Using Blogger blog for Search Engine Marketing - A Techical How-To

Blogger has changed for the better - and now you can take advantage of this free platform to get the Google+ leverage in your niche.

Warning: Extreme Geek Alert

It used to be that Wordpress.com was The Place to be for any promotion, and Blogger was a poor cousin out standing in the snow. Your wordpress sites would rank on page 1 while blogger sites showed up on page 3 or 4 if then.

What a difference time makes.

Wordpress.com was so popular, they cracked down on anything that was an affiliate link or sold anything. So they suspended sites and users in droves, rightly or wrongly, all in an effort to stop spammers from "abusing" their system. Meanwhile, the various Panda changes relegated wordpress to back pages. Apparently their content-police algorithms weren't good enough.

Now, the one difference was if you actually paid WP.com to host your site. Of course, that got you into monthly fees which also drove spammers away. Your site would rank based on quality content, but you couldn't afford more than a few blogs - which was the point.

(Slideshare.net, especially since LinkedIn bought it up, is currently going through a similar problem, and now seems to suspend you for coughing wrong. Lots of other doc-sharing sites, like DocStoc )

Blogger went the other way. Not only do they not care what you promote (except child porn, drugs, etc.) they have improved their backend.

They enabled you to put your blogger blog on a domain for nothing (you just have to provide the domain.) Or you can put it up as a CNAME, meaning it comes out as a subdomain.domain.com instead of [yourblogname].blogspot.com - which means you can now rank for your content without the penalty of being a freebie blog.

Meanwhile, blogger has also update their themes, plus there are tons of places out there which have been busy building custom themes you can install.

There are two things you might want to fix, though:

• Get your self a new favicon instead of that orange "B" (upload through the layout menu)
• Change the attribution so it's not broadcast that Blogger is hosting you (see http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2012/05/how-to-control-attribution-gadget-when.html  among many on this subject.)

It's so much better to simply use Blogger's CMS, since you don't have any worries with monthly bandwidth costs (or running out) and you are integrated directly with the Google+ universe - just add the gadgets into the sidebar.

This is so good that I actually took the next step and moved a custom-CMS-based site over to a blogger blog. But without changing my hosting, just the files on it.

It's a bit technical, but I quit programming after I passed my required classes in college - so it's not anything an average Joe or Joleen couldn't figure out.

The reason I went this route was to preserve my existing SEO rankings and have my current site link to my new blogger blog, so that it's a seemless transition (instead of working through getting redirects running right. I also have many CNAMEs and emails based on that domain, so don't want to mess with these.

The ideal is to use the template from Blogger that you like and then set up your existing CMS pages to simply route there.

1. Copy/paste your existing content over to Blogger posts. (Their pages won't SEO easily, which is one drawback.) Just keep track of the links.
2. I liked my drop-down menus, so I looked this up - the best one I found was http://xomisse.com/blog/add-drop-menu-can-styled-template-designer/ - since your menus don't change much, this makes your posts into pages for you. Code it once, and update it manually when you need to.
3. The hardest part is getting the Blogger look and feel. Save your home page (using Firefox "Save Page as..." works) and then split it up into .php pages to replace the existing pages in your CMS. (This is the technical step.) You're going to create your CSS (style sheet) and link it, as well as having php files which sit in your includes directory. Try something like OneFileCMS to show you how simple this can be. (All you are doing is slicing up what you get into the various files you need, placing these files where they are supposed to go and linking them right. Takes time, but a nice skill to learn.)
4. Then build new php pages for each of the ranking pages, which simply utilize the menu and links you have on your blogger blog.

What happens is the search engines will send someone to your site, and if they click on any other page, they are moved to your new Blogger-based site. And never return.

Yes, you have to watch your links. The whole process is an exacting one. Of course, if you moved your site by cancelling your existing hosting, then you'd be rebuilding your site completely anyway - plus you'd lose your rankings meanwhile.

This technical way of doing it enables a near-seamless transition.

Plus, you get to update your site and site links to make the new pages even better. Too often, we get into the fevered bliss of creating our new content and forget the details of SEOing every possible description and alt-tag with the keywords we want to rank for - now's your chance.

What you end up with is an updated site which now redirects viewers and search engine bots over to your blogger-hosted blog, while cutting your bandwidth and making your content part of the Google+ experience.

If you are happy with your existing CMS, then don't bother. But if you are already itching to try something new and geeky - this is a great project to jump into. (This method will also work to create static php files out of your existing CMS.)

Yes, you can expect some updates as I wrap up my first experiments.

PS. You can also take multiple blogger blogs, give them identical templates and widgets, then link them through the menu bar so they all appear to be the same site. The advantage of this is that as you CNAME all the blogs, they each will be an authority for that particular subject and cross-link into the other blogs - giving them authority. If you use the Zemanta plug-in, it's easy to make related site links to your other blogs as you go. More on this with a later post...

PS2. Ran across this one - you could move your site and domain to a OneFileCMS hosting for $4 a month and 6 domains (according to their promo) - http://www.arvixe.com/OneFileCMS_hosting

[Update: Did this with two sites: Midwest Journal Press and Worstell Farms. Both are now looking better and coming up faster than they did before. Because the page isn't being built on the fly, but is a static page. Creating another style sheet blew it up, so I simply created static header, sidebar, and footer php files. Each web page kept it's original php file-name, but was much smaller - as the stuff which never changed was stripped out into the "includes files." I haven't had a chance to check the analytics yet - but since I was "given the opportunity" to find new hosting (or pay higher than average to keep my current one) - I'll be having to compare from the new hosting.

Bottom line: both of these look better and run faster than the old ones. An improvement I should have done a year or so ago.]

What's next: Probably won't ever build an onsite CMS again. The new hosting says I've go unlimited domains I can set there (and unlimited bandwidth.) All I really need, with Blogger blogs, is the ability to create CNAMEs for them. All the analytics I'll need will be provided by Google - which will allow me to tailor these blogs to what Google says they're ranking me for. Seems like the best of both worlds.

(Still have to do the change-over at this writing, but I should be able to get into it pretty quickly and get it done, as long as I think though all the steps to begin with.)

Hope your sites go as well...

Related articles

• SEO for New Bloggers
• Start a Blog with Blogger in Draft
• Blogger or Wordpress? Why I am Sticking with Blogger
• How to get a quick, useful website - cheaply.
• The Grand "Google Empire" Experiment Begins
• Day 18 - Spreading the Content Around

Copywriting as a Metaphor - Living Life by Communication

Communication as a way of life, learned at the feet of Master Copywriters.

One thing that came up when I was studying Mike Dillard's new Elevation Income release, was that Dillard had been studying and doing copywriting so long that it had become internalized. He no longer had to think about how to write anything - it just came naturally.

Robert Hirsch (his partner, friend, and cohort in this video series) pointed out that Mike's writing was the way he talked. Meaning that he'd become his skills.

Since marketing is just communication in essence, learning copywriting is just another style of talking, like a dialect - not a different language at all.

This is different from the idea of learning Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" plot structure, but not by much. Much as Louis L'amour studied all the bestseller classics to come up with a style of writing that gave him continuing bestselling popular books. Cliffhangers, action, love interest, exotic locations - everything to take a person away from their own world to visit a new one in those pages.

I'd say really that the optimal writing and communicating style would be between those two. And then throw in a healthy dose of TED talks in there as well.

The point is that the bulk of humanity wants to be entertained, educated, enlightened - and need to be told what to do and how to take action. They are looking for leaders.

All Dillard has pointed out with his Magnetic Sponsoring and now his Elevation Income, is that you can be that leader. His own tools of choice are copywriting. His partner's are sales and entrepreneurship. Both have internalized these skills and actually become them.

They've done tons of study and gone though mountains of books, seminars, and recordings (audio and video) in order to learn their craft. Both agree (and many share this) that lifelong learning plays a key part. Essentially, you are doing this as your passion. So improving your craft - just as professional sports players constantly work on keeping in shape and being able to deliver that pass or block or serve, etc.

When sports players finally wind up physically unable to keep up with younger players, then they have to seque into another career. (But this isn't all that different from you and I - most people move through 2 or 3 or more careers in their lives. "Retirement" is one most people look forward to.)

Separately, I'm collecting up and distilling the copywriting material from the all-time greats. And directly republishing any I've found in the public domain. (I've already written an overview once.) Of course, these will all be made available to you as I can.

What I'm finding is that this starts to change me as I go - not surprising, since you always find what you expect to find (quantum physics, the "Secret", and all that...)

It's change in a good way, though. Remarkable stuff.

The point is that you are changing your life by design. This is just as any person who studies personal development (self help books) changes their lives by surrounding themselves with inspirational and motivational works.

You can look around your own life and see how you are changing your own universe by what you are surrounding yourself with. Yes, that includes your own home and your friends, as well as (*shudder*) TV.

Check it out and you'll see how your ability to communicate is being affected or improved.

Luck with this.

Related articles

• The missing ladder to start climbing to your success with Elevation Income by Mike Dillard
• How Mike Dillard Did it - he gets naked in public...
• The Bottom Line to Mike Dillard's Success with Evolution Group and Magnetic Sponsoring
• What Makes a Good Online Copywriter?

Day 18 - Spreading the Content Around

(Secret Sauce sub-series 04)
As much as people (myself included) deride the idiosyncrasies of the free blogs, they do serve a valuable purpose - besides making money for their hosts. They allow you to republish content to different communities.

The weirdest thing, perhaps, is how useful I've found these since I published The Online Sunshine Plan. Yet nothing about them particularly shows up in that book, except as parenthetical examples.

So - no pre-reading assignment, again.

Let's get right into these...

The reason you want a lot of free blogs re-publishing your content...

This seems illogical on the outset. If Google is penalizing duplicate content and giving special tags to show who authored it first, why would you want to re-publish your content to someone else's site?

Two reasons:

• backlinks
• out-creating your competitors

We have to lay one old urban legend to rest here: duplicate content penalties.

The old-school SEO boys wrap themselves around a pole on this one. Duplicate content isn't "removed" from the rankings, it's just moved down to the "omitted results" section. I gave you at least one link where Charles Heflin shows how there really isn't any competition. And if you look up any long-tail phrase, you'll see that for exact phrases, the links Google shows usually fall apart after the 2nd page (20 rankings).

So Google is really trying to produce the best possible page results. Stuff that has the exact same content is just shuffled lower (below 750-800, as linked above.) It doesn't take them out of the standings entirely, if they still have your backlinks, then they are still contributing to your site staying on top.

Duplicate content mostly hit the free sites like blogs and article directories, which suddenly found themselves with not very many pages ranking - because they weren't policing their own content. (And so now they do, with a vengeance.) However, it doesn't mean that you can't also rank for several different sites with the same content.

How blogs do this is rather interesting. You see, they sort by date, tag, and perhaps feature new material as it's released. Tumblr.com is one which pretty routinely shows up on page 2 or 3 according to their tag pages, which sorts in a different order, so has "different content" than sites which just present them according to last first. Wordpress.com has a nice feature page, which will get a lot of new posts on their front page (handy for search engines to find new content), and if people visit it, it will stay there for awhile, as this is all a popularity contest and entertainment.

Another point is that these freebie blogs all have different templates and have different content showing up. (We'll go into this later about how you can help this with sidebar widgets) So it's mostly, but not exactly, the same content. If there isn't much content around with these keywords, then your re-published content has a good chance of showing up.

Now, yes, if they all had completely different (or at least 40-70% different content) then they'd all rank for the keywords. However, it's a different scene when you are spinning several versions of that material with all that time invested. (We will go over spinning content toward the end of this 30-day program, however. In theory it could be useful - and would help out article directories.)

What we've seen by utilizing these freebie/remote blogs and tracking their ranks from week to week, is that the free blogs will show up and maybe even outrank your main site for a few days or weeks, then slowly drop down the rankings, while your main site (which they link to) starts to increase it's rank. Even though they were posted the same day, within minutes of each other (and I'll tell you how to do this on a later day.)

The top remote blogs

We'll refer to them as remote blogs from here on out, as they have your content in remote locations. ("Free" describes a lot of things these days...except perhaps beer, meals, and money.) If you visit http://knowem.com and do a search, you'll find the top blogs on their main page of social sites. They are listed below.

Blogger.com
This was bought by Google a long time ago. And this year has been getting overdue updates which allow it to rank better. Main point of use is that they don't care if you heavily push affiliate sites and you can have dozens (one lady has hundreds, per report) of different blogs to separate out your content.

Wordpress.com
Finicky about anything that sells anything - unless you have a paid hosting with them. So you can get banned and never figure out why. This ranges from dropping your site to dropping your login. I've even experienced accidentally violating their rules and having my login dropped, but leaving my blogs up - orphaned. So two things you have to do with them: 1) only link to an innocuous "review" page and not to direct affiliate links, 2) have multiple administrators for every page - you can sign up several times with different emails to make additional accounts. You're also allowed almost unlimited number of extra blogs, but once you give it up, neither you nor anyone else can get it again. Wordpress.com blogs tend to show up and sink like July rockets, settling down at the lower pages of rankings.

Tumblr.com
Quite a popular blog site. And while they have a few "bad words" which they ban almost automatically (like "work from home" and "make money online"), otherwise they pretty much leave you alone. Also lets you have numerous extra blogs. Noted as above for ranking well according to its tag pages.

Posterous.com
Almost a newbie on the scene. It was first known for allowing you to post by email. (Now all of the above, and most others, allow you do do this.) However, it's becoming more popular as a blogging platform on its own and the guess is that mainly because it allows you to post to other blogs and social platforms with a copy of your post - which will link back to that posterous blog for any default. So yes, it's giving itself all the backlinks it can find.

There are a few others like Livejournal and Xanga which we won't cover here. Mainly because you can't auto-post to them, which is a hint of what we'll cover later. Sad, really, because they have active communities. Xanga did this in response to spammers, which IMHO was a shot in their own foot. LJ does it by neglect - it's supposed so, but is wonky that way.

Other remote blogs of interest

Anything that can be remote-posted to is useful. However, if it's hosted on someone else's dime, then you can get quite a community built up.

I've already covered how you can build Wordpress blogs on your own site. But that can give you server issues, which (twice-burnt) I don't recommend as a platform. Other free blogs can be set up. And you can also set them up as subdomains, so practically you can build up as many as you have space and bandwidth for. Main problem: they are on the same IP address, so they can appear to be spam-blogs (or splogs). And is why the free/remote blogs are nice - you can have other IP's backlinking to your main site.

There uses to be several free blog hosting sites. (And you can look up free hosting and set up blogs there, but most require a lot of attention in order to retain the free status. Leave one alone for awhile and your account gets cancelled. Content means traffic means ad sales - no content means canceled account.) However, most weren't able to keep sufficient profit to survive, so they've mostly gone by the buy. Wordpress-based free blogs were the rage once...

Blog.com
One of the survivors. Wordpress based and ranks well overall. You do have to turn on remote posting, however.

Blogetery.com
Another Wordpress survivor. Went through some wierd hosting problems a couple years ago - some terrorist-related individuals were hosting with them, and their host shut all their blogs down. But they're back and other than being a bit slow at times, it's a great little community of bloggers.

Typepad.com
They are finicky about getting set up and only allow you one free blog per login/email address. And make it hard to find how to set up a free blog (I've lost that page more than once.) Otherwise, a nice little remote blog. They are their own scene and have built up a nice non-WP platform as a standard.

Again, there might be a handful of others which would fit in this. I've literally spent days searching for WP-based blogs and "free blog hosting", but keep dropping back to these few above. There are still some around, but mostly they have closed off free sign-ups, or are based in a foreign language (non-English), which gives you problems.

Tricks and Details on setting remote blogs up

Generally, these just run as a few:

• Fill out your profile so it looks like a real person. Photo, some interests and definitely your main site as a backlink.
• Unless you like a lot of email (another reason to get a[n additional] gmail account), ensure that you simply have to approve every comment. Most of these long tail blogs, in my experience, only attract fools trying to backlink to their site with comments. It's not that you can't do this, or that it doesn't work. But it's labor intensive and most of these guys are rank amateurs - they don't really contribute to any ongoing conversation.
• On some (blog.com, blogetery.com) make sure that you can remote post to them.
• Put your main site RSS feed in the sidebar to get more backlinks. When you update your main site, it will auto-update (and auto-backlink) on the remote blogs.
• A news feed sidebar with your keyword as a search term is a nice touch. Gives another hint of authority.
• Vary the theme and put a different one up than given. Takes a few minutes, but you generally wan them all to look different.
• Follow some other blogs, especially if you have others of your own on that platform.

Some (tumblr, typepad) don't have customizable sidebars. Their loss. And they might have changed things since I wrote this or last visited their site to set one up.

Isn't this a bit, well, callous?

Well, no. The reasoning goes like this: You are one of a handful who are providing new and fresh content for the Internet. Posting to remote blogs is simply a way of reaching more people with that content. These sites are mostly (-ahem-) content pimps. They (especially Wordpress.com) don't want you to earn income from your content, they just want you to post your content to their site so they can.

So you help them, and they help you.

If you keep your sales/landing pages, review pages, and infotainment pages separate (infotainment goes on the remote blogs, review pages go on your site, and sales pages are either separate pages on your own, or hosted by that affiliate product you are pushing) - then you and the remote blogs can have an amicable, cross-beneficial publishing arrangement.

There's also the point that this doesn't mean you quit contributing to your communities that you've found, just because one of them exists on one of these platforms. You keep contributing - but no one said you couldn't also have an additional blog or two to host your additional content, did they? Especially if the profile is different from your personal one... (Someone recently told me that they'd seen I hadn't been blogging much - but they don't know all the "alternate identities" I use in order to get my research done... Rest assured, I'm as over-prolific as usual - "don't try this at home", and "use only under adult supervision") ;)

- - - -

OK, another couple of freebies. But I'm not apologizing for these guys' lack of taste or professionalism. They will give you some additional pointers we haven't gone over. But it's up to you to test them. Some are dated, some never worked. But the common sense ones you should be able to spot right off.

Blogger's Guide to Profits
Building a Blog Empire for Profit

And your assignment is to check out these free platforms above and see what you find there.

Day 13 - Your Luck has it: Writing a Web Page

Here is one subject that has been made incredibly complex.

Yes, there are a lot of parts to it, but you can hardly do this wrong. However, if you take care to do each bit exactly right, then you'll wind up with some better-than-average results for your effort.

We bring this up here as now you are ready to put some things together. And like a song, there are notes, melody, lyrics, and timing to produce something better sounding than a tortured alley cat in heat. ;)

Writing to Your Heart's Content

For all the boobytraps people have laid down about writing (producing content) - it's not all that hard. However, you do have to listen to your heart and act on what you find.

Writing is simple: "Write like you talk."

Imagine someone in front of you who is just dying to hear what you think about something. All ears and expectant. And then you simply write to hold their interest.

Now there are some details like spelling, but that is what spell-checkers are for. Get something like the free OpenOffice (LibreOffice) or MS Word (if it came with your computer) and it will do a fair job of keeping your words spelled right. (And then note how they are spelled and learn - this will actually save you time in the long haul - not having to stop and correct.)

Once you learn that the inspired "voice in your head" (or however it appears to you) is an unending torrent of content, then it's simply the work of getting it all down on the page.

Of course you can study books like Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" to shortcut improving your writing quality by leaps and bounds. Most English books are tedious and filled with non-sensical rules that are dead-ended in government-supported Academia. People don't write that way and haven't for years. Read a lot and write like the people you like to read. Especially if you want to make your prose more entertaining and interesting.

Research

Of course, you have to do your research about a topic. And that is simply asking yourself, "Can I answer anyone's questions about what I'm going to tell them?" If you hold to this idea that you are working to keep your audience's interest, then it will be easy to simply stop and look it up. Once you have all the data, it will make sense to you and then you can resume telling your story.

Some people talk it out, and then ship it off to a service to transcribe their spoken words into text. That takes a fee, though. And you do get better with typing as you practice.

The main point is to be certain about what you are talking about.

One person's content is another person's spam.

There are 3 types of content on the Internet, with untold variations.

1. Pure information
2. Softsell
3. Hardsell

People put pure information out there to scratch an itch of telling someone what they just found out. And you also have this where people are simply using the Web to download their lives onto it. A personal outlet.

And that is all fine and useful. In these cases, like Wikipedia, it has it's own value and is the purest form of content. An example of open-handed giving.

In softsell, which is useful everywhere else,  people are writing "link bait" which is interesting and entertaining and gets a person to click on a link in that page in order to go to a sales page - or another page which is linking to somewhere they can buy the product.

Affiliate marketing will ship them off the the product or service's sales site to buy. (And as Michel Campbell points out, if they have a lousy sales page, you might need to write your own and then link right to their payment backend.)

Sales pages and landing pages are Hard Sell. We haven't talked much about these. Mainly because they are "disliked" by people who run social services and so on. This goes back to the point that 97% or more of everyone out there is only existing to be entertained. Hardsell pieces aren't entertainment. It's like eating a double-chocolate 5 layer cake and washing it all down with a super-sweet energy drink. You don't want to do this as a steady diet.

But they have their places. A handful want to buy and are looking for just these type of pages to help them make their decision. Your usual place for this is to follow up someone who clicks on a classified ad or auction entry. Or as above, linked into a softsell page.

3-2-1

Wordpress.com and others have made selling on the Internet an interesting place. It's now several layers deep. WP.com is protecting their own (domain-and add-on-selling) profits by telling spammers that they need to take their efforts somewhere else. Unfortunately, they have specious ideas of what spamming is. If your softsell content is linking to sales pages, that's "spamming" and your site and probably login as well will disappear with no notice. (And other free blog sites follow this as well.) Accidentally posting the same content several times to different blogs on their site will also get you banned.

So to get the lookie-loo's turned into possible buyers, you have these pages nested about 3 deep.

• A general information piece links to 
• A softsell page with links to 
• Hardsell pages. 

And that makes the whole subject more difficult, as each of these pages is a drop-off point where a person can go somewhere else or do one of these "look - a butterfly!" moments.

So some people simply concentrate on hardsell pages and writing good classified ads. Which is fine, as the conversions are better in this area.

And there is a mix when you are writing email newsletters. Because you can weed out people who are only their for freebies or to be entertained. Everyone else expects that you are going to give them something and expect something in return. Like visiting your blog in order to start the sales cycle again.

Writing a web page

You start with your purpose, of course, and exactly how you want to help that unseen viewer today.

You have a set of keywords in mind which you want to rank well on the search engines. The main keyword will wind up in the title and 1st paragraph, plus the titles and alt-tags of your images. Everything else are related words which Google uses to know what you are talking about. (Tiger Woods vs. Bengal Tiger).

Then you simply spill out your content about whatever product you want to tell a story about. And, depending on where this is going to end up, you either link to a sales page  or to another "review" page.

Once you have your story all written out and the links embedded, then you come back and write or tweak your headline. Keywords should be closer to the front in your headlines.

Now some say that Google doesn't value headlines like it used to. And this makes sense, as people use headlines to attract readers and "excite interest" (get the person to actually read the page).

And a page will be crafted to help a person get through it.

Most of us have developed the technique of scanning a page. And so a good page is crafted with images, sub-headings, bulleted text, indented text, italics, bold - all sorts of ways to mix it up and keep it from simply being a long set of boring text.

As you write, simply keep Google's guidelines in place.

If you get books by Jacob Neilsen or visit Copyblogger, then you'll see people who study people's usage and will tell you what works and what doesn't.

Again, the key point is entertainment.

Sequence is the key

You write your main site page first, which links to affiliate or other sales pages directly.

Then you post content around the web which links to your main pages.

Of course, your own site is built like this as well. You can have sales pages on your site, which are linked to by review pages, which are linked to by informational pages. And then put up social posts and so on which link to these various site pages directly.

We will go into this subject of a mini-net later (that "Special Sauce" I keep referring to) and as well how and where to post elsewhere on the web.

But generally, you work this backward as you build. And after creating a few dozen pages, a pattern will start showing up. Then you simply evaluate that pattern for it's success or "opportunities for improvement" and learn from your experience. The go and write a few dozen more. Rinse and repeat.

We'll go into analytics later which will help you with all this. Your own gut reaction to your own writing will tell you most, however.

It's not "build it and they will come", it's more - "Build it Right and They will Click Through" to your sales pages and buy.

The object of the web pages you write is not having popular pages with lots of traffic - it's having pages which get a lot of people who want to buy whatever you are talking about, and do so.

The web isn't a popularity contest. It's a shooting gallery. The most attractive targets get shot at - and the winner gets the prize. (Meanwhile, you are the one selling the tickets and making the profits from the shooters.)

Okay?

- - - -

Today's freebie is several. These are classics which people have been referring others to for years.

Hopkins - Scientific Advertising
Scott - The Psychology of Advertising
Prevette - The Power of Creative Selling

Don't be thrown off by the terms "advertising" and "selling" - it's all just words which describe getting people to act.

And you can also refer to "Get Your Self Scam Free" in order to study Maslow and Cialdini for understanding of how and why we are programmed to buy stuff.

Assignment:

Review what you've been writing recently and see how you could possibly improve it to make it more interesting.

Then pick up some popular novels (even classics like O. Henry, Louis LaMour, Jack London) and see how they keep a reader riveted.

Now write some more content with these in mind.

Day 08 - Creating Content - the How to and Where for Guide

Content originally meant just information. When the WWW version of the Internet came out, it also came to mean graphics. Later, we added audio, video, PDF's, presentation, and just about everything else.

While this probably could and should have been a section of its own in An Online Sunshine Plan, most of it wound up in Section VI - Promotion, with a tiny bit on sales pages in Section IV (page 187.)

So reviewing these sections is your pre-assignment for today.

But wait - there's more: I'm giving you your freebie right up front today - because you'll need this right off. From the original Online Millionaire Plan archives (the pre-cursor to The Online Sunshine Plan) is a chapter I wrote/compiled/edited for that book: Copywriting and Sales Pages.

Now, we'll get to the ease and simplicity of writing soon enough - first we need to talk about the rest of what shows up under "content".

Types of Internet Content

Look at your average search, particularly popular ones.

Google now lists

• web pages and articles
• blogs (which they categorize differently)
• forums and discussions
• video (and sometimes audio)
• images
• shopping sites
• other document formats, such as Word .docs, .rtf, and .txt files.

- all competing for those few top spots on the top. (And this list is gradually expanding)

So content isn't just writing anymore, although it always starts this way.

As I covered before, search engines think in terms of words. Everything is a keyword to Google, etc. What you see on the search engine rankings are the most popular combinations of words. Because they are trying to serve up just what you are looking for, they'll also populate that search with various combinations and "pretty close" look- and sound-alikes.

It's not just webpages they do this with - it's also videos, audio, images, forum posts, and all the rest.

And this is why there may be "millions" of search items, but mostly you are really only concerned with the first 2 pages - because all these "close but no cigar" populate the rest. (And is why, for those who know, SEO is so easy - once you are over the learning curve.)

The way you author your content is how it's going to get found. So the main keyword phrase has to be used realistically so that it will rank well. Note that term: realistically. Search engines follow how people tend to act in most situations. They study people who use their program. So they know that if content is sloppily put together, or spammy (ie. crap), then people won't stay there very long or come back to visit again. And so devalue that page.

Again, the Internet is built on valuable information being shared.

Any content can be simply converted to the others (as gone over in pages 254-262 of OSP.) A simple sequence is to create the original article (with links and images) in a standalone editor such as Kompozer (the old Mozilla Suite Composer - updated). And post it. Then open that up with OpenOffice/LibreOffice and convert it to a PDF. Take that same work and whittle it down a bit, then post it with additional images as a Powerpoint (on Slideshare.net). Now read that text out loud into Audacity or similar program, and post the audio file on Archive.org as a podcast. Then marry the video and slides together into a video for YouTube (or one of those hosts). That's five different types of content. If you properly title the images, you'll wind up with 6, as Google will associate your images with that keyword.

If you then took a collection of those web pages and converted it into a book (or ebook), you'd then also have the audio-book ready for publishing, as well as a CD/DVD collection of videos.

And the point of doing this all is that you can rank for multiple positions on Google, plus all those properties can backlink to the original piece, which search engines rightly appreciate. (We will cover more on back-linking as a promotion strategy in upcoming days - not too far off, though.)

Authoring Styles

The Internet isn't particularly built (except private sections like Ebay and Craigslist) to host sales pages and ads. But it does. And some elitists get this a bit wonky.

There are 3 types of people who use the Internet.

1. Lookie-loo's: These are here only for entertainment - and are what made MySpace and Facebook big in their time. They don't buy, they just look, smile, and move on.
2. Researchers: People who want real information. Often this is precursor to a sale, but not necessarily.
3. Buyers: These people already know exactly what they are looking for and want either factual comparative reviews - or the best possible price and terms.

They each require slightly different styles to get and keep them interested in your pages.

However, a lot of what passes for advice on copywriting is either for the first or the third. And Wordpress.com policies are built on the first - not wanting to offend, but also not wanting people to spam their free blogging platform with sales offers. (And so a direct sales offer, or too many direct links to affiliate sites will suddenly get your WP.com blog banned, and maybe your own account as well - trust me, I've accidentally stepped on their toes more than once.)

The first two types of visitors can be written for similarly. You write factual, accurate, and informative articles which then link to another page which in turn does a soft-sell review of the product - and in its own turn links to hard-sell landing pages. (And that is the strategy for using the free WP blogs (and anywhere so tight about it.)

Do your landing page (or ensure your affiliate sponsor has a good landing/sales page). This is designed to convert. Period. Next, you then do a review about the product(s) - and you can have affiliate accounts with all the products you compare on that page, BTW.  Your "review" page links to sales/landing pages - probably with a disclaimer that they are heading to a sales page with that link (people appreciate honesty.) Then you do another page which goes out on free blogs and as articles, etc., which then link to your review page.

While convoluted, this still is a way you can write for all 3 publics and get maximal possible leads and conversions. (The lookie-loo's are simply never going to buy anything - but you know they will some day need your product or service. So you want to write this light and memorable. Posting your light ones on the free blogs is sensible as it also can push your review site higher in Google with backlinks (although I'll go over that expressly in the "Secret Sauce" series coming up.)

The third type - buyers - are given hard-boiled sales/landing pages. And you simply take out classified ads to drive them there. This is why classifieds (properly written) have double or more the conversion rates of regular web pages. Visitors are already looking to buy.

You aren't really interested in website or blog generic "traffic". You are interested in people who can be cajoled or are already into a buying frame of mind. You tailor make your site to deal with people who come there for those specific keywords which they use to find information about the valuable product or service you are offering.

And in those few paragraphs above, you can tell immediately if some of these "guru's" are smoking something odd. If they only tell you about getting your traffic up, then they are fakes. If they say you have to get your traffic up in order to get that 1-2% of the market - they really don't know what the Internet is all about. Only if they say you are looking for precisely-targeted leads to convert - then do you continue studying what they say.

- - - -

Now that is really what I've distilled about content authoring since I wrote An Online Sunshine Plan. It's more refined than all I studied about it - and gives you the middle ground so you can effectively market your goods. (And believe me, I write this so you don't have to do the years of content as I did in order to have the retrospective view and distill it all yourself. Costs too much.)

Assignment is to simply do some studies of your own. Go back over your own market research and look up the pages people are using to promote their products which exist in your keyword space. Clickbank has some wild examples of good and bad landing pages, as do others.

Do study over the freebie I linked above. I've got some more really good classics coming up later. One thing at a time - one day at a time.

Some great stuff coming up. We'll give out some tested Affiliate data tomorrow, I think...

Day 03 - Why blog? Because somebody's gotta.

What to write about and what is this "authority" stuff, anyway?

The pre-assignment for today is to review Section II of OSP. So I don't have to repeat the data on how and why you set up your online activities in order to succeed.

We figure that regardless of whether you have settled on a niche or a service or a product, you have covered this material and know basically that you'll be setting up a business. And running it as a business, not a hobby.

The next set of logic:

• The Internet is based on content and speed.
• If you want to promote your service or product, you'll need to develop content and host it on a platform which loads quickly.
• If you do this, and optimize your web pages for the search engines, they will rank you well. 
• Mostly, anyway.

In the last essay before the articles, entitled "What you should really be going for - just the cherry on top, not whole sundae" - once you get past that embarrassing typo (well, it was a beta edition...) you see what I call this repeating graph called the Bell Curve. Key point on this is that it predicts that a small minority of people are creating all the content on the web. (Not my fact, but it does support the graph.)

Out of that, the same percentage actually set up their content to be search engine friendly (optimized). So now we see that 1 out of a thousand will create any usable content - that the search engines will place high in the rankings just because the way it was composed.

This is where Search Engines start to decide who is the actual authority that they will put on top. Where they start. In the last few years, they've moved beyond just how content was written - but not too far. Given about 3 months, a webpage will start ranking well on it's own if it's SEO'd.

Sidebar: What am I talking about - this SEO stuff?

On page 216 points out the main 5 points you have to keep in mind in order to optimize your site. And then explains the rest of the key points, which we'll revisit as they have refined (or I have) since this book was written.

However, this reminds me of a caveat - I don't recommend Wordpress (WP) anymore. It simply doesn't SEO well. And can (by personal experience) get you kicked off servers from tying up their machines with runaway scripts. Best advice right now - if you must do Wordpress - is to pay them to host your domain. You lose a lot of back-end analytics, but it will be worry free.

The real backend is always custom-built to actually SEO from the outset - and isn't something cobbled on top of a WP backend. (And if you are desperate to run your own server, try "PivotX" as it can be made to SEO properly, but can be uploaded just about anywhere.)

When I say most people don't SEO their sites, this means they don't include all the 5 points mentioned on that page.

Your community

This gets us back to Section II. A business will develop a community. If it serves it well, they will be supportive. Scammers develop anti-communities which work to bring them down. (And will hunt them even if they change their name.) It's all the value you give.

In our lessons leading up to this point, you've more or less figured out just what your interests are and a vague idea of what value you want to give.

I want to tell you right now to not fall for the trap it took me years (literally) to get out from under. And while I recommend The Challenge to anyone, I split with them on this one point:

You have to follow your bliss (purpose) to get anywhere, to make any real success.

There is a common misconception that you can simply find "hot niches" to work from and find products which are being sold there, and then simply "dominate" that niche to rake in all sorts of cash.

Doesn't work that way. You need to be working at something you could do forever. Like this: FOREVER. "Making money" is another trap. Having a "job" is another trap. You are an individual and need to be living your own life, not someone else's.

The simple way to do this is to

• Find your bliss, your purpose, your main line of fascination - what perpetually interests you.
• Develop or discover a product or service which aligns with this. And which can be leveraged to produce all the extra income you could want.
• Do your market research (next lesson) to figure out what people are looking for in the area of your bliss.
• Tailor your content to contain those keyword phrases so that you essentially move your target in front of where they are searching.

After that, it's a case of simply converting viewers to leads to customers to clients.

Not that this all isn't a bunch of work, but that's the sequence.

This ties into communities in this fashion - when you find your bliss, you'll find other people share that purpose. And you'll find forums and blogs about it. And what keywords they are using - you've just started your market research. As you continue to study the communities which have developed around this niche, you'll have the common itch they all need scratched. Provide the product or service which does the scratching and you'll have as much income as you can promote and deliver to them.

Back to Authority

This is what the Search Engines are fixated on - and playing catch up to. Social media says what people are interested in. And Search Engines use this (and how well your pages are SEO'd) to serve up pages which match those interests. (Which is why Google came out with Chrome browser, the Chromebooks, and Google+. All to figure out what people want served up to them.

So people who write SEO'd content routinely and are regularly bookmarked, liked, commented on, tweeted, and +1'd - their pages will wind up on the top of Google regularly. Infallible. Really.

That's called authority - earning Google's trust for your content.

And the simplicity of how to accomplish this is what prompted me to write all this up and give back to the community.

I'm not worried about some spammer mis-using this. They can't. Because it's too easy to see what they are doing. (And was the recent "penguin" update as they took out some social media spammers.)

Main thing is to enable you to earn some extra income and perhaps - just perhaps - be able to replace any day job income and benefits you currently have going.

- - - -

Again, I've written way too much today. That's my over-verbose fingers going again.

Assignment:

Take that list of interests and start punching around on the Internet to see what forums and groups you can find about them. Wade around a bit and see what people are talking about, what the biggest threads are.

And finish reading the rest of Section II if you can. (It will come in handy later on.)

Today's freebie - Turning Dreams into Dollars. I don't agree with everything she says, but she gives a great lot of things to start with.