What Bestselling Authors Know About Writing Titles

They vary by genre, but the majority of bestselling authors and editors return to the same hooks time and again to routinely sell obscene amounts of books. On the recommendation of Clayton Makepeace, a celebrity in the web’s direct response copywriting world, I decided to visit a bookstore and peruse the titles on their shelves and take note of what titles grabbed me.

As Makepeace explains:

“Just step through the front doors and take a deep breath: Can’t you just SMELL the money?

“This year, we Americans will spend considerably more than $30 BILLION on books and magazines.

“For the numerically challenged among us, that’s thirty thousand MILLION dollars!

[...]

“As they’d say here in North Carolina, ‘That’s some powerful BIG binnus!’

“Now, with that many shekels at stake, you’d expect the competition to be ferocious. You’d be right.

“Take a look around the store. How many book and magazine titles do you figure you see? 10,000? 20,000?

“Guess again, oh Prescient One. This is one of the bigger temples.

“You are in the presence of nearly 200,000 titles! Lay one copy of each end-to-end, and they’d stretch out for some 25 miles!

“Imagine being the marketing guy or gal whose product is only one of 200,000 competing for your prospects’ attention …

“… AND being limited in your quest for A-I-D-A (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to a single thought that will fit on a book jacket – or worse – on its spine!”

(I’d just like to point out, for those of you self-conscious about pumping schlock by the barrel, that there are at least 5 different writing style tactics used in those few lines.)

I selected the following titles for their brass-knuckles-in-your-face aggressiveness in calling for attention. They’re augmented by some selections found on Amazon’s 2009 Best Seller List.

Self-Help Category – Hook: Improve Your Life

- How To Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons On Finding Hope In Unexpected Places

- How To Talk To Anyone – 92 Tips

- Finish Your Old Year Wrong! Hangover Survival Guide

- Eat Out & Still Lose Weight

General – Hook: Curiosity About The Unknown

- Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

- Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, SuperAthletes And The Greatest Race The World Has Never Seen

- The True and Outstanding Adventures Of The Hunt Sisters

- Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story Of A Band Of US Soldiers Who Rode To Victory In Afghanistan

- The Cure: How A Father Raised $100 Million And Bucked The Medical Establishment In A Quest To Save His Kids

This category particularly fascinates me, so I thought I’d add in my grain of salt as to why these titles work. I don’t know that you can generalize to all books in this category, but the following traits stand out to me at least in the above set of titles.

1. We love stories. We grow up with them, science has proven we remember them better and so on. These books promise a story (or several)…

But not just any story!

2. These books promise a remarkable, quirky or otherwise unexpected story, often explicitly – with words like “outstanding adventures,” “extraordinary story,” and “quest”.

What really strikes me though is the variety of  implicit ways the titles make the promise of such a special story.

• “Patriotic prostitutes” makes me think, “Huh? That’s an unusual adjective to associate to prostitutes… “Global cooling” and “suicide bombers” buying life insurance are equally quirky. The book Spunk and Bite that I referred to in my previous post on schlock explains that to achieve this stylistic element you just need an unusual adjectives noun-pairing. The trick is to find a pair that isn’t contrived.

• “Hidden” and “the world has never seen” plays on our near-universal desire to know secrets, as any unimaginative marketing salesletter-page guru will tell you.

3. There seems to be a thread of ‘belonging’ or what Maslow’s hierarchy of needs addresses as “social needs” – the human desire for relationships with others.

Patriotic prostitutes belong to a nation.

A hidden tribe – well, that’s pretty explicit.

Sisters have family bonds.

We see a ‘band of soldiers’. Not just a group – an organized team with links between themselves.

The father was out saving his kids.

4. This may just be me, but I think there’s a bit of self-actualization (the peak of Maslow’s pyramid) hinted at or made explicit in each title. I’ll let you guys look them over and figure out the details.

Politics – Hook: Prove What They Believe

- Hot, Flat And Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America

- Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America (by Ann Coulter, naturally)

- The War On Success: How The Obama Administration Is Shattering The American Dream

- Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You And Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists And Union Bosses

- An Invonvenient Book: Real Solutions To The World’s Biggest Problems

Essentially, these titles just repeat back to people what they believe or are concerned about. The right wing titles (which outnumbered the left wing books in the store I visited) also aim to boil readers’ blood.

The Obamanomics title repeats back the following widely held views. Many people are disgusted by the bonuses Wall Street paid itself from the average American’s taxes, which anger just boils even further when these same people hypocritically argue for fiscal restraint as concerns other Americans e.g. in terms of providing health insurance to the poor.

Thomas Friedman’s title does the same sort of preaching to the choir (“we need a green revolution”), and adds in the national-aspirational bit in a way that seems to simultaneously strike the ‘belonging’ and ’self-actualization’ chords.

Miscellanea:

- The Long Shadow Of the JFK Assassination – I liked the shadow image

- Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road From Glory To Disaster – I think this addresses our curiosity and incredulity at the near-failures of the Big Three.

- Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer – And How To Prevent Getting It In The First Place – This seems to be another hook targeted at incredulity, combined with a self-help hook. “Cure” cancer? Prevent it? Awesome!

Conclusion

If you’re ever rocking away in your chair trying to knit up a title to fit your piece, a trip to the bookstore might be just the inspiration you need!

Gab Goldenberg wrote this post on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, an online marketing company in Dublin offering savvy search engine optimisation and web design.

photo credit: Jean & Nathalie

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Post Updated See End of Post

If you read TechCrunch, you may have noticed a post this weekend about Blueprint Cleanse, a health product designed to cleanse your body. On the surface, the piece seemed to be a  “California” lifestyle piece; however, after doing a bit of research, it turns out there’s a lot more intrigue, questionable journalistic ethics, and deception involved here.

This post is a bit long, but I promise if you stick all the way through till the end, I’m going to prove that Sarah Lacy lied about having paid for the cleanse product she blogged about about AND that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was romantically involved with a woman whose younger sister worked at the same cleanse product company.

In a July 25th post on TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy goes on and on about the values of “cleansing” and how she is getting various people around the TechCrunch office to try the product. At the bottom of the post you’ll see this disclaimer:

Disclosure: The company is sending out free samples of the product to press in California, including us, this week. I and others at TechCrunch have paid full price for this product in the past.

Issue 1: While the post may have a human readable disclosure, there is definitely a straight link which passes page rank, and violates Google’s guidelines on sponsored posts (see bottom of the post for more on this).

Issue 2: The disclosure that she has paid for the product in the past is a lie …

For the real story, we’re going to have to go back to a March 16th post on Sarah Lacy’s blog called spring cleaning. In that post, she mentions she has three objections to the same product, the third being the one we’re concerned with:

Third: It’s $85 a day for people outside of New York! We’re in a depression if you hadn’t noticed. I had to take another job just to justify buying a Kindle.

However, further down the post she  addresses that concern saying the company gave it to her for free:

Three: They comped my first cleanse.

This statement is a direct contradiction of her disclaimer on TechCrunch where she stated she paid for the product. Now, of course, it is entirely possible that the first one was comped and she bought another batch in the middle. However, Sarah takes that possibility out of the equation in her TechCrunch post:

I know what you’re thinking, because I used to think the same thing. I am a meat-loving Southern girl. Add in being a writer, and that means I drink more than I should too. I am the last person who ever thought she’d be doing a juice cleanse. I tried Blueprint out of pure desperation. A bout with pneumonia last year meant anytime I traveled or pulled an all-nighter I got sick. That’s obviously untenable given I’m writing a book about emerging markets and on a 10-plus hour flight every month. After just one three-day cleanse I felt healthier than I had in two years.  Four months later, I haven’t so much as had the sniffles.

Again she’s admitting (emphasis mine) that she had one prior cleansing four months ago, which matches with the March date of her first post. So which is it, Sarah? Were you lying in your first post that you got it for free, or were you lying in your second post where you said you paid for it?

Should you think I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, this isn’t the first time Sarah has been hypocritical in her journalistic ethics. On May 6, Sarah wrote a post titled News Flash: Paying for Coverage Is Still “Taboo” where she said:

There is no time during my life on planet earth or beyond that I will *ever* consider accepting payment for coverage. There is no circumstance or situation where I will respect a journalist who does, especially if the details of that conflict aren’t clearly disclosed. P.E.R.I.O.D.

Now, guess who went on an all expense paid trip to London with a bunch of bloggers in exchange for “coverage” on TechCrunch … Sarah Lacy. So, again, which is it, Sarah? Is paying for coverage wrong, but accepting free travel worth thousands of dollars OK? Or is it only wrong when everyone except you and your A-list blogging buddies like Robert Scoble do it? If you’re looking to get a link …  post … umm… coverage from Sarah Lacy or TechCrunch, with prices starting as low as $85 (the cost of cleanse), that’s likely to be cheapest and most effective link you’ll ever buy.

To bring this full circle and connect all the dots, one of the other bloggers on this free “sponsored coverage” London trip was Megan Asha (friend of blogging socialite Julia Allison). Megan has a younger sister who … (wait for it) … works at the exact same cleanse company that Sarah wrote the “sponsored post” for on TechCrunch. The icing on the cake here is that Megan  (whose sister works for the cleanse company) is, according to Valleywag, the on-and-off girlfriend of Michael Arrington. If this entire thing isn’t a textbook definition of “conflict of interest” I don’t know what is. If you don’t think any of this is a problem, let me rewrite the TechCrunch disclaimer to more accurately reflect the facts:

Disclosure: The company is sending out free samples of the product to press in California, including us, this week. I got mine for free three months ago but I’m totally going to lie to you and tell you that I paid for it. Additionally our founder Michael Arrington was romantically involved with a woman whose sister now works at this company. But really, this is all on the up and up … honest guys …

In the past, sponsored posts were only done by “off the radar” bloggers for $25 or less a post. However, they’ve now grown up and matured. Today these types of backroom dealings are being done by PR agencies in flagrant violation of  Google guidelines and without regard for journalistic ethics or integrity. It seems Google only likes to dole out penalties on the unknown bloggers, while A-listers remain untouchable.

While these types of arrangements may be very common in the print and magazine world, online they are a bit more problematic. For most anyone other than TechCrunch or the Internet elite, sponsored posts are 100 percent against Google’s guidelines and can result in a Web site being penalized, banned, or even removed from Google entirely. Here’s a quote from Matt Cutt’s, the head of Google’s webspam team on sponsored posts:

Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute). Google — and other search engines — do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example.

Two things need to change:

• Bloggers you need to decide to you want to be journalists or bloggers? Journalists are held to a higher standard of ethics that they are required to follow at all times. They don’t make an exception if it helps bolster their career, if someone is giving them something really cool, or even if it’s a gift they really want. They also don’t have a selective memory when it comes to disclosure.
• Google needs to be consistent in it’s sponsored posts penalties and reactions. I understand that dropping the hammer on Sarah Lacy, TechCrunch, or Scoble  is going to get you some negative press, but the rules are the rules. If you don’t enforce them equally, you look like you are profiling or playing favorites. For Sarah Lacy to claim she had no idea about sponsored posts when she wrote an article about pay per post penalties is laughable.

UPDATE: 2/5

So it appears there was an incident about an intern taking laptops in exchange for coverage over on techcrunch. The intern was fired and has offered an official apology. I find it amusing how the tech community finds this outlandish but ignored the entire colon cleansing issue. Maybe they really do need that cleanser ’cause this two tiered justice is full of ….

PS: should any of the posts in question go missing or you not see the text, here are screen caps of the originals. Yeah I’ve done this before and know how these things go down.

image credit: (cc) Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name and www.solutionsarepower.com.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Like most people who work in the marketing space, I’ve been hearing more and more about “demand media” and “content farms” in recent months and how they are either the death of quality writers or the greatest thing since sliced bread. Rather than sit on the sidelines, I thought I’d give it a test drive before forming an opinion.

First things first, this is NOT A SPONSORED POST OR REVIEW. I paid for this service with my own money. They didn’t know who I was or that I was writing a review when I placed my two orders. There is no incentive (past, present, or future) for writing this post.

OK. Into the nitty gritty. I’ve used “cheap” copywriting services before and, while affordable, the content was always hit or miss, usually with a lot more misses than hits. Most of the time it wasn’t useful for anything other than churn and burn MFA stuff. I’d given up on them a while ago and just started hiring real writers using services like the ProBlogger Job board or referrals from people I know and trust. But not everything needs to be high quality. Sometimes you need mid/low level grunt stuff that doesn’t suck and isn’t “dismembering infants” but doesn’t cost a fortune. This type of content is what I decided to test. I looked at few different services and decided to give TextBroker.com a shot.

On the main client page, they have samples you can read and pricing. I tested the $1.60 per 100 words and $2.20 per 100 words service after reviewing the linked examples. I ordered 4 pieces of 350-400 words at the $1.60 level. When the first piece came back, I was a bit disappointed. The writing was fine, but the piece had the wrong editorial “feel” to it.

It was at this point I remembered something I read in the 4 Hour Work Week about how to spec things out for a personal assistant. I realized I hadn’t done a good enough job describing what I wanted, which set the person on the other end up to fail. So I refused the piece as it was, gave a few suggestions about how to fix it, and fired it back. Within an hour I had the rewrite. While it wasn’t stellar, it was good enough for what I wanted. The remaining three articles, though (again) not stellar, were good enough. If I had done a better job up front specifying what I wanted and how/where the copy was going to live, I probably would have gotten better results. If you haven’t read Chapter 8 of the 4 Hour Work Week I suggest you do. If you have read it, skim the chapter again to remind yourself. Your results will be better for it.

For the next trial I went up to the $2.20 per 100 words level. I requested 7 articles. The pieces started rolling back a few hours later, and I was very happy with what I was getting. It may not have been flagship quality writing, but it was very good. Some writers were better than others and extremely good, but all the articles were better than average, and I was very happy with the results.

Pros

• Speed – You get your work back fast. Very fast. I ordered 11 articles and got 10 of them back within 4 hours of placing the order. The last article arrived in less than 24 hours.
• Value – You can decide how important the copy is and adjust the price to match your needs. There’s no need to overpay for something you don’t need.
• Quality – The copy was always in English, readable, and of good quality or better.

Cons

• Inconsistent Tone – Unless you select a specific author (which has a different price structure), your work is kicked into a general pool for all authors. This can lead to completely different editorial styles and a bit of a hodge podge feel.
• Prepay – You have to prepay for the service. You use paypal or a credit card and are billed the a dollar amount up front which sits in your account. You use this to order articles from. With most writers, you pay a small deposit up front or pay at the end of the month. The accelerated billing puts your costs at the front of a project.

Conclusion

To conclude, I can say that overall the Textbroker.com copywriting is service is one I’m very happy with and will continue to use in the future. I got an excellent value for the price, the articles delivered were of good quality, and they were delivered quickly. It won’t replace flagship content created by high quality writers, but it has a lot of value for the cost.

Bonus

If you order a lot of articles, and, like me, use wordpress as a CMS for your projects, here’s a tool to make migrating the posts in easier. Get the CSV2 Post plugin from Zack Preble. Use the article export feature from Textbroker to export your articles in batch. Then use the plugin to import in batch mode. I set the publish date in the import file to a future date, so nothing publishes as result of the import.  I can then tweak the articles, add images, add tags, or make any other changes. If you want to use the imported articles as pages and not posts, you’ll need Post to Page Converter Plugin.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Google has long been an advocate of “build great content”; however, in reality, it’s turning into “build great content … and if we like it we’ll take it from you, put it on our pages, and deprive you of that traffic. Without compensation.” Strong accusations, sure, but I’m willing to step up to the plate, put my money where my mouth is, and show you how it’s being done.

Let’s say you live in the Miami area or are thinking of taking a vacation there. You might want to bring your family to the Miami Seaquarium, and it might be a good idea to find out exactly where they are and what hours they are open. So what do you do? Fire up your browser, head on over to Google, and search for [seaquarium miami]. You should get a result that’s something like this:

So what’s the problem? First of all, Google gives away the hours right in the SERP. There’s no need for the people to visit the website. While I don’t know for a fact that traffic growth is a success metric for the Miami Seaquarium, I think it’s a safe assumption. By denying the Miami Seaquarium that traffic they deny them the opportunity to upsell visitors to the upcoming aquarium programs. Now Googlers might counter by saying that it’s all about “providing a better user experience.” Maybe at the next conference I’ll improve the movie going experience of some Googlers by telling them the surprise ending of the latest movie before they see it. I mean, I saved them money and two hours of their time, right? That’s gotta be a better user experience.

See that review and link to “more information”? Click either of those and, instead of being taken to the Miami Seaqurium website, you’re taken to the Google map listing page. Google stole the information they wanted from the Miami Seaqurium, hijacked the traffic for themselves, and put them on a page with contextual advertising that puts more money in Google ’s pockets. The only person that gets a better user experience out of that is someone whose paycheck directly results from that advertising. Really this is nothing more than a scraper adsense website designed to hijack traffic away from place it should be going. Because Google controls the SERP’s they make sure they are at the top, guaranteeing clicks, traffic, and revenue from that page.

This is almost the exact behavior I described in my debate with Danny Sullivan a few weeks ago on Sphinn. I stand by my position that giving Google the copyright to the information for free right out of the gate is the same as giving them permission to steal and develop a money making operation based on your labors without giving you any of the action.

Want another example of Google stealing? Sure, here we go …

Let’s say I decide I want to go to nice steakhouse for dinner. I know there’s a Bryant & Cooper here on Long Island. I wonder if it’s still any good, so I type in [bryant & cooper steakhouse long island reviews]. Here’s what I get:

So it’s got four out of five stars based on 48 reviews. That’s pretty good. I can call and make reservation right away and my mission is accomplished.

So what’s my beef here (pun intended)? Another long-standing Google suggestion is to build a website, service, or product that people want to use and place value on. This is what’s called a Point of Differentiation or POD. One way to do that is with user-submitted reviews. I wonder where Google got those 48 reviews? Let’s  check it out.

Let’s see…there are some reviews from Google, but the majority are from Zagat and CitySearch. Let’s review. Google says build great content and a service people want to use, which Zagat and CitySearch did. Then Google went and stole that content from them and put some adsense advertising next to it. If we go back to the original SERP and scroll down a bit … yep, we’ll find Zagat and CitySearch. Google hijacked that traffic, and those two sites got nothing to show for it.

What you need to do is ask yourself a question. Do you think Google is going to use less information or are they going to take more? Are they going to decide they can better serve the customers in your market by stealing your best content and putting it on their servers, where they collect the ad revenue, while they kick you to the curb faster than a no-good, two-timing, philandering spouse? Do you feel confident betting against the all-consuming data borg? Well do ya, punk?

The problem is that, as SEO’s, we’re the canaries in coal mine. We’ll notice trouble before it happens. Probably a few of us are going to have our websites killed by Google before the main stream press and Government notices. But the sooner we see the truth for what it is and stop burying our heads in the sand, the sooner something will happen to change it.

You may have friends who work for Google, but Google is not your friend. Google is like the feudal lord who grows rich off of the peons, serfs, and indentured servants who labor in the fields. No matter how hard you work you will always serve your digital master.

Update Patrick Sexton’s Video Response

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Late last week Google announced it was graduating social search from beta and making it active for everyone. I got a heads up from Barry Wise of KnowEm a day later, and we spent some time talking about what this meant for marketers. I thought I’d share some of our conversation with you.If you have a Google profile (like I do) and have any websites associated with your profile, when you are logged into that profile, your SERP’s may be affected by this new change. Google opted everyone in by default, so there’s no way to turn it off (other than by signing out or using anonymous browsing). Google has decided to ignore the “&pws=0″ parameter flag that they ignore for personalized search, a decision I really hope they consider changing.

Google is looking at the profiles associated with you and crawling who you are friends or associated with. Google uses that information combined with XFN tagging to decide what other results to show with your results. IMHO this is what the caffeine update is really all about. It’s about associating  social information and real time social activity with your searches and incorporating this information to hopefully produce a better result.

To show you how different the results can be, here are three different sample keywords from two different people:

[Michael Gray]

[Las Vegas]

[las Vegas Hotels]

Depending on how much overlap there is between your social graph (ie the people you “friend” on social websites) you may have similar or completely different results. It’s highly unlikely that two people will have identical results, unless they work at the same company and have similar social graph (an unintended consequence that will flummox search agencies to be sure).

I’ve said this many times in the past: Google considers personalized search part of their POD, and it’s a strategic goal for them from the top down. Like it or no,t it’s something you’re going to have to come to terms with. People are getting different personalized results and now they have the possibility of getting two additional personalized results based upon what their friends are doing/saying online.

In my opinion if you aren’t involved in social media at this point you are putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. You’re missing out on the opportunity to get yourself a SERP listing at the lower part of the page. To be honest I haven’t seen enough searches to know whether,  if you have an organic listing above, you might be locked out of a second listing below. However if you get a lot of social engagements that get talked about, shared, or retweeted by other people, that will definitely show up, giving you a second slot.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence waiting to get involved in social media now is the time. However this sword has a double edged aspect. To get the most out of your efforts you’ll need to get involved and stay involved. Making a few half-hearted attempts isn’t going to bring you any results. Getting involved in social media may not be easy, but neither is balancing one one leg when you’re 8 months pregnant while performing wudang double sword maneuvers. But both can be done if you make it a priority and commit to making it work for you.

photo credit: dizznbonn

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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In my opinion one of the more powerful and underutilized tools of a blog or website is the ability to tag your pages and posts. That said, effectively using  tags isn’t easy or straightforward. In this post I’ll take you through some examples of how to use tags and get the most out of them, the pitfalls to watch out for, and some advanced strategies you can use with them.

First we need to take a step back and understand that there are several ways you can arrange your website/blog. The first is by subject, which most blog and CMS platforms call “categories.” The second is by date, which occurs as most blog/cms systems put things in year, month, and date groupings. A third is by tagging, which consists of the notes or descriptions you put on your posts or pages.

All of these different classification methods bring about one of the hallmark problems of blogs and CMS’s: duplicate content. Let’s assume that you publish one page. That page will exist on the page, but also on the category archive page, year archive page, year-month archive page, year-month-day archive page, and the archive page for any tag that you attach to the page/post. This can create issues as the search engines have to figure out what page they should really list in the SERP’s. First I suggest blocking all of the date archives from being indexed by using the “noindex” directive in the robots.txt (note Google is the only search engine who currently supports this command). I also use the “noindex/follow” robots tag on each of the date archive pages. Basically we are telling the robots don’t put these pages in the SERP’s but follow through and get the pages. We go with the exact same settings for the tag pages. If you are running wordpress you can use the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk to get this done. This only leaves us with the duplicate issue on category and individual pages. To combat this problem, only show limited sections of your posts on the category pages. The thesis theme has this functionality built in. If you aren’t using thesis, you can use the teaser plugin to get a similar result or remember to use the “more” tag 100% of the time.

OK now that we’ve got the duplicate content issue resolved, why would anyone want to use tags in the first place? Can’t you achieve the same results with categories? Yes and no. Here’s an example of how I would use categories and tags: let’s say you have a celebrity website with categories like “baby bump,” “fashion,” “news,” “rumors,” etc. You are also going to have celebrities who are always in the news like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. What I would do is create tags for each celebrity and, whenever I did a post about the celebrity, I’d tag it with his or her name.

Another example. You have a travel website with categories like “adventure travel,” “family travel,” “skiing,” “cruises,” and so on. I would set up tags for countries, states, or cities, like Bahamas, France, or Colorado. You could have a white water rafting page in the adventure travel category tagged with Colorado. You could have a Skiing in Vail post in the skiing category also tagged with Colorado. You can also have a family travel article about visiting the Museum of Science and nature and Botanic Gardens in Colorado.  Those three separate articles would be interconnected by using the Colorado tag.

Here’s where the magic of tagging comes into play. If you use the cross linker plugin,  you can set it up to automagically link any word like “Colorado” to the tag page for Colorado. So if the person reading any of the three Colorado articles clicks on “Colorado,” they visit the tag page and see all of your posts about Colorado. I’ve found that in-posts links get much higher click throughs than “tag” links at the end of an article. You could set it up the same way for Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any other word/tag you used. What this does is create an alternate navigation path that’s both really useful for readers and keeps your content exposed to the search engine spiders. You could link the word individually as you write each post, but I find it easier to manage a website when I cut down the maintenance wherever I can.

Another advantage is that tagging is a much more effective way to choose which ads to display. If I’m only using categories like “family travel,” it’s hard to know which ad to serve. Do I use Disneyland tickets, family cruises, or city based Go Cards? However with tagging I can be much more specific by only serving cruise advertising to the pages/posts with the “cruise” tag. If you want to get really specific you can have general “cruise” tag and a separate ”family cruise” tag. You just have to decide how granular you want to get.

There are some downsides to all of this, of course. You have to maintain your tags because they have a tendency to get out of hand, especially if you have more than one author, and they play fast and loose with the rules. For example you could end up with “cruise,” “cruises,” and “cruising,” which really are all the same thing and should only have one tag. A secondary problem that can take things off the track is capitalization. With wordpress all of the following URL’s will have the same content:

http://example.com/tag/word/

http://example.com/tag/WORD/

If you’re blocking the tag pages from being indexed it’s not a huge issue. But it can come into play with an advanced tactic I’ll be talking about next, so I bring it up now as a problem to be aware of. To be honest the tools for administering and editing tags is pretty limited. The best one I’ve found if Simple tags. It isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done.

Advanced Tag  and Cross Link Utilization

Using tagging this way creates a problem: you squander internal anchor text on pages you are blocking from the index. In the examples above, you would certainly want a page about Colorado to appear in the index, but maybe not the tag for a small city with little value and traffic. In the example above you would set up the word “Colorado” to link to “http://example.com/tag/colorado/”. However, what if you set the cross link to a normal page like “http://example.com/colorado/” instead of the tag page? Then you could create a page with some editorial copy, install the EXEC PHP plugin, and use it to issue  a WP Query and automatically list posts tagged with Colorado. You will need to know PHP to make that happen, but it’s not too hard.

Another trick. If I’m creating “head and tail” content, I’ll set up the cross link to point to the “http://example.com/keyword/” page/post. However, if there isn’t any content there yet (ie only the “tail” pieces of content exist) I’ll use the redirection plugin to temporarily redirect to the tag page. I’ll take the redirect down once the “head” is written. This can get kind of tricky, so you should only use it if you are confident about what you are doing.

To recap and bring everything together, here’s what you need to remember:

• By using tags you can provide a more granular way to break down the content on your website.
• This break down can provide alternate navigation paths to your content for both humans and search engines.
• This break down becomes more useful to humans if you link words/tags within the main body of the content.
• This break down is extremely effective for serving very targeted advertising or affiliate links.
• Care should be taken to minimize duplicate content and duplicate/similar tags

Lastly one of the original purposes of tagging was to help blog search engines like Technorati understand your content; however, to be honest, that value is so non-existent it’s really not worth mentioning. When was the last time Technorati or ice rocket brought you any traffic?
photo credit: Mykl Roventine

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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If you pay attention to the ads that monetize most of the web, you’ve likely noticed a trend towards ads that promote content. Glance at these nifty alternatives to traditional banner ads, make some observations of your own, and then join me again at the end for my own analysis.

Is web 2.0 moving marketers to view community-building is a desirable goal?

AMEX

The AMEX ads above are the strongest affirmative answer to that question. The ads’ main goal is to drive entrepreneurs to AMEX’s Open Forum initiative, where the business owners can pick up expert tips to manage their businesses. Not only that, but AMEX has developed a ‘Connectodex’ service that helps SMB owners make connections amongst themselves.

In exchange, AMEX gets brand awareness with excellent targeting, filling the top of the sales funnel. They’ve also got a direct response effort going on at the site itself that succeeds in balancing AMEX’s revenue goals with visitors’ learning goals. You might have also noticed the subtle ‘Apply Now’ call to action in the banner’s upper right corner that ties into this.

Neutrogena

This co-branded ad with the Glam network tries to target 20- and 30-somethings, judging by the models and the text of the ad. And instead of talking about “me,” the ad focuses on “you” by offering tips presumably geared towards their audience’s interest.

I didn’t click the ad (I already know how to stay fabulous, duh), but I’m guessing by the co-branding with Glam that Neutrogena’s chosen to answer my question in the negative. They don’t want to build their own community of 20-something women.

Chase / Visa / Marriott Rewards

The ad targets an  affluent demographic of travelling businessmen who would presumably care for a hotel-rewards card with content that solicits them by name, as with AMEX’s focus on business owners. But the approach appears to be the same as with Neutrogena – sponsor content without hosting/ “owning” it.

(As an aside, I think the particular piece of content they’re sponsoring is brilliant given the bulls-eye targeting it affords Chase/Visa/Marriott.)

CLDS / Mormon.org

The Church of Latter Day Saints (CLDS) has a pretty unique situation:

• They have the express offline goal of bringing you into their community
• Their website features more content, just like AMEX
• The website’s format isn’t so much of a traditional online community where you have a multilateral conversation, but more of a guidance counsellor office type of place where you can put your questions to a missionary 1-on-1

As with other lead gen campaigns, the Mormons seem to have concluded that offering content and then gradually nurturing the lead is more effective than going for an immediate sale. This is reflected in their ‘Find a Meetinghouse [a Church]‘ call to action getting secondary treatment below the fold.

But by promoting their content (particularly with the clever flash-animated instant messaging  format), the CLDS is clearly promoting its content to build community.

What about SEO?

The lessons from these campaigns aren’t unique to banner ad campaigns.

When you’re buying or building links, you can be quite successful going with a content marketing approach. And if you own the community, you get the opportunity for both brand awareness/top of mind campaigning and your own customized direct response package. Which means you can be more aggressive with your SEO (eg by buying links) as well as reduce your dependency on search traffic. Inhouse community-building FTW!

{|- Last second update -|}

It appears the clairvoyant John Battelle called this as a 2009 prediction. In fairness, his Federated Media works with many of the companies employing this strategy, as he reveals in his 2009 Predictions: How Did I Do? post. Also, I recall Aaron Wall highlighting the foundation for this trend – advertisers creating their own content sites [not to be confused with website copy] – but it seems that hasn’t stopped them from advertising as Aaron suggested; instead they’re just advertising content.

Gab Goldenberg wrote this post for Red Fly Marketing, an Irish search engine optimisation and online advertising company. You can find Gab on Twitter @GabGoldenberg.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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While I do have some issues with Wordpress, it is one of my favorite CMS tools, because it’s easy to use, manage, and customize. In this post I’m going to give you a bit of insight into how I manage a Wordpress website.I’m going to assume you have already chosen the topic for your website. If you haven’t, you might want to check out this post from SEOMoz to help you. While most people use Wordpress as a blogging tool, I prefer to use it as a CMS for magazine or newspaper style site. Why Wordpress and not another CMS? It’s easier to administer, easier to get writers to upload and format their own content, and it has RSS and other social tools built in or that can be integrated very easily with plugins.

Keyword Research – You’ll need to do your keyword research. Decide what’s important and divide your content into different categories: evergreen content, primary content, secondary content, head & tail content, current events, and possibly even linkbait/social media content.

Evergreen Content – Some people call it evergreen content, some call it flagship content. Whatever you want to call it, this is the best content your website will have and should be written by your best writer. This will also probably be the most expensive content to produce, so you’ll have to do it in stages. Every time I put a piece of evergreen content up, I use  a plugin like crosslinker to automatically create internal links for specific words. Sure I could create the links manually, but crosslinker saves me time and picks up every instance in the past and any in the future. Little steps like this can reduce your maintenance.

Primary and Secondary Content – Look at your keywords and try to prioritize this content in order of importance. This will help you schedule the content production out over the next few months/years. Sometime I’ll use crosslinker for these posts but sometimes I won’t. It’s a case by case decision.

Head & Tail Content – I’m sure there’s another name for this but that’s what I call it. Let’s say I want to create an article titled “Best Family Friendly Restaurants in New York City.” In that article, chances are good that I’m going to have some editorial content to open and close the article, but the middle will have a brief description highlighting individual restaurants and links to those restaurants. But what if, instead of  linking to the individual restaurants, I linked to another internal page on my website with a more detailed review of the restaurant? If I wrote each of the individual restaurants (tail pieces) first, then writing the head would be a lot easier. Also if I gave the “head” article a social/linkbait feel it can increase the number of page views, since most social media articles tend to be hit and run type of traffic. As a result, this tactic gets me more bang for my buck.

Current Events – Having an editorial calendar is really a must IMHO. You can keep track of events that affect everyone like national holidays, but you should also include specific things to your vertical, like the Daytona 500 for your racing website. You can also branch out and look for other non traditional tie-ins (maybe a celebrity in your field is a contestant on Dancing With the Stars this year). By knowing what is coming and when, you aren’t living on the edge.

Social Media and Linkbait – While this is a lot more competitive than it was in the past, IMHO it’s still a no-brainer. It’s the most cost effective way of driving links, traffic, and sending social signals that people are visiting your website to search engines like Google. You need to work linkbait into your content creation schedule. Use situations like current events and head and tail creation wherever possible. If your industry can support it, you can create it as often as once every 1-2 weeks. At the other end of the spectrum once every 2-3 months is the longest I’d let it go. Some websites like Weburbanist go with 100% linkbait. It’s important to find the right time frame that works for you.

Schedule Content Creation – Now that you have an idea of what content you need and the order of priority,  if you need any of it on specific dates, you can start sending content out to your writers. I’ve had great results with the ProBlogger Job Board in the past. I like to send out a month’s worth of requests at a time. I also like to use a plugin like WP Status Notifier to send an email to myself or anybody else involved in the final review process (such as an editor) whenever a new post is uploaded and moved from “draft” status to “pending” status.

Scheduled Posts – If you’ve scheduled your content creation, once the article posts are ready it’s easy to schedule them in advance. This is another really important time saver and a way to cut down maintenance on your website. I use a plugin called future calendar, which puts a calendar on my post page and color codes the days that have posts scheduled. I like to keep things scheduled 2-8 weeks in advance. If you travel a lot like I do or just don’t like living on the edge this makes it much easier to sleep at night. You wont be able to do this 100% of the time as there are news/current events items that will have to be posted live/realtime, but otherwise it’s really helpful.

Dashboard Tools – I have a few plugins I use on the dashboard that help me keep and handle on things. Dashboard Scheduled Posts shows me a list of the next scheduled posts. Dashboard Pending Review shows me posts that are pending review. I’ll line up scheduled posts, pending review, and recent drafts one on top of the other on the dashboard, it gives me a quick glance of the editorial status of the website.

Comments – I’m not a big fan of comments, but other people feel they help build community. I see them as a maintenance point. The choice is up to you.

Sitemaps, Spiders and Crawling – Providing a clean and easy crawling path is one of the hallmarks of a site that is SEO friendly. The Dagon Sitemap generator automatically creates an HTML sitemap for your site and updates it every time you add a page or post (it’s all about reducing maintenance). Google XML sitemaps generates an XML sitemap and pings all of the services every time you add a post page (working towards zero maintenance again). If you want to track spiders crawling, spider tracker is helpful, but I wouldn’t leave it on all the time. Two other plugins that can help with crawling are wordpress breadcrumbs and robots meta plugin, both from Joost de Valk. If you haven’t already I highly reccomend reading his SEO for wordpress guide and subscribing to his newsletter. Both are excellent.

Errors and Links – Any site that has been around for more than few months will likely have things that moved and/or throw errors. The redirection plugin will let you set up redirects and also give you a 404 report, and set up redirections in one spot. I also use the broken link checker plugin to identify outgoing links  that don’t work anymore. I can edit the link or just remove it.

Utilities and Tools – Here are a few miscellaneous tools I use. Insights plugin lets you do searches and create links from the post page without opening a second tab. Optimize DB helps clean up your Wordpress database. Photo Dropper searches flickr for creative commons photos inserts and links them quickly and easily from your edit post page. WP Email and WP Print adds email a friend and printer friendly pages utilities to your website.

Logo – One of the easiest things you can do to make your website is give it a professional logo. Patrick Winfield of 10e20 created the logo on this website, and I love it. I’ve also used Prizelogos.com in the past and been very happy with the results. If you are on a tight budget GotLogos.com is another option. They charge $25-$100 depending on your needs, but they can be a bit hit or miss though. I’d recommend trying to get a square element somehow that you can use for a favicon and social media icon. It’s all about the power of branding.

Design – Having a clean, professional-looking design can go a long way toward making your website look more authoritative and trustworthy. I’m a huge fan of using Thesis as a starting point (read the full thesis review for more info). Thesis is a framework but it also has a lot of design elements built in. Also by building up a library of hooks and thesis customizations, you can leverage your work for future projects.

Backups – Having an automated backup solution is key. My favorite plugin is wp db backup. It can be used for on demand backups or scheduled backups that get sent to an email. The other thing you’ll want to backup is your theme and uploads file. I’ve seen plugins that do both automatically but once your blog gets big or the directories get large the plugin fails, so set yourself a once a month reminder and you’re all set.

That’s my big plan for how I set up and keep a wordpress website running. If you’re running wordpress you might also want to check out How to Speed up Wordpress, Wordpress SEO Plugins, or some of my other wordpress posts for some more tips.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Schlock writing is bad. Schlock writing is bad because it is uninteresting. By uninteresting, I mean that writing in a schlocky manner is generic. Schlock writing is styleless and schlock is flat.

If you just read that introduction and didn’t jump off a bridge, you’re probably a schlock writer. Go hang yourself with some piano wire.

While those may be some harsh words, at least they take a position! The sentences vary in rhythm; the vocabulary radiates intensity and aims for precision. The verbs “being” (is/are/was) and having (has/have) only appear as necessary. They don’t burden every damn sentence.

Strunk and White’s book, The Elements of Style, codified grammar and certain key ideas of good writing. It demonstrates the concision it advocates, for example.

Recently, I borrowed a book entitled Spunk and Bite, a play on “Strunk and White,” as The Elements of Style is also known.

It’s a great value.

Schlock writers – at least, those who lacked wire, earlier – would double their pay rate instantly if they bought the book and integrated its lessons. Personally, while my grammar is strong, I admit that my writing’s usual degree of sizzle doesn’t excite many readers’ palates. Spunk and Bite’s helped me with:

• Creating original images (dismembered infants instead of puppy-killing or baby-eating);
• Explaining why certain jokes are funny;
• Using adverbs appropriately, which clarifies the success of many linkbait titles I’ve seen.
• Eliminating wishy-washy words like “can,” “may,” “might,” “should,” etc.
• Sending neutrality to hell and choosing a side. I’m not writing an encyclopedia, after all.

And I haven’t even finished the book!

Schlock. Powered by Google.

Compare that energetic writing with the tedious truism of this lead I read. “Every year, many people plan their vacations.” You don’t say? Well after that shocker, I’m compelled to read the rest of your written-for-search-engine squalor.

Style

When people complain about Demand Media being a ‘content factory / mill / sweatshop,’ a large part of that is in reference to the total absence of style found in its content. Read Write Web accurately calls it ‘fast food content’ because it fills you up without giving you the substantial quality you need.

Substance

Which leads to my next point: schlock shouts with superficiality. There’s no research that goes into it. That’s also why Demand Media and others focus on the long tail, since that’s where schlock is more likely to succeed. The short tail is more competitive, which leads serious businesses to invest in researched, deep articles penned with flair. eHow sticks out like a sore thumb when compared with that kind of content.

Note: Wire content is also superficial in this way, though it tends to have slightly more style. The point is that Made For Adsense (MFA) sites aren’t the only ones who skimp on research.

My friend Rena writes in defence of such content,

“Some people say that in the world of search engine optimization there will be more low quality content. Sorry, I think it’s the opposite. There’s always been bad content. There have always been middle men who try to connect you to content, and whose interests aren’t totally aligned with yours. Google’s not perfect, but they’re probably the best company we’ve ever had at connecting people to quality content. If Demand Media is really low quality, their success on Google will be temporary.”

If we’re honest about it, SEO drives demand for content of all varying degress of quality. At the absolute low-end is autogenerated blackhat content. Marginally above that is schlock, which includes most so-called “SEO copywriting,” (code for “I can include keywords in my title and content). And then you have linkbait in varying degrees of quality, which goes pretty high. It just depends if the intended audience is search engines or humans…

Subscriptions

If you haven’t been paying attention, more and more content is being excluded from search engines with subscription models. In internet marketing alone we have subscription products from Aaron Wall, SEOmoz, We Build Pages, PPC-Coach, SEL, SEW and Problogger, just to name a few.

This trend towards subscriptions for premium content illustrates that:

a) Producing high quality content can be profitable, so long as you don’t rely on ads.

b) Increasingly, the [commercially-created] information available online for free will be of mediocre quality. While Wikipedia’s contributors count thieves and fools amongst them, its noncommercial nature has resulted in lots of high quality, free articles.

c) If Wikipedia means substantial, free, short-tail articles (Wikipedia’s tail is no longer than stub…), and MFA factories mean superficial longtail, then I conclude that deep, commercial content is only going to be available for a fee. So don’t expect search engines to succeed at covering the deep web anytime soon, short of a new business model for it.

d) Developing style as a writer adds value to your work, and that value will grow over time as more schlock gets pumped out daily.

e) Non-authority based algorithms and other content middle men will rise up to channel attention towards worthy content.
photo credit: englishsnow

Gab Goldenberg writes a non-schlock advanced SEO blog, with articles on topics like finding competitors’ conversion rates. He specializes in buying text links, and can be reached at Gab@seoroi.com .

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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