Applied Online Promotion - This isn't rocket science.

An applied application of online promotion.

Since I'm moving into study of entertainment - how to promote this in order to earn money online is its own interesting research line.

The idea is to create a content-heavy line of works whicn then would lend itself to promotion. Not so odd, I planned a set of 256 short stories, each with it's own soundtrack, illustrations, and video's. This is quite different from a single release, which you'd have to separately (and expensively) build up a community awareness for, etc. Like a single film, book, or product release.

The flow of stories itself would take on the aspect of a community interest - as some of the jokes about Dickens' magazine installments for his books (...as the ship approached the harbor, someone called out from the waiting dockside throng, "What happened to Little Nell?")

Also, the extended publishing model fits this well - and it's tuned to the multi-result approach the search engines have recognized. This is where we've been heading with this 30-day study all along.

Again, the story itself is read into podcast, it's illustrated and these become a slideshow, then a video. The drawback of this is that you don't want to publish the short stories to your remote blogs, as that is just added and unnecesary content. And would defeat sales, so cut earning money.

The marketing side of this would be to create a second line of work, which would be some sort of story analysis. This could easily be distributed through a mini-net system and then bookmarked, etc. (Your promotion is typically secondary to the original work, regardless.)

Income would be utilizing the soundtrack/podcast, videos, and text as ebooks all as income/money sources.

Promotion would have that "analysis" published via main hub and remote-blog mini-net. Also, creating podcasts, graphic powerpoint, and promotional videos for each ebook - which could (and should) be widely distributed, even though the base materials are not. Even articles can be used to post spun versions of the analyses - good for backlinks.

And obviously, they'd be done in an entertaining form, with their own continuing theme to draw in people - building a community in fact.

This is obviously a great deal of content to be distributing. And a great test of what we've been developing and studying.

Needless to say, in undertaking this, I won't be doing anything else with my time - so trying to exploit my earlier work in Affiliate Marketing would take a back seat. (And is why I haven't built my own affiliate programs into any sort of regular income - too busy researching. But I told you about purpose and passion, haven't I?)

Patterns of Promotion

So the evolving pattern - as someone who has published several dozen books - is to have ebooks on handheld devices. Smashwords seems to be the best way to get these published and distributed into several versions, as well as their distributors. 

They have an affiliate program, discount coupons, and also track backlinks to your ebook. So the basics are there.

The general sequence of promotion is slightly different from the original content creation. The ebook is created, along with soundtrack, and video. And while the ebook is published for sale, the other 2 are stored away for later use. Snippets might be able to be used out of these.

Trick here is to keep the analysis up todate and publish these immediately following the ebooks. If this can be kept (or sped up to ) a weekly promotion, then the initial price point would be kept low, plus the affiliate payouts as high as possible. So these are simply loss leaders. Later stories would gradually raise their price as the series become more popular (after the first 64, hopefully.)

Main point is that by building this community, you create a demand for these books. The volume of them makes them collectibles. This is exactly what "famous authors" who have dogged out an existence by writing. Our use of this is to speed this up immensely. We will create a "body of work" in one year or less.

And we will have "left over" a set of material to extend the brand - earning additional income - after the initial product line is established. (And that is my little secret, as to what exactly - and extensively - is planned.)

The marketing is all (or mostly) online and use search engines to track and give results based on volume of fresh content. Links which run through this would all go to each of the Smashwords book pages. And the bookmarks take in all levels of this. Exhaustively. Pinging has to be done as conscientiously throughout - to alert the search engines of the new content, as well as any "fans". You have to plan your work and work your plan.

You now understand all of what I've been bringing you to (if you've studiously followed every step to this point.) As well, I have someone I can explain it all to, now - without having to explain hubs, remote-blogs, etc.). But the main point has been to scrub all this down to a finite set of rules which can be applied to the next step of online promotion I'll be doing, which brings us full circle back to the point of how to earn extra money online.

Now that it's all written up and in your able hands, I can simply devote my time to creating this monster set of works.

Good Hunting!

Day 23 - How Article Directories Could Work

Article Directories are far from dead. There is a lot of linking going on.

The trick is to work out how to automate their submissions so we can give them what they want (content for their advertising) and we can then get what we want (backlinks from authoritative sites.

We've been over the fact that they all want original content. And you have to spin everything you give them in order to make it so. Posting individual content to each of hundreds of article directories (AD's) would take a month or so.

And it already takes hours to get a decently spun article. (You have to spin articles by hand - never, never, never use any sort of auto-spin program - there are none out there which work, period. Been there, tried that.)

If you recall from that last time I told you about this area, I referenced pages 254-257 of The Online Sunshine Plan.

In that section, I recommended a spreadsheet-based spinning tool called Article Re-Writer. (It's linked as a download - right-click and Save As.)

I've worked quite a bit with that program and sorted it out to some simplicities. What this had as it's best feature is that you had three (or four) alternate sentences which were chosen at random. Most article spinners simply change synonyms, which too often will make your sentence into complicated nonsense.

Google is all over synonyms, since this is what they show you when you are looking for keywords. So don't think they can't spot that with their algorithms. But the more important feature is that people won't stick around and view your page - which means Google will devalue it. Of course, you may only be looking for cheap backlinks, but let's be real. Tons of low-quality backlinks will not give you any authority and you will just be hurting your own main site rankings.

The reports I've seen say you have to be from 40% to 70% original. Which means you are re-writing the bulk of every version. Article Re-Writer makes that a lot simpler.

When you change out sentences, you can change grammar structure (active to passive or vice-versa) plus all sorts of Modern American English sentence forms like "Expressed Thought". No kidding. You think? Well, I'll be.

Article spinners can't and won't handle creating quality content at least as good as your original.

I've even found that changing whole paragraphs works. This is better, since you can change things around quite a bit. Often a paragraph consists of three sentences, which can be in at least three different positions without changing the meaning of the paragraph. So if you had A-B-C, then C-B-A, then B-A-C - you would still make the same point, but these different positions won't be duplicate content.

Best I've found is to simply write the article and then go down it, paragraph by paragraph, making two alternate paragraphs each time.

Sure, it's a lot of work. But there are a near infinite amount of varieties this way. The original author of the spreadsheet said there was something over 10,000 unique versions. And you'll run out of possible article directories before that time.

Next point to solve is the one of submitting your spun articles.

The top 10 I still recommend doing by hand. Plug your spun paragraphs into that spreadsheet and hit refresh (see instructions) to give you another version. You have to use Excel or Open Office Calc - any real spread sheet program. Google Docs (now Google Drive) doesn't do random functions.

But how to do the rest of those article directories? There is only one product I've found worth mentioning. And, to be honest, I've only scratched the surface of it (remember that I've not though article directory posting was worth my time up to now...)  It's called Article Demon.

The features are that is has long lists of article directories you can load and it will then go even register you with them, and has a place to spin articles (or you can - and should - simply plug in your own spun-by-paragraph articles as above) and it will submit your articles on a schedule, with delays - so they look more natural.

And as far as I can see, it does a very good job of being able to post articles and take the load off your time. It's also a one-time purchase (right now under a hundred bucks) and is being pretty well supported, having come out with a new version just recently which was offered as a free download for existing clients. (At the time I'm writing this, I'm waiting for the download to complete so I can check it out newly.)

One of the best parts is that it allows you to spin the titles, tags, and even the biography. So they are truly unique across the various AD's. 

But that is the general theory of how I would consider utilizing all those article directories out there.

The advantage of spinning your content is that you can have original content which will rank on it's own. And I've said that there are programs and plugins (I've used ScribeFire with success on both Firefox and Chrome) to remote post your blogs. The tip here is to create the text with html code, so you can also include images, then generate variations with the code included - and then insert it as html instead of text. Trickier, but once you get the hang of it - and use a WYSIWYG editor like Kompozer - it's pretty simple work. Longer than Posterous, but if you intend to post to Article Directories, it's a simpler approach. I'll leave you to work out the production sequence and flow, though.

I get results without article directories, but if you've been already submitting to AD's, this would be a way to improve your work flow.

Flash Update: Just found this page from the folks at Market Samurai who are developing what they call "Article Samurai" - and I found a description of how it works (as linked.) Of course, you can see the similarity to what we've already discussed...

- - - -

Update: Recent research and practice down this line shows that really only EzineArticles is potentially worth anything. Looking up Warrior's forum showed that you don't have to spin content, but the backlinks from these sites aren't worth all that much. One author was telling me the backlinks helped to out-rank the competition, but you can do better with a mini-net distribution and social signals such as Onlywire and Synnd.

The other point brought up on that Forum was to remember why Article Dirs exist - to help people republish your content.  EzineArticles has survived the Panda/Penguin updates well and has been known to drive some traffic. It's also not bad to have additional links back to your landing pages from them.

But skipping the Article Directories entirely is OK, too. Synnd is developing their own article directory publishing - but it will need spun content, so you are back to burning time manually spinning your content to make it into quality work.

Fastest is to post on your blog to begin with and then re-publish to remote blogs as you go. Always bookmark and also do the "super-spindle" strategy Synnd recommends for really effective social signal utilization.

So forget "Article Demon" as it's not needed. And

- - - -

I've included another freebie today - an interview with Dan Swanson, who has spent his time writing articles and tells an overview of their benefits.

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 16 - Where SEO and Social Media Meet (?)

(Secret Sauce - part 2)

Practically, SEO and Social Media don't meet. SEO had to change in order to keep up with the evolution of the Internet.

Welcome to the second day of our Secret Sauce sub-series. We will have probably 8-10 in this series of just telling you the somewhat revolutionary, but very definitely effective ways of getting your content to rank well so you can then potentially earn extra income online - enough for your goals anyway...

Practically, if you look at it, this whole site and Online Sunshine Plan book is revolutionary. Even though it's old school.

The more interesting point to me is that the more I study this stuff up, the more I've found that it's been out there for awhile and what I considered something a trade secret, has already been promoted on several sites.

What keeps people from seeing these (myself included) is their own self-built blinders.

- - - -

OK, from our last lesson, we covered that social media can be boiled down into 3 categories. These are from their function, not their communities or content-type. And we are naming these in order to simply make sense of how to earn income online by getting and keeping top rankings in the search engines.

Social Media Types: 

1. Bookmarking
2. Status Updates
3. Networking

This doesn't cover everything, but it covers what we need to know. (If you want to spend days and months covering this material, you can - I have, and it doesn't necessarily increase your income, although you are well-entertained.)

Your first steps are, just to recap:

• Find your own purpose
• Find the community which bests matches it
• Study that community to find out what solutions you can provide to their problems
• Create content to offer the service(s) or product(s) which will best help them (and you).
• Optimize your content so the search engines can make best use of that content and rank it well.

But a funny thing happens at this point. You'll see it if you use Market Samurai to dig into who is actually on top. You'll find that some of these sites have no real reason for being there. They don't have as many backlinks as the people they beat out, and also they aren't necessarily optimized for search engines as well as others.

What we've covered so far is really "old school" and based on very traditional models. And if you SEO your main site properly, you will eventually wind up in one of the top 5 spots and stay there. But that's just on-site SEO, mainly.

What will happen if you don't continue to add fresh, optimized content to your site is that it will drift lower. If more people find your site and backlink to it, then it will come up some. But Google and others bring in fresh content and float it at the top of their rankings to see how people like it. Good performing sites stick around. (Even though Google's second test is to then drop it like a rock to see if people still find it useful - if they do, it slowly rises again.)

But that doesn't explain all the weird things you can find happening on the rankings.

Social media does start to explain these.

Search engines were caught unaware when the flood of social media sites started up. And then these sites matured and started their own internal search functions, which then took traffic away from Google and the others. So now they are playing catch up (and have been for years).

In and among the 200-some factors Google uses to figure out how a site has "authority", they throw in some social factors as well. Not just popularity, but the amount of people who recommend (thumbs up, like, plus-1, leave comments, etc.) any site shows how people trust it. And trust shows valuable information.

(A scam scene I knew had to finally give up and accept the fact that forums exposing their scam were going to rank right along with them, regardless how many people they paid to remove their negative comments or take down their sites. Before, they owned the top 10 or so spots so could point to these as how great they were...)

Bookmarking

Search engine spammers (and others) first tried to understand bookmark collections as ways to get backlinks. Yahoo, in fact, was built originally on huge collections of bookmarks by several college students - who started a company based on having access to those bookmark collections.

Unfortunately, they didn't work that way. (Yes, I was one of those deluded "others".) Studying the effect of bookmarks was mystifying. You could get tons of bookmarks created for your site, but they all wouldn't show up on the search engines as backlinks. And the more popular bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, etc.) tended to not show up as well. But bookmarking did make the targeted sites improve in rank.

Bookmarking is an indicator of value and trust. And if you simply bookmark your own sites and have a few friends bookmark them, it still doesn't mean as much as a site where lots of people bookmarked it.

The other problem with bookmarks is that they aren't created by everyone on the Internet. So while they were wildly effective for raising rank a few years ago, they are more or less just an additive today (even if still a very potent additive.)

Status Updates

Twitter isn't the only rodeo out there. If you want a great overview of how prolifically these have spread, check out http://knowem.com - which deals ostensibly in "branding" by helping people to grab social media real estate for their name on the web. If you dig into their back pages, they have sorted out social media into several different categories. Status updates is huge (as are many others). But do a search from the front page and you'll have their list of key ones. You'll see some of every type, but status updates are present - and are also part of several of these, no matter how they are categorized. (Myspace, Facebook, and Google+ are all built on this, regardless of what else you can share.)

It was simply noted by Google that these status updates also showed what content people found interesting and trustworthy. So they are another factor. And while you can search for these, they don't particularly show up in Google for main sites - as they are transitory.

Networking

We are going to approach this from blogging. Every "free" blog out there is part of some community, whether they participate in them much or not. These free blogs make their money from included ads, and so promote the various new content so they can keep viewers interested and entertained.

The search engines know this, and keep tight tabs on them to find new and fresh content they can rank.

A lot of people say Facebook, LinkedIn and some others are networking social media. And it's true that they were formed to facilitate networking functions which people normally have. But both of those IPO's also shoot themselves in the foot regularly. Main point is that they don't provide content, or keep making it hard to add good, fresh stuff. Their main use, really, is in status updates. (Facebook even deletes anything older than 30 days, and doesn't like Google searching what it has.)

Our use in defining Networking sites from a blogging view is to give it some relevance from a content approach. Obviously, a site which doesn't like Google won't have much content ranking well, and so won't get the click-through's found in organic search results.

Sidebar:

Facebook is called a "walled garden" for good reason. And while you can work to involve people in your "brand"  and several people sell various ways to use chat and other means in order to get leads - it's incredibly time-consuming. The most effective strategy I've found is to concentrate on content and always link your content into Facebook, but as an invitation to leave. If you look up my profile there, you'll find that I don't stick around much - but I do post regularly, on a via. Most of my stuff is posted first to Google+ (which we'll cover later.)

This book and site follows the principle that the Internet was built on freely accessible content. And the observed response that search engines reward fresh, original content which is regularly provided.

The pragmatic workouts follow this, and say that your best approach is to simply optimize your content for the search engines to get the best ranking and click-throughs.

So our over-arching approach in all of this is to follow what the search engines observe about their users, and duplicate so we can help them understand our content best - and so get the best ranking possible.

By creating blogs, you will be contributing to the search engines finding your material and being able to rank your stuff well. And then you only have to have some way to convert viewers to leads and leads to clients. (Like that is "all" you have to do. Well, I didn't say this was easy, only that I could explain it simply...) ;)

Summary:

While I've covered a great deal in a short space today, we've still gone on longer than is wise. You are going to be using (or at least studying about) these three types of social media in order to further your search engine optimization and both attain and preserve high rankings and volume click-through's.

- - - -

Freebies and study assignment:

Social Networking Exposed! makes more sense if you don't take it too seriously. This PDF does give you another viewpoint than what I've said. The key point is to give you a good overview of how to set up social media, as well as pitfalls to avoid. Note that the date of this shows how much social media has already changed in just a few years.

WAHM Masters Course - another great book from SBI! for work-at-home-mons will give you a lot more options about how to build your business. But I'm also giving this to you now in order for you to get a thorough overview of how to build a business to earn income online. It's not all that social, but does build on their concept of having an Information Site which pre-sells the viewer into becoming a lead (and later, client).

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 07 - What Search Engines Really Need

(...probably a kick in the pants - just kidding.)

This is perhaps a revolutionary version of what you really need to know about these guys. It's based on Section V of The Online Sunshine Plan.

And might be quite shorter than what you may be expecting. (That section is your pre-assignment, BTW.)

I. What search engines make their money from: Advertising.
And Google admitted, finally, that buying ads "helps" your organic PPC. Ostensibly, they make their money by helping people convert to buyers. Or so they think. (Advertising is an addiction businesses have, which I've covered elsewhere. That's why they got the government to write it in as an exemption in the Tax Codes.)

II. What search engines are good for: New customers.
Once you have a person buying from you, you want to turn them into clients so they will continually and regularly buy your products or services. At that point, they already know your site address (or will find it by searching for your brand, not your keywords) and so no longer need to use search engines.

III. What search engines think in: Words.
All their algorithms are based in whole or in part on what associated words are used. Videos are "read" by the descriptions (and links) left below or near them, as well as their actual file title. Pictures - the same (so next time you see an image with a number or code, realize an opportunity was missed.) PDF's are turned into text and then read (so make your PDF's out of text, not scanned images.) Podcasts are slightly different as they can transliterate text out of voices (so be sure to have high-quality enunciation used, not slang or technical words so much.)

IV. What search engines hate: the same stuff we do - spammy, low-quality content which is designed to "game" the system instead of producing real value. Search engine algorithms are based on people-usage. If people click off a page, then it's not very good quality. (And why you want to include catchy phrases, video's and images - all good "infotainment" value - as long as they contribute to the actual content of the page.

And that's about all the new data I have to share. Not because this particular section was well written,  more that Google really hasn't changed much over the years. Basically, anyhow (we'll leave Android and Google+ out of the picture for now.)

Your freebie today (and assignment) is to simply get and study Google's SEO Starter Guide. The reason people don't have top ranking pages are due to not making a checklist out of this guide and comparing their own site against it. Period.

I've been working freelance for a guy who built his backend to simply do just that. Because he couldn't find anything out there which did. And years later, I did a study of some 58 different Content Management Systems and found only one which would do it (nearly) right out of the box. (And the other drawback was that these CMS's were very clunky and poorly built. Design by committee or something.) His just gets right to the point and is simple to use. I've helped improve it a bit, but just in terms of tweaks (and he's been talking about ripping it all down and starting from scratch to really do it right.)

Now, I didn't get into social media, which is another animal. And we'll also tackle "backlinking" at that point. Both of these have been buzz-words for some time. And both are poorly understood. In the upcoming section I've labeled "Secret Sauce", I'm going to let fly some strategies - while painfully honest - are highly effective, but are simple for search engines to thwart if they ever become mis-used. (And I also have the solution to make your use of them proof against any "Google-slap".)

OK?  Tomorrow we dig into the many types of content you can (and should) be producing from your original piece and the 3 styles you can (and should) be using to write their variations...