are they for, anyway? To me, these badges are for inadequate little boys that have bedrooms full of certificates and old cub scout uniforms covered in little badges (with a few notable exceptions). It’s the way most of society works. They are approbations from “authority” organisations to prove that you are “better” than everyone else. Back to my old friend Leonardo:

“Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.”

In the case of Google, a company I love in many ways, their training courses are designed for one purpose only: to make them more money by teaching you to sell their services in the way that suits them, not the client. And why not? They’re a publicly listed company designed to make a profit. But the idea of all these little Google soldiers running around impressing people with their badges just makes me laugh.

Which brings me to the world of teaching internet marketing. I entered this world full of a naive desire to help people. To give people the benefit of my experience. To learn from my mistakes (I’ve made plenty) and victories.

It’s been amazing in many ways. I’ve had some fantastic experiences, not least this week in Oxford helping people with businesses as diverse as chocolate fountain hire, luxury African safaris and selling flying lessons.

But I’ve also been interested to see the massive backlash that is happening with some of the bigger, louder noises on the internet in recent years. I mean, take a look at some of the horror stories unfolding on Salty Droid.

One of the guys being slaughtered on there is James Arthur Ray: someone I first watched in “The Secret” DVD a couple of years ago. Another is a guy who was sending me Twitter messages just a few months ago, Harlan Kilstein. I don’t know either of these people from Adam, but I was aware of their presence on the internet. I also don’t know what is true anymore, but the content on Salty Droid is truly frightening stuff that brings into question the whole “cult of personality” thing.

I made a decision back in February to use my personal domain name to start blogging. It’s been a real journey. I’ve made some incredible, probably lifelong, friends via this blog. I’ve also had the contents of this blog used against me in some of the most vile and horrific ways (which is why I don’t mention my children on here any more).

I made this decision because I reasoned that no-one else could be me. When you are offering yourself out to teach or sell people stuff, should you use a “brand”, or should you just be yourself?

I chose to be myself, but now I’m wondering if this was the right decision and whether or not I should even carry on?

(Don’t worry, the blogging and adwords seminars are still going ahead. I’m not letting any of you guys down .

I’m speaking live at Ken McCarthy’s “The System” UK Intensive!

Here are some shots.

This is me getting everyone to shout “We Love The System”. Twice, in fact.

This is Ken addressing the audience.

I got mobbed at lunchtime with questions from some really bright entrepreneurs from all around the world: mainly UK, but lots of US, Danish, Irish, Hungarian, French. A truly international event.

At 1.30pm there was a great surprise when the unadvertised Drayton Bird turned up to do an hour’s presentation. Great value info from the Daddy of the UK DM industry.

Just watching Karl and Ben doing their conversion stuff, although I’m flagging from the combination of being adrenalin burnt from talking this morning and sleeping in a terrible bed. That’s the problem with airport hotels – they’re designed for people “passing through” so the level of care (i.e. a pillow that you can actually sleep on) is way down the scale.

Had a lovely dinner (because of the company, not the food) in a Heathrow Chinese with super web designers Ben and Lizzie Hunt. It was Lizzies birthday n’all!

Day Two:

Enjoying Ben Moskel’s talk on affiliate marketing. Some great insights. Every internet marketer should have a go at affiliate marketing. It’s a lot of fun.

Here’s Ben in action:

NEWS: We got a lot of people in the bar last night asking us how we get such great results with Face Book advertising, so in the spirit of DM we’ve decided to put a guide together. We’re calling it the FaceBook Marketing System. Sign up for priority notification of when we put this together over the next few weeks here. This will help you build demographically targeted lists fast and very low cost compared to PPC or seo:

Here’s Robert McDemus, he’s a thermo spray expert:

Here’s the legendary Derek Dearden (he’s been to almost every System Seminar):

Now we’ve got the Super Affiliate Rockstar Greg Davis up on stage. This is mean, kick-ass keyword stuff:

Greg has set up a CPA network all of his own called eliteclicksmedia.com. He just gave an amazing talk – a real affiliate rock star.

UPDATE: After a fantastic curry with the System Faculty and guests, we then proceeded to deprive the over-lit bar in the Sheraton of some of it’s single malt, delivered with less than no joy by a really bored Polish barman. I had to do this simply to enable me to get at least some sleep in the hotel’s unbelievably shite bed.

We all needed to get back home, so had to get on the road as soon as we could. We did hit a 5 mile tailback on the M6 but it was an otherwise uneventful journey.

I had lots of memories spinning in my head – all the new friends we have made, the brilliant minds we engaged with, th fun of being on the stage in front of such a vaired and lovely group of people (some of whom are doing AMAZING things online). If you were there: thank you so much for such a great weekend immersed in my favourite subject: internet marketing

I’ll upload a few more pics here:

Some networking action:

Wealth Master Paul Avins:

You can get full MP3 recordings of my talks at the even inside my Inner Circle.

Great news! Ken McCarthy is coming back to Blighty to do another System Intensive following last years’ mega-successful event.

The System 2009 London UK Intensive is a fantastic event to go to if you have any interest at all in Internet Marketing.

Ken has been a teacher of mine for over 4 years. I’m a massive fan, and a lot of my internet marketing success was down to visiting his System Seminars in Chicago. It was there that I met the likes of Perry Marshall, Dave Bullock, Dave Taylor, Howie Jacobson, Glenn Livingstone, David Rothwell, and a bunch of other people that are all right up there in the field.

Last year’s intensive was one I went to as a visitor, but Ken got me up to introduce him without warning me beforehand. I was hungover and a bit nervous, but I did the job okay. Later in the day he got me to join in with a live workshop ripping into websites of people in the audience. It was amazing (and my favourite sport) especially as I was sharing the stage with some other highly distinguished people like the legendary Drayton Bird (who I now quote in all my talks), the conversion rate squirrels Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson, wordtracker founder Mike Mindel and Ben Hunt, the web design genius.

If you’ve not heard of Ken, he’s the guy who first realised that the internet is a direct response medium when he held the first Internet Marketing seminar way back in 1994 in San Fransisco. Check it out:

I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be running events like this. I suggest you get yourself booked onto the System UK Intensive as soon as you can – I might even be there to meet you!