One World. One Dream. One Blog. Different Flavor.

My local kebab shop’s menu has inspired me. From this day forth I will focus on one dream at a time, starting with this one blog.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been tossing and turning over the game plan for my plunge into the online world.

I’ve had the soundtrack to Tron on full blast, delved back into the teachings of all the blogging gurus I follow and slowly and quietly realised something. I am not being different. Only uniqueness can offer value in an industry that is over crowded, competitive and already rich in information.

One World

Currently this is the only world we know, so it’s best to learn how to make do with it and work with the options available.

Unfortunately my current location in this world is not ideal. I’m stuck in China 8,600km away from my home in the UK. Don’t get me wrong, I love China for all its quirkiness but the internet speed in my Beijing apartment has taken a turn for the worse.

Remember what the internet was like on a dial up modem all those years ago? Well my current connection is almost as slow as that. Drip feed. Everyday is a struggle to get anything done. It’s not just China’s great firewall that slows me down, it’s the monopoly my residential complex’s management have over the internet.

They won’t allow the nationwide telecoms provider to install access to their super fast internet in my building because they know everyone would switch over and they would lose all the money they are making from giving the residents no option but over priced, crappy internet. I’m paying 300RMB a month (USD38) for theoretically 10mb/s and still can’t get online!

It’s not just residential complexes that lie helpless to these monopolies. It’s all over China. Even the exportation company I used to work for in a bustling office building had no choice but to use the building’s medieval internet. It is insane that any business in that building puts up with it. The company was paying over RMB50,000 (USD8,130) a year and there’d be multiple times during the day we couldn’t get online. The connection sometimes died for hours! After a while it became so utterly useless the only way to get a satisfactory connection was to beam superior internet from an opposite building to a receiver we mounted outside the window!

The internet problem has now become the main reason for my urge to change countries ASAP because without fluid, working internet I can’t achieve anything.

To access Twitter and Facebook I must run a VPN, which is almost impossible to run unless I use my mobile phone’s 3G connection instead of my apartment’s wifi. In fact I’ve pretty much no choice but to ignore social media for the time being because I simply can’t access it with the big fiery Chinese dragon blocking my way 🙁

In the meantime I’ll try to live with the obstacles China throws at me. There’s always going to be things that stand in the way of making my dreams come true so if it means I have to travel to the other side of Beijing to find an internet cafe with fast interent I will do it!

One Dream

My long term dream is not to just make a comfortable living from this blog, SEO consulting or from my mascot costumes business. My dream is to build a software app. I’ve had one big idea for over a year now. It is a huge project and needs a lot of money. I can’t tell you what it is but I believe it is revolutionary and will make ranking your website in the search engines fun and like a game. But first I need money and experience because without that there’s no way I can convince investors to back me.

Short term dreams include being able to return home and be with my family in the UK. But I can only go back once I am self sufficient, which is why I’m going to do everything in my power to make my own business ventures succeed as soon as possible. I also want to open a KTV in my hometown (Bath) because the Chinese students would love it! Plus eventually build a villa in Koh Samui with super fast internet, a swimming pool and loads of guest bedrooms so all my friends and family can stay.

But before I can achieve any of this I must focus on one step at a time. The first step is clambr.

One Blog

I’ve decided to listen to the savvy advice of the internet moguls out there and put all my attention on this one blog. I have so many ideas for other websites and have found some awesome niches I’d love to get involved in but I’ve decided spreading myself thin amongst all sorts of different projects is not the way to go. If I’m going to make any real traction online I need to fully focus on one blog and because SEO is what I’m most passionate about it’s best I stick to that at the beginning.

The reason I’ve set out to teach myself about offsite SEO, blogging and online marketing is simple. I fell in love with SEO when I made my first SEO website for my friend’s steel trading company (SteelFromChina.com) 2 years ago. I then made two more for his laminate flooring side of the business. These websites get dozens of enquiries a month meaning the sales team have a constant flow of new business coming their way. Onsite SEO and conversion rate optimisation is what I’m good at. I can get people to send emails and want your business. I can tell you where to put buttons, what colour to make them and how to direct visitors to your money pages.

Now it’s time for me to learn offsite SEO – how to build backlinks that drive targeted traffic to a conversion optimised site. That’s where clambr comes in.

Different Flavor

clambr will be a SEO blog with an insanely different flavor. Because I am a newbie to offsite SEO this blog is not going to be in tutorial format because I have no advice to give. Instead I will simply investigate the best practices for making your site clamber up the SERPs by putting various experts’ tutorials to the test with SEO case studies.

This way, if the methods from an expert’s tutorial succeed in getting my case study blog posts high ranking on Google and a bucket full of traffic it will prove their methods really work, and so…they will hopefully want to link back to my blog so they can show their followers. What could be better than 3rd party evidence proving the methods you preach to your followers truly work?

If this strategy succeeds it’ll be a win win situation for everyone. The experts will further solidify themselves as authorities in the industry, clambr’s subscribers will learn how to put their methods into practice and I will hopefully get some powerful link juice from the expert’s sites which will likewise help clambr gain traction online 🙂

So here’s how it’s going to work. For each SEO case study I will do the following:

1. Find an expert’s tutorial to strictly follow for a SEO case study
2. Create a plan for how I will implement the expert’s methods for a blog post on clambr.com
3. Publish a blog post to be used as the content guinea pig for testing their SEO methods out on
4. Use their methods to build backlinks and buzz to the blog post
5. Come back in 1-2 weeks to share the results of the post’s clamber online

If everything goes to plan things could get really exciting!

Conclusion

I hope you’re fired up about the way clambr will operate in the future!

My next post will be an intro to the first expert’s tutorial I’ll be following and a rough plan of how I will implement it.

Wanna get in on the action? Sign up for clambr updates (at the top of this page) to find out what the plan is for clambr’s first SEO case study 🙂

I’m going to end this post with a question:

If you had a choice of one or the other which would you choose? An NSA troll that lets you roam free but lurks in the shadows watching your every move or a big fiery Chinese dragon blocking you from all the websites you love?