A Change of Direction

With several of our other blogs and websites concentrating on various aspects of marketing and training I've decided to reclaim this one and take it in a different direction.

The problem with a corporate blog is that personal opinions, ideas and interests don't really belong there, unless you are your business and it's built on the back of your unique character.. That doesn't always work in a partnership, and some of the things I want to write and talk about are more personal to me. So, at the very least they would dilute the company message if I posted them on one of our other blogs and sites.

You can, of course, find out more about our marketing services at Cinnamon Edge and our SEO and training services, just by following the links above. This blog, though is going to be less about Cinnamon Edge and more about me and, I hope, you too.

I'll still include ideas and tips but in a more individual way, and mixed in with articles and shorter posts on whatever else is interesting me at the time.

I hope you'll like it, maybe get to know more about me and what I have to offer, and come back for more. Feel free to comment on anything I say and contact me if there's anything you need.

Well, almost anything :-)

Roy

Multiple Streams of Income: UK Business Opportunities Reviews

Multiple Streams of Income: UK Business Opportunities Reviews: Do you want the unvarnished truth about a particular business opportunity? Want to know what else is available? Frankly, there are a lot...

To your wealth and success!

Our First Writing Competition - and you don't have to win it!

A bit of a departure today...

I was looking through some of my old material when I came across a piece I'd started writing a few years ago. It's the opening for a short story or novel and I think it's quite promising. I had probably been reading some HG Wells.

The problem is, I have no idea where I was going with it. So today I had a thought:

You might know we have a publishing arm, called Cinnamon Edge Publishing. We publish our own books and help other people publish theirs, as well as showing people how it's done.

So here's what I've decided to do. I'll give you the story opening and you can do whatever you want with it. All you have to do is develop it into a story of your own - wherever it takes you - and send me the result.

I'll then publish the best stories to a global audience on Amazon, via Cinnamon Edge Publishing. The more stories I have to publish, the better. The best part is, we'll be publishing them through Amazon.com, so it's almost certain that your story will make you some money, too.

Imagine - you a globally-published author and actually being paid...

You can change my opening if you want to, as long as it's still recognisable. To be published on its own, your story needs to be at least 30 pages (around 10,000 words) long, or hopefully more, although shorter stories might qualify for an anthology and a share of the profits from those sales, so do send those in, too. Or you could write several short stories that add up to 30 pages or more to make up your own collection.

Here's your opening:

You can imagine the potential.  Well, you can, but the government has a whole different sent of imaginings, a whole different way of imagining altogether – as you might expect.

I mean, imagine the potential for changing history, once the flexi-time device got into their hands, as it was bound to do.  They could change election results, stop revolutions and coups, prevent assassinations…

Strange then, that nothing much seems to have been changed.  JFK still died, and Bobby and Martin Luther King.  Hitler still lost the war, Yugoslavia still fragmented, etc, etc, etc.  Darfur still happened, Zimbabwe – all the bad stuff.

Only those pesky notes might not seem to fit, and less and less every time we Historians reassess them, but I’m sure we’ll explain that away, too.  Once we can sit down with the Temperologists and thrash out our differences (which, after all, are differences of interpretations of events, not different recordings of them), I’m sure those troublesome notes – the scribblings of a madman in my opinion – will be explained away, too. 

What he described could never really work in the modern world. That’s the thing least likely to have been changed, in my opinion.

Really, I can just see it: the chaos, the anarchy, if we ever really allowed the Ordinaries, the barbaric people to actually vote for their party of choice!

[ends]

As I say, you can change it - I'm sure you can improve it - but I'd like all the entries to be recognisably based on my opening. I won't have time to edit or proof-read your story, so you'll have a better chance of being published if it's up to scratch already. Please use a Word doc or equivalent, or (at a pinch) a .txt file.

Email your entries to me here.

Terms: the profit per book will depend on the price we set, which will partly depend on how long the book is, but the price will normally be $2.99 or more and your share will be a full 30% of the cover price for each book sold.  

Good luck!

Remember, if you have a book already written, in almost any genre, and you want to see it published, we might be able to help. Contact Cinnamon Edge Publishing directly in that case.  

Roy

  

So, if SEO is Dead...

If Search Engine Optimisation is dead, as many people would have you believe, it follows that you would expect a website's visitor numbers to be more or less independent of optimisation.

This would be especially true in the last few months since Google's latest SEO-busting algorithm change, with little to be gained from link-building, on-page optimisation, internal structure, and all the other staples of conventional SEO. At the same time, an established domain with lots of citations and pre-existing presence ought not to be affected by a redesign and a neglect of that 'obsolete' SEO.

In which case, why did this happen to a website that was relaunched just last week?

As you can see, traffic to the site, which had been generally rising until last week, all but stopped on November 29th, almost as though someone has thrown a switch.

We'll save the site owner's blushes by not naming them but rest assured we are encouraging them to get to grips with basic SEO as soon as possible!

Roy

PS. You can learn the kind of basic SEO that would certainly benefit the website's owner from my book 'Really Simple SEO for Business Owners', available on Amazon Kindle.

PPS. You can also ask for our help, at www.cinnamonedge.co.uk