Listen to the first 2 chapters for free, just to hear my wonderful voice!
The book has been up and ready to read for a few days now and I’m getting caught up with the audio files. I just finished the last ones today. Each chapter is a separate file, so there is a set of 10 audio files.
M4A files, or AAC files, are available as well as MP3 files. There are both file format versions of each chapter, so I guess there really are 20 files total. There is a total of 69 minutes and 29 seconds in the files.
You can download the first two chapters for free, by clicking the links in the matrix below.
If you buy the book, you’ll see this matrix below, only all of the links will actually work.
The easiest and fastest way to build traffic to your site is to post comments on other sites, using your web address.
This does two things. First, it builds inbound links to your site, boosting your SEO and ultimately getting more traffic from search engines. Second, there’s an immediate effect of having the site owner, other readers, and commenters become aware of you, which might lead them to check out your site, using the link in the comment.
This works for both other blogs and for forums. It also works on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not convinced that it works as effectively there. Maybe you can prove me wrong on that point. There are a lot of people who read this site that have Etsy shops. Their forums are a great place to post.
I want to help you out, my precious readers. I want you to have a direct benefit from reading this blog. So, here’s what I’m going to do.
The Challenge
I’m announcing the “10 for 10 Challenge”.
Post at least 10 comments on other people’s sites for 10 days in a row. That’s a total of at least 100 comments.
Document the number of visitors to your site on the day you start and at the end of the 10th day. That’s 10 full days of visitors.
The Prize
Whoever has the greatest increase in those 10 days will get a promotional article on my site, including an interview with you, a review of your site and your products, and a link in the sidebar on walton.com, (which is great for your SEO.)
The Rules
You need to have Google Analytics installed on your site, or another statistics program that can be verified.
The 10th and final day must be on or before July 12, which is 2 weeks from the day this article is published. That will give you a couple days to get the statistics program installed if you don’t have it already and you can do a little research for where you want to leave comments. If you want to start now and pick the best 10 days to get your maximum number, you can do that too.
Send me a screenshot of the statistics program, show the number of visits for each of 10 days in a row. The site with the greatest increase in the number of visits between the first day and the tenth day will win.
That’s not a percentage, it’s the number. It’s not the number of page views, it’s the number of visits. It’s not just the 10th day either. It’s the first day compared to any other day within 10 days. If you have a bump on the 7th day, then it declines, take the number on the 7th day. We’re looking for the greatest increase.
The actual comments that you leave are not verified. The only thing we’re counting to win is the increase in the number of visits.
Email me with your results. Show me a screenshot. The winner will be determined based solely on my judgement and my decision is final.
The Strategy
The way to make this work is to know your market. Research where they hang out. Search Google for your keyword and the term “forums” to find forums related to your product. Use your keyword and try searching for “best keyword blogs”. You can search for just your keyword, note the top 10 results, and see which are blogs or places that accept comments.
Once you have a good list of places to leave comments, hit them all, every day. See what people are talking about first. Don’t just jumps in with “Please visit my site”. No one cares about that. You need to be helpful. Answer questions. Be an authority. Give solid information. Ask great questions. Be that interesting person at the party that everyone wants to talk to.
The Benefits
If you are not using a stats application now, you should be, and this challenge might push you into doing that. Going through the process of looking for sites to leave comments, then actually leaving them, will get you into a great habit that will SEO your site for the long run.
If you leave 10 comments a day for 10 days, you WILL have more traffic, regardless of this challenge. You may not win this, but you will have more traffic. Everyone who attempts this challenge will have more traffic.
At the end of the day, isn’t that what it’s all about?
Went to the beach to make this more interesting. I’m enjoying doing these videos way too much.
In this one, I talk about taking control with WordPress. People who are not able to update their own web site, should be using WordPress. I’m a control freak, so it’s all about taking control. You should be too.
Again, let me know if there are any issues with the video. Still playing with formats and sizes, etc.
I finally sat down to start writing the book, A Simple Guide To Basic Internet Marketing, and this is what I came up with.
I always start with an outline. I wanted to organize all of the information that I have swirling around in my head. I figured I should review what some others have written about it. I was interested in one book in particular that I remember teaching me a lot.
As I read through it, I realized that they had a lot of great ideas, facts that are true, and pearls of wisdom, but it was like walking through a paintball war zone. Things were flying at me from all directions. There was no order or organization to it.
The problem is that there are general background concepts about marketing and there are tactics specific to the Internet. It’s difficult to explain concepts, strategies, and tactics at the same time. You should know phrases like “Unique selling proposition”, “Target market demographics”, “Conversions”, and “Relationship Marketing”. You will hear them in any marketing book. I want to focus on Internet Marketing tactics. I need to explain concepts first so that the tactics make sense.
Here is the core of how to market specifically on the Internet. I see 4 steps. Every business is different and there are many variations, but the “straight down the middle”, step by step process, is linear and easy to follow. I think this is the basic way that most people who are selling a product or a service will be successful.
Yes, I really used this photo to illustrate 4 steps
Here are the four basic steps to Internet Marketing:
1. Get a web site. It’s the center of the universe. All roads lead back to your web site. Without a web site, there’s no foundation to build everything else on.
2. Get people to read your site. SEO, social media, advertising are all ways to get traffic to your site. Targeting specific people that meet your target market is part of this effort. Getting people in the front door is what this is about.
3. Get people subscribed to a mailing list. Use a mailing list management service to allow your readers to subscribe and manage themselves.
4. Sell to the mailing list. Publish a newsletter. In that newsletter, you should offer valuable content and then sell your products.
If you follow these steps, you will understand the basics of Internet marketing. You will be selling stuff.
If you know how to do each of these steps, you don’t need to buy the book. If you need help and advice, explained in a simple, easy to understand way, then the book will be really helpful.
There’s a lot of talk these days about creating the business, product, or service of your heart. Kind of like business as self-actualization tool. We’re all supposed to create the thing that would bring us transendental bliss to make. Create soulful stuff, they say, and people will come.
Yes. Fair enough. If you create exactly what makes your heart sing and publicize it adequately, your odds are good that eventually, somebody will show up and buy your sh*t.
Alternatively, you could look at the people you have now and solve a problem they already have.
You see this a lot in, weirdly enough, craft businesses and techie types.
I heard about a friend of a friend recently who had a bunch of ideas for businesses to start. All of the ideas were bunk. (Yes, bunk. I said it.) It seemed that all of the ideas were about what they wanted to do and had no relationship with what anyone else, their customers, might want. They wanted to sell where there was no market. They wanted to produce a product that no one wanted.
“It’s great that you want to sell this thing, but you realize that no one will pay you any money for it, right?”
I was talking with another friend recently who had one idea for a business they were starting. It met a specific need for a large market. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t “fulfilling”. It did save a lot of money for the clients and could possibly make him a lot of money. There was the possibility of a million dollar deal in the works.
“Do what you love and the money will follow” has been going around for years. There is some truth to that. There’s a lot more truth to “Find a problem and solve it.”
Marketing, at it’s core, is about what your customer needs and meeting that need.
Forget about yourself. No one cares what you want. It’s not about you.
The craft people she mentions love doing their crafts. They add features and make products that they love to make. It makes them happy. If you want to be happy, make the nice things that you love. If you want to make money, make the nice things that other people love.
I’m a techie type, so I know what she’s talking about with us. We love to add cool features because of the cool technical challenges. We think that everyone else is as interested in AJAX and PHP and databases as we are. They aren’t. No one cares that the database is UTF8_Unicode compatible. They just want it to work. “But, dude! This is 64 bit!”
I once read a study that asked people what they most valued in supermarkets. I figured the number one issue was price. I’m always looking for the cheapest price on stuff. I was wrong. The top priority for stores where people buy their food is “cleanliness”. Woah, I guess that’s right. Me too. I didn’t think of that. What aren’t you thinking of? What aspect of your service or product do people care the most about, but you didn’t think of?
Think about who you are selling to. It’s time for a little market research. Ask. Watch. Listen.
Here’s a practical way to find out what people want, by looking at what people search for on the Internet.
What is your client’s greatest problem? How can you solve it for them? You may think this is a simple question, or that you’ve heard it before, but if you don’t have an answer, then you don’t have a successful business.
Find a problem and solve it. If you do that, you’ll make a ton of money.
What problem have you solved? Tell us in the comments.
A couple weeks ago, I asked which book I should write next. I was considering a book on Etsy specific marketing or a more general Internet Marketing book.
It will look nothing like this.
I offered a $10 discount coupon for anything in the walton.com store for anyone who responded. Those coupons have been sent, so if you answered the survey and didn’t get your code, send me an email and let me know.
Etsy has put a lot of people on the mailing list, so I figured that would be the clear winner, but there are people who have never heard of Etsy on the list.
There are also a surprising number of people who have Etsy shops, but are tired of the fees and lack of control, so they are looking for other ways to market their product.
The clear winner is the book on Internet Marketing.
It was split evenly between people who like “step by step” instructions and those who like “general principles”. I guess I’ll have to write it from both perspectives and do both!
I will be working on the book over the next couple weeks, so if you have any suggestions or specific questions you want addressed, please leave them in the comments below.
Among the 7 people who followed directions and commented on the post was this from Tess Richardson:
After months of procrastinating over the SEO thing, I downloaded your free guide and started getting busy. In the two days I’ve been searching out, and talking on, sites related to one of my Etsy products, Google analytics has shown a jump from 0 to 132 page views. I can send you a screen shot if you would like it.
Thanks for the advice and encouragement, Conrad.
Click to see the whole chart.
This kind of feedback makes me crazy, so I had to follow up and find out more. Please visit her site. Here’s the interview she gave me. The book she refers to is The Simple Guide To SEO.
I was–until Dec. 31 of last year–a communications and marketing director for an employee benefits consultant. I am not new to some of these concepts, but I had never tried them before and did not have a comprehensive understanding of them until I read your free download. Before that my knowledge consisted of bits and pieces: use really good keywords, inbound links, converse on other’s sites/blogs in a meaningful way. I never had time to put this knowledge to work at my previous job. I really needed someone to put it all together in terms I understood.
When I saw the post in the Etsy forums, I thought I’d give it a look as it sounded like what I needed.
How would you describe the book? Good points? Bad points?
I love the glossary. I love the light, readable style. I love that it’s free! (I kept wondering, “What’s the catch?”)
I LOVE the checklist toward the back, but it doesn’t seem to be in the same order that things are discussed in the book. That bothered me.
I would also like to see the checklist broken up into “Things to do RIGHT NOW,” “Things to do next week,” “Things to do next month,” or something like that. For newbies it’s a lot to digest in one sitting, even if it is all well-explained. I have gotten a start, but I did skip over some of the “sign up for this account and that account” things. I mean to get back to them, but I just picked a couple of tips at random and jumped in. Many people are not comfortable doing that, I suspect.
What did you learn from the book? What stood out?
One thing jumped out at me right from the moment I skimmed it, before I downloaded and printed for later digestion: You must have a blog. Since I’d been hemming and hawing for months on whether I should start a blog, what would be the focus, what free blog site should I use, would it be a waste of time (and all the other second-guessing) that was like a bolt from above. I set up my blog 2 days after reading the book. http://homespunlife.wordpress.com
Another thing was about using bold and italic. I had never read that elsewhere.
Tess Richardson at her Ashford Spinning Wheel (aka My Precious)
How did you find the sites to comment on?
A little background on my Etsy site…I started with rosaries, then added homespun yarn, then got a great idea for a charm bracelet based on a young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games (THG) by Suzanne Collins. A friend turned me onto the books, which are really starting to gain traction and may be the next BIG THING, like Twilight, but there is almost no merchandising yet. Even though I hope to really establish myself in the homespun yarn market (hence my blog focus), the bracelets seemed like a way to bring in some early sales since it was an untapped niche with an eager market.
I thought about where I could find my target (tweens and teens who loved the books) and started Googling for fan sites. That got me a few hits, so I began visiting them, getting a feel for the audience, what was discussed and how open I thought they might be to shameless self-promotion. Some I had to join, like Facebook fan pages and Fanpop.com.
How many comments did you leave? How much time did you spend?
I was afraid I would have to spend weeks becoming a familiar and accepted visitor to these sites, but teens and tweens are pretty open to anyone with something to offer that strikes a chord. I seriously just posted once to the sites I visited this week. Since I’m a fan of the books, I was able to “speak the lingo” about characters, and be authentic, not fake. And I tried to be humble, not pushy; just another fan who wanted to share this great tip about something others might like. And if I had to register to post, I chose a fan-specific username.
It was time consuming, though. I spent an entire morning on it earlier this week and maybe posted on 4-5 sites total.
What was the biggest obstacle in starting from nothing to getting 132 page views?
Having to register for some of the fan sites. I’ve got enough usernames and passwords to keep track of!
What was the easiest part?
Actually, it was all pretty easy. I believe in my product and think there are a lot of girls who would love it. Since I am a fan of the books, it was not hard “hanging out” on the fan sites.
What surprised you the most?
The fact that my Etsy product page doesn’t show up on Google, but my one post on Fanpop.com make it to second place, on the first page overnight!
What advice would you give someone else with an Etsy shop?
Some niches will be much harder than others to see results on. For example, my homespun yarn is going to be an uphill climb because the market is so full of competitors. But it’s something I’m passionate about, so it’s no sweat to read and comment on other people’s spinning and knitting sites. Really, the challenge of developing a unique product and finding that “blue ocean” is harder than the SEO stuff.
Any other comments?
Having spent time chatting up my Hunger Games bracelets on fan sites makes me look at my future product offering with new eyes. I realize, for example, that I don’t really want to spend time chatting on Catholic sites and will probably drop rosaries from my Etsy shop. On the other hand, I’m thinking of maximizing my time spent in finding and joining Hunger Games fan sites by developing other products for HG fans. New products will give me more legitimate reasons to revisit and repost, so I’m not just the nag who keeps hawking her stuff over and over.
Another thing I’m really excited about, having tasted just a bite of success, is that I am in the progress of self-publishing my first novel–a historical fiction. My head is already buzzing with ideas for getting out there and making online connections with history fans.
Thanks, Tess!
If you want more information about Tess, please visit her sites:
What did you learn from this story? Did you learn that if you leave interesting comments on other people’s sites that you might end up getting a lot of attention for your site? Would you like to leave a comment now, after reading the interview, and tell us all what you learned? I thought you might. Thanks!
Everyone on Etsy wants more traffic. You can get more traffic from search engines if you optimize your site. That’s called SEO, “search engine optimization”, by all the cool kids.
Etsy published the “Etsy Guide to SEO”.
SEO is generally divided into “on site” factors and “off site” factors. In their book, they detail the things that you can do to your Etsy shop and products pages, all of them “on site”.
What they don’t tell you about are the “off site” techniques. “Off site” is everything that is not on your site. It generally refers to building links from other sites to your site, which is the biggest factor in SEO.
They only devote one page to link building ideas and only one paragraph to any task that is not on the Etsy site. They want to keep all of your attention focused on their Etsy site and not necessarily the absolute best ways to get traffic.
Let’s gaze off into the distance and see if we can build some inbound links another way, without anything to do with Etsy.
Before you do anything else, you need to define your keywords. I’ve written a few posts about that and cover it in the SEO book.
When you have your keywords picked, we’re going to create a new website, for FREE, and build a bunch of links ourselves. It’s way easier than you think. Really. Watch closely.
Pick your top 3 keywords.
You’re going to create a new web site for FREE. It will have some limitations, so you can’t do everything that you might want to do, but it will do enough to make this technique work and it’s free.
Go to http://www.wordpress.com and follow their instructions, using the top three keywords as your user ID. If your keywords are “handmade glass jewelry”, then create the site as “handmadeglassjewelry”.
That will give you a site with a domain name of “handmadeglassjewelry.wordpress.com”. You get SEO value for having the keywords in the domain name, even if it’s got the “wordpress.com” in there too.
They have some instructions there about how to create posts and pages, so when you figure out how to write a new post, write a new post about one of your products. Use all of the keywords that you can think of when describing it. Put in a photo. Write naturally, like you were writing so that I could read it. I have some WordPress Tutorial Videos that might be helpful.
Put in a link to your product page on Etsy. In the “edit” page, put in the name of your product and select that text. There’s a “link” button at the top. Click that. Copy and paste in the URL to your product page. Insert that into the copy on the page. You’ve just created a link to your product page.
Write a new post for every one of your products. Write naturally, but use your keywords. Put a link, or maybe two, from each post to each product page.
When you are done, you’ll have a web site, with your main keywords in the domain name, and links to every one of your product pages.
As you publish new products on Etsy, write a new post for each one on your web site. As your products sell, leave the posts and links. The search traffic will build up over time.
If you start to love this stuff, write other posts about the subject of your products, and not your products specifically. Your site will get some SEO just from the related content. Your site gives your Etsy shop a bunch of SEO.
As your SEO rankings start to build and you start see some results, consider creating your very own site that you fully control, instead of the wordpress.com free version. You’ll be able to do more things with it and you will have complete control over it.
The more pages you have on a site, the more links you have, and the more links you can point at your Etsy shop, and the more search traffic you’ll get from the search engines.
There are many other SEO things that you can do, but this is free, easy, and effective. Call it the “low hanging fruit”.
I started reading the Etsy forums to see what people are talking about there that might apply to my products here.
One area popped out at me and that’s the problem with getting traffic to your Etsy site. There are 21 items posted every minute there! There are 135,000 new people joining every month! I was shocked. No wonder products get buried there.
The first post I read there was from Warmth, saying they were ready to pay someone to help get more traffic. There seems to be some real desperation. (If you like cute little felt mice, check out their store on Etsy.)
Of course, I think I have all of the answers, but that’s just my personality type. The answers would be having a blog and promoting it off site. There are things to do on Etsy, but I know more about the off site stuff.
I found this thread in the forum and they had a lot of great advice. There were 569 responses when I saw it.
Here’s a quote of a small part of the initial post. It’s worth reading the whole thing. Notice the mention of a blog and a mailing list. Key factors there!
I am only going to hit a few key types of off Etsy marketing.. There are so many, so i will share the 3 that I use the most. At the end I show how put all three together along with on etsy promo to get 500 views to my shop in just over 1 hour.
Blogging:
I have been blogging for a little over a year. My blog has played a very important role in the growth of my Etsy shop. With my blog I have grown an e-mail list through my monthly giveaway.. This list has grown to 1500 people.. Last spring I held a product test with the small list I had at the time, which was 250. Long story short.. I sold 15 of the product test necklaces in less than 2 hrs. E-mail lists are very powerful!
Your blog should include links to your Etsy shop. These link should be very visible so it is easy for your readers to navigate to your shop. The best method for acheving this is to use the Etsy mini that is provided by Etsy.. here is a how to video I created all about the Etsy mini.. CLICK HERE
Facebook:
I recently joined facebook, and I have found to be a very powerful marketing tool. I use my facebook for networking and marketing my business, but you have to tread lightly. Facebook is cracking down on accounts that are doing this.. make sure your main account is set up in your name and not your business. You can set up a group for your business.. where you can promote all you want.
Twitter:
Twitter is my big hitter right now.. it is very powerful.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. wiki
I am running a Lunch Time Shoppers Series, which generates great traffic. The most popular post is the Top 10 Monday post.
Tune in every Monday at lunch time (12pm) for my top 10 Etsy picks. This list is generated from the top 10 monday thread forums on Etsy, which starts at 11 am sharp. This is part of my “Lunch Time Shoppers” series… you can find these posts from 11:30 am to 12.30 pm. Check out more details HERE
I was talking with a potential client the other day. They had been referred by someone else, so I asked if they had seen my web site. They replied “Yes, and you’re not going to get me to blog!”
I understand how much some people hate to write blog posts, people like me, for instance.
We all need to get past that.
The advantages of write blog posts on a regular schedule are huge. I know. I know. You don’t have time and you’re not a good writer and you have nothing to say and blah, blah, blah.
I don’t want to hear it. If you want to have any success at this stuff, you need to have a blog and you need to write on a regular schedule.
Google loves a “regularly updated” web site. You get points for not being stale. If someone is taking the time to update a site, it must be more valuable than one that’s not been touched in years. I love to blog.
If you have 5 posts written, publish one a day for 5 days instead of 5 all on one day. Google loves that too. I love to blog.
Google will come back and crawl your site more often if you publish more often. If nothing changes for a week at a time, why should they come back any sooner than that? I love to blog.
Every time you publish a new post, your blogging software creates a new page with that post on it. More pages equals more authority for your site. I love to blog.
On every one of those new blog post pages, you have a menu that links back to pages on your own site. More pages have more menu links that increases the number of internal links that your site has. I love to blog.
Every time you publish a new blog post, there are more words on your site. If those words are your keywords that you are trying hard to rank high for, then you will rank higher for them. More words equals higher rank for those words. I love to blog.
Every blog post that is interesting will draw in links from other people who are interested in it. More external links is good for search engine ranking. I love to blog.
There are probably other good reasons to write blog posts, but these are all I can think of off the top of my head on a rainy Friday afternoon.
Did you get my point? I love to blog! You should love it too.
I heard about this movie, Lemonade. It’s about people losing their jobs and it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to them.
When you don’t have a day job to worry about, and you’re desperate, with a lot of free time on your hands, it’s easy to make major life changes that you always wanted to make, but were too afraid.
“I got laid off and I’m finally doing something that matters.”
– Erik Proulx
The film’s creator, Erik Proulx, is an advertisement executive who knew little about filmmaking – but knew a lot about unemployment. Looking for work after being laid off for the third time, he turned to the Web and found people who were actually thankful that they’d been fired.
“I have to get people talking about how losing their job ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them,” Proulx said. “It’s really hard to see that when you’re in the middle of it.”
Proulx was in the middle of it, right along with his family and a mortgage. Still it was his wife who convinced him to follow his newfound passion and make his movie – even though it meant draining their savings.
I'm sorry for everyone who doesn't live in Los Angeles, but this was the sunset on New Year's Day.
This is my New Year’s post, as required by the Federation of Internet Marketing Bloggers.
Looking back over the last year, it’s shocking to me to see how my goals for the business have changed. When I started out, I was a web developer, building small businesses web sites. That was working well, but it was, well, work. Find a client, sell a client, build a site, be done with it.
I was looking for more of a partnership with someone. I wanted to be able to share what I’ve learned about Internet marketing and building web sites with someone who would benefit from it. I have the tools and I needed someone who needed the tools.
Then I found Deborah at Mermaids Purse Sea Glass. She was a friend of my wife’s who needed some help on her web site. She had a product that was very cool, that people would buy if it was marketed well. At my wife’s urging, we built her a site.
I always thought that everyone was just like me and knew this Internet stuff, but it was all new and exciting stuff for Deborah. I was as excited to show her as she was excited to learn it. As I talked to her about strategies for selling her stuff on line, I realized that a lot of people want to sell their products on line, but don’t know how.
They want to avoid spending too much time or too much money on building and promoting their web site. They want avoid common mistakes. I get all of that. I can show people how to accomplish all of that. The light went on in my head.
I’ve been learning how to put together a training program, an “integrated learning environment” or ILE, so that I can easily show people how to do this stuff. The forum was the first visible part of that. Videos and audios and web pages and PDF files are coming. We’re working on the course outline right now.
The new year will see the launch of this new site. I’m still working on the details of it, but I expect it to launch at the end of February.
If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback that you want to share about this idea, maybe what you’d like to see in it, please leave me a comment or send me an email with the form to the left.
Seth always seems to be in front of the people that seem to be changing the world. He brought together 70 people to share ideas on how we can turn things around, how you can turn things around and they contributed to this free ebook.
If you want to do business in 2010, if you want to be inspired in your own life, then you need to read this.
Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I’ve organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you’ll find it worth the effort.
When the economy tanks, it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business.
It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art.
If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.
In a digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs.
If you make a difference, you also make a connection. You interact with people who want to be interacted with and you make changes that people respect and yearn for.
Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. This is your art, it’s what you do. You touch people or projects and change them for the better. This year, you’ll certainly find that the more you give the more you get.
Seth Godin is a blogger and speaker. His new book, Linchpin, comes out in January.
Get an Evergreen for Your Blog This Holiday Season
If you want more traffic to your web site, you need to write posts that last a long time, that people can point at and come back to, over and over again.
These kinds of posts should be about what your site is about. They should show your expertise on the subject. They should be the kinds of posts that are so valuable, so informative or entertaining or insightful, that people will want to read them for years to come.
If you could write THE definitive guide or explanation to the subject of your site, there will be links and tweets and traffic.
Think about what your subject is, what keyword you want to be know for, and write a really good post about it.
You’ll see the traffic.
The evergreens we admire for their longevity
The most obvious way is to write about a topic that never gets old. These are cornerstone reference posts, like ‘10 Ways to Build a Better Blog.’ These posts are evergreen simply because people always need that information.
The good news is that evergreen reference posts are pretty straightforward to write. Do a step-by-step summary of how to do something from start to finish, and you’ve got yourself an evergreen post.
They’re also good for defining something that’s often mis-defined. For example, I have posts bookmarked in my ‘Evergreens’ folder on “What Marketing Really Is.” And I refer back to them often, because marketing is a slippery subject.
There are downsides to these types of evergreen posts. You’re up against a lot of competition, for one. There are already thousands of evergreen posts on building a better blog or providing better customer service. There’s probably an evergreen post on 10 Ways to Do Absolutely Any Topic Imaginable.
If you want your evergreen post to be the one that gets bookmarked, you’d better make it really, really good.
Which brings us to the second downside: Evergreen posts often require much more work than your standard post. You’ll probably wind up putting in at least 5 hours — and probably more like 15 — making sure everything is well-written, entertaining, compelling, and that you didn’t make any mistakes.
You might also be putting some extra hours into in-depth research if your evergreen post is on a topic that’s difficult to understand.
This article, excerpted below, lists 13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.
All of them are valid.
The biggest cost of WordPress is the time it takes you to create a site and make it what you want it to be. The biggest downside to using a free service is lack of control.
I suggest that you try out a free site, (after all, it’s free), and learn the ropes.
When you are ready for a “real” web site, then get your own web host and install WordPress. You can point everything on the free site at the new site.
With your very own web site, you have complete control of everything! Sell stuff! Publish what you want. Make it professional and compete with other businesses. Rock the world.
Final thoughts.
13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.
So basically what I’m saying is that it’s not a good idea to have a free website as your main home online. Whether you’re an individual or a business, get your own domain and pay for your own hosting.
If you already have a free WordPress site, and it is your only blog/website, I suggest one of two things. 1) Buy a domain, install wordpress and start fresh. You can always direct people to your new blog from your old blog, or 2) Export all your content from your free site into a paid site, then you’ll have everything in one place. The sooner you do this the better in my opinion.
That said, blogging communities are great and should not be ignored. Having a free blog within a blogging community however, is very different than having a website all your own. Of all the free blogging communities around, I like Tumblr the best. Here is a list of some of the most popular blogging communities.
WordPress is a blog application found at WordPress.org
Wordpress is free to use. It’s called open source.
Wordpress is awesome. Smart people use it.
Wordpress.com is a place to be part of a blogging community.
A free WordPress blog doesn’t make sense as your only blog.
A free WordPress blog is a great way to learn the ropes.
I read Seth Godin’s blog everyday. It’s one blog that you need to read if you want to know how to market on the Internet.
He was making the point that you want to focus your efforts on “someone” and not shoot for “everyone”. If you tighten up your marketing and make the target smaller, you can hit it easier. Here’s part of what he said.
Seth’s Blog: Everyone is clueless
You don’t want everyone. You want the right someone.
Someone who cares about what you do. Someone who will make a contribution that matters. Someone who will spread the word.
As soon as you start focusing on finding the right someone, things get better, fast. That’s because you can ignore everyone and settle in and focus on the people you actually want.
Then he pointed to this page with this video in it, about a guy who runs a store that sells soda pop.
Amazing soda shop
Nese is also passionate about his customers and suppliers. He tries to avoid the big names. He seeks out small producers with unique, high-quality products. He believes when people have the freedom to choose, they’ll choose the best. Nese is one character you have to meet.
So I watch the video and it is well done and interesting. Listening to this guy talk makes me want to buy some of this soda pop. The emotions are stirred within me. (First step in marketing – emotions.)
Since he has stuff that’s only available in his store, the only place in America that sells it, I have to have some. Since his store is in Los Angeles and I happen to live about 20 minutes away, I drive there, intending to spend $20 or so. I walk up and down the aisles and spend $90 by the time I was done.
Did I mention that they have candy too? I bought Fizzies, which I haven’t had since I was like 10 years old. Yes, that dates me. Fizzies rock. When you put them in water, they fizz up and make a fizzy flavored drink. “That’s as funny as a flood in a Fizzies factory”, which would be really funny if you were 10 years old.
Since I am that kind of guy, I take photos of each bottle and plan to taste and review each flavor here, on this blog. I’ve uploaded the photos to Flickr.com. Look forward to the reviews.
I had the privilege to attend WordCamp LA on Saturday. It’s a gathering of geeks who love WordPress. There were presentations all day long. I expected to enjoy being around other people with similar interests and hearing some great, hard core geeky WordPress developer stuff that I wouldn’t quite be able to keep up with. I expected to be bored for most of it.
It was nothing like that.
The first speaker was the one that I came for. Shayne Sanderson talked about using the WP-ecommerce plugin in WordPress MU, the multi user version. I never knew that would work and apparently it wouldn’t up until a couple weeks ago. Huge shout out to Shayne for the presentation and then letting me bug him afterwards. He was very gracious and helpful, even as I asked more and more questions. Huge help to me and I’m very grateful.
I plan on taking this technology and making it available to you. We’ll be working on a new site that will allow you, or anyone, the ability to create a new blog, pick a theme, and have an inventory system to load all of your products into, then sell them in a shopping cart. We plan to only charge a monthly fee and not a transaction fee like some people we know.
We’ll back all of that up with some training material to help you through the process of setting up your own business of selling your own products.
We’re aiming this at crafters, but it will work for anyone who needs an ecommerce site, a site that sells stuff and accepts payment.
Imagine being able to work in your own home. You can have your own web site to sell your products and make enough money to meet your goals.
It’s possible and it’s coming. Subscribe to our news letter to be the first to know when it’s available.
Back on track. The next speaker was Ben Huh. He’s the CEO of the company that publishes I Can Has Cheezburger and the FAIL blog. Go ahead. Go read the sites. I know you want to, so I’ll wait here.
You’re back? Cool. He’s a funny guy, as you might imagine and I didn’t expect much more than that, a good time. He proceeded to explain their business methodology. MPH stands for Mr. Potato Head. It means that if a part of your business falls off, it’s ugly, but nobody dies. It also means that if you add a part to your business, it’s ugly, but everybody lives. He said that they focus on exactly what they need to do to get the job done and no more. You need to let go of the ego, kill the sacred cows, and lose the attitude. Be lazy. Do what your users want and that’s it. They outsource everything they can.
The results of this apparent slacker attitude? 8.2 million page views a day. He wouldn’t talk about how money they make, but the company has 21 employees.
Micah Baldwin talked about Failure being job one. The difference between failure and losing. If you have a failure, it’s only an event along the path to success. If you lose, that’s the end. There is no more. He pointed out that America loves a failure who succeeds, but hate a loser. Don’t be a loser. Get back up and fail again.
Andrew Warner talked about how to put video on a web site. I figured that I knew everything about video. I own and use Final Cut pro. I’ve put together some nice stuff out there. Oh, wait. None of my stuff is on the web, not really. He showed some crazy easy ways to produce good stuff and put it on the web. There are tools that I wasn’t aware of. Now I am. Now I’m hot to do video. Training videos. Blog post videos. I’m gonna do it. Watch this space.
John Hawkins ended up by talking about how to develop a plug in for WordPress. I always wanted to get around to learning that someday, but I knew it would be hard and I would fail and I wouldn’t like it. He was the most technical speaker, but I kept up and he made it look easy. I’m encouraged. I can do this thing. Look for a plugin coming sometime soon too.
During all of this whole day, I was hanging out with my old friend, Doug Wade. We used to go to MacWorld together, back in the early days of the Internet. I have a lot of friends, but he’s one of the few who get this part of me. I really appreciate him. I didn’t realize how much I missed him until I saw him there. Check out his blog.
Using a testimonial on your web site adds credibility. You knew that. The problem is how do you get those testimonials?
Here are 10 steps to better testimonials.
Make your customer happy.
1. Do a good job. Listen to your customer. Set their expectations correctly, then meet those expectations. Make your customer happy. It’s not really hard to have a happy customer, but without one, you can’t get a testimonial, at least, not one that you want to publish.
2. Ask before you’re done. If you are working a project for them, during the project, ask them how things are going, what their thoughts are and if there’s anything you can do better. If there is, do it better, then ask again. If they say you’re doing fine, write that down. Progress reports are good for the project and for you.
3. Ask after your done. After the sale or the end of the project, ask for a testimonial. It’s easy to let this slip away. Half of being successful is showing up, so show up and ask. The main reason that you don’t have a testimonial now is that you didn’t get up the nerve to ask for one, right?
4. Be specific. “Oh, you were great!” feels good, but doesn’t sell you to the next client. Ask what they liked the most about your services, about working with you, about the results they got. If they can give you statistics, that’s golden. If you can tell people that you increased a client’s sales 32% by redesigning their web site, the result is huge credibility. If it’s a statistic, it must be true, so stats are money.
5. Be persistent. Without being annoying, ask specific questions over and over again until you get an answer. A lot of people have positive feelings about you, but don’t ever quite get around to writing them down for you.
6. Ask for permission to use their comments. If you just saved emails or comments they made along the way, show them what you have and ask for permission to use it.
7. Interview them. Set up a time to call them and ask them about their thoughts. Record the call, letting them know that you are. After the call, listen to the recording and write down anything appropriate.
8. Edit their comments. You can imagine what some people will say. You don’t want to put all of that on your web site. You want to edit and pick the best parts. Think about what they do to movie reviews on movie posters. Shorten it up until there’s nothing left to edit out.
9. Ask for a photo if they have one. Words on a page are nice, but adding a photo adds credibility, which is what we’re aiming for here. Most people hate photos of themselves, but ask anyway.
10. Don’t make stuff up. The goal is to gain credibility, not prove that you are a lying liar who lies. It may look great on your site to have glowing testimonials, but if someone asks about them and you can’t back them up, then word gets around that you can’t be trusted. You might as well get a job at MacDonald’s in that case.
I’m doing some research into what the best way to sell handmade and unique products online. I’m hoping that everyone wants me to build them a web site, but I’m afraid that Etsy and other similar sites have advantages that a single site doesn’t have.
Do You Use Etsy To Sell Handmade or Unique Products Online?
The fully owned individual site also has advantages that the large sites can’t match. What works best? What is a waste of time?
If you would be interested in answering some questions, here’s what I’d like to know. Feel free to skip any that you don’t want to answer. If you want to copy and paste these into an email and send them to me that way, please do so. You can also use the Contact page.
Depending on the responses I get, I may group the results and report only the composite information, or I may want to publish individual responses if they are interesting and valuable.
I may have follow up questions, based on your responses. I promise to not do anything with your name and email that you don’t give me permission to so. It’s just so that I can follow up with you.
Please tell me if you give me permission to publish your responses in my blog, either with or without your name. I can link to your Etsy store if you want me to. Entirely up to you.
Thank you very much for your time and patience.
1. How long have you been selling things on Etsy?
2. Have you tried selling any place other than Etsy, online or in person?
3. What venue works the best for you and why?
4. What tips do you have for people who want to sell on Etsy? What is the best way to sell there?
5. How technical would you rate yourself, on a scale of afraid of computers to building your own web site?
6. What do you like the most about Etsy?
7. What do you like least about Etsy? (You knew that was coming.)
8. Any advice about things to watch out for when selling on line?
9. Have you ever tried using your own web site? Did it work? Why? Why not?
10. Any advice for a person just setting out to sell their own handmade products?
11. Any other stories, advice, or comments that you’d like to make?
Find out how my site beat Wikipedia in Google. Even if you don't know anything about any of this web stuff, you can learn how to improve the ranking of your web site in the search engines.
This book is targeted at the very beginner, people who are not savvy about the web or the Internet. It explains it all, from the very basic, so you won't feel like you're in over your head.
The world has changed. The Internet is becoming a normal part of everyday life for a majority of people. With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars, from radio to TV, from vinyl records to CDs to MP3s.
If you need a web site that is attractive, easy to use, and it's easy to maintain, we can build that for you. Multiple features can be built in, including a shopping basket if you want to sell your products on the web. Read about our design services.
If you want Google to list your site as close to the top of the first page as possible, we can show methods to make that happen. These methods are called "SEO", Search Engine Optimization. Higher page rank means more customers. Do you want more customers? Read about our SEO services.
Rhonda commented on How To Use Email To Make Money, Without Being A Jerk:
Great idea! I have a lot of digital products I can give away. My question is, if I have a product that I wanted feedback on, is it appropriate to email it for free and ask people to give feedback? Not sure I would get many who would bother to write back.
nancy monsebroten commented on How To Use Email To Make Money, Without Being A Jerk:
Nancy the potter here. In answer to your request for what things we want to hear from you...I just want to have you keep doing what you do! Your posts spark me to forge on! You bring up things that are in the back of my head but I had forgotten!
I
Conrad Walton commented on How To Use Email To Make Money, Without Being A Jerk:
The easiest, most obvious is a digital document of some sort.
It has to be useful, something that tempts me to want it.
I would suggest a PDF file that's a special report of some sort.
Maybe "10 things to look for when buying handmade jewelry". "Buyers Guide to Handmade Jewelry". "8 reasons Handmade Jewelry
Mike Korner commented on I’m a unicorn!:
You are definitely a unicorn Conrad!
I like "my homies" but "Freedom Partners" might be better. What I mean is, by partnering, all parties get closer to freedom.
