What makes an article so good that they tell everyone they know?

Benefits of reading this post:

• Links, people talk = rankings
• Reputation – People like you = sales
• Viral Tell A Friend Traffic

Why bother writing “Content for search engines?”

When’s the last time a search engine ever bought anything from you? Even if they did, ironically when’s the last time it worked?!? If users don’t find it valuable they don’t link to it, they don’t tell their friends, they don’t bookmark it or do anything at all! They just feel mis-lead and quickly go to a site with more value and more material that they *DO* find useful.

The critical parts of a “useful” article.

Honesty – I don’t just mean telling the truth and not lying (although that’s important) but sounding sincere and trustable. Telling personal anecdotes and giving real life examples. This is one key reason that Youtube does so well… I mean how can you not trust someone on a camera doing what they do right in front if you, you can see their face, their honesty, it’s all there!

Tips – Including tips and useful advice (even stuff that seems incredibly simple) that could help others  in some small way, sharing your insight and wisdom – or a tip you found somewhere else. The best kind of tips aren’t just the advice but also hands on WALKTHRUS with photos, etc or at least step-by-step.

New Information – Covering a topic everyone wants to hear about that you know something about or that you have the time to better research than others do. It’s super easy to dig up information and further expand on a fresh news topic or software bug, or guru launch or whatever’s going on in your industry and add your spin to it.

Pictures, Charts, Video – Some of the juiciest posts I’ve ever read, bookmarked, shared and practically yelled and screamed about had all kinds of visual resources helping make the information not so bland, I mean really the more images and examples (even if they’re just off a stock photo site) are very beneficial to making content feel interesting and valuable.

Humans – Oh yes, them too. Interviewing experts, asking expert’s opinions, interviewing by email, getting an audio, phone or in-person interview, any way that you can get some additional advice on a topic and round that out into a story or solve a problem with that information that your searchers are looking for.

Compilation – Find all the sources around the web talking about a certain topic and state their point’s of view and state your source (you don’t have to link back to them, just mention where you got the info) I did that same thing in my article about Google Caffeine. Yeah, sure it took a bit of time, but I truly believe that I had – on that day – the best Caffeine article there was on the internet covering what we know about the topic at this point. I haven’t researched it quite as thoroughly as I had then, so I can’t confidently say the same now… But it *WAS* that darn good.

Keywords – Yes, you must base your article, writeup or blog post on KEYWORDS you must do keyword research and discover what it is that people are searching for and base your topic on that, even (if you have time) go as far as to write directly about a specific phrase with little competition… BUT – yep there is a but – consider all the other phrases in the list and other sub-areas that those folks wanted to know about. Try not to get SEO paralysis in that you’re only writing for the search engines… Remember, search engine spiders don’t have credit cards.

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Envision this article on your website that has:

• A list of resources from other sources using the compilation method
• A interview with someone
• Fresh news OR your take on fresh news and some backgrounder
• An Honest review or experience you had
• A juicy tip you discovered
• Pictures, charts, video or a diagram of some kind

Remember the last time you requested a link?

“Here’s a page I want you to link to… I’m selling something, but it’s REALLY good!”

Yeah – right! And they linked to you, didn’t they? NOT!

And now…

“Here’s a page that’s really valuable, and I think your readers will find it very useful and entertaining”

What do you think the response to THAT would be? Exactly…

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Stop! Are you about to write an article because of some keyword you found on a keyword tool? If you are, and you’re basing it off just ONE keyword tool and not considering all related words, consider this…

We offer a service for $29.95USD where we examine 3 keyword sources, mash all the data together giving you a complete bird’s eye view organized by search volume and number of words…  You KNOW that Google doesn’t give you ALL the search phrases for your niche when you ask, neither do the other engines, but with results from all 3 COMBINED, you can’t lose.

Free Sample – Click the Excel Image to see what our keyword reports look like.

$29.95 – Order a keyword report right now! Just tell us the keyword phrase and you should expect your report within 1-3 business days (1 business day in most cases, but it’s important to be realistic if we’re busy…)

Many of the information and advice I post on here from time to time is straight technical traffic strategies and that was my original intention. However, it’s been on my mind to pass on some of the hard lessons of 2009.

For the last 6 years, I’ve provided SEO, Copywriting, PPC, and a whole heap of other services through my company, AnswersWanted Inc designed to boost client website traffic and of course, sales.

With the issues facing the american economy, I was forced to many jobs this last year that aren’t really my specialty… Things like accounting, sales, customer service, contract writing, and a whole host of other hats that I’d never had to wear… This forced me to learn some amazing lessons worth their weight in gold that I’d like to pass on to my friends and readers.

The Top Lessons in Offering SEO Services as A Freelancer…

#1. Always ALWAYS get a signed contract…

Yeah, small job, right? No need to get it all out on paper! I mean, seriously this job is going to be super simple and the client understands all the technicalities, and all the challenges etc… YEAH RIGHT!

Truth is, if you don’t outline what your offering, what your expecting from them, how much you expect to make, where you’ll meet, how often you’ll report, how many hours they get, where they’re money is going etc..

And.. plan for what happens if your strategy or plan doesn’t work… Sure, it worked the last 36 times, but that doesn’t matter. Plan for when it stops working and write a plan in your contracts for what then…

#2. NEVER offer anything free…

Seems so rude, rough and mean to say… In fact it’s hard for a guy like me to say that… over the years I’ve offered so many things free… Consultations, meetings, analysis, research… I want to help clients so badly that I’ll do anything to ensure they succeed…

Aaron Wall pointed out some time ago, and it’s a well known fact in business that the more you offer free, the more they want free. It never ends and it continues to de-value your work… Completely un-doing all the reputation earning and hard work you’ve done…

One day, you deliver an invoice and they scoff at it… How dare you charge? You’ve done it free all this time! Both you and the customer loose.

#3. Set expectations and deliver on them

Always create deadlines, and communicate them to your clients. Put things on the calendar, always give projects and jobs a timeline and stick to it. Just like being late for an interview, no one hires someone 15 minutes late. Always be on time, always set a deadline and meet or BEAT it.

Not only expectations within time, but expectations about the project…. How much traffic will a customer get with your strategy? How many keywords you focusing on? How many media outlets you distributing to? Seems like lots of work ironing out those details, but it’ll burn you if you don’t.

#4. Set specific hours, and take breaks.

Insanely important to not answer emails, phone calls or text messages related to work during your off time. You’ll never have a girlfriend or a wife very long if you’re taking calls, emails and texts during dinner, anniversary’s or honeymoons.

It’s not only that, having downtime helps you think, it helps you rest and prepare for a hard week. Some weeks might feel like you need less or more. In the end it’s like air, you don’t know how badly you need rest until you stop taking it.

#5. Don’t answer your phone

I’d even go as far as to say turn off your cell phone and office line durring business hours and respond to voicemails twice a day. Never answer calls… Why? When someone calls you if you respond while in the middle of a project they steal your time, your productivity and your energy.. They can blind-side you when you’re not prepared for it.. They control that call because they initiated it…

Let the voice mail catch it, educate your customers to leave DETAILED messages or they don’t get response… You can follow up via email if they phoned to check the number on an invoice or some other insignificant thing…

** Update ** – This isn’t really targeted toward 100% of clients, but i’m sure you have call display, and some clients can easily phone so much that you don’t get any work done. Anita and others are right though, there should be some hours you turn off the phone maybe 3-4 hours a day and just focus on work. Turn off MSN, Gtalk and other distractions too. Rich Schefren I think talks about the 45 minute egg timer of focused work for productivity too.

This isn’t my suggestion to IGNORE folks, or not provide good customer service. These are critical. What most probably don’t realize when reading this is that my business model often includes a weekly or every 2 week conference call. Not always, but often. With a setup like that, we’re always keeping in touch.

#6. Use some kind of online organization

One saving grace that has helped me over the last 2 years more than anyone knows is my Wiki. I use it like a CRM system for managing customers and clients.. I don’t always remember to use it for everything, but even just for passwords and contact info it has been a life saver. I can access it from home, office, client places and everywhere. It’s amazing.

#7. Trust your gut instincts all the way

Yeah, it’s hard if you don’t have a strong self esteem to trust your guts… and sometimes it’s tough to NOT take a deal or contract with a pushy client if your struggling for money, but trust me… Don’t do it. Your guts are the most useful business tool you have and the right opportunity will come along and you’ll know it, and when it’s not… your instincts are vital.

A few times I’ve looked at working with clients where it just didnt’ feel right, but I was in a position where I needed an extra gap filled to keep all my staff employed… and when my gut told me no,  I took the deal and it backfired.

#8. Startups…

In the contracting world, whether it’s SEO, PPC or any other service… Unless you own it, or own 50% of it… You really don’t wanna help startups in many cases. They don’t know how valuable your services really are, they may never understand, they may not have proven their product or have a good conversion rate… It could be complete garbage… Most independent contractors will tell you that the best clients are those who have spent $10,000 on a magazine ad “test” and failed.. living only to test again.. Startups spend $1000 and cry all the way the bank.

Some startups, organized and started by folks who have started many businesses before could be a perfect fit… but trust your gut before working with just anyone.

Anyway, to any contractor looking for advice re-selling internet marketing services, these are some of my biggest lessons that should make 2010 the best year ever.

Daniel J Deyette

I know, I know old news is just so exciting isn’t it? So when I tell you that overture, Wordtracker, Google Keyword tool and others all seem to have 2 or 3+ month old data, should that really surprise you?

Not really, Google’s honest about it right in their stats showing “monthly search volume for october” right now when you search and it’s NOVEMBER!!!

Where’s november’s stats?

Well, if you wanted to, you could use Google’s Insight’s for Search and that does seem to show the RISING stats, but only shows the top 5, so if you want some more detailed data or the LONG tail phrases which show what people REALLY want, and not just the top trends… Then your simply out of luck. Google doesn’t provide this.

I Checked nichebot, and a few others, because the niche i’m looking into right now is actually SO NEW, that there’s no data in Google or any other keyword research tool I’ve looked at yet, because it only came out early November kinda range…

Being a technical electronic device, people are bound to have questions and problems with this product and in this niche just as they did with previous version of this product and there’s a need for an online resource about it, but where do you get that research??

There’s no “Twitter” Of keyword research yet… But is there?

Introducing 7Search’s keyword research tool. Thru quite a bit of testing, it’s proven to show me active volume of searches that ARE happening in the last two weeks. I dunno if it’s a fluke or not, but getting long tail phrases AS they happen lets you write blog posts about what people care about TODAY!!! and not one or two months ago!

Note, I see that it says these searches are from October, but thru testing — But there are some search volumes showing for certain features & options that weren’t available in October… So their tool even though it SAYS october is showing newer searches.

Boy is that ever useful!

Daniel J Deyette

Well, Despite my worst fears, it finally arrived. I haven’t had much time to throughly test it, yet so I can’t say much… What I *will* say is despite the battery cover being a pain in the butt to operate that this thing is very slick, the keyboard is more than adequate and the web browser is actually very impressive.

What shocked me was this blog loaded perfectly fine, where on my old one it woudln’t load the CSS but I could read the articles… It works brilliantly.

The trackpad definitely takes some getting used to, so that’ll be an odd adjustment… I’ll report later on battery life, picture quality and other things.

I made numerous reports on various sites complaining , and complaining and complaining some more that I had not received it, I ordered it on a tuesday, and 3 weeks later it finally got here… THAT i’m not impressed with. I phoned Yesterday (Thursday) and said that if it wasn’t on it’s way I was going to cancel it. I didn’t need to be bothered and emotionally upset by how long it was taking that badly, I could wait until they worked the bugs out of the silly thing.

I go by Dano77 on most places, and Thumbtyper on some bberry forums.

Another question from the old email grab bag…

"how to make my website searchable?"

Good question!

I’m a big fan of the Google CSE for basic sites and even some moderately advanced ones…  It’s not complicated to use and it lets you build a search engine that only searches your website and even collect money if someone clicks on an ad.

Truth is, it seems Google has perfected the art of finding things based on phrases, similar words and popularity even within a single site and you’ll see by many government websites that it’s almost never a good idea to try and build your own search engine from scratch or rely on basic text searches which may bring up very relavent and extremely old documents! … And that sucks!

Google won’t do that to you.

Until next time,
Daniel J Deyette

I thought I’d take the time to answer some emails that I get from time to time here on my blog.

This week’s question was "how to make my website appear on google?"

I’ve spoken to this topic tons of times at various events and conferences, but the gyst is based on these 3 things.

Relevance (having the words you want to show up for somewhere on your site)

Popularity (having other sites linking to you)

Trust (having a site that’s old, or having older sites link to you)

Now that is an extreme over-simplification of a very complicated algorithm, but let me share some secrets if you’re new to the game and NOT trying to rank for competitive terms.

To get your site into the Google index and appear for searches like YOUR name or business name, directory submissions at places like Business.com, Yahoo Directory and such can help BIG time. Another great trick is using eBay’s Kijiji.ca where for only $1.00 via paypal you can get a link that gets listed in Google pretty rapidly in most cases.

Are you trying to rank for a phrase that’s really competitive? Is it going to be REALLY hard to rank for?

I wrote an entire book on this topic, but if the sites your going up against are really old, or have tons of popularity, you might consider re-visiting the Google keyword research tool for less competitive phrases.

Until next time!

Experts have said for months that Yahoo has really given up the ghost, by "selling out" to Microsoft letting Bing run the search engine instead of Yahoo’s engine.
Yahoo’s apparently addressing that issue on their marketing blog discussing "the next wave of search" .

Yahoo posted how they are still creating innovations in search, paid advertising and consumer relevance.

Yahoo, I know your trying to remain viable… But the MS deal still seems like a sell out. Even if Yahoo does come up with all kinds of innovations in the search market, I still can’t see them being a viable business in the long term unless something somewhat dramatic changes in the background.

When doing keyword research for online marketing of any kind, one of the hardest things to do right is think LATTERALLY. Search engines tend to be able to do this better than humans in some cases when it comes to thinking up all the different ways someone might search for something with the same intention.

Then Comes Google Wonder Wheel, I invite you to go check it out…

P.S. I stole this picture from www.googlewonderwheel.com

Every Retailer from Futureshop to Fraser Valley Wireless has no Blackberry Bold 9700’s in stock even
though promised by the cellular Giant “Rogers Wireless Inc”. They’ve released no official statement however
many customers are upset and finding they do not have the product they ordered.

http://www.pocketberry.com/2009/11/06/rogers-canada-runs-out-of-the-blackberry-bold-9700/

I know, folks who are waiting diligently for the marketing advice I’ve made myself famous for are going to kill me with all these Blackberry posts.

Truth is that I could do what I do without my Blackberry 9000 and Now, It’ll be with the Bold 9700 once it arrives on Friday or Monday. Clients would be come angry and
upset if they found out some days I have to run around to banks, programmers, designers and other labor sources to get jobs done and didn’t get their emails answered or
Inquiries dealt with in a timely fashion.

Blackberry 9700 Themes

Yes, they’re not practical and they can slow a device down, but truth is when I see a happy picture on my device thru the day it makes me stay positive.
Apparently the secret is the Bold 9700 will be using the same themes and designs as the Tour 8900 that I yelled & screamed about in a previous article. So if you see any themes out there for that broken feature poor Blackberry 8900 that look appealing… They should be compatable with the Blackberry Bold 9700!

All for now.