If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First off, apologies for the lack of posts over the last week. I was out of the office so things got a bit stale. I’m playing a bit of catch-up on work, but hopefully the posts will settle back to their regular intervals now.

I’ve been digging through my feed reader today and finding a number of gems. The greatest in my option that I have run across so far is a post from Barry Schwartz titled US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter.

The post discusses the recent case Standard Process v. Banks which looked at trademark infringement as it related to SEO. In the process of deciding the outcome of the case, the court got up to date on SEO and decided that the use of META keyword tags was immaterial to the ranking of a particular webpage.

Barry’s post is based off the analysis from law professor Eric Goldman, which can be found here, which includes a quote that I love. It is:

Lawyers, on the other hand, have been living in a parallel fantasy universe where keyword metatags single-handedly divert unwaveringly brand-loyal customers to piratical competitors.

Gotta love that.

This brings up an interesting SEO tactic – don’t try to figure out SEO, let the courts do it for you.

Kidding.

Two more articles of SEO interest for you to peruse over the weekend:

Diagnosing The SEO Health of Your Website by Jill Whalen
Link Development Tool Shortcuts for Firefox by Rae Hoffman

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Funny how the SEO world works. SEO practitioners have this inherent problem – when they figure out something works it is both sensible and rewarding to push that method as far as they possibly can. Unfortunately, pushing any SEO tactic too far is almost guaranteed to result in restrictions or rules being implemented by Google to curtail the successful tactic.

One interesting story that illustrates this point is the story of Matthew Inman and his site JustSayHi. You can read the full post, Widgetbait Gone Wild, over at SEOmoz, but for those of you who prefer the Reader’s Digest version, here it is:

• Matthew created an online dating site called JustSayHi
• Matthew built widgets that displayed information for various quizzes that people took – in each widget was a text link that pointed to JustSayHi with beneficial anchor text
• Due to the popularity of the widgets, JustSayHi ranked #1 for “online dating” and many other competitive dating terms – the site had over 500,000 members
• With the encouragement of the site’s parent company, Matthew started using their widgetbait technique to promote other offers, including payday loans and EDU sites
• Google discovered the widgetbait scheme and decided that, even though people willingly put the widgets on their sites and could remove the text links if they wanted, the use of widgets to cross-promote other web properties was a violation of webmaster guidelines
• JustSayHi was dropped from the Google index and was not allowed to return even after a reinclusion request
• Since JustSayHi was dropped from Google, Matthew started a new site OnePlusYou to try to get a fresh start and move over the JustSayHi users
• Matthew used the same widget technique, but in a way that seemed to fit the regulations of Google, since they were only linking back to the site that distributed the widget
• Google changed the rules again and said that OnePlusYou could not use keyword anchor text on the widgets, and were forced to change all of the anchor text to OnePlusYou

In the end, Matthew is left wondering how linkbaiting – a method that was once embraced by Google – has suddenly become regulated and grounds for penalization.

A good question indeed.

Continue reading "When Does Linkbait Become Black Hat?" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week is keyword research week on the PPC Hero blog, so it’s needless to say that I’m looking forward to each new posts they do. Today’s PPC Hero post got me really excited since it covers one of my favorite things - free SEO/SEM tools.

The list cover 4 different keyword tools that can help you expand your keyword list, research keyword volume and trends, and even identify a general cost-per-click for different keywords. All important things to understand before you start a PPC or SEO effort for a particular product or service.

Out of all of the tools I think the one I like most is Spyfu.com. Specifically, I really like the data they give on the CPC range for keywords – something I’ve been missing since Yahoo! went all “black box” with their Panama platform.

Make sure you read the full post, Expand Your Keyword List For Free: 6 Keyword Tools You Should Be Using (but probably aren’t), for a full rundown on what each tool can do for you.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land is holding his SMX conference in Sydney right now. Turns out Danny had a keynote with Google’s Marissa Mayer and was able to get some interesting information out of her about a new search feature called “previous query.”

Previous query is a concept that is already implemented in Google’s paid search results. Basically what this functionality does is looks at the previous query made and will display different ad results based on the combination of the two queries. So let’s say you did a search for the word “Munich” and then did a new search for the word “car rental.” Using the previous query functionality, Google would modify their paid results to reflect a search that more closely resembles “Munich car rental.”

In their talk, Marissa told Danny that users can expect to see organic search results that use previous search style search behavior. In my mind announcement wouldn’t be a big deal, except for this – users will not need to be signed into a Google account to see the previous search functionality – previous search is cookie based, so as long as your browser accepts cookies, you’re going to be affected.

From an SEO standpoint, this could be big – especially if you rely on people doing one word queries to find your site. As Danny points out in his post, this will make many “single word” queries bring back queries of two or more words, depending on your previous search.

What should you do to optimize for this change? From what I can tell, nothing really. Based off the search results shifting I’ve seen on Google as of late, it’s getting harder and harder to safely say what you rank for a particular keyword – and the addition of previous query will only make your actual positioning on Google that much more subjective.

If there is any advice I would give it would be that its really time to make sure you have a good grasp on non-ranking related metrics to evaluate your SEO success. Look at visits, pageviews, leads, sales, whatever – just don’t rely on search rankings alone – chances are they’re not going to be the same for everyone.

Check out Danny's post about the keynote here.

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Terror.

That’s the feeling an SEO gets when it looks like their site has been banned by the search engines. Even if there is no real reason for a search engine to ban your site, suddenly not seeing your site ranking for a keyword can touch off a sense of panic that will get your heart racing.

Normally the panic is unfounded. Your site may have just slipped a few rankings or could have been indexed incorrectly for some reason.

It has happened to me.

Google bot decided to swing by InsureMe.com right in the middle of a site update once, and our site was suddenly cached as a blank screen. When I checked our rankings the next morning, we had dropped magnificently. It was a disaster.

But the good news was, we weren’t banned or penalized. After some quick checks I realized the issue and we were able to react accordingly. After a couple days Google reindexed the site in its correct form, and our site quickly made it back to its original positions in the search results.

Knowing how to check and see if your site has been banned is a fundamental skill for anyone who cares about their site’s search rankings. Mark Jackson at Search Engine Watch has written up a nice article that explains how to check and see if your domain has been banned by Google, Yahoo! or MSN – and how to go about getting it un-banned if it is.

Check out Mark's post, How to Tell Your Domain is Banned in a Search Engine.

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Starting at the end of last month, Google started pushing out an algorithm/index update that seemed to be one of the more extreme updates they’ve done in recent memory. Actually, may people noticed that Google’s behavior was very similar to the “Google dances” of old, as rankings were mixed up throughout the different Google datacenters over a number of days.

This kind of extreme update is unusual for this day and age since Google usually pushes out smaller updates on a gradual basis, and usually the changes aren’t as extreme as this update, which has been dubbed Dewey.

I’m not sure if the days of the mega-update are back, or if Google just decided to make some changes this go-round that had a broader effect on the results than usual. Either way, for anyone looking to better understand the process of a large Google update, and the hubbub it creates, this is a great opportunity to get up to speed.

If you are looking to learn more, I’d say your best bet is to head to the Dewey update thread in the WebmasterWorld forums. By reading through the various comments you’ll be able to see:

• What happens to people’s rankings while Google is pushing an update
• The massive amount of speculation that surrounds a Google update
• Different IP addresses for different datacenters that are out of sync (or at least were at the time)
• Webmasters pointing out new exploitable holes in the new algorithm (even thought they are usually fixes pretty rapidly)
• How Google’s Matt Cutts (or other Googlers) will often ask for feedback from webmasters during a major update

If anything, reading through the comments on the thread will give people newer to SEO a good idea of what Google updates looked like a couple of years ago. And for veterans, it’s almost like a trip down memory lane.

I’m guessing this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this update. I’ve been seeing ranking shifts for most websites ranking on the first page for major terms for a month or two now…so I wouldn’t expect the results to “settle” quite like they used to in the days of major Google dances.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If SEO is an art form, then link sculpting is one of the major tools that an SEO artist has at their disposal. I’ve spoken before about using the rel=”nofollow” link attribute to maximize the flow of link juice to your most important pages, and reduce the flow to the least.

But what many people don’t know is that they may have some link equity somewhere on their site that they don’t know about. Maybe someone linked to an article on your site randomly and you never noticed the link. Maybe someone picked up on a blog post of yours and pointed a link to that page. Heck, maybe a page on your site got included in an academic directory and you never noticed. Seriously, I’ve seen it happen.

Knowing where all your inbound links are pointing is essential to being a proactive link sculptor, and luckily Google provides a tool in their Google Webmaster Tools interface that can help you see where all of your inbound links are pointing.

To see this report you need to do the following:

Continue reading "Using Google Webmaster Tools to Find Hidden Link Juice" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love this guy...

[via]

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our affiliates was checking out the Google results last week and was surprised to see that Google was obviously in the process of testing out some new versions of the results page.

Here’s a screen grab, you can click it for a bigger view:

As you can see there are a number of things going on this Google results page, including:

• AdWords ads showing up with a bright yellow background on the top and the right
• A video results section is showing up under the AdSense ads on the right sidebar
• A news results section is showing up under the video results on the right sidebar
• A big “searches related to” section running at the bottom of the page

The affiliate also reported that he saw other iterations of these results showing up, including one where the video results section was running on top of the AdWords sidebar on the right side of the page.

Very interesting stuff. But why would Google do this?

Continue reading "Google Results Experimentation Seen Last Week – Possible Step Towards Video Ad Integration?" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page – and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.

Coincidentally, Search Engine Land’s Bill Slawski posted an article that talks about the importance of a privacy policy when you are doing search engine marketing. Like any of Bill’s articles, this one is well thought out and researched and points to three reasons you’d want to make sure you include a privacy policy on your site (so make sure you read the full article here). They are:

1. Privacy policies give your site credibility and reassures your users
2. Whether your site has a privacy policy or not has an influence on your PPC Quality Score with Google
3. Some people think that having a machine readable privacy policy will affect everything for search rankings to the filtration of sites by toolbars and other tools

All this privacy policy talk made me realize that a lot of new affiliate marketers probably don’t even think to add a privacy policy to their affiliate site – which could be hurting their chances of success. If you fall into that boat, you should make it a goal to get a privacy policy added to your site(s) by the beginning of next week.

Oh yeah, one other thing, don’t just go and steal someone’s privacy policy off their site…that’s bad form. Instead use one of the helpful online tools out there like this privacy policy generator.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s been a while since I have checked out the SEOmoz blog, but since there has been a serious lack of interesting information being published on other sites (*cough*-Search Engine Land-*cough*), I decided to check in and see what Rand and friends were up to.

Now aside from having some of the most photogenic people in the search business working for them (I mean look at those profile photos – it’s like a geek modeling agency over there), SEOmoz tends to do a nice job of putting out actionable SEO advice, although mostly just for paying subscribers. Today though, I was excited to see some advice on the free site that discussed some recent test results from the Mozers.

In the post, Rand describes the findings of an experiment with the effectiveness of multiple links to the same URL coming from the same webpage. What they found was a bit of a surprise to me – when there are multiple links to a single URL on a webpage, Google only counts the first link on the page towards the distribution of both link juice and the anchor text of the link.

In the past I’ve always thought that each link passed link juice to the destination URLs on a webpage, duplicate or not. For example, if there was a webpage with five links on it, with 2 links to webpage A, 1 link to webpage B, 1 link to webpage C and 1 link to webpage D, I assumed that the following was true:

• webpage A would get 40% of the link juice from the page
• webpage B would get 20% of the link juice from the page
• webpage C would get 20% of the link juice from the page
• webpage D would get 20% of the link juice from the page

But based off of SEOmoz’s testing, the real link juice distribution would look like:

Continue reading "New Link Sculpting Advice from SEOmoz" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back on the third of this month Yahoo! put out one of its “weather updates” – announcing indexing, crawling and algorithm changes that were pending. After the announcement, there were very few visible changes to the search results, but starting last week, the changes starting taking hold.

After doing my Monday morning scan of our rankings, I definitely noticed some changes. Specifically, some of the sites that have historically given Yahoo! some issues, Xanga being the best example, are ranking well again…something that took Yahoo! a while to fix after the last update.

Also, there seems to be more sites getting multiple pages ranked well, versus the past when most sites just had their homepage ranking well for key terms. This is a mixed blessing I’d say – since it gives site owners a better chance to have your inner pages indexed, but also seems to be filling up the top rankings with multiple pages from some highly influential websites.

Also, the number of inbound links, at least for our site, has decreased quite a bit. I’m not sure if this will just be temporary, which is usually the case, or if Yahoo! is being more aggressive when filtering out or reporting links.

Either way, if you’ve been doing SEO for your sites, and you haven’t checked your Yahoo! rankings lately, today may be a good day to do so.

Oh yeah, and if you want to see something kind of funny/sad, look in the post comments and see how much spam the post has gotten that hasn't been cleaned up. Kinda makes you wonder if Yahoo! is collecting those site URLs and blacklisting them or something.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s a bit of an uproar going on over at Search Engine Land about an article written by Shari Thurow’s called “You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice.”

In the column, Shari suggests that SEO not use what a lot of SEOs call “link siloing” or “pagerank sculpting” because is being used to improve rankings and not to improve user experience.

For those who don’t know, link siloing is basically the act of using the “nofollow” tag on links to unimportant pages on your site (unimportant from a search standpoint - like privacy policy, T&C, etc.) so that other links without the “nofollow” attribute get more link juice from the linking page.

Shari seems convinced that the overuse of “nofollow” will eventually be considered a bad thing by Google, even though Google’s Matt Cutts has said publicly:

Yes, webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages

Continue reading "Is Link Sculpting with “Nofollow” Bad SEO?" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s a video from 45n5.com’s Mark Wielgus that explains his 2010 rule for SEO. The premise is that you should only try to do SEO in niches where you can build a webpage that is 20% better than the top 10 results for a particular keyword. Here’s the video:

What I really like about the 2010 SEO rule is that it challenges affiliates to actually create a site that adds more value to a particular niche than anyone else is currently. This in itself is really what I think defines a good affiliate site…a site that is not just able to rank well, but is able to rank well over time, even under the scrutiny of a manual review by a search engine’s search quality team, because the site adds value.

Sure, 20% better is a bit vague – but I think the number is more symbolic than anything. The real point is that you should do whatever you can to create the best website for the niche you operate in.

Take a look at your site and compare it to the top ten sites for the keyword you’d like to rank for. Is your site better? If not, what could you do to make your site better? Is there information you can add? Can you make your site more user friendly? More entertaining? Can you offer more options than the top 10?

Figure out everything that can be improved upon and strategically incorporate those things into your site. That’s your “20% better.”

By challenging yourself to create the best site in your niche, you’ll give people more of a reason to seek out your site, link to your site, and tell their friends about your site. And that folks, is a powerful path to SEO success.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If this sounds like an interesting concept for providing better search results to you…

VortexDNA is a technology that came out of the insight that the way we structure our beliefs is governed by the mathematics of complex systems. What that means is that we know the structure our beliefs, and because of that we can then map out the structure of our intentional DNA, the intentions behind the world we create, and that’s basically the breakthrough, the technology. It provides a map of the way people organize who they are, literally who they are, through their belief systems.

…you should probably read this article from Gord Hotchkiss at Search Engine Land that discusses the work of Vortex DNA.

While this might not be the exact future of search, it gives some insight into what people are doing to solve the mystery of searcher intent (i.e. figuring out mathematically if someone wants a computer or a piece of fruit when they type “apple” into a search box.)

Enjoy. Have a great weekend. And safe travels to all of you headed to Affiliate Summit in Vegas!

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today’s affiliate tip comes from a conversation I had this morning with one of the best affiliate SEO guys I know, who will remain nameless (because that’s how he rolls), but for the purpose of this post we’ll call him Mr. SEO.

As you might guess, doing SEO for Google in competitive verticals (like insurance) requires time, skill, and healthy amount of experimentation. Experimenting with eternal linking methods, content creation, site structure and internal links are usually necessary when trying to pull first page ranking on big money terms.

What a lot of affiliates don’t understand is that the same experimentation that makes a site successful in Google can also eventually lead to ranking penalties. Whether those penalties are deserved or not isn’t really the point – if you get zapped by Google, it’s time consuming and difficult, if not impossible, to recover – especially when you aren’t a mainstream branded site.

When faced with a fairly obvious Google slap to his main money making domain, Mr. SEO realized right away that it was time to dump his penalized site and start the optimization process over with a new domain.

This caused a bit of a problem.

Continue reading "Keeping Sites on the Back Burner So You Don’t Get Burned" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Wow.

Debra Mastaler has done it again. To see what I am talking about check out her comprehensive list of link building tools at Search Engine Land. By comprehensive I mean she covers tools to help in all stages of link building, including tools that:

• Check for broken internal links on your site
• Check for sites that rank well on more than one search engine
• Find “hub sites” that link to more than one of your competitors
• Analyze anchor text on competitor’s links
• Check the age of potential link partner’s domains and their bad neighborhood status
• Search for directories and sites that allow URL submissions in your niche
• Search for blogs that can be mined for links

Based off a quick count it looks like Debra points to no less than 20 sites that can help you get a better grasp on how to build quality links to your site.

Needless to say, I know how I’m spending the rest of my day…

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Link building maven Debra Mastaler put together a list in September of ways that someone who is new to link building could start getting some links. While I wasn’t following her blog at the time, I am now, and I figured I’d put a link to the post since it is really a good resource for anyone who has to build links (hence, the post recently won a Semmy award).

The thing I really like about Debra’s approach to link building is that she looks at it with an eye towards traditional marketing as well as online. In Debra’s list you will find all the classic methods like directory submission and press releases to more creative approaches like contacting journalists and getting interviews.

If you have a website that you’d like to seem move higher in the search results (who doesn’t), make sure you read the post and apply what you learn.

On an unrelated note, here is Carlton Banks dancing to Tom Jones. Happy Friday:

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The “one stop shop.” Based on research done by Phrases.org.uk, the term originated sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, with the oldest known usage coming from an auto shop advert in The Lincoln Star newspaper.

The concept of a one stop shop, a place where you can get all sorts of products and services in one place, has worked well for the mega retailers of the world like Wal-Mart, Tesco, and Target. We all know that the combination of a super retailer’s massive buying power, mixed with location based convenience creates a powerful draw on offline consumers looking to get what they need as quickly and cheaply as possible.

But as small scale marketers, we need to be careful when we assume that what works best for the biggest and brightest in the offline world is the right way to do things in the online world.

Here’s the thing, if you are an affiliate marketer, and you are aiming to be successful and build a business, the one stop shop concept is of no use to you. To begin with, half of the draw of an offline one stop shop is the ability to get a lot of different purchases made the same physical location. But in the virtual world, physical location really isn’t a concern since every product or service is just a Google search away.

But even taking the physical location aspect of the one stop shop strategy out of the mix, some affiliate would still argue that it is very convenient to get all of your online shopping done in one place. Naturally, whey would offer up Amazon or eBay as an example of one stop shop success. What they are forgetting is that Amazon didn’t start as a one stop shop, it started as an online book store. And eBay, a place to buy and sell Pez dispensers. You see, these companies grew and matured into a one stop shop of sorts, but they started and originally succeeded because they weren’t trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gate.

Continue reading "No One Needs Your “One Stop Shop” Online" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If there is one thing I’ve heard from Yahoo! representatives speaking at search conferences it is that Yahoo! ranking algorithm for its natural results is a stickler for clean code. It seems Yahoo! looks for clean code as one of the indicators for a site’s quality, which makes some sense.

This might not be a huge deal for a corporate coder, but if you are an amateur website coder, the clean code requirement can be daunting. I know I have a hard time putting together error-free HTML most of the time, and I’m not totally schooled on what is “compliant” code and what isn’t. Luckily I have a great team of programmers and designers to do 99.99999% of the coding of InsureMe’s pages, but if you don’t have a corporate IT team behind you, there is still hope.

The Web Worker Daily blog has written up a good summary of three tools that can help you tidy up your code. They are:

1. HTML Tidy – This will find and clean up most HTML mistakes, and if it can’t fix them it will at least tell you where they are.
2. HTML Stripper – This works really well at cleaning up frames and scripts that are no longer necessary in your website.
3. Link Sleuth – This application will help you find any broken links on your website, so you aren’t sending people to dreaded 404 pages.

If you are looking to get better rankings on Yahoo! and you haven’t had someone check out the code on your site for cleanliness, set aside a chunk of time in the next couple days to check and correct your code. If could be the thing that takes your site from Yahoo! obscurity to Yahoo! success.

[Note: Download this stuff at your own risk - I have not tested these to see if they will completely melt down your computer once you install them. Just sayin'.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you’re an affiliate who uses content creation as a channel to drive traffic to your affiliate offers, you know more than anyone that some days creating original/interesting content can be a bit of a challenge. And if you work on sites in niches that just aren’t all that exciting to the average web user, insurance for example, you know how hard it can be to come up with content that will draw in readers and keep them around long enough to covert them.

So what’s an affiliate to do?

In one word, strategize.

There is a reason why top bloggers and other content producers seem to get more attention than the average writer. The difference usually comes down to the level of planning, strategizing and thought that goes into the content produced.

Brian Clark from Copyblogger, home to a multitude of highly regarded blog posts, is a pro at creating original, interesting, and informative content that tends to get the links, visitors and acclaim that we all desire. Not surprisingly, he is a firm believer in strategizing before he creates content to make sure that he is writing the right thing, for the right audience, at the right time.

In Brian’s post, A Three-Step Approach to Strategic Content Development, he shows us how to go about building a content creation strategy that has a better chance of getting read and passed around the net. While the focus might be on blogging in the post, most of the tips, if not all, can be translated over to a site that is creating content that is aimed to bring in affiliate marketing dollars.

Give the post a read, and then take the time to sit down and run through the questions he presents in the post. Who knows, you could end up with a new direction for your content and a chance to take your business to the next level.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)