No resting on laurels - how to bookmark bookmarks

Social Signals Skyrocket your SERPs

Where we started and where we want to go…

This question was left hanging from a http://synnd.com/1909-2/ video. So this response as I scratched my own itch. (Update: I've completely rewritten this, as once again, I got sucked down a spammer's rabbit-hole on the original. Moral - if it's too complex, it either a J.O.B. or you've lost the trail.)

Essentially, you bookmark your own bookmarks, which gives Google an idea that the thing is popular. In fact, you can (and should) take this layers deep.

Of course you quickly run out of any benefit that Onlywire might provide. Because it becomes labor-intensive and so just another J.O.B.  I recommend and use Synnd for this. It’s more effective and leaves no trail. The cheap and free method is Onlywire. A monthly investment will give you the Pro version.

Their description of this is quietly noted in a FAQ – it’s called Superspindle, which is borrowed from horticulture then a person grafts stock onto the same sturdy stem. A pdf is available here which goes into more detail.


Again, Synnd is for people serious about getting their pages to rank. For me, it’s whether they are on page one and how far away from the top five. Because the top 5 get the lion’s share of click-thru’s. Means my SEO work is intensely oriented to get results.

Your mileage may differ, as will your budget.

The point on Onlywire, if I haven’t made it before, is that you have to bookmark around 10 (or some say 20) other sites before coming back to your own again. This is what seems “etiquette” on social sharing sites – and prevents your bookmarks from leaving an obvious trail. However, Synnd uses it’s thousands of networked subscribers to do this for you – all from different IP’s, so the authority is far greater and there is no trail. In fact, it’s hard to see the effect unless you’re ranktracking your main site closely.

The people who I’ve ever seen complain about Synnd either 1) didn’t use it the way they were told to, or 2) ran one campaign with a handful of bookmarks and expected results literally overnight.

Google is looking for sites which are immensely popular to rank on top. This means hundreds of bookmarks, in several layers. So you’ll run several Synnd campaigns, which can take up to several weeks to run (depending on the limits of the network, and the programmed naturalness of the propagation.) Synnd doesn’t make your site popular, it merely primes the pump so others can start doing this naturally for you.
Whether your stuff goes truly viral is dependent on many things, one of which is your own copywriting ability.

So to incorporate this into your scene:

1. Great content posted on your hub.
2. Bookmark this on a social news site (SU, Digg, Reddit)
3. Pull that link and bookmark it (or run small campaigns on all of them)
4. Run a bookmarking campaign some of those bookmarks.

And that will get you going right along.

Solo Promotion - A critique of "what the pro's do"

The necessity for leverage in online promotion is that everyone starts out by themselves. 

And what prompted this is a new look at Market Samurai's "Professional SEO" article from an application viewpoint. You may want to have this article open in another window (or a separate screen, which is even better) so you can refer to it as we go.

This article makes some sense on the overview, and is why I refer people to it.

However, it doesn't really say much about the individual and their efforts to succeed or scale.
They are actually pointing out that there is a huge market in the middle between the two - since the Professional SEO firms are dealing in major corporations only, while the individual is simply working their own concept over.  And there is a scale of work which separates these two as well - one is dealing in "hundreds" of pieces of content every week, the other a single piece of content weekly.

That isn't very fair to the individual, and they don't tell you how to scale this or how to leverage your work.

Of course, these 30 days are just that - how an individual can leverage their own efforts to earn extra money online. And we've also reviewed how you can ramp your content up to many versions of the same work within a single week - unlike their example of the individual who chose hard ways to do things and later quit these in exhaustion.

Limiting Misconceptions

1. The first one is their emphasis on backlinks. And we've already covered this. You don't use bookmarks and social media to try to get backlinks. You use them to improve the social signal quality of your main and remotely-posted content.

They do cover the point that article directories are a valid way to get backlinks, all white-hat and everything. And this is where they start - pushing their incomplete project of an article publisher. (I'm sure they'll get there, eventually.)

2. And because they don't write this from the view of really getting the whole job done (just from an article marketing viewpoint) they don't really lay out a scheme or plan which the individual can use to scale their production.

So for a long time, this sat in my own mind as an isolated report. Only on finishing up this series and starting that new project did the groundwork they laid start to bear fruit.

How an individuals can scale their promotion

The idea is that the Internet is a great way to leverage all that you do. Market Samurai is a great way to leverage your time required on market research in order to get all the data you need quickly. That one-time purchase should last you years or more - since they support it with updates, and you can also recommend it as an affiliate product.

We've covered in some broad strokes how to simply get this accomplished using a central hub, remote social properties (blogs), and social signals. This type of system can also be scaled, to include other interests - so you are able to promote in several lines. This splits your time up considerably, so it may be that you want to simply start out with concentrating on a single interest and building up content on this.

What the Market Samurai guys cover about Article Directories is correct, provided you spin the content (instead of hiring people to write articles for you on a one-to-one basis) - which is covered in Day 23 - How Article Directories Could Work.

Under that workflow, you simply would take the extra hour to convert that content into a spinnable format, and plug it into Article Demon (another one-time purchase that looks to be supported well so far.)

And that additional hour, plus a submitter like Article Demon, will leverage your one hour into perhaps a hundred or more backlinks on article directories - where everyone wins.

Once your article shows up an AD, you can then bookmark it and then ping your bookmark profile RSS feed - as covered. You may wish to have that article bio spun to give links to your remote blogs instead of your hub - or in addition to it. Just depends on how you created the content for each. But it gives you more options.

As well, many of these AD's give each author an RSS feed, so that could be pinged. As time-consuming as it is, the best results would be probably to use is like a remote blog, and bookmark it/ping RSS. I have no program (yet) which will submit sites to be pinged on a delay - though I'm sure they are out there and will only take looking to find.

Press Releases

Another line of promotion we haven't talked much about is the Free Press Releases. As usual, you want to use those which are effective, and cost nothing. There is simply no good review or explanation of these in The Online Sunshine Plan. Sorry.

Press Releases are not used much, as they are often misunderstood. Mostly, they do not get picked up by news services. And have recently been plagued with spam. Results is that many have been dropped by Google News (if they were ever on it to begin with) and have had to change their operation to restore their credibility. (See http://www.bignews.biz/blog/?p=6 for an exceedingly short list, and some descriptions of why.)

Essentially, these sites are picked up by both regular web searches and also Google News. So they are similar to article directories, but give you additional exposure on a new type of search engine.

However, they are each decidedly different as to how they accept your data. And so have no programs which will submit spun copy (as the Article Directories have only recently begun to have - well, as far as decent ones.)

So there is no real value in getting these only as backlinks. They simply take too much time to implement. You are going to have to spin the content and then also hand-copy/paste it into their particular fields. Some allow internal links within the body copy, some allow images. So it's no walk in the park.

But, like article directories, once you have spun copy, it's simpler to post to several of them, which will mean keyword-rich backlinks on authoritative sites. And - who knows - maybe a reporter will actually read it and call you up (or more likely email) for more information...

In order to find these, the simplest way to test this for yourself is to take a list of "top" or "best" free press release sites and then do a search of Google News to see which ones have pages indexed there. In the search box, type "site:" followed immediately by the domain name (no space between or "http://"). This will show you the top dogs of Google News.

If you cross-compare this with lists of such "best" free press release sites, then you'll get a short list to distribute to.

I spent a couple hours this afternoon (in between interruptions) and culled a short list for you (again, this will change, so isn't final - and I'm sure I missed a few.) And when I was done, I remembered and pulled up an older list I had and cross-compared. (And you'll also see that their Alexa rank has no relation to what Google thinks of them.) Again, these counts change all the time. What was interesting is that the top dogs gained quite a bit on average and the bottom feeders either dropped, or dropped out completely.

URL	Alexa Rank	Pages on Google News
prweb.com	2,469	24,600
prnewswire.com	2,915	23,300
businesswire.com	4,951	12,500
live-pr.com	24,157	9,720
mynewsdesk.com	12,156	7,420
pr.com	8,492	3,770
SBWire.com	16,376	3,180
mediapost.com	4,502	1,150
your-story.org	42,303	688
PRUrgent.Com	17,479	547
betanews.com	5,442	363
PRLeap.com	43,629	314
DirectionsMag.Com	19,834	236
ClickPress.com	12,498	130
free-press-release-center.info	19,260	96
openpr.com	17,098	89
ecommwire.com	29,673	35
MediaSyndicate.Com	446,193	30
NewsWireToday.com	23,797	6

New format? Not so much...

How these would fit into your promotion system is similar to what you already have:

• Hub
• remote-blogs, slideshare.net, video sites, podcast sites, article directories, press releases
• social bookmarking
• pinging RSS feeds of bookmarks
  

Using these doesn't fit every model. My own instance is moving to writing and publishing short stories. So for every short story, I could author a press release - and by illustrating these stories would be able to create all the rest of the content. However, article directories would probably be best suited for a non-fiction treatment or analysis of what the story meant. So it's 2 additional pieces of content needed for the press releases and article directories. Regular content could be simply spun in order to fit it into article directory posting, but may not be newsworthy.

(Does that 2 additional pieces of content put me over the top? Personally, I don't think it's unmanageable right now.  Getting into the inspired flow, illustrating a short story to bring it to life will be a lot more work. But there is method to this madness as well - all that content can be republished ever again, but that's another story.)

Now note that you can ping the RSS feeds of the article directories and (some) press release sites. And so cut down on your bookmarking work, which is pretty one-on-one in its execution. However, the real effective use of pinging is to do the bookmark feeds. So you may want to get your bookmarking done simply, as the RSS feeds would be cumulative for the bookmarks you do via that feed - once per week should be plenty.

Freebies: I did find some pdf's which cover more the style and use of press releases. "New Rules of PR", and "News Releases". And don't forget the "Article Re-Writer" as a free download (right-click and "save as").

And, as usual: Wishing you Good Luck in Everything You Do.

Day 22 - Beginning of the end, with explantations

(Secret Sauce sub-series - finis)
Explantations is a good mis-spelling. Because we are creating a plantation of social fields which bring us different SEO-enabled crops. However, our field workers are willing and self-paid, so it's a congenial and profitable enterprise for everyone.

Today, we are covering more why's and wherefore's, most of which is dealing with Bookmarks and some about Social Updates. These two are the secret fuel ingredients which give this system so much boost.

That relationship is covered in a Search Engine Land article.

Now to understand the below, I'm going to give you a link which explains bookmarking, RSS, and pinging. 

I believe I've covered before how bookmarking was a bit hit when it became popular, and Google (for a time, anyway) was following these closely as an indicator of what was trusted and so had authority. Then, of course, the spammers started gaming the scene and Google moved on. (However, not completely, as there was recently a big slap they emposed on one network and all the players in it who depended on the "in-bound links" which were being artificially created. So know that Google is watching...)

Our basic model, which deserves repeating:

• The Internet is build on content sharing.
• The search engines (Google, mainly) model their rankings based on people's use of the Internet.
• People trust useful and regularly freshened content sites - and will visit these routinely, according to their own patterns of use. 
• The way to improve your rankings is to routinely create valuable content and let people know that it exists.

Note the emphasized part of that last sentence - that is what we are talking about today.

This is what online promotion has evolved into. And you have to promote in order to tell people about your valuable product or service. The search engines and social media are simply ways to prime the pump in order to find clients.

This was covered somewhat in The Online Sunshine Plan (starts about page 212 and goes through 222). You want to utilize search engines so your new clients can find your product (and old ones can find you when they lost your address). When you have established clients, they will be coming to your site for regular services and won't be utilizing search engines to do so. This also includes search engines built into social media.

And a review of the Promotion section of that book would probably be in order - especially since you know so much by now. (Pages 242 - 309.)

Priming the pump

Here's the point which spammers don't get (as well as a lot of SEO guru's):

You don't get down from an elephant, you get down from a duck.

The search engines can send you traffic, but they won't sell your product for you. Backlinks is just one of over 200 different indicators which Google uses to rank sites. If you are trying to get just backlinks from social media, you are going to get Google-slapped. It's just too obvious. That isn't what the social media are for.

We are going to avoid social networking like Facebook. To get anything from Facebook, you have to spend hours engaging with people directly. Just like an insurance agent will join every social club in town. Gain people's trust, and get invited to their home to do your pitch. You don't close any sale at the club-house.

This is the same point of getting people to opt-in to your list. Email continues to be the #1 use of the Internet. Barely half (and dropping) of the US is using Facebook. Hardly anyone uses their email. Reason? Over 70% of the US already uses email daily - and this is growing (much to the chagrin of the government monopoly called the U.S. Mail Service.)

So you simply let people know that they can get personal emails about the valuable service and product you provide by sending it directly to their email.

The social media can be incorporated into this promotion by leaving little tips here and there, with links.

Another Campbell book - freebie alert

Here's a PDF built from a scrape I did off a site he created: http://www.jigglingtheweb.com/ And he is a good study in what to do. He tells you some incredibly valuable stuff, then says - oops, the rest of this material you have to pay for... but you can sign up here. (Just wish he had an affiliate link.)

Sidebar:

The essentials of his Goobert (Affiliate Marketing) System is found on his newsletter post. With what you now know, you can actually improve this incredibly. And when you sign up for his newsletter (I just renewed it again) you get some more freebies (still wish he had an affiliate link...)

This "web-jiggling" really lays out the basics of what we are doing here.

First make a post to your blog. Second, submit a snippet of the post to social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Propeller.

Third, bookmark your social news snippets, or article submission using three or four social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Mr. Wong, Delicious, Mixx, BizSugar, Yahoo My Web, Faves, Simpy or Google Bookmarks.

(You can get a huge list from AddThis. Just beware that many of these services come and go like the wind.)

Fourth, the last step is to ping each bookmark RSS feeds, just once, using a site like Autopinger, PingMyBlog, PingKing, Pingoat or Pingomatic. Just be careful not to overdo it, as these services will ban you for over pinging. If you ping two or three of your bookmarks, that will be enough. The search engine spiders will find the rest of the links on their own.

That's how simple it is, and what we've built up to.

1. Post fresh content to your main site/hub.
2. Post link to that conent on Google+
3. Spin that content and post to remote blogs, with PDF to slideshare.net
4. Bookmark the remote blogs
5. Ping those bookmark RSS feeds.

Test this out for yourself. This last puzzle piece fits everything together. I've only confirmed this again this week, even though this was posted sometime in 2010. Not a secret, really. But since it doesn't fall under GRQ (get rich quick), lazy spammers probably haven't figured it's worth their effort.

Bookmarking and Status Updates - automated

Now there are free ways and paid ways to go about this. I only recommend one free way and only one paid way. There are others, but these work the best for me.

Onlywire will post to bookmarks and status updates. Set up an account and you'll also need to run their little program on your computer. I've had my difficulties with them in the past, but they seem to have gotten the bugs out (helps if you set it up right to begin with - that's a confession.)

The page I just linked to says you are going to have to go out and set up these accounts. But let me help you with these.

Bookmarking sites: 

Bibsonomy
Connotea
Digg
Diigo
Jumptags
Stumbleupon

Status Update sites:

Twitter
MySpace
Plaxo
Plurk
Friendfeed
Hi5
Identica

The rest aren't worth it, for one reason or another, and I won't go into them here, as I still have too much to go, plus this needs to get wrapped up.

Both bookmarking and status update sites will tell the search engines about your remote blogs, which then let them discover your main site/hub.

And the bookmarking sites above all have working RSS feeds. You are giving the ping sites (like ping-o-matic, but there are several) the RSS feed for your profile there - so you don't have to ping these more than once a week, as they'll then pick up the top few into that system.

A note on OnlyWire - if you budget this carefully, you can stay on their free plan indefinitely, which has 300 a month. However, if you go over once, you are going to have to either create a new login, or pay for their next version up (which is 10$ a month and another $3/month for the optional captcha solver.)

Drawback to Onlywire
It's only you doing this. (Priming the pump, remember?) So if you do a lot of this, it's going to look pretty spammy real quick. Another option is to also bookmark a lot of other sites, but that then uses up your Onlywire credits - or makes you do this manually. Some blogs will do posts like this. And ping.fm can do status updates to several sites like this - however, the shortener gives away the fact that you aren't doing this personally, so don't expect a lot of community support.

The solution brings up our paid version - but don't worry, they also have a free version you can also use indefinitely.

Synnd - the Syndication Revelation

Sure, that's the marketing line for it. What is does it similar to OnlyWire, but while it has a program running on your machine, it's taking that IP address along with all the other members (there's about 4700 now) and automating the process of setting bookmarks and tweets, likes across the many social media sites out there.

So you can run campaigns which will bookmark your content from all manner of international sites.  And there are numerous benefits to not being the only one to bookmark your content. Multiply this by enabling hundreds of others to do this, and you can see the advantages as Google can see that many people are interested in your site, not just one.

I could sit and talk about it for hours, but we'll let you do your own research.

• Here's 6 lessons with videos on how it works: Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine
• Here's a freebie PDF "The Syndication Revelation"
• Here's a webinar you can watch (free sign up): "Driving Traffic, Viral Exposure, Opt-ins & SEO Using Automatic Social Signals"

And did I tell you they have a free version to try out? You can only run one campaign at a time, but you'll see exactly how it works and get some immediate benefit. Try Synnd Lite.

OK - that's more than enough. This isn't a sales page for Synnd, although I could rave about it if I wanted. It's a heckuva monthly expense, so you need to be doing this professionally. The results seem slow but sure, however you'll see results for you new content if you train on how to use it (not a long training curve) and really exploit what it does.

Again, the key datum which they also have found useful is to bookmark, and then run campaigns on the incoming links to your remote blogs. You don't have to do this, but it is the secret ingredient to the secret sauce.

No extra freebies or assignments today other than the above. That's more than you get most days in this data dump, so I'm not going to add to it.

- - - -

Coming up is another week of the stuff I can now tell you, which adds to everything you've learned so far, but isn't essential to it. You will be able to further increase your income with some of these tips - provided they work for  you according to your tests.

Day 20 - Backlinking you probably can't afford

(Secret Sauce sub-series 06)
Now, this is a change from what I've gone over, but you are going to run into these things and I have to tell you why I don't use them (anymore). Plus, I'll also tell you how they can be done - if you have the time to spend.

Pre-reading on this from The Online Sunshine Plan was pages 263-265.

Now I did a thorough number on researching this area after the book was published, as I kept hearing about Squidoo and Hubpages. These two have long been held to be a standard for getting backlinks. And article directories have been held up even longer. You keep running into various mentions of these, hyping them as the latest and greatest thing to use.

My research showed that while they can contribute backlinks, the search engines have moved on, so they don't have any particular reach beyond other platforms. So I'm covering these to let you make up your own mind.

There are 2 reasons I don't use any of these as part of a regular campaign for the web development clients I support (or my own online promotion):

1. They are no longer reliably able to rank on the first page of Google.
2. They take a lot of individual time to produce and maintain.

But they are all three a great way to get backlinks if you do have the time to commit yourself. And all have valid communities which they support. As well, if you study how they became a success (and how they lost it) you will see a greater understanding of the basic natural laws at work (IMHO).

Article Directories

There is more on article directories in The Online Sunshine Plan (pg 254-257) than the rest of these. And that write-up is still valid. But, as noted, you are going to have a nice time investment to take advantage of them.

This area was researched extensively, since AD's had a long run in being popular with the search engines - and were just as extensively promoted, especially by people using them to acquire list opt-in's.

Unfortunately, the AD's didn't change fast enough to remove duplicate content and both gradually were down-ranked and also slapped by the "panda" algorithm updates. Interestingly enough, the top 10 AD's (which are also the ones which routinely send traffic to your site) were also the ones which regained their rankings almost as quickly as Google lowered them.

If you want traffic, the top 10 are really the only ones you need to submit to. Unfortunately, they all insist on non-duplicative content and on top of that are each different in their submission process to the others. So they must be dealt with individually - for the most part.

Another drawback is that the best AD's all have individually-reviewed articles. So it can sometimes take 3 months to get a submitted article approved and online. This is faster after you've gotten several approved, but most won't let you submit more than a handful until you have proved you can abide by their rules. Now, after a hundred or so approved articles, you can basically get away with murder (unless someone reports you). So AD's have a long ramp-up time.

That said, if you've submitted before, they will probably start checking your work quickly, as they really do want people to submit there. So don't close old accounts with them. Might be useful, later.

While I'd (mostly) given up on these for my own submissions, recent research has discovered a relatively inexpensive one-time-payment tool which is designed to actually help solve this problem. As well, it can post non-duplicative content to dozens (or hundreds) of other AD's, which would then give you some backlink juice. (More on this with a later day, after the "Secret Sauce" series is complete. You don't need AD's as part of your own success sauce.)

Squidoo

These next two get short shrift in my book - only part of a page, in fact (pg 263).

What prompted my research into these was my studies of "Conversation Domination" which gave extensive write-up's on how to utilize them.

Squidoo was built by marketer Seth Godin and was loved by Google for a long time. This, of course, brought in spammers. Squidoo changed their requirements and were mostly able to keep showing up in the standings. As well, they have a solid community of people who go around and comment on other's "lenses" - which gives them points in Squidoo's internal awards system, and this helps raise their own sites within Squidoo rankings.

However, you really have to spend some time each week within that community to keep your own Lenses alive and expanding. If you are adding new content each week, and helping other lenses with theirs, then your various lens will "stay alive". If they go dormant, they will become invisible. And if invisible for too long, will be deleted.

The other point which came up during ranktracking just around the Panda update, is that they don't show up on the 10 ten anymore - unless you do extensive work to freshen their content and get comments as above. It's probable that a bookmarking and pinging campaign could raise a lens - but you have to decide if all this time and effort is worth it, compared to other approaches. (And after today's post, we'll start stringing my favored approach together for you to study on your own.)

Hubpages

This is a tough community to be part of. Mainly because they were top of the heap for a couple of years for Google. And the spammers hit them hard. So now, they review every single hub. And if your hub is flagged, it takes a ton of work to get it off that list. Hours per week, actually, just to build and maintain a hub.

Too many flagged hubs and your profile get flagged.

My setbacks far outnumbered my successes, so I simply dumped this as an unworkable scene. As well, since Panda, they have also not been able to rank very well for content (at least not page 1 or 2, which is all I look at.)

Before Panda, they were one of the Internet Marketing darlings - and were easy to set up hubs. Now, it's like a Fort Knox with guards coming around every few minutes - well, maybe not that bad, but compared to how easy a free blog will rank and can be posted... I decided that I didn't need their approvers looking over my shoulder and the time it took to make things all nicey-nice for a hub which would barely rank.

Probably the kicker is that they only allow one backlink per hub. Hell, I could get 2 or 3 with any submitted article. And not so stringent lookovers.

My view on this one is to completely forget it. They've gone anal with their internal community and really don't want outsiders creating content for them (IMHO.)

Summary:

I didn't really want to scare you off using these or trying them out. Articles are very good for backlinks, and once approved can be promoted with bookmarks and pings. Both Squidoo and Hubpages will tell you exactly what you need to make great content - and are actually telling you what search engines like. So if you want some training on how to build content, post a few lenses or hubs and get them approved. Great training.

However, the added time you need to invest in these make them hardly useful for a serious production line-up in terms of being able to roll out content which routinely ranks well.

And again, I'll show you what I mean over the next (and last) 3 days of "Secret Sauce" posts.

- - - -

Freebies today are numerous. But at least they are simple and fast reads. I couldn't let you go without seeing some of the marvelous marketing that was done for Squidoo. Note that these PDF's I include tell you basics which can be transferred/applied to other social media or regular websites as well.

Everyone is an Expert
Who's There?
Squidoo It Yourself

Day 19 - Slideshare and Videos

(Secret Sauce sub-series 05)

Today we cover some of the more viral (as in virus) and effective alternative publishing formats.

If you wanted to review this section in The Online Sunshine Plan, it start about  page 254 and goes to around 262.

Obviously, I've found it far more useful than I described it originally. Because I started working for someone who was ranktracking as a regular part of his business. And we were able to test out these things as part of working to salvage a floundering business by investing heavily in online promotion - which was cheaper and more effective than TV, radio, or other advertising.

Now we are into re-publishing mode here. Briefly a recap:

1. Write your content, include images and links to other pages on your site. Post this.
2. Make a Powerpoint version of that - post to Slideshare.net
3. Record that article and post it to Archive.org
4. Marry these two up as a Slidecast on slideshare.net
5. And/Or turn the recording and slideshow into a video and post this to YouTube and/or any other video site of choice. (Google owns YouTube - hint). Make sure you have backlinks in the description, and the file is named with your keyword.
6. As you assemble quite a set of these, create an ebook and give it away as an opt-in incentive (and/or sell on Smashwords)
7. Assemble the video's into a DVD and use this as an incentive, or a product on it's own. (Costs you under 2 bucks to burn and mail.)
   

Slideshare.net

This has some incredible ranking. Often it will show up on page 1 of Google with several different articles. This is because they will extract all the text of their PDF and post it below the flash version of the PDF itself. Brilliant move, actually.

While you are posting your content as a PDF, they then create a new, original text version on their site. Now the PDF can still be read by Google, and your description and profile should still have links back to your main site.

They also do featured content, which gets internal views by their community (particularly if its snazzy looking).

As I said above, you create a powerpoint and post it there. But you also do a document-type PDF and post it - with all the text. (Never, ever make a PDF out of images. Use Open/Libre Office which converts your original content - copy/paste from Firefox - into a PDF with all the links intact.

If, as part of your posting, you do this with all new content, your whole site becomes accessible through Slideshare PDF's and will simply replace other sites on Google which are present for the same terms. This brings up the possibility of having 6-8 positions covered on the front page of Google. It's become more rare recently (since Panda/Penguin updates), but occasionally we still pull this off.

There was a product called "Conversation Domination" by Howie Schwartz, which used to work along this line. One Halloween, he had the bulk of the top 5 pages (50 spots) covered with his content which pushed a specific costume as an affiliate product. It's much harder to do that now days, as the search engines moved on. Some parts of it still work, but it's labor intensive.

What I learned from this, and in figuring out how to apply this to multiple clients, is in taking the parts which could be simply produced with minimal time investment, but similar results. And yes, when my boss saw my work take over half-a-dozen spots in Google's 1st page, you knew I had his attention and help in streamlining this.

Video's

Mainly, this is YouTube. Because Google owns it, and so will give you multiple opportunities to take additional rankings.

This is one point Schwartz' technique covered. Google, as I've pointed out before, will return web pages as search results, but will also return images, forums, videos, docs, news, and a few others as valuable information. All on the first page. So if you can get the same content published in multiple formats, you can rank for several different content types - and get people ultimately visiting your site.

Another valid point Schwartz found was that this was highly targeted viewers. People who followed those links were interested in this data and were more easily converted to buyers/clients. It didn't result in spikes of traffic, but did result in spikes of sales.

So the simple technique is outlined above. Text to speech, images to a powerpoint, marry the two into a video.  Post all the sub-products to their own free hosting to rank on their own for that keyword.

If you're presentable, you can always create regular content by simply videoing yourself talking. I just like the above because you get more products out of it and don't have to invest in a camera or lighting, backgrounds, etc. Most computers come with some sort of video editing program, or they can be acquired online for little to nothing.

Audacity is a very good open-source recording program. And video editors are also available, while XP and Windows 7 come with their own, as does the MAC. Linux also has many free ones.

Ensure you have a backlink in the first line of your video description. That is what always shows.

The secret to this success is to set up your production lines to generate regular video content along with everything else. Google likes regular, fresh content - and this is a no-brainer if you can organize your life to write once and publish many ways and formats.

- - - -

Assignment is to check out Slideshare and see the many wonderful and creative people who contribute to their communities. And look for documents to see what you find there.

If you already have your Google account, fill out your YouTube profile and poke around in there. Set up all the backlinks to your main site you can.

Freebie - To give you more background on this "Conversation Domination" theory, I've included an ebook from their heyday: Bending the Web. Use a substantial amount of skepticism when you read this, as the two authors are known for fantastic (unbelievable) sales pitches. While some of this material is dated, there is more of it which has become mainstream. Also, note their presentation quality.

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 17 - The Google Gorilla in the Room...

(Secret Sauce - third installment)

We can't continue here without discussing the 900lb. Gorilla in the room - Google.

This particular scene only unfolded for me last month, but is so basic to our SEO efforts that I had to tell you (been "busting to" in fact).

Google has been working on entering the social arena for years. They tried Buzz and Wave and now Google+ - which seems to be a hit (finally). Of course, it's overshadowed by Facebook, for now.

The reason I can say that is that point I've mentioned about Facebook before: it's a walled garden. Unfortunately, that works against it. While I could tell you all the statistics which show it reaches a saturation point in any country and then starts slowly declining, they offset that with it's entry into new countries. And point to ad revenue (which doesn't get new clients for those businesses, so is a ponzi scheme waiting to implode.)

Google+ is simply built on how people share content. So it's a natural fit to Google and users.

But the real deal is that it's now integrated into all Google does - and shortly will even have their analytics built into their Google+ pages. And how you integrate with Google affects what searches you personally get and also who gets your links. So this will help your community to keep track of your content - nice, yes?

There are 2 parts to this:

1. Everything you connect into Google will help your site rank better.
2. Google will teach you how to make better content - so your pages rank better.

Now, the outset is that you need to set up a Google Account, which is fairly simple -  go to https://accounts.google.com and fill out their form. Now a point here is that you don't try to set up several accounts here. It's not like twitter. They cross-check stuff. So one should do you and keep it the same. From all the work I've done with them, that's my short version. Pick one and stick to it.

Google's purpose

Arguably, they have mostly been interested in how people store and retrieve information. Their business plan has been to sell advertising, which has worked. Especially with the tools they offer to "auction" their ads. So they very nearly always sell as the highest rate possible, but that's another story we don't have time to get into.

The great part of Google is that they have been so successful at search, that they have long controlled the greatest part of the market for searches. So if they say they want "such-and-so" every one asks - "how high?" (mixed metaphor).

For better or worse, they have started to become ubiquitous on other platforms as well. Their Chrome browser is now starting to unseat Microsoft's IE as top dog. And this is another way they are working to understand people's usage of the Internet, so they can give better results in their search.

Factually, their biggest problem now is their success, as they have been losing trust - essentially due to the huge amount of data they can access about people. Again, this is an issue that there are solutions for which we don't need to get into.

Our use of this is to leverage their ability to have their fingers in all pies in order to get them to notice our content more easily. The second point it that their feedback on what we do can improve our own rankings. So we use their expansiveness to our advantage.

Analytics

Google Analytics is simple to find. http://www.google.com/analytics/
You sign in with your gmail account (Google Account) and then enter all the various properties that you have. For each one (unless you group them together) you'll get a number which you can drop into other social properties where they ask for such.

A lot of these social sites are supporting Google analytics, which is a good thing. It makes it easier to implement (no cutting and pasting code into your page headers) and this also tells them that your site is available and connects to you.

While we'll go over this later, this is a key point - that you take control of ownership for your content. The better you make this content and the more sites you have out there, it's important that Google knows where it started. By plugging in analytics, you then will enable Google to directly track your site/blog/content and so tell you all sorts of things about how it's working and what you can to to improve it.

Now a caveat - Google Analytics simply isn't as good as your own server. But if you are using free hosting, it's the next best thing (and far better than nothing.) So if you have a Google account, then take the next step of generating a number for it and plugging it in.

Webmaster Tools

Their use of this is fascinating, since they can tell you what people are using to search your site. Again, your own server is better for this in terms of accuracy, but this is what Google thinks your site looks like and so can give you a leg up on what content you should produce next in order to back up what Google is sending your way.

A rule of warning here - it's not the Gospel truth of what are the best keywords you should be using. Remember our lessons on Market Samurai. Not all keywords are valuable. You want to chase those which have commerciality - people click through on ads which others pay good money for. But you can scrape these keywords and run them through Market Samurai (or for free - through Domain Samurai) to find out what is working best for you.

They also tell you here what broken links you have and how you can improve your site for the search engines. Mainly that when they search a site and find broken links, they come back less often. So fixing these ensure they will search your site quickly (like minutes).

Recently (this year sometime) they plugged Webmaster Tools into Analytics which improved both of them. So when you go into Analytics (you'll have to turn on this interconnection, but it's simple) then you can see what keywords are being searched for and what pages people are accessing.

Again, this is included with your Google Account. And some, like Wordpress.com, only take Webmaster Tools. Odd, but at least you'll be able to see the keywords they visit your free Wordpress blog from it's dashboard - which is also handy.

Google+profiles

While this has been a long, slow start and with several mis-steps, now it looks like they have their feet under them.

Google+ profiles are your personal page on Google. And ties all your work on their various platforms together. And it's the best of the profiles out there, since they have learned from Facebook's and other's mistakes. Just review that freebie I gave you yesterday about setting up your social profiles and you'll get the bulk of it. (Pictures, links back to your site, the whole thing.) But they do privacy better (as much as you can on the web...)

I'm not one who cares all that much for burning my time keeping track of other people's posts. (Even Google has this on automatic.) But Google has released this along with some of their other updates, and is probably the first to use a tag (rel=author) which says that the content on that page was created there first. By doing this, they can see where someone else simply copied the content and pasted it onto their site.

So they can then give the best value to the original content. People who copy your stuff (and leave the links intact) will then be sending you authority for being the author. So they boost your site up for those keywords.

The way Google helps you with this is by enabling you to put a badge on your site which lets people "plus-1" your page. But also marks your site as the original.

Google+ pages

I'm continually surprised that there isn't a land-rush for these.

The same thing you do for yourself, you can do for any product. Like affiliate products and such. If you support or recommend a product and have put up pages about that product or service, then create a Google+ page for this and then share the link here for your content (a lot like Facebook or Twitter). But in this case, the links don't disappear, since Google is hosting it on their servers.

Now, if you have a site for that product, then create a badge from that Google page and plop that code down in the sidebar. Voila - you are now the authority for that content as well.

So if you have several sites, you create Google+ pages, share the links, and plop the badge on those different sites. Don't forget to put your link on that page to your site - it goes right under the logo you use. (Nothing like a backlink from Google to make your day, eh?)

Both on their pages and your profile, you can link all your other sites in. Of course, this makes your blogger blog have more seniority, doesn't it? Not bad for free.

- - - -

There's really too much to discuss here. I've touched on the basics we are going to use later in our "secret sauce" sub-series.

The freebie today is called the Google Plus Marketing Landscape - a collection of data from someone who is an online geek from beyond. While you can get it from his site, I've left all his links in and encourage you to visit it just to get a feel of what he knows. (His style of content isn't what I cherish, so I opted out after awhile...)

Your daily assignment is to create a Google Account if you don't have one and play around with their profiles and pages. If you want, you can start linking in your content so others can find it on Google.

Now I don't go into these "circles" things. But I'll leave you to search for them, as there is quite a bit of discussion on them. Hint: pages can't "circle" people. But you can find "shared circles" of just brands and pages to use for your pages to increase their authority. (It's just branding after all...) Active brands will include you're brand in their circles, particularly if you've shared some good content on your G+ page.

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 12 - Review: the Pause that Refreshes

About this point, I want to do a quick review of what we've covered.

No, I haven't started running thin on material by a long shot.

But I wanted to put this material in order so it makes sense. Because I want to ensure that you have the basics down before we move into the "Special Sauce" section, which can be confusing.

Basics, however, are basics.

1. First we covered that you needed to know what is most interesting to you and you like to do the most. Somewhere around in all that is your basic purpose. (Or at the very least, a more fun way of doing life.)

2. The Internet runs on content - fresh, original, search-engine-optimized content. Almost no one creates this stuff, so someone who can routinely create content focused on a single (remunerative) theme can pretty much ensure that they can earn extra income.

3. The whole point of marketing is to find where there is a problem and offer a valuable solution. People who express interest in your solution are called "leads" and converting them to buyers is the trick.

4. In order to find this problem area, you can start by "scratching your own itch" - meaning that you consult what you are interested in, and search through related communities to find something they want or need that you can provide. This can be your own product or someone else's which you offer as an affiliate ("Hey, I know someone who has some of these for sale - just like what you're talking about...")

5. The search engines make it simpler to do market research, as there are well-used keyword phrases that people use to find what they are looking for. If you carefully look these over - and find those which have good "commerciality" (people pay good money to advertise products with them), then the chance is good that if you put your target in front of where people are aiming, you can get this traffic to your web pages. To do that, you simply create content which has those keyword phrases describing it, or in it.

6. Content doesn't have to be all written - but it does have descriptions about it, and that is where you artfully place the keyword phrases (and links to your other content - like your main website) so the search engines can send traffic your way.

7. Search engine optimization is quite simple. You simply find what Google has been saying for years about what a "good" website consists of. And then follow their instructions to the letter.

8. The ideal is to offer several products, preferably those which have to be renewed, or replaced after they are consumed. If you are offering someone else's products, then you can work at getting affiliate commissions for those continuing purchases. This can make your income more or less on "autopilot" if the clients are treated well. Another possible point is to get in with multiple-tier affiliate programs or even "network marketing".

9. I've given you a longish list of very good affiliate programs and why I consider them good - but that doesn't mean they are right for you. Consult your own purpose and see if they will make your life simpler and/or bring you greater peace.

10. The other advantage to offering someone else's products is that these commissions you receive can give you income while you continue learning and improving on your marketing skills. As well, if you are developing your own product, it can pay for your R&D while you do.

And that's the 10 basic points from what we've covered.  I didn't mention some points like auto-responders, but that's because it's a "how", not a basic "why".

At this point you are ready to read something with a critical view. Stone Evans wrote a substantial book called "DotComology" years ago - and it has been passed around for free ever since. A great example of true value. Now some of it is dated (and ignore the stuff about reciprocal linking, which I'll cover in the "Secret Sauce" lessons upcoming) but now you know enough to have a critical view of how things fit together and when someone is blowing smoke (or smoking something odd.)

See you tomorrow...

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...