Auckland, New Zealand

I’m sat taking some time out from our travels down under to let you know about a couple of great giveaways.

Yes, I am on my travels again. This time touring the other side of the planet. We are down in Auckland, New Zealand right now, after a quick stop in Singapore and just before we head to Sydney, and then Melbourne Australia. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be updating my blog with a vacation update but this news is too good.

How good? My friend Sean is giving away an entire audio course. Not only is he giving it away, it’s a course that he is currently selling right now on his website for $2500.

Go get it now before he comes to his senses.

You will need to opt in and part of the terms and conditions is that after you have gone through the course you will provide feedback. So Sean gets your opt-in and a testimonial, you get a full online course that you can play on your iPod completely free of charge. Seems like a good deal to me!

While we are on the topic of free information, I should have told you a little while ago that another friend Daniel Scocco is giving away his ebook on making money blogging. It’s 54 pages, covering Content, Design & Usability, Networking, Promotion and Monetization.

Opt-in to get the ebook here.

I’m going to go finish my “Flat White” and chocolate brownie now while you go and sign up for those great offers before they disappear. Om Nom Nom

Chris “G’day’ Garrett

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This text has been taken from the article Brilliant Free Stuff from Friends. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Gary crushing it at Web 2.0 Expo NY

Today I am happy (and more than a little relieved) to be able to share with you this quick and informal interview I grabbed last week with Gary Vay.Ner.Chuk.

Gary has quickly become a fixture on the convention scene, TV celebrity and a media darling because of his larger than life energy and positive personality, and also his expertise in personal branding, social media and business.

Right now he is in the process of the launch his brilliant new book, “Crush It“.

I was fortunate to grab 30 technical gremlin frustrated minutes where I got to ask him about his philosophy behind business and life. Thankfully by patching the legible bits I managed to salvage a lot of the interview. Check it out right here …

… or download the mp3 (under 20mins) to listen offline.

Signed Book Winners

• @rawarrior
• Jade Craven
• Dave Sabol

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This text has been taken from the article Gary Vaynerchuck Interview. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

As part of the launch of Social Media Examiner I will be doing a live video chat along with Mike Stelzner. It’s free and easy to join in, and should be good fun!

• 10:00 New York time
• 15:00 London time

Check out the full details here.

Also, while you are there, check out my first article for the site …

“How to Create Headlines that Go Viral With Social Media“

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This text has been taken from the article Join Me For a Live Chat. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Business Blogging Made Simple

Order now and get instant access …

Save $10 – offer ends 14th Today! (Offer extended)

I am really proud of this new book, I think the Wordtracker folks have done a grand editing and design job, and I know you will recoup your investment many times over by implementing my step by step plan

Check out the full details

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This text has been taken from the article Get My New Business-Blogging Book with $10 Off. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Got personal branding or social media questions? How would you like to get answers from one of the biggest new media rockstars on the planet?

Gary Vaynerchuk is one of my favorite people in social media and he is in crazy demand right now due to his massively successful business projects, his new book (Crush It), and the arrival of his child. I am pinching myself right now because he has given me a slot in his super-busy schedule.

Frankly I am also a little cautious – I do not want to mess up this chance to get some GaryVee wisdom on record.

This is where you come in!

As well as giving me a chance at an interview, he has also signed three books which are yours to win.

All you have to do is tweet or comment on this post to ask your question for Gary. Right before the interview on the 8th October I will select the winners at random.

• Click Here to Create Your Tweet

(If you tweet manually, make sure you include the #q4garyvee “hastag” so I can track and collate the questions, do NOT bombard Gary’s Twitter account with your questions!)

Of course you might also get your question read out in the interview

What do you want to know? Ask your question now to be in with a chance of winning!

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This text has been taken from the article Climb Inside Gary Vaynerchuk’s Brain and Crush It. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Win Copywriting Success Summit Tickets

It’s time to announce the winners of our Copywriting Success Summit 2009 Competition!

This was a very close thing, and Mike and I debated back and forth. There were some very cool entries, some excellent creativity and fun responses, others more serious, but we felt the winner we chose would get a lot of value out of the Summit and be able to directly put everything to direct use …

Before I announce the winners, I need to remind you that today is the last day to save $200 on the Summit! Remember it is 100% online or over the telephone, with all recordings and replays made available if you miss any of the sessions. No travel necessary, follow the great information and ideas directly from your home or office. These folks are going to really boost your copywriting in ways you will love! And I am doing a session too.

Book your ticket for the Copywriting Success Summit 2009 now and save $200

Grand Prize Winner:

This post from Sherice Jacob – Web Designer, Copywriter, Author

Twitter Prize:

Random Twitter Winner – random.org selected Tweet #254 … @ABCWriter Nancy Adams from Michigan, USA

Congratulations to the winners

Commiserations and sorry to everyone who missed out. There were a gajillion twitter entries, my Twitter @replies stream has been filled to the brim for days, heh. The competition goodness isn’t over, I have more great stuff lined up, so look out for that.

While we are on the topic of prizes, my good friend Gareth is giving away a Flip Video Camera over on our travel blog, FiveAMTraveller – get over there and win yourself a cool video gadget now!

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This text has been taken from the article Copywriting Summit Winners!. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Win Copywriting Success Summit Tickets

As mentioned in a previous post, Mike Stelzner is putting on another one of his fantastic online summits. This time it is the Copywriting Success Summit 2009, billed as the “largest online event dedicated to helping you successfully market your writing business”.

Now you have the exclusive chance to win two valuable seats to the event!

The line-up is an all-star cast. And me. Peter Bowerman (Well-Fed Writer author), Steve Slaunwhite (Start & Run a Copywriting Business author), Michael Stelzner (Writing White Papers author), Marcia Yudkin (Persuading on Paper author), Nick Usborne (Net Words author), Casey Hibbard (Stories That Sell author), Chris Marlow (the original copywriter’s coach), Pete Savage and Ed Gandia.

You are going to hear about great topics such as:

• Write Marketing: How to Attract Opportunity by Shining the Spotlight on Others
• Using Social Media to Grow Your Writing Business
• Maximizing the Income Potential of Your Freelance Writing Business
• How to Turn More Prospects Into Clients
• How to Win Copywriting Clients With Direct Marketing
• Painlessly Mastering the Process of Prospecting
• How to Get Customers Coming Back for More
• Attracting Prospects With Blogging
• The Faster, Safer Way to Make the Leap to a Full-Time Copywriting Business

Go here to see the full details of the more than a dozen sessions …

This event does not require any travel (no hotel, rental car or wasted time). You simply attend sessions online and meet the experts and network with peers from the comfort of your home or office. Pretty cool, eh?

Here’s What You Could Win!

There are two prizes:

1. Twitter Prize: Valued at $497
One ticket to Copywriting Success Summit 2009

2. Grand prize: Valued at $1,693.90!
Two tickets to Copywriting Success Summit 2009 (one for you and one for a friend)

PLUS

• A consultation with Peter Bowerman, author of The Well-Fed Writer (Peter will spend an hour with you, helping you market your business)
• A site-critique by me (I will identify actionable steps you can take to improve your blog)
• A copy of the Problogger book by Darren Rowse and me
• A copy of the book Writing White Papers by Michael Stelzner

Think how your business could be boosted by this package? Just the consult with Peter is priceless; he’s sold more than 40,000 books on growing your writing business!

Enter for Twitter Prize

Simply post a Tweet on Twitter using the button included here, or simply copy and paste the below Tweet message. This automatically qualifies you for an entry into the prize drawing to win a free seat at the summit. You may tweet up to 5 times between now and 23rd September 2009. The tweet must contain “#css09yes” to qualify. We will select the winner randomly on the 24th September 2009.
The Tweet:

Win a FREE ticket to Copywriting Success Summit
2009: http://chrisg.com/RDTy #css09yes

How to Win the Grand Prize

To win the grand prize, write a blog post (no longer than 1,000 words) explaining why you want to win a seat at the Copywriting Success Summit 2009. Have your post published by midnight 23rd September 2009 (GMT). So we are notified about your post you will need to leave a trackback on this blog post or comment with a link.

Remember the grand prize includes two summit tickets, a consultation with Peter Bowerman, a site-critique and two awesome books, so it is well worth getting your friends on board. The more friends who enter the more chances you have of getting a seat yourself

UPDATE: Already purchased a ticket? No problem. If you win, you get your money back and free access to the summit!

Good Luck!

The winners will be selected by Mike Stelzner and I, and announced right here on this blog on the 24th September 2009.

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This text has been taken from the article Win Tickets to Copywriting Success Summit 2009. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Today’s blog critique is for Medical Practice Trends, an information resource for doctors and medical practice administrators. This blog is a perfect example of how content, marketing and user interface need to come together to deliver an overall experience, as the team here have excellent expertise that is currently being let down by conflicting and competing design elements.

The first thing that strikes you when you arrive at the site is many different elements all competing for attention. While this kind of magazine style theme is popular, it is vital that you deliver the content within a well considered hierarchy.

Think about magazines or papers on a newsstand. There will be a major headline, and then more headlines in decresing importance. You will have one huge image that demands attention, usually with something inviting or instantly attractive, such as a celebrity face.

On the page in question though, each headline has equal priority because they are all of equal size, in similar sized boxes, and the most stand-out image is one of a zombie. If you strictly adhered to the “15 second rule” and had to decide what the site was about within 15 seconds, how accurate would your assessment be?

Our big lesson from this is an important one for all website owners and builders.

Understand and Organize Around Reader Missions

This site ranks pretty well for some useful keywords. There has been some effective work done in article marketing. There are funnels leading to lists. That part seems to be well in place. Now you need to take a step back and consider the following:

1. Who do we want to attract? – Work on creating audience profiles for every type of visitor that you want to draw in.
2. Where do we find those people? – For each profile determine the most likely place to find these people (as well as search engines).
3. What are those people looking for? – Do keyword research for each profile and also work out the information needs of each reader.
4. What will they want to see when they arrive? – Your visitor needs to be instantly reassured that they have arrived at the right place. Show them they have found what they are looking for without distraction.
5. What can we offer them? – Once they have found what they were promised, now what? What is your offering for each type of profile? You need to cater your products and service to the needs and language of each profile, creating new landing pages if necessary. Connect those information needs and your offerings to create a crumb trail to lead visitors from your funnel to your most desired actions.

Right now when people arrive on the homepage (and 90% of the site links point to the homepage), the average user is going to be confused. If the content that drove them to the site is good then a percentage will overcome this and go hunting around, those not pre-sold on the site will go away because too many options are worse than too few. Overwhelm me with choices and I do not make a choice, I hit ‘back’.

We need to take your content and rearrange it to lead your visitor by the hand all the way to conversion (email or sale).

Design Tweaks

Design is as much about removing elements as adding. Here are some tweaks, items to remove, and tips for how to focus the experience and help the reader get more out of their visit, and do what you want them to do!

1. Remove the date – It makes sense for a magazine, but not for a homepage that focuses the visitor on what is important (to them, or to you). You need to only keep elements that work towards driving the reader on their mission or towards your most desired action.
2. Give more impact – The current header is almost shy, and the repetition of the domain is unnecessary. Create a real first impression, big and bold, with graphical elements that subconciously imply what the site is about.
3. Promote the benefits – A good strapline but can be made much more compelling. Think of why the reader might want to dig deeper, what do they take away from your site? Rather than describe what the site or company is, tell the reader what they get in a way that makes them say “Yes! I need some of that!”
4. Powered by .. – The Powered By sign is a little confusing, and works as a speed bump without any context. Better to have in the sidebar with a link to what that is?
5. Confusing Navigation - Again, work towards a benefit and user centered approach. Are these navigation headings what the reader is looking for in the exact language they would use? Again it needs to be about the user mission, rather than a description of what you have.
6. How new media savvy are your prospects? – Do your average target readers know what podcasts are? If not, try to simplify the language and the visual elements to concepts they immediately see the benefit in.
7. Cartoons are fun, but … – I like cartoons, but the impact of this front and center on the homepage makes me worry a bit.
8. Blog posts AND articles - Why the differentiation between blog posts and articles? Should there be a difference? Would it be less confusing to just have the headlines without labeling as one or the other? Many business people either do not know or do not care what a blog is, providing they get the information they need, so do not add descriptions and labels unless they really aid understanding and use.
9. Good solid headlines – As mentioned earlier, the content is good, and the headlines seem to me to speak to your target market, so do not bury them down there, put them up top where they can be seen, big and bold.
10. Push Your Opt-in – I imagine your most wanted response from the reader is to sign up to the email list, but every other design element is drawing the reader AWAY from noticing this. Even the colours are muted. Emphasize this box, use colour, depth, and attractive graphics. Pull the reader in rather than shyly hide away!
11. Video – Again, the video is kind of hiding away, and on many monitors it will be below the area where you need to scroll to see it. With so many buttons and links above it, it is unlikely many people get to it.
12. Reduce Categories – You need to reduce the number of categories down. Keep to around 5 – 7 categories, keep it simple.
13. Lose the tweets – Unless your tweets are completely non-social (in which case you need to start being more social!) then you should not put your tweets on your homepage. Website visitors do not want to see your conversations, but to be a good Tweeter you need to be conversational. Therefore tweets on your site do not work.
14. Put the about link up top – One of the things your visitor is going to want to see is an about box or page. Right now the cleanest link is in the footer. Put it up where it can be seen.

In Summary – Be User-Centric

It is a jargon phrase that gets over used but the intent is true. You need to focus on what the audience wants and needs and how you can achieve your aims by leading them to what they are after. You can work this out through your analytics, brainstorming, click tracking (such as Crazy Egg and Clicktale),  through interviewing customers, and by observing people reading the site.

I would recommend a new homepage with only the following elements:

1. Inviting header that really speaks to your benefits
2. Introduction video
3. Opt-in box
4. Headlines
5. About and Contact

This would answer the major questions of

• Where am I?
• Why should I care?
• What can I do?

Right now the user is likely to be confused. Make it easy for them to find your great stuff and they will reward you!

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This text has been taken from the article Medical Practice Trends Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Read on, there is some great business building content up for grabs and all you need to “pay” is your email address!

My friend and white paper mentor Mike Stelzner has just launched his “Copywriting Success Summit 2009” which I am going to be presenting at. My session will be about building your freelance copywriting business using blogging. It will be awesome.

Mike just put out a great round up of advice from his copywriting guru friends (and me), that you can find here.

Even better, as a gift for entering your email to find out more, you get a fantastic one hour video along with PDF downloads by Bob Bly called “How to Be a Highly Paid Copywriter as a One-Person Business”.

It’s more than the title would imply, and I encourage you to at least check it out.

• Getting more leads into your copywriting business
• Motivating your prospect to buy your services from you
• Creating an information kit and “bait pieces” that pre-sell your expertise

I am sure you realize this is very in-sync with my Authority Blogger process

Even if you work in a different field, this presentation has some excellent advice for anyone looking to build a freelance service business online.

Get it now, click and add your email on the page linked here because this is advice you would ordinarily have to pay big bucks for and you are getting it for the price of an email address!

You will find the sign up box over in the right hand column, and after you confirm your email address you will be taken to the video page.

Enjoy!

PS.

You might be wondering if those are affiliate links? You bet they are. My name is on it, of course I support it.

In this case, yes the Copywriting Summit will be awesome but you do not have to pay anything to get the free content. Just add your email address. Or not, it’s up to you. Bob really knows how to build a freelance copywriting business and he lays it all out for you, so I would at least take a look if I was you

As fair warning for anyone who is only here for my free stuff, I am going to be talking about my forthcoming Authority Blogger 2.0 Course a fair amount over the coming weeks, and that is a product you need to buy. Just thought you would want to know in case that factors into your decision to read

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This text has been taken from the article Want to Know How to be a Highly Paid Copywriter?. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

The main component of my membership site is WordPress. One of the free reports that Brian is giving away with his Teaching Sells launch is “How to Build and Launch a Quick and Easy Membership Site” and I was pleased to see he explains that you can build a membership site using the blog software. Back though when I started building Authority Blogger, almost everyone I knew scoffed at using WordPress to build a membership site – the “done thing” was to use Joomla, Drupal, specific offerings like Membergate, and various other online services.

When I logged into Brian’s Teaching Sells course I was nearly persuaded to go the Joomla route – it really is a very good system, but I knew I wanted to get something out quickly and easily, and being the geek I am, I would have spent time procrastinating learning a new system.

I had some experience with Drupal, enough to know I didn’t want to build another membership site around it. Joomla, as mentioned, was going to be a learning curve I did not want to face, and I knew WordPress inside out. There was really no other choice for me at the time.

Authority Blogger Construction

I went with the following solutions:

• WordPress as the content management system
• Amember as the membership solution
• VBulletin for the forum

My big mistake was with the forum – I set that up first only to find I could not retrospectively add Amember control without screwing up the existing user accounts. Amember along with the VB plugin can integrate, I just set it up wrong. Lesson learned. This means when someone joins I have to get them to sign up again, this time at the forum and manually give them permissions to the members-only forum area.

Now I know there are easier ways, but this approach worked for me all the same

1. When you first visit you see the public-facing WordPress installation. This contains some pages of information that drive you to either sign up, buy or go to the forum. Members can also see the login link here.
2. When you buy or log in you go through an Amember installation. I actually outsourced setting this up – it’s not the simplest of software – but you can also get installation as part of the license purchase.
3. Within the Amember-controlled membership directory I created another WordPress install. This is where the lessons are kept and all the mindmaps, process map flowcharts and ebook PDF downloads. Go to anything in that directory on the server and you are asked to login, including going to the lesson web pages.
4. For video and audio I use Amazon S3 hosting – for speed and also because these multimedia files get BIG, so I do not want bandwidth charges!
5. To make the course easy and fun to consume, lessons are structured as bite-sized blog posts, grouped together as series using the in-series plugin, which unfortunately is no longer supported by the developer. Grouping the lessons into series creates a bunch of “mini courses”, so there is for example one on blog seo, another on launching your blog, and one on product creation, etc etc. This also means I can keep adding and adding – there are now around 100 individual lessons and I do not see me ending soon, heh.

A nice touch about Amember is every customer can also be an affiliate so they get commissions for recommending the course to friends and colleagues. I think that is nice, a recommendation from an existing customer and user of a service is always more persuasive than someone who has not used a product.

I am currently working on a “version 2″ refresh for the coming season, and because of the modular structure and organization being based on WordPress, that is much more efficient to do. It makes me glad I chose to go the way I did.

Now though there is another option for creating WordPress based membership sites called Wishlist Member. Check out the video here. So far I have been very impressed with it, much easier for us WordPress jockies. My next courses will be built around Wishlist rather than Amember.

I hope that answers your questions but do let me know in the comments if there is anything I haven’t explained or anything you would like me to expand on …

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This text has been taken from the article How I Built My Authority Blogger Member Site. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Day after launch

After a week

As you can see, after I week the site had received 8,000 page views, from nearly 5,000 visitors. In fact, the reason why I didn’t post this case study earlier is that it is still getting visits and I didn’t want to draw conclusions too early. As well as visits, it also gained over 200 email sign ups, and was retweeted over 300 times.

Of course I have launched lots of new sites over the years. My friend Gareth and I launched a Fantasy Formula 1 site using Twitter earlier, but that was just a bit of fun. I wanted to see what would happen if I gave it a little more of a push.

The site I was launching is Social Media Work book – the site is for a forthcoming product I am working on, with a view right now to gain feedback about what people want to know about social media. This launch was purely to put it on the map, get some visibility and links. A secondary goal was to gain some opt-ins, but because it was not a priority I worked a plan that involved more of a viral element than to drive opt-ins.

So what did I do?

1. First I built the site in WordPress using the DIYThemes Thesis Theme and the openhook plugin and sent small trickles of traffic to it to test response. In the lead up to the launch I achieved over a 50% opt-in conversion rate on the home page, which was higher than my expectations so I did not spend any more time on it, hence it is not the most elegant of designs but it works! Once the launch was under way and people were sent to my content page, opt-ins dropped to 6% at best, and 4.5% on average, but this is not surprising when you think the landing page people were sent to was not focused on gaining subscribers but on delivering content.
   

   Conversion Rates in Testing

2. As mentioned above, the goal of the site right now is to get people to submit social media questions in return for free goodies. There is a kind of catch-22 there as I need to know what people are struggling with before I can create the goodies, but I can’t get people to submit questions without that ethical bribe. Thankfully enough people submitted questions through the test phase that I had a challenge I knew I could answer right away.
3. Consistently people were saying they struggled with issues around content, visibility, traffic, and getting clicks. I knew in my Authority Blogger Course materials I had a nice little report that I could repurpose quickly, and the launch was on.
4. I grabbed my 102 Proven Headline Formulas report and created an e-cover graphic for it, slapped up a page.
   

   102 Proven Social Media Headline Formulas

5. As my goal was a viral effect leading to visibility and links, I added the TweetMeme and Tell-a-friend WordPress plugins. TweetMeme worked very well, the tell a friend not so much. The benefit of a Tell-a-friend script though is that you can see what people are saying about your content, which is a very valuable insight!
6. All what was left was to seed out into Twitter and ask people to retweet … which thankfully my followers did, over 300 times

Traffic Sources

I have to confess that while the experiment was to use Twitter, and Twitter did drive the majority of the results, other traffic sources did naturally come into play!

Traffic Sources

Had I got onto the Digg front page the traffic would have been far higher, but I wanted to see how Twitter would work out and that is what I focused on. You can see that Twitter was the main traffic driver, we can say that the majority of the “Direct” traffic was desktop Twitter application users as few to no people knew of the domain before launch, and Ow.ly is the Hootsuite URL shortener.

Limiting myself to Twitter did constrain how much I could do, and a multiple channel approach is always better, but it does allow me to hone my approach for future campaigns. I am a testing freak

Search traffic

Recall one of the aims was to get links to prime the site for search? With essentially this one free report I had met that goal already, which I did not fully expect to happen so quickly.

At the time of writing the site has gained around 80 links with around 5o to the report landing page. Not bad going so far.

Of course now I need to keep following up so that I do not lose the momentum, and I need to work towards creating and launching my product which is the whole point of the exercise!

If you are interested in what I do next and how that works out, then you need to subscribe now because I will be keeping you updated right here with progress

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This text has been taken from the article Case Study: Can You Launch a New Site With Twitter Alone?. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Brian from CopyBlogger just put out a great free report about Authority. As you know this is a subject I take a great deal of interest in, teach in the Authority Blogger Course and write about here, so when Brian told me about it I grabbed it immediately.

As you can always expect from CopyBlogger, it is great stuff. You can read it online or download as a PDF from the Authority Rules site. It features:

• The Shocking Power of Authority
• Cashing in with Authority
• Google Loves Authority Too
• Content and Citation: How to Build Online Authority
• The 10 Rules for Building Authority Websites
• Rule One: The Winning Difference
• Rule Two: Don’t Sell… Teach
• Rule Three: Cornerstone Content
• Rule Four: Headlines and Hooks
• Rule Five: Win Friends to Influence People
• Rule Six: The Money’s in The List
• Rule Seven: SEO Matters
• Rule Eight: Code Google Loves
• Rule Nine: Design Makes the Site
• Rule Ten: Tend Your Tribe

Grab your copy now, it’s free and you do not even have to provide your email address.

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This text has been taken from the article Get Your Free Authority Report from CopyBlogger. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Seeing as it is a little while since the Summer Traffic Blog Project announcement I thought I would give you an update on what we have been discussing over at the Summer Traffic forum area:

• Your Traffic Goals and Mindset – Traffic on its own is not enough, discover how to think through your traffic goals and tactics so that you get the best results for your blog.
• Make Your Content Go Viral - Get more benefit from the traffic you already get, and magnify the results of your new efforts
• How to Borrow Traffic – Where to get better traffic and more subscribers, the easy way
• 10 Steps to Successful Guest Posting – One of the best techniques for gaining more visibility and quality links

Click here to join in on the Summer Traffic Project, because who doesn’t want more traffic?

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This text has been taken from the article Summer Traffic Tips Update. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Stephen Smith

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing SEO, Productivity Expert and Businessman, Stephen Smith.

In this 30 minute interview Stephen tells us:

• How he grew his consulting and coaching business after being made redundant
• His system for being productive
• The simple and basic SEO tweaks that any non-technical website owner can do to get more Google traffic

Download the MP3

Check out the Writing for the Web course from Stephen and Brad.

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This text has been taken from the article Interview With Stephen Smith – Business, Productivity and SEO. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

aimed at people who are interested in writing, self-publishing/print-on-demand and internet marketing for their books (in print/ebook or audio format).

That is a great niche, there are thousands of people struggling to get their book written, published and sold. I know the pull of books very well myself.

Joanna has self-published her print book using print on demand, and also e-books, along with marketing via clickbank, so she has practical hands on knowledge of what she writes about. She also has created an online course called Author2Zero which teaches people “how to use Web 2.0 tools to write, publish, sell and promote your book”.

You know already what I am going to say … yes, Joanna is an Authority Blogger

The content of the blog is great, and Joanna has a great personality that comes across very well in text (as you would expect!), audio and video. While the video is not “slick”, and on occasion lighting and audio suffer a little, I actually think the character of them is an asset and warms you to get more engaged rather than putting you off.

In terms of promotion, the site is currently No 6 on Australia’s top writing blogs. This score is based on Google PageRank, Alexa and Technorati scores. Essentially, if Joanna gets a bunch more links then she will be able to top that list.

First Impressions

Colours are fighting for attention

My first impression was that the red dominates. Spend too long reading and you might get a migraine I guess this pushes people to subscribe to the feed, heh.

"Noisy" layout

The layout is also very busy. There are literally hundreds of links per page – far too many choices without giving clear demarcation and some sense of content hierarchy.

Choose what you want the visitor to do next, then work your layout to support that focus.

As it stands the visitor might well get so confused they do not hang around, I imagine this is reflected in the bounce rate statistics.

You will want to guide visitors to

1. Read
2. Subscribe
3. Buy

At the moment the clutter will cause the first goal to be hindered – prioritize the content, and put everything else to the background apart from your subscription box (providing a clear call to action) and also give your Author2zero product banners space to breathe.

Recommendations

I have three big recommendations for this blog, and combined they underscore a key lesson in any kind of market.

Packaging is as important as content.

1. Change the colour scheme so red is used only to draw attention to specific focus areas rather than as a block colour. Right now the background dominates, and the colour combinations used in the content cause confusion rather than attract. If you look at my blog, I use spot red for very important locations, and orange as a general “look at me” colour. The rest of the scheme is very much in a supporting role. Make the content come to the fore, the background should, well, be in the background.
2. Simplify layout and use graphics and HTML boxes to differentiate, clarify and segment the content to add more legibility and context. Right now the layout is “noisy”. When the visitor is given too many choices they make no choice at all. At the moment rather than being helpful the layout is inhibiting the visitor. You need clear sign posts, and remove the clutter. Reduce the categories down to seven as a maximum, lose the Tweets and the tag cloud.
3. Build links by offering viral blog content resources and networking with other bloggers and writers. You already do a good job of networking, and offer some great free content. What you need to do is turn those around to your link advantage. Repackage some of your already written content and put those to work as series or big resource potsts, then promote promote promote in social media. Also create a writing competition where folks can win copies of your books. Anything to bring the links in to boost your link count and traffic, and in turn grow your PR, Alexa and Technorati scores.

As it stands the vast majority of your links go to the homepage, which is not going to help with your search traffic as you want topical, keyword focused deep links as well as general domain linking for good long term growth.

I would also grab the variation of your domain without “the” (”creativepenn” versus “thecreativepenn”) as some people will instinctively write it without as well as with.

You do not need to throw away your branding. In fact I would suggest the DIYThemes Thesis Theme for WordPress as your base theme, with your existing header would be an excellent evolution rather than a radical departure. This will also give you the advantage of an excellent framework that will make full advantage of the links you grow.

Summary

Right now the content is great but being let down by usability issues. These are easy to resolve, either with the help of a great designer or simply by moving over to a customised Thesis Theme install.

Any wannabe book writers should definitely check out the site!

What do you think? Please share your feedback for Joanna in the comments …

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This text has been taken from the article Creative Penn Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Every year I get questions from people asking how they can fight the “summer slump” where traffic droops over the summer months. Also, who does not want more traffic any time of year, right?

So this year I came up with a plan.

Starting 1st July until the end of Summer, I will be posting tips, tutorials and exercises over at the Authority Blogger Forum. For your part I will want you to share your traffic generation questions, experiences, results and thoughts so we can all make the techniques and tactics even better.

Here is the best bit for you. Anyone who participates will get all the resulting content compiled into an ebook that you will be able to download absolutely free. To qualify for the ebook you just have to take part. This could be:

• Asking questions
• Trying out techniques on your blog
• Helping answer questions
• Adding ideas
• Bug fixing and typo killing
• Answering polls
• Taking part in experiments
• Tweeting and voting
• Or anything else that adds to the over all experience

If you think this might be something fun and worth a try, head over to the forum now – more details will be added there as we get started.

Comments are closed on this post, let’s take all the discussion to the Forum to keep it all together

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This text has been taken from the article Summer Traffic Blog Project. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Everyday Guide First Impressions

Wow these blog critiques have been popular lately – I hope you are getting as much out of them as I have fun writing them

This critique is for Althaf Ahmed who runs a site called Everyday Guide which he described in his email to me as “an online repository of mini guides”. He also has the .net version of the domain which is due to be merged with the dotcom.

What are these “mini guides” you might ask? Good question, I am glad you raised it. Here are some examples:

• How to start a home business
• What is a blog
• How to start an internet business

Essentially this site aims to be an “everything for everyone”. A particularly tough nut to crack!

This means

• Not being anything in particular
• Not having any specific target audience
• Not providing a deep experience

and it also means going up against the big hub sites, wikipedia, Squidoo …

Now this approach can work. You can get social media traffic by creating DiggBait, and you can get links and search traffic through linkbait. Just be aware of what it is you are creating. Essentially a traffic vehicle, and some ad opportunities.

My recommendation though is to tweak the strategy somewhat. Will return to that in a second. Let’s get some general impressions down first.

First Visit

Now if you go visit the site, I am sure you will agree that the first thing you will be struck with is that you are unaware of what the site is about. It seems to be about a lot, and then not very much. This is because, as regular readers will remember, we need to offer some sort of orientation.

• Where am I? – People need to know where they are, and might not even be entirely sure how they got there. You might be dropped into a deep page from a search result or blog link, or might have clicked a homepage link in a social media profile, or some other random occurrence. You can not guarantee the visitor will have been given any context.
• What can I see/do? – Navigation is not enough, and in fact more often than not in blogs you are overwhelmed with options. Too many choices is as bad as too few. Your popular content in the sidebar is good but too low down the page to get noticed.
• Why should I care? – The old chestnut of WIIFM – What’s In It For Me? Give the visitor a benefit, or even better a problem that your site solves. Individual guides might well solve a specific problem, but why would they return?
• Now what? – What can we do now? What should we do next. Always have a next step!

Reading Experience

The content quality varies, as does tone and style, which gives an impression of no single voice or personality, while the about page says there is only one person behind the site. Either make it a multi author blog (preferred) or a single author blog with a single voice.

My preference for multi author is because I know your future plans involve really growing the content, and this is your best route to that. If you go single author, you need to put more of “you” into it. Make it more conversational, provide picture and more detail about you.

Individual Articles

A lot of the content is quite “thin” and does not entirely deliver on the promises made in the headlines. This is a similar problem to the content you find on article marketing sites and ezine directories, where the content is simply “enough to meet quota”. Do not fall into the trap of search fodder, create truly valuable resources and you will get far more links, word of mouth and social media votes.

Way Forward

Here is how I suggest you progress:

1. Select an under served niche rather than go up against Wikipedia
2. Target that niche’s specific audience rather than “everyone”
3. Provide the very best answers for that audience’s specific problems – ask them what they need to know
4. Approach advertisers who want to capture the attention of that audience
5. Network with the leaders and personalities of the niche to grow awareness of your site

Essentially, rather than be “everything to everyone” become something specific for a specific group! You will gain by

• Grow links, search and traffic traction
• More profit with no “ugly adsense” downsides
• Easier to create content ideas

Not only that, it gets better!

When you attract a specific audience with something truly useful to that audience, you can grow a subscriber base of people who want to hear from you. I can not underline enough how powerful this is.

It is only a slight change from your strategy, and in fact you can split off content into sub-sites or their own domains.

• Starting a business
• Getting healthy
• Gaming
• etc

All it needs is to really get inside the mindset of each audience and give them what they would most respond to.

Over to you

What do you think of Everyday Guide? Please share your thoughts in the comments …

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This text has been taken from the article Everyday Guide Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Spiritual River

Patrick Meninga, aka skinnyninja to forum members, won this blog critique in the Blogger of the Month competition. If you would like to win a blog critique or Authority Blogger membership there is still time to win the June prize, you just need to participate in the forum by being friendly, asking excellent questions that spark discussion, or answering questions well.

The blog is called Spiritual River and is about addiction, or rather I guess is more about sobriety by being more spiritual.

By using the Thesis Theme, many of the techy things you need to do are handled already, so in terms of SEO and having a good web framework, this is well sorted. Patrick has used a basic Thesis install and added a custom header and some adsense for monetization.

There is nothing wrong with the base Thesis look but you get better results by properly skinning it to your own, unique appearance. You should avoid looking like every other Thesis install on the planet! That said, the header looks good.

Another issue design wise is it is not very obvious for a first time visitor what they are being offered. You must communicate where the visitor has arrived, what they can see and most important, why they should be interested. This is fundemental, as a confused visitor is not likely to hang around.

Put some text in the header, a benefit focused statement, such as

“How to achieve sobriety through spirituality“

(although having just read that back, you might find a phrasing that suits your audience better!).

A key part of your differentiation is that you are a person who has been through it. You have been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale. I often say to my coaching and Authority Blogger clients that “you are your secret sauce”, and here it is especially true. The people in your audience will likely have well-meaning experts telling them what to do but someone on the exact same wavelength, just a bit further ahead of the them on the path, will be a valuable person to know.

Keeping that in mind, you need to personalize a little more. Your about pages are excellent, but even better would be a small about box with your image in it right in the sidebar. You can link to your main about page and bio from there.

As well as this, engage the reader more in a conversation. If you go back over your recent posts, most end with a statement. Switch that up and instead end on a question. You will see wherever I write I normally end with a question of some sort, it is rare that I do not. Something like “What do you think? Please share in the comments …” works a treat.

The key to getting comments is to spark the conversation using questions that have no right or wrong answer. Everyone has an opinion, but not everyone dare answer a question in case they end up looking dumb or worse. So make a good, welcoming environment, where people feel safe to respond, and also make sure that people know they can be anonymous as much as they need to, because it is a sensitive niche.

If people do not want to comment you still need to engage them. Really push your contact form as a place where people can interact with you. Ask questions and ask them to ask you questions. Some of my very best content ideas are simply questions I have been asked by readers and customers. These are beyond precious.

As well as reaching out to readers, also reach out to other bloggers. This networking will help you boost your link profile (although you are already doing pretty well in that) and help you raise your referral and search traffic. It might also lead to profit opportunities.

This can start with Twitter connections, and guest posting, which can also lead to paid writing gigs which is something you mention on your site.

If you are serious about getting paid writing opportunities then you need a service page and to mention this in your sidebar, about page and when you guest post. You could list experience/appearances, how to book you for writing and the kind of work you do. Of course you do not have to stick to only writing on addiction sites. You have a particular frame of reference that would allow you to write personally on many subjects and a writing ability that would allow you to write on topics that you have not personally experienced but could research. After all, I have written about rehab without experiencing rehab or addiction!

Consider the related subject areas you can connect to:

• Spirituality
• Self help
• Health
• Life Coaching
• Hypnosis
• NLP
• etc

All of those are topics that you could expand to or network with but also when you look over those again, they are all areas where there are products and services that can be reviewed or joint ventured. You could make advertising deals, affiliate commissions or partner to develop products.

When you look at your blog as aimed at an audience rather than a subject, your opportunities expand.

Speaking of which, I am not sure how much money you will be making with Adsense, but consider getting sponsor ads (Thesis allows you to add a column easily) as I imagine rehab could be a high paying niche, but also look closely at making money via affiliate and your own products. For the affiliate side, because people in your audience will be vulnerable, you need to be even more open and honest in your recommendations, but there is a lot of potential there. I know that rehab leads are worth a lot of money, and are not as ugly as Adsense

Finally work hard to show your subscription options and provide a call to action that shows why someone should sign up. Why should they subscribe? Also provide subscription links under your articles as this is where someone who has enjoyed your content will want to see them.

What do you think of Spiritual River? Please help Patrick by adding your feedback in the comments …

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This text has been taken from the article Spiritual River Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Next Tuesday Darren is joining me on the telephone where I will be asking him YOUR biggest questions about blogging, traffic, subscribers and how he makes so much money – and you can join us online.

Windows users will be able to listen live from your computer speakers, no phone necessary. Due to scheduling issues and time zones the call will be at 11am UK time, which while fine for the rest of the world is early for our USA friends, but even if you can not make the call live, if you sign up below you will be able to still ask your question and get access to the recording and transcript after.

Last time I did a teleseminar it was over subscribed and people got locked out, so make sure you get in quick to avoid disappointment.

So sign up now in the form below!

Get Access to the Call, Replay and Downloads Here:

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This text has been taken from the article Join Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett on a Live Call. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Free Pursuits is a blog about “Lifestyle Design”, or How to Live the Good Life Without Being Independently Wealthy or Retired

• Find the flexible career you were meant to have
• Manage your career to maximize your happiness
• Make time for and pursue the things that really matter to you

What this means for you is a blog packed with content guiding you towards living the life of your dreams. Of course what this means for Corbett as a blogger is he is pitting himself up against Mr 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris and the fantastic Non Conformist, Mr Chris Guillebeau.

This is two challenges in one:

1. Most people do not know what “Lifestyle Design” is (you need to do some keyword research to find what people are really looking for and build lots of content around those items)
2. Those people who do know what Lifestyle Design is probably turn to the learned gentlemen mentioned above.

Now all is not gloom and doom because in Corbett’s favor he has a great blog. Let me briefly outline some of the good points:

• Well set up (WordPress + Thesis)
• Nicely designed and usable, if not a vast departure from the default Thesis look
• The content is well written and clearly readable.
• Good emphasis on reader benefits, including running a survey to get insights
• Beginnings of some peer-outreach

In fact this all makes my job of critiquing much harder. You can’t see this but I am shaking my fist at the monitor, heh.

So the blog is on good foundations, what is the answer to the aforementioned challenges?

Differentiate!

You must move past the template, both visually in terms of Thesis, and also direction as compared to the rest of the niche. How are you different?

First with the design, while it looks great and a lot of people would love to have a blog that looks as good, the niche is competitive and dominated by strong, well positioned personalities. You need to stand out from the pack by offering something richer, more impactful and most of all, yours.

As always the strategy, once you have moved past infrastructure, is to decide, and to effectively communicate, your positioning. What is your uniqueness, remarkability, or brand?

When you are not the first, not the biggest, and not the most well known, in any niche, you need to find ways to stand out on your own and cut through the fog.

One way I like to approach this is by using the following fill-in-the-blanks phrase:

Unlike other Lifestyle Design Blogs, Free Pursuits ___________, which means for you __________.

The first part of the phrase identifies how you are different, the second part answers “so what?”.

You could be different by painting yourself green, but that doesn’t mean anyone should necessarily care

After you can answer this in a compelling way, then you can translate that into action.

Audience Focus

Your first port of call when differentiating outside of yourself is your audience. After all it is these folks you are aiming to serve. At present the blog aims to capture pretty much everyone interested in lifestyle design. This could be a tough struggle, better to focus and grow outwards.

For example David Hobby writes a photography blog, but instead of all of photography he focused on photography lighting using inexpensive strobe lights. Now he is a world renowned photography rock star

So what part of the overall audience can you most appeal to and help?

• Beginners
• Advanced
• Freelancers
• Travelers
• Wealth-focus
• Spiritual-focus
• Productivity folks
• Cubicle escapees
• Passive income dreamers
• Silver surfers
• Eco-living
• Families
• … the list goes on

You will find if you focus on a sub-group then you will have more content ideas rather than fewer, plus nobody will be in competition and therefore everyone will be much more willing to help, link and comment.

Multi-Author

Rather than fixate on one smaller group, you could go the other way and make your blog (and you have a great name for this) into a multi-author blog. Think of your blog as Techcrunch or BlogHerald for the lifestyle designers maybe?

You could even bring in the existing lifestyle design personalities for regular or guest posts.

Grow Your Community

Of course the logical extension of a community of bloggers is a community forum, membership site or social network. This kind of connection and interaction is practically designed for lifestyle design and nomadic lifestyles as very often the old face to face networks become strained and a virtual socialization takes its place.

Perhaps Free Pursuits could be the biggest community for the lifestyle designer?

• You need to drive more people to comment using in-content call to action
• Post polls
• Drive people to comment with questions in Twitter
• Draw people over from forums and Facebook
• Find out where people hang out and interact there

In particular you will want to look in social bookmarking sites for what was popular previously.

Once people are on your site you need to keep them around, and there are two main ways your site is ideal for this

1. Build a real email list now, not Feedburner but with a service like Aweber – this will enable you to send out interactions and alerts, along with free reports and other exclusive content. It also allows people to reply and know they will get a human being.
2. Create series posts on “big ideas”, and perhaps collect them into reports that you can give away

I also find conversions much better when I use an obvious email form rather than a sign up link.

Sell the Dream

Any lifestyle blogger needs to remember that the majority of the people reading will not make the full leap. You need to sell the dream, give vivid pictures, video, audio. The full multimedia life stream. Use flickr, youtube, twitter so people can live your life via proxy. Show Don’t Tell.

This is also

1. An excellent way for your audience to get to know you better
2. A way to introduce other prominent folks from the niche and network with them

Consider a blogtalkradio show? I imagine Webinars/Teleseminars would be a huge draw (and profitable if you wanted to charge)

Fix Real, Compelling Problems

So we have talked about how you can stand out, and we have briefly looked at community. Both of those are going to aid you getting more visibility and traffic, while branding your site.

The biggest impact you can make though is if you take the overall “dreamer” aspect of the niche and turn around and solve real, pressing problems for the people who really need to make a change.

Interact with your audience, on forums, in social media (particularly Twitter and Facebook) and find out the real challenges that people are coping with and can not find an answer to. Once your audience grows, make it obvious and easy for people to send you their problems.

Most of my best content ideas are from consulting clients or reader questions. You can not top the inspiration and good feelings that come from actually helping people with real issues.

A great example for how to gather reader issues is over at CopyBlogger … sometimes how people do something is more instructive than what

One of the problems with “Your guide to lifestyle design” (other than “what’s that?”) is the “That’s nice dear” effect. You know, when you tell someone something really cool and they just smile and say “That’s nice” rather than get as excited and passionate about it as you are?

So work out the real problem your blog solves on a macro level and for each post aim to solve a problem on a per-article basis also. A real problem that people can solve with your help. If possible use the exact phrasing that your audience uses.

Summary

Free Pursuits is an excellent blog and has been given a great start, and is now ready to be taken to the next level.

Check it out now.

Over to you – what do you think about Free Pursuits? What would you do differently? Do you disagree with what I have said here? Give the benefit of your thoughts in the comments …

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This text has been taken from the article Free Pursuits Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com