Marcus Taylor

7 Tips for Making Your Facebook Ads Work

Written by on May 26th, 2013

When it comes to Facebook ads, most marketers I speak to are skeptical about how effective they are. In my experience, those who don’t believe in Facebook Ads simply haven’t experimented enough.

Over the past five weeks I’ve been running a Facebook Ad Campaign that has a ~400% ROI for a client in the music industry. Every £200 we spend, we drive £1000 worth of signups.

What I find particularly interesting about this campaign is that there is no way it would have been a success if I had created it via any of Facebook’s recommended approaches. To cut a long story short, Facebook do not make it easy for you to run a really effective

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14 Lessons Learnt From My Most Successful Online Product Launch

Written by on October 30th, 2012

For context, last month I launched my first 100-hour long ‘epic deal’ on my website TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk to help musicians save money on recording, distribution and music promotion. Here are fourteen lessons and tips I picked up from planning and launching this deal.

1. Focus on WHY your offer or product is valuable, not HOW

If you haven’t already seen this TED talk by Simon Sinek, I strongly recommend putting aside 18 minutes today to do so. It was one of the videos recommended to me by the organisers of TEDxMelbourne

Posted in Entrepreneurship


I’m Speaking at TEDxMelbourne

Written by on August 7th, 2012

A couple of nights ago,  I was on the tram into Melbourne CBD with my girlfriend to meet some friends for dinner, when my girlfriend got a text from the friends we were meeting saying “Does Marcus know he’s just won the Awesome Foundation Grant and is speaking at TEDxMelbourne?!” – apparently my reaction at this point was priceless.

After checking the TEDxMelbourne Facebook Page I confirmed that this wasn’t an evil prank that they were playing on me :-)

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WhatisMyComfortZone.com Facebook App Launched

Written by on May 7th, 2012

When I launched WhatisMyComfortZone.com in February 2012 over 10,000 people measured their comfort zone using the web app, but after the initial surge of users, traffic died down to a couple hundred users per week (still not bad, but pretty low in comparison to what it *could* be).

The initial surge of traffic

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The Future of How Google+ Will Affect Search Rankings

Written by on December 26th, 2011

Back in August, I ran several experiments to try and find out whether Google’s +1s had an impact on search engine rankings. The results suggested that in almost all cases Google +1s did have a positive impact on rankings. However, a lot has changed in the past four months, so I’d like to share where I think Google is going with the impact of Google+ on search rankings.

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The Launch of Get Noticed!

Written by on October 22nd, 2011

Today, Rob Lawrence and I launched our co-written book ‘Get Noticed‘ which is a guide on standing out in a busy space, be it getting your story or music heard, growing your personal brand, or simply meeting more of the right people.

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What Happens When You Build 10k Dodgy Links to a New Website in 24 Hours?

Written by on March 1st, 2011

You get penalised. You get a heap of traffic, and then get penalised.

While I am certainly no black-hat by any means, and do not advocate the techniques outlined in this post for long-term SEO projects, I love testing the theories and rumours that circulate in the SEO community about what link building works and what doesn’t. Regardless of how dodgy the rumours are,  it helps me build a bigger picture of  how Google treats link building.

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About Marcus



Marcus Taylor is an award-winning entrepreneur from Oxford with a passion for online marketing, the music industry, and getting out of his comfort zone. In 2012 Marcus created the World’s first scientifically valid ‘comfort zone calculator’, which he later presented about at a TED event in Australia.

Day-to-day Marcus runs Venture Harbour, a company that converges Marcus' passions to help brands within the music and entertainment industry grow their businesses online. Venture Harbour also manages a collection of Marcus' own projects including TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk, a website that helps over 300,000 musicians a year learn new ways to grow their fan base.