I hadn’t had a chance to sit down and write about it, but I came across an excellent article covering it thoroughly today. It’s far more eloquent than my own post would be on this topic (as copywriting is not the primary area I work in), so be sure to give it a read to pick up the fundamentals.

How Split Tests Can be Good for Your Web Site Conversion Rate - by Steve Jackson of Conversion Chronicles.

If you’ve been considering buying the ProBlogger book from Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, I highly recommend it. As I mentioned  in a review recently on my freelance writing blog, it’s worthwhile even if you’re an experience blogger.

Read the full review to find out what you may learn from the book.

I think the biggest problem is that it’s extremely easy to set up an online business, and there’s little to no startup capital required for many of them. Therefore it really is possible for “anyone” to start an online business these days.

However, being easy doesn’t make it any less of a business, and there are a few benefits to taking your online business seriously from the start:

• Avoid legal and tax problems down the road
• The more serious to treat your project, the more likely you’ll stick with it in the long run (and more likely you’ll earn a significant income)
• Others can tell when you don’t take your work seriously, and it can hurt your credibility

Here are a few basic things you should consider doing to take your online business more seriously:

• Register it as a formal business if appropriate
• Keep thorough financial and administrative records
• Invest time and / or money into adequate marketing tactics
• Take the time to do market research on your audience and their behaviors before getting into your online business to begin with

What else do you think people can do to take their businesses more seriously, and what other benefits do you see in doing so?

The truth is that most types of marketing copy work! If they didn’t, they wouldn’t still be around. What you need to figure out, as either a copywriter or a business owner / webmaster, is what kind of copy will be most effective for what you’re selling to the specific audience you’re targeting.

So please… stop simply copying what everyone else seems to be doing in the moment, and start taking time to understand your audience and what motivates them to act or buy. Test different types of Web copy, or even test different language choices. Watch what happens to your conversions.

And remember, the best copy isn’t necessarily the type of copy you think you want going into a project. You may want something touchy-feely, and find out that it’s not what actually sells to your audience (what they tell you they want and what makes them buy aren’t always the same thing - that would be like asking any of us if we want commercials playing during our favorite TV shows). Or perhaps you want something flashy, but your audience would respond better to a serious case study. The audience comes first. Then comes testing. Then, and only then, comes your amazing, high-converting copy.

Here’s something else to keep in mind: Just because something “works” doesn’t mean something else wouldn’t work better. Don’t stop testing and tweaking just because you’re satisfied for now. Would you really be happy with a 20% increase in conversions if a different style of copy could net you an 80% increase? Just saying….

I know Clickbank seems to have the better-known affiliate program and likely more built-in affiliates. They also seem like it would be more hands-off to run an affiliate program through them, whereas I’m getting the feeling with E-junkie that it’s more manual. Am I getting that right?

My concern is that I don’t plan to launch the affiliate program until the e-book has been out for a few weeks (when I’ll be raising the price, as I’ll have tapped most of the market members I’m directly involved with). Can Clickbank work well in that kind of situation, or should I go with E-junkie if that’s what I want to do?

Currently I only use Clickbank as an affiliate, and I’ve sold one e-book through E-junkie, so I’d really love some feedback from those more experienced if possible.

• I’ve stopped taking on new PR consulting work, to focus more exclusively on my PR writing and business writing.
• I’m in the middle of the first e-book in the Web Writer’s Guide series I’m putting together, and have launched that site at WebWritersGuide.com.
• I’m still working on a non-fiction book tying together online PR, small business, and music.
• I’m lining up quite a few interviews with independent artists for the re-launch of AudioXposure.com (which seems to be forever “pending”).
• I’ve gotten my small business blog (BizAmmo.com) back on track with posting. This is the site that used to be a PR6, then got slapped by Google down to a 0 because I sold text links as advertising (which I still hold as a perfectly legitimate business model). It went back up to a 2 not long ago, but it’s back to 0 again. Just posting because I’ve noticed it. I have no intention of changing how I run any of my sites for Google still - good thing I was smart enough to not rely on them for my traffic, huh? Of course it helps to have my background in PR, which makes it easier for me to build relationships with folks who are great at spreading the word via word of mouth (which I still insist is the best kind of traffic you can get - as it’s work out of your hands, so no constant SEO work, and it often results in recurring visitors).
• I’ve also revived my book marketing blog.
• On that note, what I’m featuring at All Book Marketing mostly right now is my progress on a novel I’m writing (in the outlining phase until the end of June). During the following month (or after a short break), I’ll be moving on to outline a second novel. I reviewed two books on my freelance writing blog a little while ago, each promising to teach you how to draft / outline a novel in 30 days - so I’m doing this to go beyond the reviews and to actually test and compare the methods more thoroughly.
• I’m gearing up to make some changes to All Freelance Writing Writing Jobs - I’ll be changing the types of gigs I add there, changing the theme to match the main freelance writing blog, and keeping the job board on the main page so it’s always updating (with my job list posts being featured mostly through the email subscriptions - although still accessible on-site).
• I sold two of my blogs recently to clear some of the clutter - AboutGreenLiving.com and FreePressReleaseWriting.com.
• Naked PR is still going strong, and I did some interesting interviews recently (a feature I plan to continue in the future) with Todd Defren, Darren Rowse, Joe Beaulaurier, and Andreas Charalambous. I’m still planning a new feature addition or two over there when I have time to hash it all out - one will be a lot of fun and let me not only by my somewhat snarky self there, but also give me a chance to be a bit more creative.

As always, there’s a lot going on (and obviously I have client work on top of that), but I think that about sums up any current developments.

• They simply don’t want to put the effort into writing a full marketing plan.
• They’re too short on time to write a comprehensive marketing plan.
• They don’t know how to write a marketing plan, and are flustered by the process.

A one page marketing plan can, in these cases, be a viable alternative to a full marketing plan, while still touching on important marketing strategy areas. This sample includes a variety of marketing areas that should be addressed. Use the following guide to help you fill out your one page marketing plan:

• Target Market - Briefly mention your target market for your company, website, product, etc., including any important demographics.
• Industry Trends - Are there any industry trends that would affect your marketing strategy (such as major growth or decline in your specific industry within certain markets)?
• Goal(s) - What is the goal of your marketing efforts? What do you want to accomplish? Make your goals specific and measureable.
• Strategies - In a general sense, how do you plan to reach your goals? These shouldn’t be specific tactics (like send a weekly newsletter), but should be broad in nature (such as increasing repeat visitor traffic, if your goal were to grow to 100,000 pageviews per day while marketing your website).
• Yearly Marketing Budget - Simply include your predetermined marketing budget, so you know what you have to work with when planning out your marketing tactics.
• Marketing Mix - Here’s where you’ll tackle the 4 Ps of Marketing.
  • Product (or service) - Simply mention what your product / service is. What is it that you’re marketing? A tool? A professional service? Information?
  • Price - How will the pricing model of your products/services factor into your marketing? Will you sell with a low price on a value principle? A high price to target a luxury market?
  • Placement (also referred to as distribution) - Placement means where you will physically or figuratively “place” your products or services, to make them visible to your target market. Will you sell through special in-store displays? What kind of stores? Will you sell through a catalog? Your own website? Online through affiliates? etc.
  • Promotion - Give a very general overview of how you intend to promote your products or services. How will you build your brand?
• Top 3 Competitors - Who are the top three competitors that you need to position yourself against? For example, if you’re an online book seller focusing on a niche of selling mysteries, Amazon.com won’t be one of your top three competitors. You’ll need to position yourself against other online booksellers in your specific niche before trying to go after the “big guys”. Keep things as realistic as possible. Who’s competing against you in the most direct sense?
• Your Strengths - What are your particular strengths which might help you position yourself against your competitors?
• Your Weaknesses - What are your weaknesses, or potential barriers to positioning yourself against your competitors? (Everyone has them.) For example, are you new to the industry? Do you have a smaller product line? etc.
• Monthly Tactics - Using the rest of your one page marketing plan as a guide, determine where your chosen marketing tactics should fit into your yearly plan. For example, using the book-selling scenario again, if there were a specific week or month focused nationally or internationally on reading or your specific niche, you might want to focus certain marketing efforts around that time (like a sale, having online chat sessions set up with select authors, etc.).

If you’re ready to kickstart your strategy planning, view and download (a .pdf file) the free one page marketing plan template.

Note: I originally published this article for the Suite101 network.

Since I didn’t have any buyers interested in the full site, I’m now selling just the domain. It’s currently being auctioned at the DigitalPoint forums if you’re interested - visit the auction.  All offers need to go through that auction please. The auction ends Wednesday evening, and there is currently a high bid of $50. The reserve price has not been met yet (it won’t be sold without the reserve price being met during the auction). There is a BIN (buy-it-now) price of $500 for this domain - keyword-rich, simple domain highly relevant to its niche, and with growing traffic already heavily from word-of-mouth and past users of the directory.

There was a BIN price of $1000 for the full directory / site. You can still purchase it at that set rate if the domain doesn’t meet the reserve price in the current auction by Wednesday, or you can make another offer privately at that time for the site or domain. If I don’t receive an acceptable offer for this first-of-its-kind niche directory or domain, I will likely simply hold onto it for a little while until I have time to improve it and re-develop it.

Traffic info and other details are available in the auction thread.

Interestingly, I’ve seen people say 14 days is far too much time for this challenge, and just today I saw some comments on another blog about it saying that 14 days is too little time to write a quality e-book. What are your thoughts on that?

Personally, I think it’s more than adequate. I wrote my first e-book (albeit short), and had it online ready for sale, within just five hours.

I’m obviously writing an e-book during the challenge (although not the longer one I’ve been slowly working on about pre-launch book publicity). I’m not going to go into too much detail about it other than to say that it’s targeting freelance writers.

Although I’ll be detailing the process a little bit over at All Freelance Writing, I’ll likely be updated here at Jentrepreneur regarding sales and such after the fact. What I know for now is that I’m not going with a traditionally long-form e-book sales letter, I’m using e-junkie as my payment processor / delivery service, and I’ll be setting up an affiliate program (my first, so that’s bound to be an experience).

Wish me luck, and if you have any tips along the way (especially the post-publishing area or dealing with affiliate marketing), feel free to let me know.

However, I’ve noticed that a specific blog of mine (my freelance writing blog) was doing decently in the SERPs for a few pretty basic terms, and so I’m challenging myself to get top ten rankings for them.

Here are the sites:

AllFreelanceWriting.com
AllFreelanceWritingJobs.com

Note: The second domain was just broken off of the main domain a day or two ago, so it will take a little while to get in the SERPs at all, and all placements listed below are for the first domain.

Here are the keyword phrases (and current rankings):

Freelance Writing - 16
Freelance Writing Jobs - 11 (this result should hopefully be replaced by the new domain)
Freelance Writing Gigs - 8 6 (I’d like to get this in the top 10 with the new domain; preferably the top 5)
Freelance Writers - 17

I also target “writing forums” and “freelance writing forums” for a subdomain - writingforums.AllFreelanceWriting.com. It’s currently ranked 4 and 5 respectively for those terms. I’ve used the second domain above in the past, and it always ranked extremely well for the targeted terms, so I have high hopes for it (it’s why I revived it and pulled the jobs off of the main domain again).

Wish me luck.

EDIT: Not even 24 hours after I just posted my positions in the SERPs for these keyword phrases, and my blog seems to be completely wiped from the results for those terms (not de-indexed though). Now why the hell would that happen? It doesn’t feel like coincidence, but who knows? Can you think of any reason it would happen right after I posted here? I know Google’s completely wonky at the moment anyway b/c of the apparent pagerank update that’s taking forever to finish, so I’m hoping it’s something that just passes in a few days. I suppose we’ll see. If nothing else, I was reminded why I don’t waste a ton of time on SEO, and instead focus on more reliable traffic generation (like publicity, networking, and building word-of-mouth exposure by building a reputation in my niches). For the record… I despise Google… pretty much always have… probably always will.

EDIT 2: Some interesting updates:

1. The rankings have pretty much corrected themselves (updated numbers above for any that changed). Hopefully they’ll stay that way. (The new domain isn’t ranking at all for the targeted keywords yet.)

2. If they don’t, I’m fine with that too. While I can’t explain it, my traffic increased significantly for the first two days after disappearing from the SERPs, and then went right back to normal ranges thereafter - so the Google traffic lost was more than made up for by some good old fashioned promotion and word-of-mouth.

3. I do still despise Google. I’m not a fair weather fan. I also don’t have many plans to do a ton of SEO work other than trying to improve rankings on these few keywords. Quality content will definitely stay the primary focus.