Finally…What was all that other junk? What do the spiders want to see? What are
the best words to use? Where do I place them?
Don’t worry, the above chapters are not a complete wash. The more you learn
about the web, the more you will learn how ideas overlap. Good usability is usually
equal to good search engine optimization.
Some people stress search engine optimization so much that they forget about their
visitors’ needs. SEO is just one part of the site-building puzzle. Ultimately, it is
your social impact or cash in the bank that is a measure of success, not where you
rank for some random search query.
In the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell shows how small changes can bear
amazing results. If you can learn to include some of those little extras that make
your site better than your competition’s, site, you will find that others will do your
marketing for you. That is why I think it is more important to understand the
concepts of the web and the goals of search engines versus just learning the flavorof-
the-moment optimization. If everything else is good, then you do not need to
worry as much about optimization.
Plus, knowing the above in addition to doing search engine optimization will allow
you to draw lots of visitors and have a higher conversion rate. On the web, when
you lose a customer, it is usually forever. The last thing you want to do is draw
prospective customers into a minefield they are sure to regret.
Each and every page is a chance to capture or lose customers.

Focusing a Site & Combining Site Ideas

One time, a person contacted me asking for a bit of help with their site. They
wanted me to submit their site to directories. When I looked at their site I saw it
sold handmade hemp jewelry and SEO services.

In the real world, you would never see people do something like this, but many
people think it is fine on the web.
On the web there are even more alternatives to your business than in the real
world. Because of this, you need to focus on the consumer that much more.
It is fine to have many unique ideas and revenue streams, but each site should
cover its own specific niche. If you cross industries within your site, you weaken
your brand and may offend many people. What are the odds that someone is
looking for SEO services while shopping for hemp?
Even within the specific niche of SEO, I can have a site for linking, one for
keyword research, one for pay-per-click…the list goes on. Most websites fail
because they fail to properly focus, not because they are too focused.

Follow your passions
• Always cite sources with an HTML link
• Don’t sit on a great story if you believe it is a great idea
• When in doubt, it is better to be opinionated than boring

Popular Blogs

To find blogs in your field you can
• search Google for your topic + blog
• search for recent events in your field on Technorati or Google Blogsearch
• search for feeds on Google reader and see how many subscribers top
channels have
• look at the Technorati 100 most popular blogs list or the Bloglines 1,000
most popular blogs list

Why is Blogging Such an Effective SEO Strategy?
Over time popular bloggers build up hundreds or thousands of subscribers. These
subscribers are people interested in the field or topics that blogger writes about.
Each time those bloggers write a new post those readers get notified of the new
content in their RSS readers.

Imagine that…
• everytime you had an idea to share, that 5,000 people who trust your
opinions see it.
• most of those 5,000 also write blogs in your field or related fields.
• some of those bloggers frequently mention your site
• some of those bloggers also have thousands of subscribers.
Blogs are all about spreading ideas (via in content links) and accumulating
attention. Where people go search engines follow. If many people link to your blog
posts that also boosts your search engine rankings for the other parts of your site.
If you write a frequently updated blog the media is more likely to believe you are a
topical expert than if you are just a merchant selling goods in your industry.

Attention

one of the easiest ways to do it is to BE THE MEDIA. To summarize the key
message from their report:
The “voice” delivering a message, along with its perceived authenticity, will
become as powerful perhaps as the message or offer.
Due to a rapidly increasing number of competing channels, each publisher is vying
for a smaller piece of the pie. As people like you and me spread stories of blogging
success, it gets harder to jump into the blogging game late.
There are many strategies you can use to accumulate attention against more
established players.

Passion

If you are passionate about a topic it shows. People who share that passion do not
subscribe to your blog, they subscribe to that passion. And they also share it with
others.

Bias

Each of us is brilliant and highly flawed. We are all human. Communities are built
around commonly shared ideas and shared points of personal identity. We are
more likely to listen to and believe those who tell us things confirming our
worldviews than people who challenge them.
Fox News is successful because it turned news into biased entertainment. Many of
the most popular blogs are popular because they are biased and entertaining.
It is easy to build a community around negativity, but it is hard to profit from that
type of community. People looking to spend money are more interested in stories
of hope and success.

Niche

With there already being 1,000’s of SEO blogs, I would not start a new blog
focused on SEO in 2008. The only way I would allow myself to do that is if I was
focused on SEO for a specific vertical like real estate or if I was focusing on a
subset of SEO like link building.
From a publishing standpoint, owning an idea is much more valuable than being a
#57 player in a larger market. The top site in any niche gets more media exposure,
more self reinforcing exposure, and can charge more for ads than a site which is
viewed as an also ran.

Formatting

We thin slice the information we see and make quick judgement calls. We are more
likely to trust and subscribe to sites that:

• are aesthetically appealing with a unique site design
• make important content, like top posts and about us pages, easy to find
• rely on simple words and short sentences, and are thus easy to read and
understand
• are well structured – with headings, subheadings, pictures, videos, and
bulleted lists to help break up the content

Social Interaction

Many of the top channels got to be top channels by adding original content and
value to their marketplace. Others may have got there by stroking the egos of key
players in their market.
Your content quality does not matter until you get people to consume it. So here
are a few tips to help you get noticed
• Quote and link to popular bloggers, and add value to the conversion
• Leave valuable useful comments on popular related blogs
• Write articles for other popular blogs
• Create community based ideas and ask for feedback or involvement of
community members before launching it
• Actively solicit comments and reply to them
• Network offline at industry trade shows, conferences, and community
gatherings

Don’t be afraid of controvercy. If you gain mindshare and authority some
envious parties will hate you for it.
• Add enough value to ideas that people talk about you when referencing
them
• Encouraging contribution from others and highlighting their contributions
builds a community effect to your site

Post Regularly

People appreciate regularity. Some bloggers ask for guest bloggers while they go on
vacation, while others pre-write draft posts that they publish periodically when
news is slow.
If you are short on ideas to write about then participate in your community and/or
solicit feedback and questions until you find good topics to write about.

Wait to Monetize

It is hard to win mindshare in competitive markets with a new site, especially if you
run too many ads on your site. If you place AdSense or other ads above your
content on a brand new blog people are going to be less trusting of your blog.
Blogs are often hard to monetize using contextual ads, but tend to have great
revenue potential if you sell branded ads, create your own products, or use your
blog to create opportunities for indirect revenue.
Brian Clark released a great report to launch his Teaching Sells subscription site.
His thesis was that the web is getting too saturated to profit from AdSense, and
that it was more profitable to create your own content to sell. Even if you plan on
giving away your content, if you create content that is good enough to sell that will
help you quickly gain attention and mindshare.

Push Marketing

You have to do a bit of push marketing to get a new website noticed in competitive
markets. When you launch a new blog you should:
• Get involved in your topical community – online and offline if possible.
• Submit your blog to some of the popular general directories and blog
directories.
• Consider buying targeted AdWords or AdSense ads to drive traffic to your
site. Also look at BlogAds if they are popular in your space.
• Guest author for other trusted blogs in your industry.

• Inline ad blocks also get a great click-through rate.
• Typically, I place fewer ads on the home page than inner pages in
order to make my AdSense sites seem less ad-cluttered than they are.
Some pages sell the site as being of quality and linkworthy. Other
pages sell ad clicks. It is a balancing act.
• If you make the content look ugly enough, the ads can look relatively
appealing, but that is probably not a good approach for sites you want
to be long-term earners.
• Centering content and using fixed-width designs makes it easy to
control the ad placement and ad-to-content ratio.
• Many high-traffic, low-cost-per-click sites can greatly increase their
income by placing Google search boxes on their site.

Value-Added Packaging

In any arena, there will only be a few people who make lots of money packaging or
repackaging information. Coming up with value-added packaging ideas will help
guarantee the success of your product. I sold more books than I ever thought I
would have based primarily on the fact that the book was attached to my blog.
Most other SEOs selling a book do not have a search engine news blog where they
give away free tips.
If you sell things, like jewelry, the visual appearance of the site is exceptionally
important. Design and copy help develop trust and are part of the packaging.
People do not pay (or want to pay) for what something is allegedly valued at; they
want to pay what they feel it is worth to them.

Price and Value

In the past, I sold my e-book for half of its current price. Some people assumed
that it must have low value based upon that price point. Since then, I have done
thousands of hours of research and writing, which likely greatly increased its value.
Few affiliate marketers wanted to make a small share of $40 when they could
recommend other products and make $50-$100 commission per sale.
From what I have seen, affiliate marketing is not usually honest, and most affiliates
recommend what makes them the most money, not what is the best value or the
best product. For example, many affiliates promote software in fields where
better free software exists. Software like OpenOffice allows you to make PDFs for
free. People still market a bunch of junky PDF generator software because it is
easy money and because search engines deliver poor relevancy for many PDFrelated
queries.
I doubled the price of my e-book and later switched to hosting my own affiliate
program. Within a couple months, I had over 100 new affiliates and ads for my ebook
appeared on thousands of pages.
If this e-book gives some successful marketers only a couple useful tips, then it has
more than paid for itself. Others who are newer to web marketing would expect
much more, since they still have much to learn.
The more business experience people have, the more reasonable their expectations
are. Raising my price filtered out most of the worst potential clients. Some people
will never be happy no matter what you do. The more you try to use price as
your competitive advantage, the lower the quality of your customer base
and the more hate and fraud you deal with on a daily basis.
I have ranked clients at #1 in Google for terms worth over $10,000 a month while
charging them less than a $1,000 one-time fee for the service, and they were still
angry at me. That is what you get when you accept commodity clients and sell
yourself as a commodity. Those people are rarely appreciative.
You are only a commodity if you think of yourself as one. If you sell your product
at commodity prices, you will attract commodity clients who may never be pleased
with the amount of value you deliver.

Being Published, Gate Keepers & Profit Margins

A major book publishing company read this book and wanted to publish it. I was
all for it if I could keep electronic distribution rights. They wanted me to give that
up and take a huge pay cut, and meanwhile I would have had to hope that they
would have done a good job marketing the book. For most authors, that’s never
the case

I have sold more copies of this e-book than the average physical book sells. If my
business model revolved around a physical book, the slim margins would mean I
could not afford to compete in the pay-per-click market, and affiliate marketers
would market inferior products to my book because they would get paid a higher
commission.
Do not let others fool you into thinking that you need their help or that you need
to be a part of their network to succeed. A few years ago, I knew nothing about
the web or marketing; I was kicked out of the military for using drugs; I had few
social connections; and I had to backdate a credit card to have money to live on.
Now, money is of no concern to me.
To be honest, I could probably make at least five times as much as I do just by
writing smaller and quicker e-books on a wide variety of topics and marketing them
via strong sales copy and pay-per-click ads. If you look through the ClickBank
marketplace, you will see there are thousands of Internet marketers making far
more money than I do by doing just that—creating dozens of similar information
products in various markets.

Price Points

I do not sell a lot of varied products, but I read about and listen to many marketers.
Many people believe that ending a price on the number seven is a good thing
because many consumers are taught that the number seven is good due to religion,
gaming, and other ideas. If your price is going to be somewhat cheap, you can
usually end the price in $9.95 without seeing a huge drop in sales.
If you are going close to $100 or over, then you may also want to try ending the
price with a 7. Usually the only time to end a price on round numbers (like $250 or

$500) is if you are trying to appeal to people who are trying to buy something for
its extravagance.

Value & Price Disconnect

If you look on the Amazon.com marketplace, sometimes a brand new hardcover
version of a book will sell for far less than a used copy of the paperback version. I
find it interesting in a marketplace of that size that there would be large price
disconnects with items so close to one another.
In any market there will be price disconnects, many of which will make no logical
sense. If your long-term business model is being the cheapest, then you may want
to refocus on brand-building or other aspects, or your business model may be
doomed from the start.