SEO Werkt!

This is the third post in our series on Blog Business Models.

On Digital Photography School, we currently sell nine ebooks on different aspects of photography. When you look at the blog now, it looks as if it was built to sell products, but it wasn’t.

A couple of dPS ebooks

The site is five years old now. I remember brainstorming potential ways of monetizing early on, and I’m pretty sure that products were on the list. I didn’t have specific ideas on what ebooks those might be, but I knew there was potential with an educational site to go in that direction. (Other niches might have been tougher to develop products for.)

My strategy for the first two years on dPS was to build the audience, and if I could cover my costs, which were very low, with some advertising, then that would be a bonus.

So I had advertising and affiliate marketing on the blog before I developed the products. I was mainly using AdSense on dPS, as an easy way to make money while I built the audience.

Preparing for products

From the beginning I knew I was building the blog as a platform for monetization—building audience and building community, which are such a big part of selling products. If you can get a community feel on your blog then your readers become advocates for you, both to each other, and beyond your blog.

The other way I used the blog was to test product ideas. So after two years of writing, I had a fair suspicion of what might work. I knew my audience, what they were commenting on, and what questions they were asking.

The blog itself was almost a bit of a research tool, as was the social network that surrounded it. I used the social network to research things like what type of information did people read, and what formats did they use.

On the blog I did a little of research around pricing—I did a survey about what people were buying (books, magazines, and so on) and I got a sense from that as to what people were regularly spending their money on. A lot of photographers buy UK photography magazines which are about $15. That gave me a hint as to what sort of price I could expect for my ebooks.

And of course the blog and the social networks gave me ideas about products that actually would help people.

Challenges of a product strategy

I’ve faced a couple of pretty major hurdles in developing a product strategy on dPS.

Firstly, I’m not a pro photographer—I’m more of an enthusiastic amateur—so it’s always a challenge to put together material at a level that’s going to help people. While my knowledge might be beyond what a normal camera owner’s is, I’m not confident about it as the basis for an ebook!

So the challenge has been to develop partnerships with pros to write the products. That whole process of partnerships is a challenge, as is finding a model that’s a win-win between myself and the author. Then there’s the task of maintaining that business, and managing the day-to-day logistics of that—profit sharing and so on.

The key for me is the team I’ve built around the product strategy. We outsource our design and editing, as well as the writing of the ebooks. So a lot of energy has gone into drawing that team together and getting them working together well.

One of the other big challenges is trying to build a platform to sell the products—choosing shopping carts and so on. I’m really not a technical person so I spent a lot of time researching the options for delivering the products and collecting payments.

If you don’t have the skills yourself, it’s important to find the right people—people who are passionate and can deliver the product content you need.

Building the business

The key to building a paying customer base around dPS has been email: we use the blog to get people on our email list.

If we were relying on people reading the blog posts, or subscribing via RSS and Twitter and so on, we’d be much smaller than we are—and significantly less effective in selling.

The vast majority of our sales come when we send an email, not from when we put up a blog post or Tweet or Facebook. It’s the email address. We’re more about email marketing than we are about anything else, so the email address is the big key.

Our email strategy is pretty straightforward—we send a weekly newsletter, which is like an RRS feed in an email. And when we launch a product, subscribers receive a series of weekly emails over four weeks. Each of those emails does a different type of thing—announces some aspect of the launch, reminds people of product features or special offers, and so on.

Really, though, the success of that strategy rests on the quality of our products.

Quality information is also really important. Our ebooks are longer and deeper than many of the other photography ebooks around. We do charge a little bit more for them, but we get a lot of feedback that the quality is really good. So we emphasize that.

We also take our time publishing them—each ebook takes four to six months to write and publish, which is significantly longer than what a lot of others are doing in this space.

Quality also plays into the design. We put a lot of emphasis on getting the design right—our ebooks are far beyond a Word document converted into a PDF. We really invest money into that, because we feel it’s important.

The other aspect that’s crucial to the growth of the site—and product sales—is the work we put into the launch process.

Our first launch was a ten-day launch; now we’re doing four-week launches and thinking about how we can really build the momentum over that time.

How can we build the launch into an event? How can we tell the story of the ebook and showcase it in a way that’s not “hypey” but builds anticipation and highlights what customer needs it will help with?

The creative process doesn’t stop once we’ve written or designed the ebook. That’s just the beginning: once you’ve got the product, it’s about creative selling.

These days, for us, the marketing starts before we even write a word. We’re always thinking, what need is this fulfilling? How would we sell it? And that informs how we work with the writers as well—we’re always trying to get the authors thinking about selling the content, rather than just writing it.

In terms of new challenges that will help us grow the business, I’m now looking at new ways to keep the sales momentum going after an ebook’s launch.

I’m thinking hard about the long-tail opportunities that surround products like educational ebooks, and how I can create a stronger, longer sales life for each product.

One thing I’m looking at is developing channels that will allow us to resell the materials we’ve already developed over a longer time period. Basically, I want to leverage the wealth of already-developed content by looking for new channels through which to sell it.

Just starting out?

If you’re just starting out with a product model, I think it’s critical that you know your readers and the needs that they have. Then, you can develop products that really are taking those felt needs and solving thproblems.

Some of the ebooks we’ve published have done better than others, and they’re the ones that solved a really felt need. The ones that don’t sell as well were products that we felt might be useful to people, but our readers didn’t feel those needs.

So it’s about getting to know your readers as much as possible.

Are you building a product strategy around your blog? How’s it going? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Blog Business Model 3: Sell Electronic Products

Looking for a new tool that will help you get the most out of your SEO campaigns?  Consider any of the following programs that we use at Single Grain in order to maximize the efficiency of our SEO activities and our general productivity: Keyword Research Tool #1 – Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool Although the [...]

Keywords are important. I’ve heard from several potential clients recently who have talked to other “professionals” who told them keywords are no longer important for SEO, and that good content is all you really need. Here’s the thing. Keywords are language. They’ll…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The day has come, the return of the discontinued Yahoo Site Explorer in the form of Bing Link Explorer.

Bing has announced some incredible new tools for Bing Webmaster Tools now really setting it apart from Google. The new Bing Webmaster Tools is completely revamped but the most exciting feature for me is the new Link Explorer.

Link Explorer lets you look up links for any site on the web, like Yahoo Site Explorer did but with more filters. Here is a look at the filter options:

The options include filter by site, anchor text, query, scope and source. This is pretty good news. I have yet to really test it because I am writing this while in a lounge about to fly back to New York after SMX but this step by Bing is huge.

Other changes and features include:

• New User Experience
• New: SEO Reports
• New: SEO Analyzer
• New: Fetch as Bingbot
• New: Canonical Alerts
• Updated: URL Removal Tool
• Updated: Keyword Research Tool
• Updated: URL Normalization

Bing has a nice blog post explaining all the changes and Vanessa Fox has a great write up at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Na meer dan 8 maanden ontwikkeling lanceerde Redesignme afgelopen week een nieuwe tool ontwikkeld voor het houden van online marktonderzoek door bedrijven en bureaus. De tool heet

Bing has announced three new features for Bing Webmaster Tools but the biggest new feature to me is the new Bing Webmaster Tools API. Markup Validation Tool. This feature allows webmasters to enter any URL and see what the markup looks like on the page, within the code. Keyword research tool. This…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Join Maggie Fox next Tuesday February 28th at 12pm EST / 9am PST for an exclusive live webinar from Social Media Today on B2B and the Complex Sale.

The nature of complex sales has changed dramatically with the adoption of the Internet as a research tool. People on the sales end are much less in control of the process because customers can now find out much about the supplier without asking them directly. Now vendors are adopting some of the same capabilities provided through the Net – researching the needs of potential customers and clients, discovering what will bring value to their companies. The B2B world is becoming one where negotiation can become more well-informed before it even begins. This webinar will cover this changing landscape, addressing questions like the following:

• How do sales people train to operating in the Enterprise 2.0 world?
• What tools are available today to both vendors and buyers that did not exist 5 or 10 years ago?
• How does online B2B affect the sales cycle?

Maggie and panel members, Kendra Lee, author of the award winning book Selling Against the Goal and president of KLA Group and Ron Karr, CEO of Karr Associates Inc., a firm that specializes in helping organizations build high performing sales cultures and customer loyalty and is also the author of Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way.

Register now, HERE!

Join Maggie Fox next Tuesday February 28th at 12pm EST / 9am PST for an exclusive live webinar from Social Media Today on B2B and the Complex Sale.

The nature of complex sales has changed dramatically with the adoption of the Internet as a research tool. People on the sales end are much less in control of the process because customers can now find out much about the supplier without asking them directly. Now vendors are adopting some of the same capabilities provided through the Net – researching the needs of potential customers and clients, discovering what will bring value to their companies. The B2B world is becoming one where negotiation can become more well-informed before it even begins. This webinar will cover this changing landscape, addressing questions like the following:

• How do sales people train to operating in the Enterprise 2.0 world?
• What tools are available today to both vendors and buyers that did not exist 5 or 10 years ago?
• How does online B2B affect the sales cycle?

Maggie and panel members, Kendra Lee, author of the award winning book Selling Against the Goal and president of KLA Group and Ron Karr, CEO of Karr Associates Inc., a firm that specializes in helping organizations build high performing sales cultures and customer loyalty and is also the author of Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way.

Register now, HERE!

Warning: The crux of this post surrounds the word “shit.” It’s not used to be vulgar or profane, but to show what consumers are saying about brands online. If the word offends you, please move on. If you don’t and it still offends you, you were warned.

Talking with the folks at NetBase in preparation for Friday’s 11 for ’11 Webinar (see below), we came up with a fun little experiment to see A) How good NetBase is at really distinguishing between very similar phrases with very different meanings and B) Which brands are winning and losing in the online sentiment race … at least within these very small parameters.

There’s a major definition difference between saying something is “shit” versus saying something is “the shit.” They are, in fact, polar opposites. But having a text analytics or online research tool that can automatically decipher which is which is tricky. We put NetBase to the task and found that it not only worked, but there are some brands out there that could use some help getting their online audiences to add the word “the” to the phrase.

Here are the brands that lost in the online battle of who is “shit” versus who is “the shit:”

Notice how dominant Blackberry is in being called “shit.” Odd also that all the major phone carriers are there. Maybe it’s not the phone carriers themselves, but just the technology in general that sucks.

Now here are the brands that “won” because they were called “the shit:”

My only questions as interpret this data are A) McDonald’s? Really? And B) I’m thinking Taco Bell might be listed because it gives you “the shits.” So we may need to go decipher the data a bit. Then again, White Castle didn’t make it, so maybe I’m wrong. Heh.

Silly as it might be, these are potentially interesting bits of data for brands to have. So even though we focused on a little bawdy language today, know that there are online tools out there, like NetBase, that can help your company find and distinguish between the two.

As for the webinar, the last (11th) in the series is this Friday, (11/11 at 11 a.m PT, even), the NetBase gang thought it would be fun to have me do a webinar on my book. If you haven’t had the opportunity to hear my stories from the book talk, please join us! NetBase is giving away several copies of the book during the webinar, so just being an attendee gives you a chance to win.

Register for the webinar on the NetBase website and then block your calendar off for this Friday, Nov. 11 at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET for some good fun.

See you Friday!

by Stoney deGeyter

Keyword research is an important part of the optimization process. There are thousands of ways, tools and resources to do keyword research. Every SEO has their own methodology, favorite data and ways to organize and sort through that data in order to create solid keyword lists for their SEO campaigns.

But there is more to keyword research than just the research. You have to be able organize and sort your keywords into groups that will allow you to optimize them most effectively into your website.

This post will walk you through the organizational side of the keyword research process, using a customized keyword research spreadsheet I have created to make the process easy. You still have to do the research, but this tool helps us create keyword lists for on-page optimization.

Let’s get to it.

First, you need to download and open the spreadsheet linked above. You should be on the “Phrase 1″ tab at the bottom.

If you know what your “core” phrase is, you can rename that tab accordingly. We’ll work with the phrase “battery charger” since that will give us plenty of variety to work with.

Importing Your Keywords

Before you can import anything you need to have already gathered a list of keywords from your favorite keyword tools. For this post we’ll use Google and Wordtracker.

You first need to export your keyword lists from the research tool to a different spreadsheet. Make sure your search volume is to the left of the keywords. If not, you’ll need to move some columns around until it is. For Google you can insert an extra column between the search volume and the keywords so you can copy/paste cleanly into this keyword organization spreadsheet.

Tip: When exporting from Google, be sure to select the exact match for accurate search volume numbers. You’ll then need to use find/replace to remove the brackets before importing to your keyword spreadsheet.

After you paste the keywords, be sure to select the option that allows you to keep the formatting on the current sheet rather than importing the format from the sheet you copied from.

Once you paste both sets of keywords and search volume, your sheet will look something like this:

Note: Google will let you export up to 100 phrases while Wordtracker can give you hundreds if not a couple thousand. This spreadsheet can handle a little over 2000 phrases from both Google and Wordtracker (or your favorite source) combined. To keep this post simple, I’ve eliminated all but 600 phrases.

Merging Duplicate Phrases and Data

A good number of phrases will be duplicated between your research tools. We want to merge these so the Google and Wordtracker numbers are on the same row for each keyword.

The first step is to alphabetize the keywords. To do this, click column “D” so the entire column is highlighted. Then, over on the far right on the Excel “Home” tab, you’ll see a “Sort & Filter” option. Click that and then select “Sort A to Z.”

This will create a “Sort Warning” dialogue box:

Be sure “Expand the selection” is selected; then hit “Sort”. This makes sure that the search volume numbers stay with the correct search phrase as they are sorted A to Z.

The result should look something like this:

If you look at rows 16/17, 21/22, 26/27, and 34/35, you’ll see the same phrase with a different search volume for both Google and Wordtracker. These are the duplicates we want to merge.

This spreadsheet has a cool “Merge Duplicates” button. Click that button and all the dupes will be merged together. Just like magic!

Tip: Make sure no garbage code is imported in with the keywords. If a bad text is imported into the “All Keywords” column, the merge macro can get screwed up.

Here you can see the duplicates merged together. Notice rows 16, 20, 24, and 31.

Now you want to sort by search volume. Going back to the sort button at the top, select that; then, choose “Custom Sort.”

A new dialogue box will pop up allowing you to customize your sort options. You want to sort by “Ggl” first, then by “WT” (or visa versa). You may have to “Add Level” to get the second sort option to be available.

Tip: Be sure to sort on “Values” and order “Largest to Smallest.”

Sorting by volume, you can get a pretty good idea as to what phrases are more popular than others as noted by either or both tools.

Be careful not to use search volume alone for determining keyword value. As you can see below in rows 18, 30, and 37, Wordtracker isn’t showing search volume for some substantial Google phrases. Similarly, if you were to scroll down, you’d also see quite a number of phrases that Google doesn’t record as viable, but Wordtracker does.

Note: The lack of search volume on some of the Wortracker phrases here is likely due to me having deleted any phrase that registered less than 10 in Wordtracker search volume.

Eliminating Negative and Junk Words

Anytime you import keyword lists this size you’re going to end up with a number of junk keyword phrases. This spreadsheet provides an easy way of getting them out of your way without having to delete them one by one.

First, scan your list looking for any negative words you want to eliminate. Then add those words to column A in the negative word tab at the bottom.

In this case we’ll pretend the client sells only automotive battery chargers, so the four words we typed in above can be globally eliminated.

No, go back to your research tab and click the “Check Negatives” button. Any keyword phrase that contains a negative word is automatically highlighted red throughout the worksheet!

Note: The Negative Words tab is designed for global application. Do not add negatives that are core-term specific.

If you accidentally added a negative word that does not belong, no worries. Just remove it and re-click “Check Negatives” to correct.

Important: Don’t leave any empty cells in the negative keywords list. If you remove a keyword be sure to fill in the blank spot.

If you have a lot of negative words highlighted and want to get them out of your way, the spreadsheet has a filter option that lets you hide them all. Click the filter icon at the bottom right corner of the negative column heading, then uncheck the “x”.

This will cause all the negative words to be hidden. Notice below that rows 47, 61 and 77 are now hidden.

In most cases, using negative keywords is not enough. You will need to manually go through and eliminate keywords that aren’t any good for optimization to your site. Simply place an “x” in the “No Good” column and your phases automatically highlight red.

Note: Do not manually add “x’s” to the Negative column. If you run the Check Negatives macro again these will automatically be removed. Only manually mark negatives in the No Good column.

You can then filter out all “No Good” keywords just as you did with the negative words, leaving you only with phrases that you believe are worth optimizing!

Categorizing Into Shopping Funnels

I’ve written about the Research, Shop and Buy funnels for keywords before. You need to be familiar with that before using these categories.

The general idea is that you want to categorize each keyword into one of these funnels. You can through this section in four steps, marking phrases that fit any one category at a time, or go keyword by keyword and mark the most appropriate category for each as you go down the list.

Tip: If you organize one category at a time you can hide each category when complete leaving only unassigned keywords. This can help make sure none are missed.

Once you’re done your spreadsheet will look something like this:

Assigning Keywords to URLs

Next you want to figure out which keywords should be optimized to any given page on your site. Let’s start with the “Research” funnel. Use the filter options to hide all other keywords but those.

Looking at these keywords together can help you determine which URL(s) is/are best to optimize for the keyword group. Place the URLs in the blue area at the top of the page. Start with P1 (Page 1, see above). Now go through your funnel list and add “p1″ to each keywords you plan to optimize for that page.

Note: You will likely find that not every keyword in each funnel works for a given page. You might need several unique URLs for each filter group.

As you can see, we placed “car” and “automotive” keywords on page 1, “motorcycle” keywords on page 2 and “boat” keywords on page 3.

When you’re ready to optimize, you can use the filtering option to hide all keywords except for the page you you are optimizing. Below I’ve filtered all but page 1 keywords.

Now you can back and repeat this process for the Shop, Buy and Info keyword funnels.

One last thing. If you run out of blue URL space at the top of this spreadsheet, don’t fret! You’ll notice the rows jump from 6 to 14. There are six hidden rows that will allow you to add more. All you have to do is highlight rows 6 and 14, right click and select “unhide”.

Now you want to repeat the entire process with your next core phrase! If you need more core term tabs, just copy a blank one and start afresh.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

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