Sense amongst Madness - Wit amongst Folly

After selling information products online since 1997, I decided to write down some random thoughts and a few things I have learned.

1. Test the Price and Listen to what your Customers say.
Always test a selection of prices. Sometimes a higher price is perceived as better quality and result in higher revenue and sometimes it won’t. No way of knowing unless you test – the customer is always right.

When releasing a new product, it is quite likely to need some tweaking and adjustment. Most likely people will use it for a different purpose than you are selling it for. That’s OK too! Listening to feedback from customers, and watch your stats like a hawk. For example, you may want to target students, however, teachers end up buying it to use as a lesson plan to teach the subject. No problem – back to the drawing board and re-write the material, adding classroom activities, games and notes for the teacher. Presto! Instead of an ebook for students, it is a lesson plan for teachers. (more…)

If you have been blogging for a few years, or even 4 or 5, then you have accumulated a huge amount of material on your subject matter. And presumably, covering every possible facet and related topic.

If it is properly indexed, they you have 300 or 400 pages of material which is a huge boost for your rankings and traffic. Beyond that, it is just sitting there.

What you do with this accumulation is compile it into an ebook which you can sell! Here is what I did with a 5-year old blog, plus several years of article submissions and masses of site content. (more…)

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

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

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...)

If you aren’t using Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) on your blog, it’s time to get on it! Everyday Akismet blocks about 100 spam postings by linkers.

Why so many?

Spammers are trying to get links to their website by posting comments on Blogs to increase their link popularity. Whether the search engines actually pay attention and count the links from blogs is highly questionable. Almost certainly Google excludes these links, but MSN may count them and Yahoo probably counts a few of them.

Why do they keep doing it if they all get blocked?
Obviously nobody is checking or they would see right away their comments aren’t being posted. If they aren’t checking that probably means they aren’t doing it themselves and they can’t be paying whoever they have making the posts very much.

Looks like freelancers in China, Russia or India.

Content sites are a great way to soft sell your way to high conversion. I keep producing content for my own sites and client sites and watching the traffice increase slowly but steadily.

Something I have been noticing recently is sites jump in and out of the rankings for no apparent reason. Reading one of my favorities blogs recently BlueHatSEO, I found an article which goes into all the gory details of how Google handles fresh content.
(more…)