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Posts Tagged ‘quality content’
In other words, when you have two sites that are identical in every way, shape, or form (same type & amount of backlinks, both quality content, etc), the one with the best internal link structure will outrank the other one. This is exactly why I always teach that sniper sites need to have at least 5 or so posts on them. Sure we only care to rank one post (usually the homepage post) but in order to get any credibility whatsoever in Google’s eyes, we need to have at least a few posts that link back to the main post. I used to always put up one post and would hammer that one post with thousands upon thousands of backlinks… but guess what: it was nearly impossible to rank high in Google with just that one post – even with hundreds of solid backlinks pointing to it. If anything, Google would penalize my sites because they did not have much worthwhile content on them AND also because having all backlinks point to one single page does look VERY spammy. This is when I implemented the strategy of having at least a handful of quality posts on each site – with each post linking back to the main post (through a hyperlinked in-content keyword). I also started to randomly build backlinks to each of the posts rather then having all of them pointing to the same one. My rankings started to improve almost over night. It was pretty cool to say the least! Let me try & explain it all a little better in this short video I shot for you: Check out a super cool plugin that helps you automate your in-site link structuring! Adding those in-site links is a lot of work – especially when you have an established blog that you did not do a lot of in-site linking with right from the beginning. Which is perhaps why I love the new plugin that Matt came out with that makes this whole process a breeze. More details here… Even if you don’t get it (though I recommend it), just watch his video on that page and you will pick up a golden nugget or two about the importance of proper internal linking. Enjoy!
Late afternoon yesterday I decided to shoot a quick video for you and though most of it went well, I did not realize so much background noise would get in to the video. I tried editing it out but there is still quite a bit of the none-stop thunder in the background, including rain, and a siren. While editing it I screwed up the original HD somehow and the visual part of it got distorted too a bit, so I apologize for it not being as crisp as we like to have our videos. Having said that, I think the message is still understandable and for those interested, I do lay out some actionable steps you can take to duplicate my success.
I touched on this topic in my previous blog post entitled “Do Blog Networks Still Work?” but figured I should create a short little video where I talk about what exactly I did in a little more details. So here it is! I would love your feedback and personal experiences in this regard!
I am not a perfectionist for the most part, but every time I launch a product, I get this deep down feeling that it isn’t quite up to my standards. Yes, it works great and yes, it delivers immense value for the price point I am selling it at. I just can’t help but notice all the little things I could have and perhaps should have done differently or better. Someone reminded me recently “If Microsoft released their software only once perfect, you and the rest of the world would have never heard of them!” There is a certain truth to that. Products do not have to be perfect right off the bat. You can always release updates later on that bring about the desired improvements. This is especially true if the product is a software. Even if it is as close to perfect as you can get it (with your own testing and trouble shooting), someone else will find flaws in it. And that is not at all a bad thing. The most problematic software launch I ever did (aside from dozens of software glitches, I screwed up just about everything in the launching sequence as well), was also my biggest overnight rags to riches launch I have done to date. Though I did practically everything wrong along the way, I did one thing right that made the big difference: I took feedback and bug reports to heart and fed it straight to my programmer the minute I got it. As a result, every few days or so (after the launch) there was an update available for the software. It was a painful process but you know what? The end result left me with a nice chunk of cash in my wallet AND a highly sought after piece of software that customers brag about to this day. I have gone on to do various other launches since. Some were software products, while others were information products. None of them were perfect, but that did not keep me from launching them, making money off of them, and building my list at the same time. Again though, I took all feedback I could get and updated the products often the first few days. Sure there is going to be the odd unhappy customer but reality is, it does not matter how perfect your product is, you WILL have unhappy customers. For the most part I found that customers I interacted with were almost proud to be part of the products’ “perfecting” process – which (I guess) gave them a sense of “ownership” as well. Getting back on track: it’s been over a year since I launched my first major software product and just the other day I went over it again and realized that “it truly turned out to be a solid product!” So I went over it again and decided that I will update it one more time this year and will add a few more bells and whistles to it while I am at it. I want to take it from being a “great” product to being a “mind-blowingly awesome” product. And the best part? When I relaunch it, I will double the price for it as well… and it will be worth every penny of the new price! I will be doing the same thing with all the other products I have launched to date. For the software products, For the ebooks and pdf guides, I will go through all of them and update them. Yes they are all still great and the information in them is still applicable today, but I have learned a lot since I first wrote them so it is only fair that I raise the bar on them too – after which I will of course raise the price for them as well. What I am getting at is this: It takes time to build something phenomenal. This is something I have been learning more and more about in the last few weeks. I see top marketers in the Internet Marketing niche who’s products easily sell for $997 to $2497 each. These are oftentimes information products! The question I ask myself is “who in the right mind would pay that much for a product?” but truth is, they have people buying their stuff – right, left, and center – every single day. My next question is “how in the world can they pack enough value in to a product that people will pay so much money for and be happy with it?” and that is when it hit me: They have been selling these exact same products for years and yes, there often times was a point where they sold the product for no more than $37 when they originally launched it. The difference in price between then and now is a direct result of ongoing polishing and tweaking. In fact, this is also how trustworthy brands are built. The question we need to ask ourselves is: do we want to continue making low price-point products and sell them to the masses or do we want to create few – but mind-blowingly awesome products and make significantly more (up to 100 times more) every time we sell one copy? I myself am trying to get away from creating new products every month. I’d rather focus that energy on perfecting what I have (that did well) than fall in to the trap so many marketers fall in to of having to create new products every single month just to pay the bills. Some people prefer things that way, but in my opinion, we got to evolve. Our time, energy, as well as our products, need to increase in value the longer we are online. And as we all know, more value should equal more cash in our pockets. This poses another question though: who do we want to cater to? Those who never have money or those for whom money is not an issue? There really is no “right” or “wrong” answer to these questions, but I think they are important questions we as product creators need to ask ourselves. What are your thoughts? Do you prefer creating many low-price products or few high-priced products? If you are not a product creator, which ones would you buy rather: a decent low priced one or a perfected, high-end, high priced one?
It is absolutely critical to use relevant content on your site. This content needs to be informative and engaging and ideally position you as an expert on your chosen subject. Now you may think this is difficult to achieve but really it isn’t. Becoming an expert takes research. With the use of the internet research is easy to do and is the perfect way to find lots of content fast. What I would suggest is that you make a folder on your desktop and copy important information into it. This folder could contain statistics, breaking news, links to additional facts and figures and more. Once you have compiled your research folder you can easily access the information to create your own content for your website. Then it is just a matter of writing content using the keywords which you are trying to rank for. It is also a good idea to link to other useful posts within your site on the same subject. When constructing your pages whether as articles or blog posts always aim to have a keyword in the title if at all possible. Plus you want the title to entice the reader to click on the heading to read the full post and hopefully leave a comment. Some great post title ideas are:
Writing bullet lists are a great way to provide your reader with important information plus lists are easy to read. A list is more likely to grab the reader’s attention and make them continue reading. In the article body your aim is to provide interesting information on your subject. This is where using your statistics and other information is good. When writing attempt to put yourself into the perspective of a buyer. Think about what content you would like to see and what would make you click on a link to buy a product or sign up for more information. When you can write from this point of view successfully you will see both your list and your sales grow. If you are recommending products on your site make sure that you match what your site is about. Don’t sell dog collars on a site that is about learning how to use wordpress for example. Another thing with products is to research the product before you recommend it. Your reputation could be harmed if you recommend junky products. Your readers won’t trust you and you will be faced with people constantly unsubscribing from your list. Remember you want to brand yourself with your website. So take the time to create meaningful content. This will have your readers coming back for more and eagerly awaiting your new posts.
It is true: you used to be able to ping a link and whoala, a day or two later that URL would show up in the Google search results. Not anymore though! Search engines have evolved big time! Can you imagine just how much data Google (or any search engine for that matter) would have to add to their searchable database on a daily basis if they were to show every single link they come across to their search audience? That concept just did not work anymore, which is why Google (and Yahoo!) stopped counting every link publicly. This does not mean that Google doesn’t give you credit for all of your backlinks anymore, no. It simply means: just because Google crawls a link does not mean they will also show records of it when you search for it in their search engine. The good thing is: it makes it harder for your competition to reverse engineer your SEO strategies. The bad thing on the other hand is: it makes it harder for you to reverse engineer your competition’s SEO strategies. Some people get so caught up with the number of links they have to their sites. I myself don’t care. Sure, it’s nice to see hundreds and thousands of quality backlinks to a site of mine, but frankly I don’t care whether or not the search engines tell me how many backinks I have. In fact, the only thing that matters to me is “top ranking”. If a site does not rank #1 on Google for my keywords, I will continue building quality backlinks to it until it does. It is that simple. One thing I do make sure of though is that Google crawls my backlinks. Heck, that is about the only thing I can make them do. A “mass pinging tool” I created for my personal and business use (now available here) was designed to do just that: to take all my backlinks and turn them in to an RSS feed – which it would then push through pingomatic.com using unique IP addresses (check out my PingAutomatic WP WSO for exact details). Does it work? You betcha! Does it get my backlinks indexed? Sometimes. Sometimes not. What it does for sure though – it gets all my backlinks crawled. It keeps presenting them to search engine spiders using unique visitor IP addresses which pretty much forces (in a good way) search engine crawlers to spider them. Whether or not search engines decide to show my backlinks in their search results is beyond me though. There is very little we can do about that – but we can always try, right? I had someone email me recently saying “I ping the backlinks I build and they do not show up in the search results. Yet the backlinks I buy from you keep showing up in the search results. What are you doing differently Konrad?” There are a few things you can do to try and get your backlinks indexed (as in: showing in the search results). It is still not a guaranteed way of making them show, but it does seem to help the process. It’s simple really: First of, make sure that the backlinks pointing to your sites are of utmost quality. If the backlinks are of good quality (and on good quality sites), the chances of Google indexing them are greater. Secondly, build backlinks to those backlinks. This pretty much tells search engines that there is something special about the page where your site’s backlinks are on and it encourages them to index it. Pretty straight forward really! SIDE NOTE: Building backlinks to your backlinks is also a great way to drive lots and lots of link juice to your websites. I use this approach daily – it is effective and should not be overlooked. Now, a lot of people disregard RSS feeds and say they have little to no value, but I strongly beg to differ. You have any idea how much Google spent to acquire feedburner.com (an established feed network site)? I doubt they would suddenly turn around and render the feedburner project “worthless” as far as SEO is concerned. I am a strong believer in RSS feeds. I use them every day to help get my links and backlinks crawled. They work wonders if you use them right, but that is a topic for another time. I hope this gave you some clarification on the changes taking place with the major search engines. Again, don’t worry so much about your backlinks not showing up on backlink checker tools. Just make sure that your backlinks get crawled by search engine spiders and move on to building more high quality backlinks. Don’t get distracted by silly statistics. Instead, focus on what really matters!
Is content really still king? You bet it is! At the beginning of this year I put up about a dozen brand new “sniper blogs” (as outlined in Google Sniper 2.0). Every one of the domain names consisted of a longtail keyword and each one of those keywords were (more or less) equally as hard to rank for. I put the exact same wordpress theme on each of the blogs and optimized them all the same way. I also did the exact same backlinking for each of the sites. The only thing I did differently was: I put no new content on some of the blogs, put one post on a couple of them, and put 3 posts on some of the other ones (all unique posts – just to be clear). I really did not do a whole lot with those blogs for MONTHS. All of a sudden a couple of those sites started generating me sales for an affiliate product I was promoting. Of course I was super excited. Few things in life excite me more than making affiliate sales. A long story short, I started to analyze the stats on each of the sites and here is what I found: the blogs with the most posts were getting the most traffic and as a result were also generating me the most sales. This reconfirmed a philosophy I had adopted to my “best SEO” practices over a year ago which basically says: One should always post at least 5 articles on a sniper site. In this example I only had up to 3 posts but 5 would have been even better. Generally speaking, when I commit to making a successful sniper site, I usually have a link in the first 4 posts pointing to the main page where I have the “sales” post. The idea here is to push as much linkjuice to the sales post as possible. Anyways, I could go on and on about the importance of having a handful of quality posts on each site but I think it is common sense – at least for the most part. I just wanted to share my quick case study to let you know that – despite many theories – content is still king! I would love to hear your experiences in this regard, Konrad PS: – I keep getting asked where I get my content from. I write all content on this blog myself and for the most part also write all “sales posts” on my sniper blogs myself. All other content I almost always get done at GLA.
The last few days I’ve had to think a lot about the quality of the content I put on my sites, and the main reason probably is just seeing how big G (Google) is cracking down on sites that have nothing but junk content. It’s a funny thing… even the famous EzineArticles got slapped by Google recently which resulted in EzineArticles getting half the traffic it used to get. I guess Google finally caught on to the fact that the content on some of these article directories are nothing more than advertisements for thousands and thousands of sites. Nothing against EzineArticles or content marketing – I believe content marketing is still very powerful if spread out over many sites, but as far as depending on article directories for traffic or linkjuice… I will say I have not had a good experience with it. Anyways… here is my short video. I sounds and look a little sick… am getting over a cold. Let me know what you think or what your experience in this regard has been. Also make sure to like and retweet this post if you found the information valuable. Konrad Braun PS: – The guide I was referring to in the video can be found by clicking here!
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It has been my personal experience – and the experience of many SEO professionals – that a proper internal linking structure compounds the love Google gives a site.
A problem all perfectionist product creators share is that the product is never done. And even if done, there are a million things they want to continually improve on.
I will update all the coding to make sure they are all 100% up to date, and I will once again add a few features that they did not have before just to make them even more valuable.
Every other day I get an email that asks the age old question “what is the fastest way to get my backlinks indexed? I am building backlinks and I pinged them but they are still not showing on any backlink checker tools.”
This is not a breakthrough SEO discovery BUT with an ever changing Google search algorithm, it is important to remember the simple things that simply work.
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