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EzSEO Newsletter # 99
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. Kim Standerline
2. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part XI
3. Other Stuff
Hi again.
I have a very quick favour to ask. This newsletter has just been accepted into the Best Ezines directory. There is a voting system on that site where you can give a score for each newsletter. Please take a few seconds to visit and cast your vote (good or bad).
Thanks in advance for this.
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1. Kim Standerline
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Last week I mentioned Kim Standerline’s new site. In case you missed it, she is the registered nurse who has opened up a new website on health. Obviously, being in the health profession, Kim knows what she is talking about and has a lot of insider information.
Her site offers you the chance to become an eBook publisher by providing you with all the tools you need, including the eBooks that you can brand for yourself and sell as your own. As such, you become the merchant, and you can easily have your own affiliates to help sell YOUR products.
This really is one of the best ways to make m0ney online.
Assuming you want your own products, but don’t want to have to start writing from scratch, why do I think that Kim’s is the one for you? After all, there are several sites like this around.
Well, let me give you a quick insight into what Kim’s site offers.
1. Products are only available for a month before they are removed. That means that anyone signing up as a member after November 17th, wont be getting the products from October (unless they pay a premium price for them). You may wonder why I think this is a good idea. Well, what this means is, you have less competitors than you might have at other membership sites like this. If 100 people cancel their membership, and 100 new ones join, those 100 new members wont be able to download back products (which would make 600 competitors for each product). The idea of removing products after one month, helps protect your investment.
2. The products are being created under the guidance of someone who is an expert in the niche. You can tell this by the shear quality of the product offered in October. e.g. one of the niches for October is Alzheimer’s Disease (this is mentioned on the sales page so I am not breaking any secrets by telling you this). This is one of the two products for this month (although Kim has given you a third bonus eBook on a health related topic).
The Alzheimer’s niche contains an eBook on Alzheimer’s. This is a 62 page document that covers the disease in great detail. What I particularly like about the eBook is that it is geared towards helping individual with the disease and provides comprehensive information on the disease, cures etc. There is also a list of places (organised by country) where you can get more help and support for the disease, a further reading list, a glossary of terms and so much more. This eBook really is interesting, informative, and helpful. I think Kim should be congratulated on the quality. If all eBooks she creates for her members are of this standard (and looking at the other niche eBooks provided so far, I have no reason to think they wont be), then Niche Health Blueprints will be a big hit.
OK, on top of the eBook, what else do you get?
Well, there are 10 articles you can use on your site just to get you started (the other niche for October has 25), and complete keyword lists from Wordtracker. Kim decided to offer the keywords as Wordtracker emails. That means owners of KRA-WT can import them and do their own filtering.
There is also a forum where you can talk with Kim and other members, plus a few unannouced bonuses.
This morning she told me that she will also adding sales letters for the products, for those people who find it difficult to create them (that will be coming in the next week or two).
Overall, I think Kim’s site has got all you need to make a success of your own eBook publishing empire. What’s more, the niches are all health related, and that means they usually command high Adwords bids (which translates into more Adsense income for you). However, I for one will not be using Adsense on the sites I build for these products. I think that the products will sell well, earning even greater inc0me than Adsense can provide.
If you are not already a member of a site offering monthly products like this, and you are prepared to work, then Kim’s is one I highly recommend.
Unfortunately, you do need to act fast. The membership is being capped at 500, and because of the way products are removed each month, I don’t see there being a big turn-over of members. If you don’t get in now, you will find it difficult at a later date.
Despite only being open for a week or two, Kim has told me they are more than half full already, and several others will be promoting the site next week, so remaining spots may fill up quickly.
You can read more, or sign up for this great opportunity here:
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2. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part XI
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If you have been following this course so far, you will have:
a) identified your niche and checked for profitability
b) carried out your keyword research at Wordtracker.
c) sent yourself your keyword research from Wordtracker.
d) selected several phrases to use as main page keywords.
e) selected suitable phrases to be used for article pages.
f) learnt how to theme pages. You should use this information to begin collecting themed keywords for your planned pages.
g) seen how main pages differ from article pages, and understood how these differences dictate how the pages are created.
h) seen how selling differs from pre-selling, and learnt one way to sketch out a blueprint of your pre-selling content.
i) looked at a top selling sales page, and dissected out the various pre-selling techniques highlighted by the “pre-selling blueprint questions”.
j) looked at two models for building main sales pages.
If you missed any of these newsletters, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/blog/
This mini course begins in issue #89 and continues to the latest post in the blog.
Last week we looked at two models that you can use when building your own main pages.
This week, I want to discuss articles. Now, when I refer to articles, I am not just referring to any old content that draws traffic and gets your Adsense ads exposed to visitors.
I am talking about genuinely useful content that will reinforce your site as useful, add value to the internet, build your reputation, help keep visitors on your site, encourage then to return to your site, and recommend your site to others.
If an article is going to provide these benefits, it must pass the “Value Test”.
The Value Test
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Take an article page on your site.
Remove all graphics.
Remove all Affiliate links
Remove all Adsense
Remove any script generated content (e.g. RSS feeds).
Remove all menus leading to other pages.
Then read what is left. Would a visitor on your site find the remaining text interesting? Would they recommend it to a friend looking for information on this topic? If yes, then the article passes the value test. If no, then it doesn’t.
Since we are looking to create articles that pass this test, we need some guidelines.
I divide articles into two main groups – product reviews, or discussions about a particular topic.
Everyone approaches article writing in different ways, but let me tell you how I do it.
Let’s look at reviews first.
Writing Reviews
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You should be familiar with the product. While you wont always own the product (and don’t want to buy it), you can find enough information online at the search engines. When writing reviews, I use a set of questions to help create the article. These questions may look familiar:
1. What are the problems faced by your visitor that this product ATTEMPTS to solve? Let your visitors know that you understand their problems.
Note that we have changed the wording slightly – “product attempts to solve” instead of “product solves”. That is because, we are writing a review, and at this point, we have neither mentioned the product, nor given our verdict on how well it works.
2. Describe what life can be like without the problems (mental picture again). You are trying to build a mental picture in your visitor’s mind, to show them what life could be like if they were using a product (not necessarily this one) that solved the problem. If this product ultimately does not deliver the goods, you can point them to one that does, so the mental image is not wasted ;o)
3. Introduce the product. Describe the product, and what it was created for.
4. Advantages of the product using the feature list to guide you.
5. Any disadvantages to this product. If you don’t own the product, look at other people’s reviews for anything that does not quite seem to meet the grade. Tell your visitors the truth, or it might just come back to bite you.
6. How well does the product work. You have told them what it can and cannot do, now tell them how well it does what it does.
7. Final summary and rating. I always like to give a rating for products I review, since this not only builds a more professional looking review, it also tells anyone who sees the site (including “thin-affiliate hunters”) that you are actually creating useful content that helps guide your visitors in their buying decisions.
You can take this one step further by creating graphics for each score awarded (5/10, 6/10 etc), and even special “Recommended”, or “Our Choice” graphics to award the very best products.
8. Similar products? This is the opportunity to link to other reviews of similar products, or even include affiliate links to similar items. This is another good section to include to help avoid the “thin-affiliate” label, since you are providing genuinely useful content. It also gives you the opportunity to send your visitors to a recommended product, if the reviewed one is not up to scratch.
9. Call to action – What do you want your visitor to do next? If you have reviewed the product favourably, you might ask them to buy it from your merchant. If you are not offering affiliate products, you could ask them to read another review that does, or get them to sign up to your newsletter, or to recommend your site to a friend. Whatever your personal goal is for the page, state it in the call to action (BTW, you cannot ask them to click an Adsense link as that is against Google’s TOS).
This list of questions is just our original pre-sell blueprint questions with slight modifications. That should not come as too much of a surprise, since most reviews will be trying to pre-sell a product you like.
Warning: If you don’t like a product, either don’t write a review of it, or be brutally honest in the review. The former is usually easier, since the latter often gets angry emails from the product creator ;o(
Writing reviews is one of the very best ways to add unique, valuable content to your site. “Thin-affiliate hunters” would find it very difficult to label your site as thin, if it was built up of reviews you have written.
Discussion Articles
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OK, so what about “discussion” articles? The above questions don’t work for these.
Well, I approach discussion articles in the same way I used to approach lesson planning when I was a school teacher – by asking myself questions.
Here is the question I used as a teacher:
“By the end of this lesson, my students will have learnt…:”
And I would then list 1 – 5 concepts (depending on how complex the concepts were).
That was it. Once I answered that, my lesson had focus.
All that was left for the lesson plan was to find an interesting way to introduce the concept, and get that concept across to my students.
When writing articles I actually ask myself two questions:
#1 “By the end of this article, my visitors will have learnt…:”
And I then list 1 – 5 concepts.
#2 What benefit do I want to get out of this article?
Once I have answered these question, my article has a purpose, and also a blueprint for its creation.
Since the concepts listed in question #1 are the main points I want to talk about in the article, once each have been discussed, my article will be written, and my visitors will hopefully leave with more information than they arrived with – job done. I then only need to work in my answer to #2, and the page is complete.
It is not really possible to give a formula for writing discussion style articles, since they will differ from subject to subject, and writing style to style, but here are some rough guidelines.
1. Identify the keywords you want to target.
2. Identify concepts for the article.
3. Write the article so that it covers the concept(s) (and include the keywords) in such a way that the visitor will feel that they have learned something on the subject.
Use sub-headers and bullet points to highlight main points.
4. Create a headline based on one or more of your concepts that is enticing, and tells your visitor what they will learn from the article (I always create the headline at the end, because by then, I have a better understanding of the concepts).
5. Call to action – what do you want your visitor to do now?
This is where you work in your answer to #2 above. If your answer was to make Adsense income, then I suppose you could just include another Adsense banner. However, I think that Adsense is making content publishers lazy.
Answers to #2 might include Adsense, but should also include:
* increase link popularity and reputation to other pages on my site
* funnel traffic to a sales pages
* promote my own eBook
* Capture an email address for newsletter or autoresponder course
* Get your visitors to recommend your site to their friends
and much more.
* Get other webmasters to republish your article and resource box on their site.
Any you choose, should be worked into your page.
6. Resource box – if required, to help with the call to action. It does not need to be an obvious “resource box” as seen on so many sites, but it can be used to provide additional information, or help achieve your personal goals for the page.
Some quick guidelines when writing your article
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1. Use sub-headers
2. Use bullet points.
Both of these make your article easier to read, and people often skim read, and use headers and bullet points to gauge whether the article is worth reading in its entirety.
3. Use short paragraphs separated by a line space to spread out your article. People hate reading big blocks of text.
Stuck for ideas on what to write about?
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Here are some ideas of things you can include in the body of your article.
Pros and cons of different solutions.
History of the concept, or solutions to the concept.
Personal stories.
Links to other pages on your site (e.g. review pages or main sales pages).
Relevant news (with sources and dates).
Facts and figures, etc.
Finally, there are some things you might consider that can give your site an interactive feel (interactive = not “thin”).
Here is one idea.
Using Tell-a-friend scripts
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Why not experiment with your sites. Add a “tell a friend” form at the end of your articles so that if visitors find an article interesting, they can easily recommend it to their friends?
Don’t under-estimate word of mouth advertising.
How do you do this?
Search Google for:
free recommend site script
The top site here in Spain, and probably where you are searching from too, is Hot Scripts. On that page there are a variety of scripts, lots of them fr-ee, to allow you to add a tell-a-friend function to your pages.
The more useful your articles are, the more value you can expect when using tell-a-friend scripts.
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3. Other Stuff
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Please go and register a vote for ezSEO Newsletter.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old ezSEO Newsletter archives.
Have a great week!
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About Andy Williams
