Sep 12

Writing good content for your website, and benchmarking it

Doodling, Social abuse No Comments »

As I always do, I read two magnificent posts on other SEO blogs, and came up with my own, brand new, twisted version. 

First of all, read this post on how to write good content for your website, I believe its an excellent read.

Then, read the headsmacking tip from SEOmoz on testing a site with ppc.

Do you see the synergy? No? Oh well… It was silly of me to believe I could end the post right here.

Here it is:

Make categories of your content. Of course, that means that you actually do have content, 100 pages is a minimum. Separate them with tags like:

  • Spoonfeds (10 ways to get fat in 3 weeks eating just icecream and hamburgers)
  • Lists (15 things about the Aardvark that noone really wants to know)
  • Howto (How to stop peeing your pants by getting a bigger penis)
  • Rant (This world is not real. There is no spoon.)
  • News (Oops, she did it again… She played with his heart…)
  • Reviews (This site is THA shit)
  • Hatred (He bit me! Mom!)
  • Salespitch (Buy now, or HE will take your firstborn)
  • Etc…

Now, you need to research the social sites. Find top stumblers, diggers, whateverers, all those people who have nothing better to do with their lives than to find “interesting stuff” on the net.

Locate one top submitter, for every one of your tags, whose submissions fall in the same tag as your content. E.g. some top submitter who has 98% hatred submissions, gets the “hatred” tag. Got it?

There is no technique here, you just have to find the top taggers for every one of your categories. Find what they like, and feed them with it.

Now, you can do this the sneaky way, or the straight up way. 

The sneaky way is to start up a conversation. Following our “hatred” example, send him a pm about how big mofos the guys at microsoft are, and how horny does your Macbook make you when you touch the touchpad.

Become friends through the system, and feed him stories without saying that they are yours, with angry comments, according to the story. Now let him rant about it and share the hatred with his other I-have-no-hobbies buddies.

The straight up way, is to contact a top tagger, and feed his ego, about how good his submissions are, how beautifully hand picked they are, and how he should work for the Times. Then send him your story, and ask for an honest review.

So, you might ask, why is this any different that the classic “make friends and share your linkbait” strategy?

There is a huge difference. This, if it hits, is a critical hit. Critical meaning frontpage, meaning getting tagged by a thousand people. Or, getting buried in an instant. All or nothing.

You need to understand, that this is the ultimate benchmark for your linkbait. Its all or nothing, get high or crash.

That way, you can go through your content fast, weeding out the crap ones. After 10 or so “suggestions”, you will have a pretty good idea of what “sells”. Then make more. And feed it. To the right people. Yes… to the sneezers.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , , ,

Sep 03

Advanced: Kick starting your Xth site Part 1

Heavy construction No Comments »

As promised, I will discuss the techniques you can use, to start a new site. NOT your first site, a new site.

This is not for beginners, although they can benefit from it. This is not a step by step analysis, its a strategy.

All techniques are summarized here, I will analyze them in future posts.

Well, you have your new niche, done your keyword research, picked up a nice brandable domain, and now you need to kick start the site so that traffic pours in the profits.

Regarding the design, you need to make it the same way you want it to look in 2 years. Monetize right away, put up those affiliate links. You don’t need thousands of visitors to make a sale, you need buyers (My personal record is a 350$ sale from 2 visitors. Beat that).

Also, many say that you need to upload the content slowly. That is totally bullshit, except if you are autogenerating 500.000 pages. How many do you have, 10, 100, 1000 articles? Put them up there. The sooner they are exposed to the spiders, the better indexing they will have. Remember, that 2nd tier search engines exist, and they take 4-6 months just to find you. Google has no problem at all, and a brand new 500 page site is not a red flag.

Next comes the well known secret, that googlebot likes sites that are constantly updating. You need to get your site in that category, by updating content daily. You can always add a post every day, but our scenario is the webmaster who owns 10+ sites. Updating them can become a nightmare very quick.

An easy way to do this, is to put up a secondary Wordpress blog, with a scraper plugin, that posts 5 news stories from your niche every day. Link from your homepage as “News”. This method is not totally efficient, because google will not index all of the posts from the scraper. Still, the pinging and the sitemap update show your site as being alive. A custom scraper that spins the posts would be ideal.

Another controversial revenue source, that also creates content at the same time, is an Ebay store. I know, stupid people at fora will nag, oh my stores are deindexed, Google hates BANS etc etc whine whine.

Of course Google hates Ebay stores, because by themselves they are merely scrapers. Integrate them in a complete site though, and they become a great part of it. Ebay is so big, that you cannot possibly not find a niche to fit an Ebay store. Every search a visitor does, creates another page (the search log will be priceless later when you want to tweak the site and squeeze every penny). Mcjiffy is fine for this job, but you need to tweak the template.

An easier alternative is an Amazon store, but it does not sit in your server, and you lose the content benefit.

You have researched your competition, right? Include a light directory script in your site, that links to them. Yes, link to your competition.

Why? Because a site is judged by its relevant outgoing links, and unfortunately, the relevant sites are mostly your direct competitors. Sure you can link to a wikipedia page, or another niche article. But they are not enough, you need at least 50 links.

Then, create links with your competitors name as anchor text, and link to your directory pages. Most webmasters are not narcissistic enough to rank for their own name, so go ahead and rank for it. Sure, people will simply land on your page, and click the link, landing on the competition. But a small percentage will browse around. You will be stealing a percentage of their traffic, and they cannot complain, because you are already linking to them. A long term benefit is that you can charge for their listing when you gain traffic.

An even better version is to use a script that asks for reciprocal links in order for someone to submit his site. But do as mentioned above, link to the top 20+ in your niche by yourself. An empty directory is useless. This is a nice fire-and-forget method, that benefits you long term.

Popularity: 8% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,