Ecommerce Blog

Unbelievable as it may sound but a 2 year old WordPress blog run by just 1 person sold this week for $15m (£8.5m). The blog is Bankaholic.com and the press release about the sale can be found here.

On the surface this looks like a too-good-to-be-true scenario for the owner. After all the blog does reasonably well in terms of traffic and visitors but it’s certainly no Facebook. The site receives about 8500 visitors per month, is ranked 41,904 by Alexa, has a Google PageRank of 5 and has approx. 27,220 inbound links.

So whilst traffic and links etc. are certainly very healthy, is a site with that level of traffic worth £8.5m? I believe that the secret to such a high valuation is down to 2 things: the sector and the keywords that it ranks well for.

The Sector

The purpose of Bankaholic is to provide information on US bank accounts, credit cards, and other consumer finance products. The site is simple, easy to use and most importantly contains useful and well thought out information and product reviews.

As any finance affiliate will tell you however, the finance sector is one of the most competitive but also rewarding sectors to be involved in. Affiliate CPA’s for this sector are pretty much the highest available of all sectors, and therefore competition is steep.

However, do well in this sector and as we have just seen, the rewards can be very high. By focusing on finance, Johns (the blog owner) has made sure that he can command a selling price that is comparable to the high payouts available in this sector. For example this sort of valuation would never happen in retail. If the blog was a blog about clothing, discount codes, gadgets or anything else from the retail sector then I doubt very much it would command such a high asking price - especially with comparable levels of traffic. There just isn’t the margin in retail.

So by picking an ultra-competitive but highly rewarding niche your traffic and users are 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 times more valuable than less competitive sectors. Something to consider if you’re just about to launch your blog but aren’t sure on what sector to pick.

SEO

I’ve always said that WordPress blogs seem to do well in the search engines natural rankings, and this certainly seems to be the case with Bankaholic. Look at this bit from the press release:

“Bankaholic is ranked high in natural search for both deposit and credit card keywords. We believe their organic traffic will increase our deposit and credit card revenue, and with a high composition of free traffic, will help to improve margins”

Those wise words were from Thomas R. Evans, new owner of Bankaholic.

It’s clear that the key to the value of this blog, is it’s ability to rank well in the search engines for finance related keywords and keyphrases. So how do you rank well in the SERPS? Well as I’ve always said the 2 most important off page SEO elements are fresh regular unique content and inbound links.

The site clearly has loads of fresh content that seems to be updated daily, a great starting point. More importantly, the content isn’t just some existing content just rehashed and cobbled together by robots, it’s written by humans and is interesting to read.

For a site that’s only just over 2 years old, having over 27,000 inbound links is also clearly having a positive effect in terms of the SERPS. Again the blog owner has understood the importance of this and clearly worked hard at it.

So to summarise, here’s how to create a blog that will sell for millions of pounds:

Step 1: Use WordPress - WordPress is just a fantastically easy tool to use and is free, another bonus. But most importantly the search engines seem to love it and it’s already configured to create pages for you that are search engine friendly.

Step 2: Pick a profitable niche - If you’re creating a blog with the intention of making money from it, gathering a user base and eventually selling it on. Then pick a sector where there are lots of buyers with lots of cash to throw at you when the time comes.

Step 3: Write original, fresh and interesting content regularly for your users - I can’t over-emphasise the importance of this. A lot of people try to game the search engines by just throwing low grade content at a site/blog and hoping that some will stick with the search engines. It may do, but not for long. A much better option is to sit down every day and write an article that you yourself would like to read if you were reading your blog. This will ensure that not only will the search engines eat it up but your users will keep coming back for more as well as recommending your site to others. A prime example of this, is this very blog. I have never ever seeked out any links to it, yet according to Yahoo! Site Explorer there are over 12,000.

Step 4: Get other sites to link to yours - If you do Step 3 well you will find that other sites will link to you without being asked. You will become an “authority” in your space without ever asking for a link. Then if you actively start a linking campaign on top of all the natural links (by natural I mean the links that you don’t go out and seek yourself) you will see your site slowly start to rise through the SERPS. One thing I would advise against is paying for links. Never ever ever go down this route. Google doesn’t like it and will penalise your site if you get found out. Personally I much prefer a “clean” approach to link building, it may take slightly longer than buying links but you will stay in the SERPS with no danger of being kicked out for any wrongdoing.

That’s all there is to it! If all of the above sounds simple then it’s because it is. However don’t underestimate how much hard work steps 3 and 4 take. Both take up a considerable amount of time and resources and there are no “short cuts”. You need to invest the time to make your blog a success but if you do, the rewards will follow.

ContentNow.co.uk

I didn’t write this article with the purpose of promoting my content writing and link building business but as I created the business to help me facilitate steps 3 and 4 for my sites, I would be remiss not to mention it here.

Let me start by saying that if you have the time to write your own content and do your own link building then you absolutely should. However if you are short of time and have a budget for marketing/SEO then I don’t see anything wrong in getting some outside help.

At ContentNow both myself and my business partner have and still do run websites and know the difficulties in getting inbound links to your site and writing engaging good quality content. Which is exactly why we set the business up, to meet this need. Like many other webmasters we have both tried to outsource link building and content writing to other companies - mainly with disastrous results. In the past I’ve found myself having to pay for articles clearly written by writers who don’t speak English as their native tongue and whose only talent is being able to cut and paste from Wikipedia. Likewise I’ve paid for linkbuilding services that have resulted in nothing more than links placed on the link building companies “farm” of 1000 sites.

So with our joint past experiences setting up ContentNow was easy, all we had to do was the opposite of what every other company who we have had bad experiences in the past does.

Our content writers, researchers and proof readers are all based in the UK and speak English as their native language. They all understand the culture, as they live here and they are all well educated and can write intelligently and even with humour when required. Likewise our link building managers are all UK based, and absolutely understand the industry and the approaches to take when dealing with potential link partners.

OK, I’ve already gone on far too long about ContentNow - I could go on for pages and pages as I’m passionate about it - but I don’t want to bore you all

Instead I’ll leave the last word to our clients, here are some quotes from a couple of emails we’ve received this last week:

“The content has been fantastic and very engaging – exactly what we are looking for.”

“I have now received all 20 articles, thank you very much, it is clear that your writers have properly researched the subject and the writing style shows a strong command of the English language.”

What I’m listening to right now: Jazmine Sullivan - “Fearless”

Post from: Affiliate Marketing Blog Here.org.uk

How to sell your 2 year old blog for £8.5m

Share This

Original post by Kieron

Unbelievable as it may sound but a 2 year old WordPress blog run by just 1 person sold this week for $15m (£8.5m). The blog is Bankaholic.com and the press release about the sale can be found here.

On the surface this looks like a too-good-to-be-true scenario for the owner. After all the blog does reasonably well in terms of traffic and visitors but it’s certainly no Facebook. The site receives about 8500 visitors per month, is ranked 41,904 by Alexa, has a Google PageRank of 5 and has approx. 27,220 inbound links.

So whilst traffic and links etc. are certainly very healthy, is a site with that level of traffic worth £8.5m? I believe that the secret to such a high valuation is down to 2 things: the sector and the keywords that it ranks well for.

The Sector

The purpose of Bankaholic is to provide information on US bank accounts, credit cards, and other consumer finance products. The site is simple, easy to use and most importantly contains useful and well thought out information and product reviews.

As any finance affiliate will tell you however, the finance sector is one of the most competitive but also rewarding sectors to be involved in. Affiliate CPA’s for this sector are pretty much the highest available of all sectors, and therefore competition is steep.

However, do well in this sector and as we have just seen, the rewards can be very high. By focusing on finance, Johns (the blog owner) has made sure that he can command a selling price that is comparable to the high payouts available in this sector. For example this sort of valuation would never happen in retail. If the blog was a blog about clothing, discount codes, gadgets or anything else from the retail sector then I doubt very much it would command such a high asking price - especially with comparable levels of traffic. There just isn’t the margin in retail.

So by picking an ultra-competitive but highly rewarding niche your traffic and users are 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 times more valuable than less competitive sectors. Something to consider if you’re just about to launch your blog but aren’t sure on what sector to pick.

SEO

I’ve always said that WordPress blogs seem to do well in the search engines natural rankings, and this certainly seems to be the case with Bankaholic. Look at this bit from the press release:

“Bankaholic is ranked high in natural search for both deposit and credit card keywords. We believe their organic traffic will increase our deposit and credit card revenue, and with a high composition of free traffic, will help to improve margins”

Those wise words were from Thomas R. Evans, new owner of Bankaholic.

It’s clear that the key to the value of this blog, is it’s ability to rank well in the search engines for finance related keywords and keyphrases. So how do you rank well in the SERPS? Well as I’ve always said the 2 most important off page SEO elements are fresh regular unique content and inbound links.

The site clearly has loads of fresh content that seems to be updated daily, a great starting point. More importantly, the content isn’t just some existing content just rehashed and cobbled together by robots, it’s written by humans and is interesting to read.

For a site that’s only just over 2 years old, having over 27,000 inbound links is also clearly having a positive effect in terms of the SERPS. Again the blog owner has understood the importance of this and clearly worked hard at it.

So to summarise, here’s how to create a blog that will sell for millions of pounds:

Step 1: Use WordPress - WordPress is just a fantastically easy tool to use and is free, another bonus. But most importantly the search engines seem to love it and it’s already configured to create pages for you that are search engine friendly.

Step 2: Pick a profitable niche - If you’re creating a blog with the intention of making money from it, gathering a user base and eventually selling it on. Then pick a sector where there are lots of buyers with lots of cash to throw at you when the time comes.

Step 3: Write original, fresh and interesting content regularly for your users - I can’t over-emphasise the importance of this. A lot of people try to game the search engines by just throwing low grade content at a site/blog and hoping that some will stick with the search engines. It may do, but not for long. A much better option is to sit down every day and write an article that you yourself would like to read if you were reading your blog. This will ensure that not only will the search engines eat it up but your users will keep coming back for more as well as recommending your site to others. A prime example of this, is this very blog. I have never ever seeked out any links to it, yet according to Yahoo! Site Explorer there are over 12,000.

Step 4: Get other sites to link to yours - If you do Step 3 well you will find that other sites will link to you without being asked. You will become an “authority” in your space without ever asking for a link. Then if you actively start a linking campaign on top of all the natural links (by natural I mean the links that you don’t go out and seek yourself) you will see your site slowly start to rise through the SERPS. One thing I would advise against is paying for links. Never ever ever go down this route. Google doesn’t like it and will penalise your site if you get found out. Personally I much prefer a “clean” approach to link building, it may take slightly longer than buying links but you will stay in the SERPS with no danger of being kicked out for any wrongdoing.

That’s all there is to it! If all of the above sounds simple then it’s because it is. However don’t underestimate how much hard work steps 3 and 4 take. Both take up a considerable amount of time and resources and there are no “short cuts”. You need to invest the time to make your blog a success but if you do, the rewards will follow.

ContentNow.co.uk

I didn’t write this article with the purpose of promoting my content writing and link building business but as I created the business to help me facilitate steps 3 and 4 for my sites, I would be remiss not to mention it here.

Let me start by saying that if you have the time to write your own content and do your own link building then you absolutely should. However if you are short of time and have a budget for marketing/SEO then I don’t see anything wrong in getting some outside help.

At ContentNow both myself and my business partner have and still do run websites and know the difficulties in getting inbound links to your site and writing engaging good quality content. Which is exactly why we set the business up, to meet this need. Like many other webmasters we have both tried to outsource link building and content writing to other companies - mainly with disastrous results. In the past I’ve found myself having to pay for articles clearly written by writers who don’t speak English as their native tongue and whose only talent is being able to cut and paste from Wikipedia. Likewise I’ve paid for linkbuilding services that have resulted in nothing more than links placed on the link building companies “farm” of 1000 sites.

So with our joint past experiences setting up ContentNow was easy, all we had to do was the opposite of what every other company who we have had bad experiences in the past does.

Our content writers, researchers and proof readers are all based in the UK and speak English as their native language. They all understand the culture, as they live here and they are all well educated and can write intelligently and even with humour when required. Likewise our link building managers are all UK based, and absolutely understand the industry and the approaches to take when dealing with potential link partners.

OK, I’ve already gone on far too long about ContentNow - I could go on for pages and pages as I’m passionate about it - but I don’t want to bore you all

Instead I’ll leave the last word to our clients, here are some quotes from a couple of emails we’ve received this last week:

“The content has been fantastic and very engaging – exactly what we are looking for.”

“I have now received all 20 articles, thank you very much, it is clear that your writers have properly researched the subject and the writing style shows a strong command of the English language.”

What I’m listening to right now: Jazmine Sullivan - “Fearless”

Post from: Affiliate Marketing Blog Here.org.uk

How to sell your 2 year old blog for £8.5m

Share This

Original post by Kieron

I hope Lyndon from CornwallSEO.com can forgive me from using his quote for the title of this blog post. When I saw it on this article I just had to use it as it’s what I’ve been preaching about for years now. Lots of people ask what it takes to launch a successful website/blog and I always, always tell them they just to write good old fashioned interesting content. That’s it, no magic formula, no secrets, no shortcuts, no black hat techniques just write about something interesting with passion and people will keep coming back for more. Plus the search engines will eat it up.

So many people over optimise their websites and worry about structure, keyword density, tags, the colour of socks that they wear when building a site and so on. Now while these are all slightly important I wouldn’t waste too much of my effort on them. In fact Google themselves just blogged about optimising your site for Google search. And as you can see it’s not rocket science.

Another slightly worrying trend is the reliance of building traffic through the social network sites and the likes of Digg etc. People seem to build blog posts purely as linkbait so they can get to the Digg homepage etc. Instead of just writing something that is genuinely interesting and of use to your visitors. Or they can spend thousands of pounds on creating a viral or Facebook ap that they hope will be the next “big thing”. The problem is that even if you succeed (as Patrick writes) this type of traffic from the likes of TechCrunch and Digg isn’t what it used to be.

All of the above is why I launched ContentNow.co.uk. We supply quality hand written content that can supplement your own content - or even account for all of it - and help you with your rankings in the search engine results. That coupled with our ethical link building services can really make a big difference. Like I said above, it’s not rocket science or a dark art, it’s just hard work and high quality that will get you results. Luckily (as it’s always a bit of a gamble when launching a new business) there are a lot of site owners who know this works well and are utilising our services for their benefit. We’ve had a really fantastic launch and the last four weeks have been flat-out in terms of getting campaigns up and running for our new clients as well as maintaining our high service levels for existing clients. I’ll give a full update of the new business at a later date but just wanted to mention it here as its relevant to this post.

What I’m listening to right now: Christina Milian – “All We Need To Know”

Post from: Affiliate Marketing Blog Here.org.uk

Forget “Content Is King” - “Content IS SEO”

Share This

Original post by Kieron

I hope Lyndon from CornwallSEO.com can forgive me from using his quote for the title of this blog post. When I saw it on this article I just had to use it as it’s what I’ve been preaching about for years now. Lots of people ask what it takes to launch a successful website/blog and I always, always tell them they just to write good old fashioned interesting content. That’s it, no magic formula, no secrets, no shortcuts, no black hat techniques just write about something interesting with passion and people will keep coming back for more. Plus the search engines will eat it up.

So many people over optimise their websites and worry about structure, keyword density, tags, the colour of socks that they wear when building a site and so on. Now while these are all slightly important I wouldn’t waste too much of my effort on them. In fact Google themselves just blogged about optimising your site for Google search. And as you can see it’s not rocket science.

Another slightly worrying trend is the reliance of building traffic through the social network sites and the likes of Digg etc. People seem to build blog posts purely as linkbait so they can get to the Digg homepage etc. Instead of just writing something that is genuinely interesting and of use to your visitors. Or they can spend thousands of pounds on creating a viral or Facebook ap that they hope will be the next “big thing”. The problem is that even if you succeed (as Patrick writes) this type of traffic from the likes of TechCrunch and Digg isn’t what it used to be.

All of the above is why I launched ContentNow.co.uk. We supply quality hand written content that can supplement your own content - or even account for all of it - and help you with your rankings in the search engine results. That coupled with our ethical link building services can really make a big difference. Like I said above, it’s not rocket science or a dark art, it’s just hard work and high quality that will get you results. Luckily (as it’s always a bit of a gamble when launching a new business) there are a lot of site owners who know this works well and are utilising our services for their benefit. We’ve had a really fantastic launch and the last four weeks have been flat-out in terms of getting campaigns up and running for our new clients as well as maintaining our high service levels for existing clients. I’ll give a full update of the new business at a later date but just wanted to mention it here as its relevant to this post.

What I’m listening to right now: Christina Milian – “All We Need To Know”

Post from: Affiliate Marketing Blog Here.org.uk

Forget “Content Is King” - “Content IS SEO”

Share This

Original post by Kieron

Luxury retailer Cartier recently launched a MySpace presence for its Love by Cartier campaign. But it faces an interesting reputation management issue: since MySpace already has hundreds of profiles that use the name Cartier (it is a surname, after all).

If you type in “Cartier MySpace” in Google, this is what you get:

If someone really wants to find the page, they may head over to MySpace and use it’s site search box, and still not find the official page:

You have to type “Love By Cartier” in Google or MySpace to get the link to the Cartier MySpace page (at time of posting, algorithm changes or incoming links to Cartier’s page may change that).

Yahoo’s algorithm does select the right page for “Cartier MySpace”:

Though you can’t control how Google matches pages to the search term (duplicate content filter in action), you can build links to the page you want to rank well to help boost its “Page Rank” which may cause it to beat out other pages in the search engine’s index. (If the search engine indexed 500+ pages from MySpace relevant to the term “Cartier”, it only picks 1 to show in search results, 2 if it uses an indented second result).

Cartier could also nag MySpace to tweak its internal search to rank its page tops for “Cartier” searches, especially since this is an advertising partnership between the two.

This is also an example of why brands should really claim their social network profile names / domains / Facebook Pages and Groups proactively, even if they just sit on them. It’s easy for net citizens to beat you to the punch which makes it harder for you to be found in search engines and social network searches.

3 Things to Die For: Web Analytics Unleashed

Free webinar: July 17th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Avinash Kaushik, Author & Analytics Evangelist, Google
Register to Attend…

You may also like these similar posts:

• Hack Week Part 3 - Scoring a PR8 Link From Google
• Search Within A Search - Good Idea?
• Killer SEO Trick only 1% of Online Retailers Use
• Dodging Duplicate Content Filters While Assisting Affiliates
• Zappos Secret SEO Sauce For Branded Pages

Original post by Linda Bustos

Interview on the latest in link building strategies to help retail SEO with Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts from the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

 

See More IRCE 2008 Interviews…

We conducted 16 interviews with various ecommerce vendors at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

1. How to choose ecommerce software and technology - Bernardine Wu, CEO, FitForCommerce
2. How retailers can sell more online with social commerce - Jay Shaffer, VP Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Powerreviews
3. Hackersafe is now McAfee Secure - Rich Murphy, McAfee
4. The benefits of RIA’s for ecommerce stores - Graeme Grant, COO, Allurent
5. Why online retailers should be blogging - Darren Tomey, VP Sales, Compendium
6. How do ratings and reviews help online retailers? - Sam Decker, Chief Marketing Officer, Bazaarvoice
7. When bad people ruin good online marketing - Ryan Douglas, PlumberSurplus.com
8. Direct international shoppers to local sites automatically - Justin Skogen, Director, Enterprise Sales, DigitalElement
9. The state of affiliate marketing in online retail - Larry Joseloff, VP Content, Shop.org
10. Multi-store retailing - Roy Rubin, CEO, Varien
11. How online stores use images to improve customer experience - Stephen Kristy, CEO, LiquidPixels
12. 5 more videos coming soon…

Subscribe to the Get Elastic RSS feed or by email at the top of the page to be alerted when the remaining interviews become available.

9 Ecommerce Innovations: What’s Now & What’s Next

Free webinar: June 19th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

You may also like these similar posts:

None Found

9 Ecommerce Innovations: What’s Now & What’s Next

Free webinar: June 19th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

You may also like these similar posts:

• How Do Ratings and Reviews Help Online Retailers? - Internet Retailer 2008
• Multi-Store Retailing - Internet Retailer 2008
• Comparison Shopping Engine Tips for Online Retailers - Internet Retailer 2008
• Why Online Retailers Should Be Blogging - Internet Retailer 2008
• New Ecommerce Service Lets You Shop Online With A Friend - Internet Retailer 2008

Original post by Jason Billingsley

I’m really pleased to announce the launch of my new business venture, ContentNow.co.uk!

I launched this service to meet the demands of what I believe to be the two key aspects for achieving strong search engine rankings, namely content writing and link building. I wanted to build a business that would operate to the highest service levels using entirely ethical methods. Let me explain in a bit more detail.

Content Writing:

You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content Is King” many times over the years, especially with reference to Google. The very fact that you still hear people saying it now is because it’s true. If you update your site on a regular basis with fresh, unique, hand written quality content then you will find that not only will Google like it and index your site more regularly, but also your users will too.

The problem we all have in this day and age is that we’re short on time and it does take a lot of time to come up with decent quality unique content. Well that’s where we can help, here are just some of the many benefits of using our services to write unique content for you:

1. All of our content is 100% written by humans. We do NOT use any automated tools to ‘borrow’ content from other websites and reword it in attempt to rapidly create unique content and fool the search engines.
2. We have a team of over 100 highly experienced content writers, researchers and proof readers, many educated to Doctorate level.
3. Our team are all native speakers. UK / English assignments, are always handled by UK nationals. We also have team members capable of writing in other major languages who are located in various countries including the United States. Search engines are becoming increasingly complex and are known to be highly sensitive to spelling, grammar and even semantics (the correct contextual use of words and the overall meaning of the content).
4. Our content articles are all keyword balanced. I.e. they contain an appropriate keyword density / number of occurrences of the target search terms for which the page or article in question is optimised, without appearing to be over-optimised which also attracts a penalty.
5. All prices include research and writing of content followed up by proof reading by a separate proof reading team.
6. Prices start from only £5 per article.

In a nutshell we will ensure that you receive the very highest quality unique content written by knowledgable authors on your chosen topic. We are lucky that our pool of writers contain many people who write not for money but because they enjoy writing. These people will often spend 3 to 4 hours or more researching and writing just 1 single 500 word article. It is then sent to another individual for proofreading.

The main selling point is that the content writing service we provide is QUALITY. Yes, you can get cheaper content written offshore but would you really want to? A lot of it is just existing content repackaged in an attempt to trick the search engines. Click here for more details on our content writing prices and packages.

Link Building:

The second service we offer is link building. Again, we all know how important it is to have links into your site - it’s another of the key determining factors for success in the search engine rankings. However, as above it can be very time consuming, and quite daunting to find sites on-theme that will link to you. The choice of link partners matters a great deal when trying to get good rankings for particular subjects for our clients. Accordingly, we adhere to the following guiding principles when identifying potential link partners for a client:

1. On-theme - link partners MUST have a close logical association with the theme of the client’s site. Inevitably there is a degree of interpretation involved here but the association should be intuitive.
2. Focus on the user experience - links should add value to our clients’ visitors.
3. Complimentary not competitive - there is little or no point in soliciting links from direct competitors to the client. Firstly they are unlikely to return the link and secondly the search engines are likely to see these links as “artificial” – after all, why else would two competitors trade links with each other? Rather, we focus on partners that have complimentary sites.

Link Quality:

Since we drive our activities by the presence of sites in the search engine results for relevant terms, there is an implication that sites must meet the search engines’ quality criteria to appear there in the first place. That said, there are numerous further checks performed in “future-proofing” our clients’ link equity. The search engine algorithms don’t stand still and, whilst some of them don’t always practice what they preach, the day will come when they will so we adhere to a number of best practice guidelines when assessing the quality of potential link partners which must:

1. Be on-topic based upon the complimentary theme approach described above.
2. Avoid link trickery - including “nofollow” tags, internal redirects and a host of other tricks which will result in little or no value to any links obtained.
3. Avoid excessive or off-topic linking - many sites have either been poorly advised or have adopted old fashioned approaches to linking with “anything with a pulse” resulting in endless, often off-topic links. Some deliberately employ these techniques in an effort to spam the search engine results. The more links there are on a page, the less the value of each link.
4. Avoid spamming techniques - many sites still employ keyword stuffing, hidden text, cloaking, redirects and a range of other techniques designed to fool the search engines. Some have been around long enough for these techniques to be overlooked (we can explain why if requested) but are unlikely to remain so indefinitely and represent a risk as a potential link partner.
5. Avoid participating in visible linking schemes - this may sound a little strange coming from a provider of linking campaigns but many low rent campaigns use so-called link farms or exchange sites from which to return a link and tend to add code to the site which is visible to the search engines and screams “I’m desperate to link” - which isn’t a positive. Our linking technology was specifically designed at the outset to avoid creating this effect.
6. Have relevant content – sites comprised entirely of links or with very “thin” content are of little value.

Another key differentiator that we have which we think sets us apart from other link building services is our “Linking System Client Portal“. We believe that our Linking System is one of the best in the world. When you choose to run a link building campaign with us you will be given a login and password to our client portal where you can check the progress of your campaign at any time. Benefits of the linking system include:

1. Full visibility of your linking campaign 24/7/365 days a year.
2. Instantly see the status of all your inbound links.
3. Review your inbound links, see Google Pagerank and Alexa data for the sites hosting your link.
4. Built-in best practice: handles linking the way the search engines want it.
5. Extremely configurable: all client campaigns are deeply customised to ensure the best possible results for you.
6. Huge knowledge base built up over many years of running successful linking campaigns: a massive head-start.

For more details on either our content writing or link building services then please visit ContentNow.co.uk or contact me, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have and can tailor a solution to suit the needs of your business.

What I’m listening to right now: Lil Wayne feat Babyface – “Comfortable”

Post from: Affiliate Marketing Blog Here.org.uk

ContentNow.co.uk - Content Writing and Link Building services

Share This

Original post by Kieron

Customer reviews certainly help shoppers, but they are not substitutes for weak or generic product descriptions. Unique product descriptions help your search engine optimization, help overcome your customer FUDDs and ultimately sell more product!

I want to share a few tips for creating unique, compelling product page copy using customer review content - even when your site has few or no reviews.

Death to Stock Manufacturer Product Descriptions

SEO and Duplicate Content

Our example is the “LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set.” This product is carried by most toy retailers, and many are just using the stock product description from the manufacturer:

Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading. Nobody goes hungry for learning with this set of 26 colorful easy-grip magnetic letters and magnetic letter reader that attaches securely to your fridge. Each letter talks, sings and teaches letter names, letter sounds and learning songs. Put a letter into the reader to hear its name, its sound or a fun phonics song. Your kids might not eat their vegetables, but with the Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set they can learn to spell them. What it Teaches: * Letter names * Letter sounds * Learning songs

Nothing wrong with the description itself, it’s actually very clever. But typing “Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading” into Google delivers 1,520 results, which tells us Google has indexed that many pages using this phrase. The danger to sites using stock descriptions is they may not appear in search results due to the duplicate content filter.

Writing a unique description, or at least modifying it so it’s not word-for-word is a better approach, especially to capture long-tail search traffic.

Address Fears, Uncertainties, Doubts and Deal-breakers

Manufacturer’s descriptions are typically written before the product is sold to the general public. Copywriters don’t necessarily have enough customer research to answer these questions:

• Who buys this item and why?
• Did the product live up to expectations?
• How long did the product last?
• What unexpected uses do customers discover for the product?
• What’s the worse thing about this product?
• Would the customer recommend it to people like themselves?

But you have access to free market research that addresses these concerns - customer reviews. Plus, you can identify common FUDDs - fears, uncertainties, doubts and dealbreakers that can help you write more persuasive copy, establish trust with customers and convert comparison shoppers - even if yours is not the lowest price.

How to Use Customer Reviews to Improve Product Copy

Start with your featured products, best sellers, highest margin or seasonal products.

Custom copywriting does take time, especially when you’re performing thorough customer research by reading a number of reviews. Choose items you expect will get most mileage for your time investment.

Tip: Check out Amazon’s Bestseller lists by navigating to any category and clicking the Bestsellers link!

Tap into the largest customer review bases for each product.

This could be Amazon, Epinions, Rate-it-All or any other review community. You might want to Google the product itself “{product} + reviews” and start with the first result.

I like using Amazon because I’ve found it not only has a large number of reviews, but the review quality is usually very good. There are great sort tools to help you hone in by star-rating, rank by most-helpful or even search within reviews for keywords. I do find the search feature’s precision to be lacking. If you want to find reviews with the phrase “would not recommend this for” it will match single words, and plurals / alternate endings for the word “recommend.”

Example: Using our LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set as our case, here’s how you can leverage Amazon…

From the product page, scroll, scroll and scroll some more until you find the “See All Product Description” link.

Hello! This product has won some awards.

• Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, Gold Seal and Snap Award, 2003
• Parenting 2003 Toys of the Year Award
• Toy Wishes All Star, Preschool Category, 2003
• Toy of the Year, Nick Jr.com, 2003

These are strong value propositions. Use this to your advantage in home page merchandising zones, PPC copy, email marketing as well as product page copy.

You won’t necessarily find awards for every product, but who knows what gems you’ll find.

Read reviews.

You don’t have to read ALL the reviews, just a handful of reviews voted most helpful buy the community and a few of the lowest rated. As you scan, clip quotes that stand out to you. Look for:

• Product strengths: “What I love most about this is that because it is magnetic, we do not seem to lose them unlike the wooden puzzle ones my 8 year old used when he was younger.”
• Benefits to the owner, gift giver or secondary users: “It’s great that it’s in the kitchen too so I can cook or clean while she plays.”
• Unexpected uses: “…you can use your washer and/or dryer. We do a lot of learning while I do laundry.”
• Natural cross-sell or upsell opportunities: “Since any magnet can damage your TV, VCR, and other electronic devices, we purchased a large magnetic board for her room, and that helps us encourage her to keep her magnetic items in there.”
• Cautions: “WARNING about the magnet. Keep at least 6″ away from pacemakers, and avoid contact with magnetic computer media, including floppy disks, Zip disks, removable Hard Disk Drives, Televisions, and Computer Video Monitors, other magnetic media including credit cards, ID badges…”

Pay closest attention to negative reviews.

Should you discover (as in this example) that the product is often defective, you need to address this both in your copy and in your selling policies.

Are you willing and able to offer the assurance of free return shipping on defective products? It could be the deciding factor on whether a comparison shopper chooses you or your competition. You could add copy like:

“Though most customers are extremely satisfied with this item, a small percentage of customers report the product does not play the correct letter sounds for some letters. In the event that your product does not work as expected, we will gladly offer free return shipping and send you a new set.”

Use Buzzillions.com

Buzzillions is a popular customer reviews aggregator from the folks at Power Reviews. One feature it has that I haven’t found elsewhere is a “Review Snapshot” that gives you a list of Pros, Cons and Best Uses as mentioned by customers.

Under the pros tab you’ll find fantastic adjectives to use in your copy.
The cons tab lists fears you must address in your copy, or gives you ideas for cross-sells. Hard to clean? Suggest a cleaner. No storage container? Suggest a suitable container.
Best uses helps you develop “Recommended For” copy. You can also add these products to the appropriate gift finder tools, or add product tags if your site uses them.

You may discover different ways of gleaning from customer reviews than the ones mentioned here. The takeaway here is that you tap into the consumer conversation that’s freely available to you, and consider how you can leverage it to improve your product copy. If you want to take this to the next level and use customer reviews to market to the sexes, check out Holly Buchanan’s post Using Customer Reviews to Pick Up Men, Women.

Yesterday, Ray blogged that his site has risen in Google to number 10 for the term “discount codes”. Up until yesterday that was the exact position my site held for that exact term! Now my site ian’t anywhere on the first 5 pages for that phrase

So Ray, can I have my position back please?

Seriously though, Google does this type of thing now and again. And looking at the A4U Forum here, there seems to be a few other people experiencing the same problem. Last year my site disappeared for the main search terms for a couple of weeks then came back, so I’m sure it’s just a temporary blip. I’m still getting traffic from long tail keywords so am not too concerned.

What I’m listening to right now: Madonna - “Hard Candy”

Post from: Affiliate Marketing Blog Here.org.uk

Ray stole my Google position, give it back!

Share This

Original post by Kieron

A

Original post by Alistair Croll

What?!! It’s true. Many of the biggest and most popular online retailers with fat SEO budgets are not showing up for their own names or valuable keywords in Google search results. Most don’t even know it. How can this be?

All the major search engines offer a .com search engine and a number of country-specific engines, like Google.ca, .co.uk, .com.au, .fr, .de and so on. These are local search engines, and often use geo-IP targeting to show the local search engine as the default when a searcher lives outside the United States.

If you’ve never seen a localized search engine, this is what it looks like:

As you can see, a searcher has the option to restrict search results to only pages from his or her country. This is particularly helpful for searchers who are performing transactional searches - they’re looking for products to buy. Using the general “search the web” will often deliver US sites which requires the shopper to dig through the sites looking for shipping information and costs. Searching only pages from their native land, searchers can save time and discover online stores they purchase from over and over again.

(more…)

The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

If an estimated 80% of sales start with a search engine year-round, you better believe consumers use search to find gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and so on. And they often include the holiday name in their search query.

Are you showing up in search results for these queries?

Let’s look at how two heavy-hitting flower delivery sites have optimized for one of their biggest events of the year - Mother’s Day: Proflowers.com vs. 1800Flowers.com.

Notice that both sites rank for “mothers day flowers” with deep URLs targeted just for Mother’s Day. Both have the search term at the beginning of the title tag, although 1800Flowers has added the term “gifts” to rank for more than just “flowers.” Both have keyword-friendly URLs. When you click through to the sites, you’ll notice the navigation menus both include special Mother’s Day tabs at the far left - can’t miss ‘em.

Proflowers

(more…)

The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Colors are search modifiers that can bring a lot of long-tail traffic. When someone searches for a particular product and color, it often indicates someone is close to a purchase, or at least further along the sale-trail than one who goes broad.

But you can’t create a separate product page and URL for each color because that’s duplicate content, and duplicate content is the worst of sins, right? That’s what I thought until I started testing it - and it turned everything my momma ever told me about duplicate content on its head.

(If your momma never had “the talk” with you - you know, *content reproduction,* we recently did a duplicate content post that included a PG13 explanation. I made sure this post was completely different so nobody mistakes it for duplicate content).

Yes, Virginia There Is A Santa Clause…And You Can Optimize Product Pages for Color

Here’s an example:

Jessica Bennett Shoes sells its product through its own e-store and various retailers like Amazon, Zappos and ShoeBuy. One of its styles is called “Harli.” It’s made from burlap and comes in navy, beige and brown.

Shoebuy.com has 3 indexed product pages for Harli – one for each color.

Each page has an identical meta description, and according to Webconfs’ Similar Page Checker, these pages are 100% identical.

But Shoebuy not only owns top spot for each color, Google’s also throwing in some indented result love. When you search for “jessica bennett harli navy” (at time of writing and from my data center):

Top ranking… and for “jessica bennett harli brown”:

“jessica bennet harli beige”:

The only differentiators between the 3 color pages are the URLs (just numbers, no keywords) and the title tag. I’ve scoped out other sites that use different pages for different colors and they all seem to rank fine when color is included in the search query. The technique seems to be create color-specific pages in addition to one main product page (hence, indented results). Since all pages are indexed, the color pages are selected to appear when someone searches for the color, with the non-color, main product page potentially appearing as an indented, second result.

This leads me to believe that as long as your color pages are getting indexed, you don’t need to worry about duplicate content smackdown.

The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

This isn’t a new topic here at Get Elastic, but since search engine optimization is such a key part to ecommerce success I’m going to bang the same drum once again on optimizing for brand names.

Zappos appears to have covered all the bases and then some in optimizing its brand category pages. For example, its Nine West page (below) includes 272 occurrences of “Nine West” on this page - that’s 4.55% of the entire page copy. This is what is referred to as “keyword density.” Though keyword density is not as important to SEO as was once thought (title tag, keyword rich backlinks from other sites and the domain’s overall authority have more impact), this page certainly is considered highly relevant to “Nine West” by Google.

Like Karmaloop, Zappos includes a paragraph about the brand itself. Most ecommerce sites have category / brand pages that consist of little more than images, links and a page title.

Also included at the category level are customer reviews. Each product with a review appears on the same page. Though the links to the product pages are “nofollowed” (link includes an HTML attribute telling search engines not to crawl the linked page or pass Page Rank), the keywords count towards the overall relevance to the page.

Get you’re scrolling finger ready, you’ll need it.

(more…)

The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Today is my first day back at my desk here in Vancouver after a lovely week in the Canadian Rocky mountains. While at the CWC/Corus Digital Media Career Accelerator program, I enjoyed the best green tea I’ve ever had in my life. The brand is “Higgins & Burke” and this is the only green tea I’ve tasted that hasn’t given me a bit of nausea after drinking it. I must have it here at my home office!

So I turn to my trusted Google search engine to find out where I can get my lips on more of this tea. Typing in “Higgins and Burke” into the search engine delivers these results:

(more…)

Web Analytics for Online Retailers: Technology Use & Satisfaction 2008
Free webinar: April 17th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Eric T. Peterson, CEO, Web Analytics Demystified
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos