Want to be really really good? Like Bob Dylan, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet etc.? You have to do what you are doing for 10,000 hours.

The full article is here , recently populized by Malcom Gladwell, in Outliers, the Story of Success.

I like Malcom Gladwell - he is iconoclastic, eccentric and intellectual. So it caught my eye. So how many is 10,000 hours in days and years?

Quite a bit – 4 hours per day, which is a fair bit to focus attention on exclusively, for 5 days a week, works out to 960 hours per year, which would be 10.41 years.

Not testing? Time to get on it! Everything is in full swing and you are definitely late for the party.

According to a new report by Forrester Research, only 26% of online marketers are taking advantage of testing technologies.

Seems hard to believe when you can quicly and easily replace a picture and increase your conversion by 150%! That is an awful lot of money left on the table.

And if you think Google isn’t paying attention to high conversion websites? Think again! Google loves high conversion sites.

Perhaps the missing element in the latest Caffine update?

Interesting article from Advertising Age on Reuters and AP and others outsourcing content creation and some very intersting discussion from both sides of the issue.

More Discussion here

What’s the biggest problem with the Web? More opportunities than time to do them.

Here is a great post – there are thousands of ideas like this

http://seoblackhat.com/2009/12/25/scientific-money-poster-a-free-business-idea/

Here is the high-brow view – http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/03/28/blogonomics-monetizing-readers/ – Chase READERS not Pageviews!

Aaron Wall offered an interesting view on his blog http://www.seobook.com/blog which I can’t locate, and I am paraphrasing here, saying to keep most content just above the medium quality level, and then smaller amounts of very high quality content.

Here is a great book that has made a huge difference in the way I look at content.

Content Strategy for the Web – Kristina Halvorson

With 52 sites and 100’s of pages of content, it is easy to lose track of everything! The really important take-away from this book is to make a Content Audit. Make a list of all the content you have, organized by category, PageRank and then see what is converting and what isn’t.

Guaranteed to change the way you look at, create and post content.

Download a free copy of our new Ebook — Article Marketing and Article Syndication.

Contents

* Article Marketing Overview
* Create Traffic and Sales through Content
* Content is STILL King
* Article Syndication
* Building Web Credibility
* Content Soft Sell
* Tips for hiring Freelance Writers
* Writing for the Web
* Recommended Article Submission Software
* Full Article Marketing Course
* and more …

Download Here

How do you actually convince someone to pull out their credit card and actually busy something from your website?

Anyone who knows the answer to that question, or even part of the answer is worth a million bucks. Unfortunately there ins’t any one answer and ‘the answer,’ such as it is, comes slowly and hard. And further, it is different for different types of sites.
Strategies for Education sites are going to be different from strategies for sites that sell machinery.

My personal strategy for promoting sites is the “learning library” approach where lots of free information is provided for browsers with a soft sell approach. This type of promotional strategy works well for education related sites, dating sites, some web and Internet related sites, for example SEO content sites, but not web design sites. Maybe more…

The learning library strategy means creating an online library of material that is related to your product or service. See my other posts on Anatomy of a Content Site, Broad Conent and Content Sites Sell

Conversion is the number of browsers on your site that do something that you want them to, such as signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, or inquring about your services. If you take the total number of visitors and divide by the number of ‘actions taken,’ then yo have the conversion number expressed as a percentage.

Increasing your conversion rate is hard work, but also one of the best things you can do for your site. Here are a few tips to get you going.

1. Install analytics
Analytics comes in 2 different types, PC programs that analyze log files, and web based programs. I like to use both because because I get a bigger picture of what is going on. For a web based program, Google Analytics is free and very effective. For a log file, analyzer, I recommend click tracks, which is more expensive, but well worth the cost.

With a log file analyzer, you can start analzing your traffic right away, with Google Analytics, you’ll have to wait a while to gather data.

Even before that, there are a few things you can do to get started.

1. Take the HOME button off the home page! When browsers land on your home page and see the HOME button, they quite understandably think they are on an interior page of the site, so they click on HOME to get to the home page. THis just reloads the page they are on. So, browsers have been on your site for 10 seconds and already you have confused them!

2. Edit your menus. As above with the homepage link, having a CONTACT US link on the contact page.

Think about your browsers and the different types of browsers that visit your site, and how you want them to navigate through the site. Sketch out the most desirable route through your site and then arrange the content and menu choices to ‘guide’ browsers through you most desirable route.

What are SEO Articles?
SEO Articles are web content that has a specified number of keywords. For example, an article, that may be part of a Learning Library or Knowlege Center on a website, may contain 17 repetitions of a particular keyword. For a 1000 word article, that is 1.7% keywords density.
(more...)