Transcript continued from the Episode 030 Show notes
Some Cool Articles From Around the Web:
I’ve got a couple of new projects going on, but before we get into that I was digging through my reader and I saw a couple of good blog posts that I thought were pretty interesting.
The first one was at Affilorama, which is kind of a cool affiliate marketing training blog. There was a post on there from Sam Frost. I don’t actually know Sam, but I like this post that he did on profiting from RSS scrapers.
You may not be aware of this, but a lot of people run blogs and the whole monetization content strategy behind the blog is to grab content from other blogs on the internet and scrape it using the RSS feed and essentially republish your content. A lot of times you can get out ranked by people who are scraping your content, which is really frustrating. This is an age old problem that’s been happening for a long time.
Sam has a pretty good analysis of it there. He publishes a way that you can actually turn this to your advantage and in some cases create a backlink from the scrap site to your site by including a link in your RSS feed, and he tells how to do that. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, but if you go over to Affilorama.com you can check it out, just look for Sam’s article.
It works sometimes, sometimes you’ll get click through traffic from that, sometimes the blogs will make all the links no follow, sometimes they won’t make them active, so this doesn’t work every time. It’s interesting because what I did when I saw this article was I took one of my more recent articles and I took a full sentence out of the article and put it in quotes, that makes a very unique search for Google.
You can search for a 15 word phrase in Google from your content and you can see how many hits you got – I got 15 hits. Some of them were legitimate syndications from RSS sites that I syndicate my content too, but many of them were scraped. You can definitely see if you have this problem by using that technique. There’s not a lot you can do about it, but you can check out Sam’s post and see what you think. It’s pretty cool.
The other thing that I saw in my Google Reader was a really cool article on the Kissmetrics site. If you’re not familiar with Kissmetrics, you should check them out, it’s a really cool blog with infographics and information, marketing guide type service. They had an article called 5 Surprising Factors Behind the Most Shared Tweets and How to Use Them.
Some of the factors weren’t all that surprising. They find that the authority that posts the tweet that if you’re going to reference an article, the place that the article comes from has a lot to do with whether or not the tweet is retweeted. So if you’re posting something from an authority like Wired or Mashable that tweet is going to have a lot more legs than if the tweet came from some source that is less well known. That’s kind of an obvious thing.
Another thing that was a little bit less obvious is the actual language that you use is a little bit counterintuitive. I think this is one of the more interesting findings of this article. You would think – I would think – that the more sensational and crazy sounding the tweet is the more viral it would be. But they’ve got some pretty good data here that indicates that the more straightforward the tweet is the more likely it is to be retweeted.
They give some really good examples in the article. Their examples are from places like BuzzFeed and Gawker, which make their money on kind of sensational content, versus some straight ahead tweets like maybe from Mashable.
It was interesting to think about that. I guess the idea is maybe in your tweets you should test staying away from these really sensational words like amazing, astonishing, breathtaking, electrifying – at least test that and see if you don’t get a little better response.
The other thing that they do that’s a really cool trick that I’ve used before is if you mention popular names in tweets you’ll get retweeted more. This is kind of obvious. People will be searching for those names and they’ll retweet them and it will catch their attention and they’ll retweet them. They also give you some ideas of how to research names to tweet. One of the things they suggest is looking on Klout for really popular people that you can say something about and result in some retweets. That’s kind of a cool strategy.
The fifth thing they say in this article, which I think is really cool, is that they recommend that you test stuff. I think that’s absolutely right. I don’t spend much time testing tweets, to be honest with you. You probably really should if tweeting is part of your strategy. I’m just not that heavy into it and don’t choose to spend my time there.
But, this is a generally true thing in all of internet marketing. One of the amazing things about internet marketing is that it is testable. It’s not like putting a billboard up on a freeway, which can be really hard to test. That kind of marketing or putting an ad in a magazine can be hard to test. Internet marketing is generally really easy to test directly and a lot of people don’t take the time to do that. Tweeting, just like anything else, deserves your time testing and is highly recommended.
Check those two articles out, one on Kissmetrics and one on Affilorama. I think they were both pretty cool.
Update on Niche Site Experiments:
I wanted to update you on some experiments that I’ve got going on. Some are stalled and some I’m picking back up again, so I just wanted to run through a list here and tell you some stuff that’s going on.
First, the corn sheller site. We’ve talked a lot about that in the past. What I can tell you is the traffic picked way back up and then it died off again. We talked a little bit about how I submitted links from Deep Linker Pro, that’s Josh Spaulding’s directory linking tool. It’s a pretty cool tool, I like it because it’s online based and I don’t have to run software on my PC, it’s based on Josh’s servers. That’s a really cool service and I recommend you go check that out over at DeepLinkerPro.com.
There was a significant bump in my traffic in June. Coincidentally at the same time that I did those Deep Linker Pro submissions that has fallen back off. Not completely, it is notched up a little bit and the site is still generating a little bit of money per day. It has generated almost $150 total since the first of the year, so that’s pretty cool. But I’m not back to the levels of traffic that I had before.
One of the things that I’ve decided to do since that’s really just a throw away site is I’m going to pull out all my automated trickery and see if I can build some backlinks to that. But I’m intentionally going to be careful about using the same anchor text or similar and related anchor text too much. I think that was why that site was affected, because all of my anchor text was too similar. I was really sloppy when I did the link building for that. So I’m going to use some tools that I have at my disposal to build 300 to 500 new backlinks to the site and see if I can’t effect the rankings.
My theory on why the site – why sites in general – do Google dance type things like that where they pop up and pop back down is that Google promotes them to the first parts of the ranking and then they look at what happens to the click through rates for the site, do people hit the back button and go back to Google search, for example. When that happens and people hit the back button and go back to Google search, Google can detect that and they recognize that as meaning that wasn’t the person was looking for. I think when sites go up and come back down and then go back up again, a lot of times that’s Google trying to collect data and trying to determine whether or not that’s a good site to be putting in the rankings.
I’ll be working on that site and reporting that result here, but so far the results are still pretty mixed.
The second thing I wanted to talk to you about, I just released a video on the blog that you might want to check out, I’ve started doing some video blogging while driving. I don’t recommend this, but you can check it out and see what you think. I’m always stuck in the car and I can put my Flip recorder on the dash and get some video and tell you what’s on my mind.
Lately I’ve been thinking about these tools that Jonathan Leger has released; ArticleBuilder.net and Keyword Canine. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could do almost a fully automated site with a little bit of promotion and see what would happen and document that as an experiment. I’ve got this up and running in the snoring niche and the first video is out on the blog, you can check that out. You can either watch the video or it’s also transcribed there if you’d prefer to read the post.
Basically what I’m doing is I’ve intentionally picked the snoring niche because I was able to find a good keyword to attack in Keyword Canine about snoring and snoring is one of the supported categories in ArticleBuilder.net. The reason I like Article Builder is because it creates articles that while they’re private label rights they’re pretty high quality, there’s value to those articles.
Jon has added some automated monetization schemes to ArticleBuilder.net and he’s also automatically able to include graphics from Flickr. Those are two really cool things. If you’re interested in checking out Article Builder and you’d like to support the show, you’re certainly welcome to use my affiliate link at MasonWorld.com/ab. Otherwise you can just go to ArticleBuilder.net and check it out yourself.
So those are a couple of experiments that I’ve been working on and getting some real work done. There are some stalled experiments that I’m going to pick up again. One stalled experiment is the original Niche Site Duel site, the guitar site that I had started over a year ago. It’s still ranking even though I’ve done nothing to it. I’ve not monetized it gets traffic.
I’ve decided what I’m going to do for that and I’m going to start working on that, so be watching for some discussion on that on the blog. I’m going to turn that into an affiliate site where I try to sell “learn to play guitar” things from Clickbank and other places, so that will be interesting and you can watch for that.
The other thing that I want to do is on the Open Niche Project, which was another thing I was working on that also got stalled, I’ll probably retool that and merge the Niche Site Duel and the Open Niche Project into one thing because they’re very similar.
What I want to do is transparently and openly work on what I consider to be a real niche site. Playing the guitar is something I care a little bit about, I’ve been playing on and off since I was 12, so I’d like to create a good resource for people who play guitar. I think that’s a really good marriage of those two. Watch for that, I’ll be working on that here shortly.
Dallas Area Meetup
Before I forget, I did want to mention that I put a post out on the Mason World blog about a week ago where I mentioned that I am interested in having a Dallas area meetup if there is some interest. I already had a couple of people on the blog mention that they’d like to do that. I get a request for this periodically and I’ve never really done anything about it.
Sometime in late August or early September I’d like to set a meeting location if there’s enough interest and just get together and have a cup of coffee and talk internet marketing with anyone that might be within the sound of my voice that’s interested in appearing in the north Dallas area, maybe at a coffee shop or a pub or something like that.
Of course it’s Late Night Internet Marketing for me, so that would be one option or maybe a lunch. We can talk it out once we see what the interest is. If you’ve got interest in that, head on over to MasonWorld.com/meetup and leave me a comment on that blog post or a comment on the show here and we can certainly see what we can put together.
And now for something completely different and unexpected…
Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie
Sometimes at the very end of the show I say something crazy for those of you that hang around until the end of the music. Last time I promised internet marketing fortune cookie, a new segment on the podcast. I don’t know if it will stick or not. Years ago I did these blog posts called internet marketing fortune cookie where I operated under the theory that all fortune cookies told you something about internet marketing, they had internet marketing wisdom.
Sure enough, I got a fortune cookie that says:
Your love of music will be an important part of your life.
This is already true for me, but it was a clear sign that I had to go ahead and crank that LearnGuitarBasics.net site back up and get back into the Open Niche Duel. (Pat crushed it, by the way.)
I think everything in life can be revealed through the greatness of the fortune cookie and certainly internet marketing truths are evident in every fortune cookie you eat. I challenge you, the next time you eat a fortune cookie to read what it says and you will find important internet marketing wisdom therein.
Review Site Tips – Getting Content
I’m embarking on doing some of these review sites, particularly getting back into LearnGuitarBasic.net, which I’m going to make a review site. I think probably the snoring experiment that I have, initially it will have all automated content but eventually there will be some reviews of snoring related products on there.
The question comes – what do you do for content for a review site? I think there are some options you can consider, I just wanted to go through some of those.
If you’ve ever considered doing a review site let me say that one of the things that frustrates me so much as a consumer and as a user of Google is when I try to look for a real review and I see some things that are obviously ridiculous affiliate marketing reviews.
If you’re going to create a review site, just for me, create a good one with a real review. Don’t write reviews just to sell stuff, write reviews that actually help people. It’s a good way to think about internet marketing – try to add real value. Putting up junky review sites does not add real value. Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox on that.
Of course the very best product reviews are probably product reviews that you do yourself. You can write product reviews where you make a list of products that you review and you review the features of each one and start writing about them. Write about your experience. Pat Flynn recently mentioned on his blog about the power of unboxing videos, those can be really good parts of reviews.
You can also write product comparisons. People are always looking for help on making appropriate product decisions and when there are two competing products if you can find a way to compare them that’s great.
Include photos of products if you’ve got your hands on the product, or screenshots if it’s a software product. Videos, again, are very powerful. In addition to unboxing videos you can take videos of yourself demonstrating the product, you can also get videos of people talking about the product. With that latter one of people talking about the product, make sure they’re real. People go to jail over fake product reviews – don’t be one of those people. Tell the truth, add value, be transparent, and you’ll like the results a lot better.
There are also free sources for reviews. If you read the terms and conditions of the Amazon Associates program, you’re allowed to display the review details from Amazon on your website. Not the actual text. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one on TV, but as I read the terms and conditions, I don’t think you’re really allowed to show the text of the reviews but you can show the ratings and the number of reviews and you can make it so that users can click through to see them.
In order to do this I use a plug-in called PHPzon and you can check that out at MasonWorld.com/phpzon. It does all that kind of stuff automatically, which is really cool. That’s a way to get review-like information on your site and that will help users.
You can also get plug-ins that allow users to add their own reviews and rankings to the site. Kind of blog comments, if you start getting enough traffic you can get user generated content on your site to help you with reviews. You can also embed other people’s YouTube videos. The terms and conditions for YouTube allow you to do that.
You may have your own review site, but you can embed someone else’s unboxing video, that’s perfectly legal and allowed. In that case, you really are providing a service, you’re curating content – finding the best unboxing videos, the best collection of information on YouTube and adding it to your site so that everything that a user needs can be in one location.
You can also find some decent reviews in reprint article directories, like EzineArticles.com. I’m not a super huge fan of this approach because it requires you to publish the resource box which is going to drive traffic away from your site. But you can certainly look at that and you can find content. If content is your biggest problem, EzineArticles is still a way to go for that.
Finally, I’d say what I’d probably do the most often is pay for reviews and you can hire a ghost writer. Sometimes you can find really cool private label rights content that incorporates reviews where people are doing reviews and selling those reviews as PLR content. That can work really good, especially if the content is good. You can look at Alice Seba and Nicole Dean (who have both been on the show before) for those kinds of PLR content to use on your site. You can hire a ghost writer, of course. Lately I’ve been using Media Piston for this kind of work, that’s over at MediaPiston.com. I really like those guys, they have really quality content. Once you find a really good writer over there you can stick with them and get some really good results.
Those are my thoughts on how to get review content. Hopefully that’s helpful to you. If you’re thinking about building a review site, just make sure it’s a good one, make sure you tell the truth so that you don’t get in trouble with the FTC, make sure that you disclose your affiliate links so that you don’t get in trouble with the FTC, and you can really generate some real value through the magic of the review site and rank for some cool products and help people make good buying decisions that will make their life better. After all, that is what we should be all about.
It was a little bit of a short show today because it’s 1:00 AM and later this morning I’m headed to Mexico. My wife and I are finally going to find a little time to sneak off and see if we can dodge the hurricanes down in the Yucatan long enough to get some sunshine, play around on the beach, maybe hit the spa. I’m going to see if I can’t get this episode in the can and get to bed.
I’m struggling to get back on a weekly podcast schedule. That is my plan, but I am still struggling so I’m not quite weekly yet. Bear with me. If you want to help me and encourage me, you’re certainly welcome to head on over to iTunes and leave us a review – love those.
Another thing that I’d like to incorporate on the show, if you’re interested, is some listener questions. One of my favorite on some of these internet marketing shows and other types of shows when listeners write in with a question, a lot of times those are of interest to everybody. Even better is to call in with a question and you can do that on my voice feedback line at 214-444-8655, call and leave me a question. Don’t worry, I’m not going to pick up the phone, it’s a Google Voice line. Even it takes you two or three takes, I’d love to hear from you and hear your question and I’d love to use it on the air and plug your website while I’m doing it.
The other thing I’ll say is in the message, be sure and leave your email so I can respond back to you by email if I need to. I won’t play your email on the air, but leave it for me and we’ll go from there. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I hope you’re having an absolutely fantastic week. Talk to you soon.
