EzSEO Newsletter # 175

This week:

1. Google Hacking

2. Top tips for webmasters, by webmasters

3. Two New Polls

4. How to sell a product online - Part IV

5. Other Stuff

Hi again.

Hope you have had a good week. I can hardly believe that we are already in August. This year is flying by.

Hopefully you are well on your way to achieving your goals for this year.

Let’s get on with the newsletter.

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1. Google Hacking
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Its was more than a year ago now, I think, that I first noticed something strange was going on with a website. The site in question was myweddingfavors.com. Why was I interested in this one? Well, simply because it is run by an SEO friend of mine, Brad Fallon.

This site is one that he often referred to in his training materials, and on sales pages, as proof that his methods worked.

This site was also raking in obscene amounts of money every month.

It was one of the sites I kept on my radar.

Then it happened.

The site lost its PR, and its rankings.

I cant remember exactly what the PR was before this happened, but certainly a 5 if not a 6. Then, it dropped to a PR 0. In fact, I remember visiting the homepage and seeing a grey bar in the Google toolbar. It was no longer in Google.

What happened?

Well, it looked like his homepage had been penalised. I continued monitoring this site for several months, and saw some strange things. The ranking of the site went from #1, to nowhere, and then bounced around, sometimes appearing at #5. Now this may sound normal to you, but when a site is PR 0′d, it is very rare to find it appearing in the top 10 for search terms with over 2 million competing pages (e.g. “wedding favors”).

Something was up, and I admit, that at the time, I had no idea what was happening.

In the mean time, Brad was taking the heat from people who assumed the worst. Brad kept quiet on why his site had fallen, and that only added to speculation that he had been caught using black hat techniques.

Well, the mystery may well be solved, and it doesn’t make pretty reading. It could affect us all.

I have added a link to an article that explains it on my essential Reading page:

Read #3 on Google hacking.

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2. Top tips for webmasters, by webmasters
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Over on the Warrior forums, Andy Henry started a thread that resulted in a very useful eBook where webmasters offered their best tips for success.

I have added a link to the download page for this report on my essential SEO Reading page.

Read #4

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3. Two New Polls
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Last week, I asked for some info so I could setup some new polls. Unfortunately, the response was really poor, and I only got replies from a handful of people. However, I got enough to setup the polls.

In the first poll, the question is:

If you could only keep one tool for your business (excluding Web Editor), what would it be?

I got one subscriber answer that “Dr. Andy’s Internet Search Browser” was her favourite tool, but since that isn’t currently available outside of my Fat Content Course, I have not included that tool in the poll.

You can vote, and see the results of the first poll.

The second poll, was asking the question:

What is your favourite Keyword Research Tool?

I had a little overlap here, with Wordtracker and KRA being voted for in this poll as well as the first, and I have included all suggestions I was sent.

You can vote, and see the results here.

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4. How to sell a product online - Part IV
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In the last part of this series, we looked at how aMember can be the central “hub” of your business, taking care of a great many of the essential tasks that are required when you sell your own products online.

Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about another part of selling your own products online, and one that many companies do badly - customer support.

This is the unglamorous side of selling products online, but it is one of the most essential to get right.

There are a few reasons that support is so important.

Firstly, there is your image as a company. If a customer tries to contact you, and they don’t hear back at all, or it takes a week or more, then you will get a bad reputation, and believe me, reputation online spreads far faster than in the bricks and mortar world.

What you don’t need is someone posting about your “weight loss” company/product on a slimmers forum. It will kill sales.

Another response you can get if you don’t get back to your customers quickly enough is, “can I have a refund”. Quick, reliable support is essential for keeping your customers happy, and keeping them as your customers.

On the other hand, a customer with a good experience is likely to recommend you to their friends, and become a repeat buyer. People want to know that there is someone at the other end, should they have a problem.

Another reason support is so important is that you can learn a lot about your target market. I often hear from my own customers who say, “this tool is great, but wouldn’t it be cool if it could ……”

Ideas from your customers can improve your products.

You’ll also find your customers contacting you over support issues. Something doesn’t work, or even they can figure out how to install the product. This type of feedback can help you create a support package, including tutorials, and help files, that not only help your customers, but also makes a good selling point on your sales page.

Listening to customers is very important for moving your products, and your business forward, and support is the centre of it all.

The traditional method of supporting products is email. I use to use this up until a few months ago, where I switched to a support desk solution plus supporting videos, tutorials etc for my products.

There are several problems with email, and these are the reasons why I switched.

Here are a few of those problems:

1. Email is unreliable. With increasing numbers of spam filters, it is more and more difficult to get emails through. When I was doing email support, I often replied to emails several times, and yet the customer continued to send emails (often abusive) complaining that they had not heard back from me. Imagine how frustrating that is. You are replying, but the customer is not getting those replies.

2. Email addresses get harvested from a website, and you end up on spam lists. If you post email support addresses on your site (and even if you don’t), you can find your email address gets onto spam lists. I had one email address that was only ever published as a graphic on one of my sites. Bots cant read it, but it ended up on a spam list. Someone must have maliciously submitted the email to some list.

3. Email is too easy. Since it just takes a few seconds to fire off an email, you often get several emails from the same person, within the space of a few hours. All emails are unconnected (meaning they don’t contain information from the previous emails), and it makes it more time consuming reading each email before replying, since the customer will often give you details that build on the previous email. This doesn’t happen so often in a support desk.

There are other reasons why email is bad. I even got reported for spam once for sending a reply to one disgruntled customer. They had been very abusive in an email, so instead of trying to calm the customer down, I simply sent them a refund. I then received several nasty emails. I replied to one, and they reported my reply as spam.

Since I stopped email support and switched to a help desk / knowledge base system, my support times have decreased from around 2 hours a day (7 days a week), to around 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week.

Next week, we’ll look at the components of a good support system (support desk, tutorials, knowledge base etc), and how they all work together to increase your reputation, and increase customer satisfaction, while simultaneously reducing the time it takes to support your products.

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5. Other Stuff
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I mentioned last week, that I was about to officially release my “Creating Fat Content Course”. For new subscribers, I should explain that this course has been released twice before, both for just 24 hours. However, this time, the release will not be a time-sensitive release.

This last week, I have been working on the sales page for the course. You can read it, and sign up for notifications of the release of the course here:

Creating Fat Content Course

I hope to have a release date very soon.

Well, that’s it for this issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:

http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php

For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:

http://ezseonews.com/archives

Have a great week!

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