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.

What testing does is force you to do things differently that you think they should be done. Often we become attached to having a webpage or a product a certain way. Or the way the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) or the person in the company with the most aggressive personality wants it. None of that matters. What really matters is the customer. Listen, watch and stay open and flexible.

2. Most products will fail on release.
I read somewhere a survey where business people were asked to rate the success of their new product or service. The result was a staggering 12% rated their product a success. So – probably your project will fail on the first release. That doesn’t mean you give up though. What you need to, as above, is listen and watch, and think of another way product can be used. Maybe you can give it away free if people join your Face book page. Or a free iphone app. Stick with it and think outside the box.

OK, those are some higher level strategic concerns. Now for some tactical coding level concerns in Part II in a week or so.

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.

First I hired a guy who was referred to me by a client as Editor and Project Manager. He had a Masters degree and was unemployed and agreed to work of $20/hour. First I got him to come up with an outline or table of contents. I asked him to research every single possible topic for the book (in this case on how to study) so that the book would be the complete guide on how to study and cover every conceivable aspect and topic.

Once we had the table of contents, I zipped all of the material together (which was quite a lot) and sent it to him together with a quick index of the material.

The first step was for him to go through and inventory everything and compile a list of topics that are missing. Once he gave me the list I hired my usual freelance writer to write up the missing parts,which was about 40 pages total.

While that was being written up, the Editor was putting the existing content together as well as writing transitions. A book is more than just a collection of blog posts and articles put together, and putting them all together into a cohesive whole was harder and more work that I expected.

Simply copy and pasting a huge collection of blog posts together feels very disjointed. As well blog posts tend to be quite short, and often just give a cursory coverage of the topic. Often blog posts had to be taken out or used as a basis for a more in-depth article which was then integrated into the larger document.

Still, a successful project, although it took longer, cost more and was more difficulty than I originally planned.

The result? 3 ebooks, on related topics, 200 pages, 110 pages and 50 pages respectively. Hooked them up to paypal, linked everywhere internally on the site and re-couped my investment for the freelance editor and writer in just over 1 month. From here on in it is all pure profit.

One of the ebooks, here, was so successful, I had my main writer, add another 50 pages.

All of the ebooks are undergoing extensive multi-variant testing to determine price breaks, and sales copy. So far, it looks as though my original guess at price was too low, and tweaks to the sales copy have increased conversion by 57%.

Very Nice!

More Discussion here

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.

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.

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

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

How many keywords should I have on my pages?

There is no clear answer and really no way to find out. In the past, the ‘follow the leader’ strategy worked but no longer. It used to be possible to analyze the top ranking sites in your area, and copy everything that they are doing and you would rank as well. Those days are long gone. However, there are a few things that you can do and here are a few tips:

Make it look natural. Repeat keywords 2 or 3 times (in 500 word articles) as a bare minimum.

Use secondary keywords. Brainstorm and research alternative keywords. Come up with a list of primary, secondary and third level keywords, as well as synonyms. Each primary keyword becomes an article and is usually included in the title. Secondary keywords should be included in sub headings.

The goal of having different levels of keywords is so that anyone can still tell what the articles is about if the primary keyword is taken out.

For more information on SEO articles, see my post on Anatomy of a Content Site and my post on Google loves Broad Content, and Content Sites Sell

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.

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.

Similar to BlueHatSEO, my sites would disappear completely from the Search Results, then appear a week or so later. I watched this several times, and the disappear/re-appear schedule was exactly in sync with the Google’s Cache date.

So what is going on here in plain language?

Google loves fresh content, but not too fresh it seems. And it gets more complicated. To understand that we have to look at some of the factors Google uses in ranking sites. Google uses the history of your site as one component in the ranking algorithm. Things like how long your site has been online, and how often it has been updated, and how big the updates have been, on average since the first day. As well, the history of other sites in your sector are analyzed and their update history and frequency are compared to your history.

All of this goes into the mix of several hundred factors that are used to assign rank. So, for example, if your site is never updated, and suddently you start updating every week, and the other sites in your sector are only updated every 3 months, then Google of course notices and your site is penalized. Once the next index cycle comes around, all of the averages have normalized to some extent and your site goes right back to where it was.

OK, so what to do? Here are some tips and guidelines to staying just fresh enough:

1) Look at your competition and see if you can find out how often they update. I just realized I was updating every week, after few updates over the last year, and my competition are all old sites that almost never update. Generally I am #3 for my target keywords, but I kept getting penalized for a week or so then back to #3 — all because my update schedule is out of sync with my competitors.

2) Work to a schedule of updates and stick to it. First, as in #1, figure out how often your competitors are updating and use that as your starting point. Next, work out a plan to gradually move toward more frequent updates, keeping the averages in mind. If everyone else is updating every 3 months, say, then start off with every 3 months, then every 2 then every month.

If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. You don’t have to do it yourself though, and can easily hire a freelance writer or hire a blog writer.

4) Consider other ways of using content besides updates. If everyone else in the top 10 is updating every 3 months, why work harder? Content can be used in dozens of ways. Use your content for syndication, or for email followup. Set up an auto responder that sends out 10 tips about _____, or a series of articles followed by a special promotional offer.