Focus on a niche and focus on getting the right core users.

I have been getting lots of questions about marketing a site on no budget. The words that are used are not the following, but the question invariable is How do I market my bland useless me too site? The answer invariably is don't make your site bland and useless and expect to market it on $0.

There is a balance on time and money. If you can't afford much money to market your site it likely means you do not place exceptional value on your time. Thus they surely can afford to learn about something they are interested in and then share what they learned.

Most information is in one form or another repackaged. As the amount of information continues to grow logarithmically there is going to be an increasing amount of value in being able to create vertical editorial websites that point out the best news and information.

If you have no money to invest in marketing does it make sense to try to learn how to market something useless? Why start your brand with a meeee ttooooo empty product database?

Or does it make more sense to learn your market first, create content about things that interest you, and then later use that channel to help push your other ideas?

A site does not need to be big to make lots of money, but original content that grows over time draws passive traffic streams that continue to grow. It also helps you get quick feedback and allows you to launch new ideas and have them spread quickly.

The guys at Google are geniuses who are amazing marketers and had great market timing. Most people will fail if they try to go that broadly though. Think of how many search engines you can think of. There have been thousands of attempts and almost all have fail.

You can own large verticals with algorithms too though. The guys at Topix, a leading news site, are no doubt geniuses and were able to smartly create amazing algorithms and then use that to leverage great partnerships.

Most websites and webmasters are not going to do fundamentally innovative things that allow them to work on large data sets the way some of the large resource rich companies do.

But you do not have to be a programming whiz or have infinite resources to do well so long as you are:

• interested in a topic

• willing to work hard at tracking and learning it
• focused on a niche
• opinionated

If you are all of those 4 you should be able to beat out an algorithmic driven process every time. If you can't then it just means you need to focus more on a niche, become more opinionated, or pick a topic you are more interested in.

The feedback cycles take time and unless you are absolutely great at writing the first 6 months to a year can start to look a bit bleak, but after that you should be able to grow quicker than the market does, so long as you did not start off in a niche that was already hyper saturated.

More and more companies are fighting to create ad networks that help automate the monetization of content. If you don't have any money to push an ecommerce site then you might do well to push content creation and leverage that original content, mind share, and traffic flow for profit.

Negative publicity or affiliates may end up eating a large amount of the search results for your brand name.

If it is negative publicity of course you should take the message on board, but what do you do if you solved the problem and the bad search results will not go away? Directly contacting them and showing the problem has been fixed might help. Maybe even offering to donate to a charity may help, but if the person will not work with you it is going to be up to you to create other content that can be deemed more authoritative than theirs.

If the affiliates add a lot of value of course them listing below you for your brand name is no big deal, but what happens if they are thin affiliate pages that add no value, or worse yet try to use your brand to push people to a competing product with a higher payout? Is there another way to add search results to the index that will not cost you a percent of your sales?

Press Coverage:
The first thing you want to do is ensure you are leveraging your authority and brand correctly. Are you well known? Has your company been covered in the press? If so do not be afraid to point a few links at the good press pages.

Extend Press Coverage:
Look for press coverage in search results for your brand name. Also look through your backlink data. You may be able to talk to people who were mildly interested and get them to do more in depth coverage of your goods and services.

Wikipedia:
If you have a strong enough brand you may be able to list your company in the Wikipedia. If your stuff is legitimate I typically recommend creating a whole page instead of just adding a link because I believe most pages have to go through a deletion cycle vote before they are deleted. Make sure to reference media coverage in your Wikipedia article.

Creating your own topic page in Wikipedia also makes it easier for it to rank for your brand since the whole page is focused on your brand, instead of your site just being mentioned in a link.

Keep in mind that if you are trying to block out negative comments and have not changed the business model or issues that caused them you may be giving people another avenue to criticize your business in the Wikipedia page about your company.

The earlier you get into Wikipedia the lower the bar will be. As they create more content, get more citations, and have logarithmically growing costs it will be harder to get into the Wikipedia.

Social Networks:
Set up pages on sites like MySpace.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Sites like Knowem make it easy to register your brand on many sites.

Press Releases:
Press releases typically do not pack a huge punch in the search results, but they do well in news search, and if you point a few links at them it could also help them outrank other pages that are not on high trust websites.

PRleap and PRWeb are a few free resources on that front.

Good press releases can also lead to other media coverage.

Interviews and Writing Articles:
Just like press releases it is another easy way to create content that is highly relevant to your brand or name. Make sure you link at it to help build it up. If you write for a somewhat well known site, and especially if you can make something a bit controversial or appealing to a link authority rich group that page should pack a punch in the SERPs.

If you interview someone else that is popular then others may heavily link at it. Add a few more links and it may be able to rank.

Blog for Others:
You have to build up some amount of trust before you can do self promotional stuff on other sites, but if you are creative with how you write you can keep a page from sounding too self promo while virtually guaranteeing it will rank by including the right words in it and placing it on an authority site.

Sites like Lockergnome have guest authors write some of their channels.

Vertical Databases:
Sell software? Do you have a profile page on Download.com, HotScripts, or sites like ZDnet.com? If not why not?

Give away software? Are you listed on all the software AND freeware directories?

Highly Relevant Second Page on Your Site:
Create an about page that you link to sitewide. When you write content and submit it to other sites point some of the signature links and whatnot back at your about page instead of at the home page. Do this to try to get a double listing.

Subdomains:
You probably do not need to create many of them for this purpose, but maybe you can create a subdomain for part of your business and then link it up.

Local Sites:
Create sites for different regions. Maybe create sites for different user groups. One domain for consumers, one for distributors, etc.

Profile Pages:
MSN's Small Business Directory allows you to create a company profile page. Make sure you point a few links at it and it should rank for semi competitive phrases.

There are also other types of profile pages that may require deeper thinking to find and then deep thinking to debate the consequences of. Creative Commons has a directory with profile pages.

Rent a Pre sell Page:
Rent a whole page advertisement on someone else's site.

Blogging, Forums, and Social Sites:
Create a blog on Blogspot or one on Wordpress.com. Or maybe one on each.

Create forum user names and make a few posts. Link back to that profile to build up its authority.

Many sites such as Newsvine, Squidoo, or some free host sites also allow you to create pages on their sites which may help you leverage the authority of their domains.

Creativity:
There are many ways to leverage big ideas that are not your own. For example, what is to stop you from creating a Wordpress theme that is named after your company.

SEO Question: I have a little personal side project going -- selling an info product (completely unrelated to SEO; it has to do with _____ and local markets) and I loved the simpleness of your delivery of your ebook. It was straight forward and easy to follow. I want to mimic your process -- I will be using Paypal too.

Any advice or pitfalls you encountered along the way? Techinical or otherwise? Just thought I'd ask someone who has been there before. Maybe save me some time / mistakes.

SEO Answers: There are many ways to go with selling info products. We'll start off with the pieces I think are important and then maybe others will add info at the end.

First you really have to survey the market.

How to survey:

• Do keyword research, looking at things like Overture price and search volume. Perhaps even set up a test Google AdWords account.

• If you know the market well what were the major questions you had when you were buying information and products about your market? You can use Google AdWords to collect feedback for what issues are important to others. Tell them you have a nearly completed book that will be for sale soon and that you will give them it free for feedback on what they would like to be in the book. Alex Mendosian calls this concept the Ask Database, although it may be just as easy to set up a form box that sent mail to a Gmail account and use tagging and their email search to sort through the feedback.
• You can also search industry forums, blogs, and Google Groups to see what common problems and questions people have.
• Do information products, software, and service products in your market have commonly complained about issues? If so you may want to make that part of your sales angle.

Competitive Analysis:

• Does the business model and delivery model make sense? Sometimes by changing the format something can become hyper successful or a complete failure.

• Look at the Clickbank marketplace to look at the sales techniques used by many people pushing affiliate marketing heavily in your vertical, related verticals, or verticals that would appeal to similar audience profiles.
• Do link analysis on competing sites.
• If you see one product appear in the regular search results and search ads many times that may be a hard site to compete with.
• Buy competing products to see their whole sales cycle.
• Look at high ranking search results for competing products names to see how deep their affiliate network is and if they have any mainstream news coverage. Also look to see what bloggers and forums say about them. How can you appeal to the various potential viral marketers of your product?

For most people it is typically going to be easier to work in an under saturated keyword market than it is to work in a hyper saturated one or create a keyword market from scratch. I did it the stubborn pig headed way and just sorta went after making my own market. It is working great now, but for about a year it was somewhat brutal.

Reacting to survey:

• If a market is saturated you may not want to enter it or you may want to focus on a niche within that topic.

• If people seemed to be exceptionally concerned about one issue then that might be a great sub niche to focus on. Especially if that niche seems complex and / or is high margin (or if the niche seems complex to others but is still rather easy to create a fairly automated high value service in).
• If there is one or few exceptionally common problems with information items in your field you may want to use that as your marketing angle.

What is the goal of Creating Your Information Product:

• To help people

• Name recognition
• Influence
• Build a targeted audience or subscriber list
• Direct profit
• Indirect profit

Some ideas will help in multiple areas, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices in some of the categories to help your end goal along in other categories. Generally though if you can build a large enough targeted audience you can get any or many of the above in most fields.

Writing the Book:

• Spend a day or a few days creating an outline before you write the book.

• I used Word and Adobe PDF to make my ebook, although that was like a $600 or $700 spend buying those. If you want to go the cheap route OpenOffice is free. It has a program similar to Microsoft Word and a PDF creator inside of it. I distribute my ebook as a PDF.
• I revised my book many times so it really is a bit hard for me to even say what the original looked like, but using short text, bulleted lists, and not trying to write at exceptionally advanced levels are good tips to live by if you are writing a how to book.
• John T Reed wrote a book on how to write how to books. I think his general thesis and content are great, with the exception of his thoughts on online marketing and DRM. I reviewed his book here, and explained why I thought his views on DRM and search engine marketing were not up to par.
• Do not feel you need to be stuck to a specific format. There are probably other formats that would sell as well or better, and maybe even at higher price points.

Digital Rights Management:

• Piracy is a form of progressive taxation.

• Retail only matters if you have reach and people are buying.
• Time spent creating value is typically time better spent than time spent worrying about value you have yet to create.
• If you intend to market heavily on affiliate networks like Clickbank and your product is internet marketing related expect lots of fraud if you do not use a DRM system. Since I do not use DRM people who buy my ebook are about 10 times as likely to ask for a refund or reverse charge their credit card if they bought through Clickbank than if they bought through Paypal.
• If you plan on using Clickbank and are selling an internet marketing related product you may really want to use some DRM stuff so you can pull their right to use your tool or print your book if they ask for a refund. For $197 eBook Pro provides DRM. If you don't want to spend that much money and want to use Paypal as your shopping cart Payloadz is free off the start, and then its price scales up as you use it more.
• Eventually I expect Google to create a micro payment system which ends up beating out Paypal. Google will become the default amateur video network and then extend the system out to other content formats.
• If you sell a product and give it away to certain people make sure there is some taxing element to it. For example require some sort of authentication and require their email to match a qualifying website. When I did this it cut down on sleazy requests and associated fraudster hate email by over 90%. It made life way better.
• Some people also try to buy feedback or require links to their site in exchange for giving their products to charities. I guess on some fronts that may work, but it is probably not something I would feel good doing, though in some markets doing a technique like that could be the difference between a highly profitable business and a venture that provided little to no returns.

Using Paypal:
You can use Payloadz to set up an affiliate program and to create temporary URLs which only make your download page available to individuals for a limited period of time.

If you are selling an information product and have no digital rights management make sure you encrypt your Paypal button so your order return location is not in the page content. When you create a payment button you also want to click the add more options button in Paypal and set your successful payment URL and cancel payment URL. If you do not set the cancel payment URL I believe visitors hitting the cancel button will be forwarded to your thank you page.

Business Models:
Typically most information products are used to up sell services or make up sells via affiliate links. Some ebooks, like the version of 33 Days to Online Profits I read, seem like they were primarily created to recommend as many affiliate programs as possible.

Do you want to go with a low price point (maybe even free) and try to raise your status, build an audience, and monetize that growing audience by sending them affiliate product offers or high end service offers?

Do you want to go with a high price point? If you go with a higher price point that will filter out many bad leads, but you sacrifice distribution with price. If you go with a higher price point it is recommended that you do not use affiliate links in your work or some will question the motive of your recommendations and why your price point is so high.

One Book or Many?
Many people selling ebooks and information products make far greater income than I do because they create products that rarely need updated, are hyper targeted, and sorta set and forget them after initially creating the sites.

Some people then push those sites via affiliates while others use AdWords and the like.

After you perfect the sales process with one or two it should be easy to churn out dozens more books and sites on other niche topics. If they each make around $1,000 or $2,000 a month you are making a great income.

It took me a while to start earning decent money, so it may take a few months before sales start rolling in. Make sure you are not duplicating errors in the sales process from site #1 on sites #2-12.

Give yourself time to learn from feedback from the early channels before duplicating those problems across a half dozen or dozen channels.

Marketing Your e book:
I started with absolutely zero authority or credibility, so you may not need to do all these steps, but here are the things I did.

• Participate in communities discussing your topic. People who chat about your topic can also recommend your stuff. It is also where people as questions about your topic. If you are new to the market you can also learn a boatload of information by actively participating in topical forums. Forums can also create friendships that may last longer than your career does.

• Write articles. I started writing articles about 4 months before I started selling my ebook. Whenever I wrote an article and syndicated it I noticed my phone started ringing and money flowed into the bank account. Cool for me. I really should get back to writing more articles!
• Try to win the trust of influential voices in your industry. See if you can write an article for their site or if they would be willing to read a free review copy of your book.
• If you ever get any publicity make sure you leverage it. If one of your articles is a hit, while you are popular for 15 seconds ensure the effect is lasting by trying to push other citations or ideas through. For example, while your site is hot and your name is in the news maybe that is a good time to request links from great resource sites or try to do a few link exchanges with sites you like. Of course with asking for links tact is important.
• Write a topical blog. If people read your stuff daily then they can get to feel that they know and trust you. It also makes it easier to market your site in search results if your site is more than a one page sales letter. Conversation is easy to cite. I predict that many people will use a format similar to SeoBook.com to sell information products.
• Writing short witty posts that invoke laughter or other emotions is great, but if you want to convert new people in your industry into buying customers writing at a lower level and doing in depth posts probably works far better than the abstract funny high level stuff. It also helps build a large keyword rich database of pages that will rank for lots of random queries related to your field and target audience.
• As an example of the above, my mother thinks we write Threadwatch in some sort of code. That site is not published in a format that is good for selling to people new to the SEO market. The content on this site probably does a better job of selling market entry products.
• People love pictures of people and testimonials.
• Sometimes the people who recommend your site and give you your authority are not the same people who buy your products. Make sure they have the opportunity to review your product.
• Sometimes the concepts, ideas, and content which make people authoritative are different than what they make most of their money from. Think horizontally. Are there any vertical databases or viral ideas you could create to help market your brand or site?
• Make it easy for people to do what you want them to do. For a while I advertised my ebook on the sidebar of my site. The day I moved it to the content area my income tripled.

Bundling:
If you put serious effort into your brand do not let your name and work be bundled with others without looking hard and long at the potential side effects. I totally screwed this tip up. I wrote a mini version of my ebook for someone else so they could bundle it with their software.

They did things like market their other free guide they wrote using the colors from my site. They also wrote my ebook sales price as the suggested value of my throw in book I gave them the rights to. I got dozens of support requests from their customers and some of them said that they would have bought my book long ago but they thought they already got it. Most people probably do not send me those sort of emails, and I probably threw away about 20 to 30% of my potential income with that one time fee partnership.

Another time I sold rights to a few thousand of my ebooks to a SEO related company so they could give it as a gift to their clients at Christmas. It was a nice cash bonus for me, but that also led to others giving away my ebook and business model without asking me. So even if a deal is a great deal there might be some unexpected side effects.

Joint Ventures:
I believe it is typically worth avoiding most joint ventures.

If you are not serious about being successful there is no point wasting someone elses time and envoking potential lawsuits. If you are serious about doing well most of the time the other person will undervalue what you can do.

If you are not well recognized as a trustworthy expert then the other person is also likey going to undervalue what you can do. If you are already well known then you have to ask yourself what value the other person adds that you can't buy for a one time fee instead of giving up liquidity or creating recurring expenses.

Worse yet, if you are in a category largely dependant on thin margins and the other person does next to no ongoing work and gets a cut that cut might turn shift your business away from profitable venture into the waste of time category, and a bad partnership may even take away your motivation to create and succeed.

Tracking Content Theft:
If you are pushing your name and your brand really hard I do not think you need to spend much time tracking potential content theft and distribution. If you are opinionated and publish frequently most of the market will know who you are. If others start to publish your works one of your kind readers will likely tell you about it.

If you go more of the one page salesletter site route you may want to use Copyscape, subscribe to search results related to your product, or some other method to look out for content theft.

Product Naming:
This is not something I would call myself an expert at, but my short list of criteria in things I would look for in the name of something I was going to work exceptionally hard at would be:

• something I thought I could eventually rank for (ie: if there is a huge open source software project with the same name you probably are not going to be able to outrank them)

• something that is short
• something that is memorable
• something I can get the .com domain name for if possible
• There are arguements for and against using your keywords in your domain and product name. I don't want to go too deep into that idea because that could be a long post on its own. It is something that should be considered though.

Sales Letter Writing:
Read lots of other sales letters in your field. The sales letters at sites like Marketing Tips.com are wrote to convert. Make sure you also pay attention to the tone and voice of your sales message...make it match the rest of your site if you have a content site pushing your information product.

Leveraging Affiliates:
Not something I am good at because I have not done it much yet.

It is important in many markets, especially in categories like internet marketing or if you have the one page salesletter type of site.

Sometimes it helps to be able to give them something that they can give away which is a product of some value that really pushes the value of your product you are selling.

Your price point matters as well. If your price point is too low you can't give affiliates much for their efforts.

I also set my minimum payout to be at the 2 sales level to prevent self sale discounts.

Things I could do far better:
I am good at finding and creating value but am not the best at maximizing value returned for value created. For a long time I sold my ebook for half its current price. I also do not charge recurring fees yet for updates and some of my friends have told me that is a large error.

Affiliate marketing - as noted above.

Write and syndicate more articles - as noted above.

Email marketing and list building - I really do not do it much...and that is a huge error.

Business - in spite of getting inqueries from companies worth billions (and once even hundreds of billions) of dollars I do not leverage my mindshare well enough and work with some large companies. Business in general is not me deal at this point, and I am not sure if it will ever be, for a variety of reasons.

Sales vs the Knowledge Curve:
The demand curve for search marketing is based on what was effective a while ago.

Here is a perfect example: It is well noted that keyword density is typically not that important compared to other things in the grand scheme of SEO. Yet when I recently added many tools to my SEO tool list the only tool someone requested to buy was a keyword density analysis tool, which is probably one of the least valuable tools on the page. (I later made it open source so I gave it to him free).

If I sold any of the following I would make far greater income than I do with less effort, but I probably would not be creating more value for others than I currently do:

• links from high PageRank pages

• link spam software
• link exchange software
• reciprocal link software
• subscription based link network access

By the time the mass market really understands the quality links and trust concepts search may move on to being more focused on user data.

In some fields it makes sense to try to be on the cutting edge, but often sitting back a bit and profiting from the lack of knowledge in the mass market will provide far greater profit.

I love Lee's answers to ideas cheap businesses throw his way while trying to bilk out SEO services for next to nothing.

If you sell SEO services you will love Just Say No to Discount SEO.

I am not certain why, but I have been getting lots of requests from claimed SEO companies that want to outsource 100% of the link building associated with SEO.

My typical response is:

If you don't do link building you are not a real SEO.

That may sound brutal, but it is true. Here is why:

There are the rare sites that have already spent millions of dollars building their brands to where all they need done is descriptive unique page title and making sure their content management system works. Then there are sites like SearchEngineWatch that are just the authority sites in their field, self reinforcing market positions and a decade of writing quality content about a topic the author loves. But most sites do not fall into those categories. If you feel a site needs more links to compete, why - other than laziness - would you want to outsource 100% of the link building project?

If a site is in non competitive fields sure a few directory listings and the like may be all that is needed. But if that is all that is needed I don't think it is hard to develop processes to do that sort of stuff.

If your an individual person who runs one website I guess it may make sense to outsource that to a person who provides affordable services, but if you are an SEO company with recurring work and new clients coming through all the time it doesn't make sense to outsource it.

Sure some people make certain services cheap and are really good at what they do, but if the price gets too cheap and the process is fairly automated the link quality is going to be low.

As far as link builders I would recommend, I would have no problem paying Eric Ward for the connections he has and his solid site announcement history. I also know and trust Debra Mataler well enough to know she would do a good job building links.

As Stuntdubl said, you want to balance the link equation. Get a variety of link types. A good link builder will do that for you. But it is hard to build an SEO business model that

• is profitable

• gives clients individualized attention
• provides end to end solutions

If you guarantee success with your service you are better off doing affiliate marketing than selling SEO services. You get a larger percent of the action that way and have no clients!

Demand for SEO lags what is most effective and many people think they just need more PageRank. And many of the most profitable business models are going to revolve around selling pieces of the pie instead of selling the whole process. Many of the SEO firms that have been contacting me wanted to outsource 100% of their link building to link brokers.

Some links are about social relationships. Those are key in hyper competitive fields. How can you compete in hyper competitive fields if you are not learning the market or pushing social relationships? How can you even know what budget to allocate for link building if you don't do it? If people should buy link services off a link builder then what value does a clueless SEO firm add by taking a cut charging a premium for their own ignorance?

I am friends with a few link brokers, and know pieces of their partner networks, business models, and link types. Some of the content sites in the networks are so good that they provide enough direct value to pay for themselves even if they had no effect on SEO. Of course it would be hard to say that about all link buys. Sure some of the links probably do count well and others probably don't count at all.

Assuming all the links from link brokers counted in all search algorithms (that would be being hyper optimistic) there would still be a few fundamental flaws with only building links from brokers:

• A link profile consisting of only one link type is not a real natural profile.

• If nearly all your links come from a few networks or are brokered through a few people then the odds are pretty good that a competitor is going to come in contact with the person who is selling you links.
• Most people selling links will also sell links to competing sites.
• If you get to the top of the search results there is little effort needed to duplicate your actions if all your links are rented.

I am not trying to hate on any individual type of link. I just think that you should mix what you use. If possible do all of the following

• articles (these make great direct sales)

• press releases (when I was a total no name a well known Yahoo! search engineer saw one of my press releases and reviewed my ebook for me based on a press release)
• directories (most are one time fee)
• viral marketing opportunities, free tools, & ideas (these are hard to do but also hard to replicate, and are the cheapest link opportunities if you land a good one)
• affiliate marketing (you set your payout percent, affiliates only get paid if they convert, and it still builds your brand even if the links do not count for SEO)
• buy links where others are not looking (use Yahoo!'s advanced search page or the concept in this tool. Instead of only entering add URL search for ezine ad, associations, history, and other ideas which may provide greater value than the typical add URL search)
• if you can afford it do off the web marketing that drives online activity
• if you can afford it maybe it makes sense to buy an old site or the rights to publish content on old sites

A couple years ago effective SEO was using the same anchor text everywhere and just getting thousands of low quality links to point at you. That is not the case anymore. A strong link building program

• Should be able to help guarantee usage data and targeted traffic that converts (since people tend to click on legitimate links and trust what is perceived as an unpaid recommendation).

• Should provide secondary links that were not requested. If a site like SearchEngineWatch writes an article about your site you can guarantee that others will syndicate how interesting your site is.
• Is hard to replicate.
• Mixes your link profile.

Your link profile is about who knows you and who trusts you. If you outsource that outside of your client and outside of your business I think you owe it to your clients to at least know enough about the following:

• how to evaluate how competitive a market is

• the value add of different linking strategies
• the risk vs reward profiles of different linking strategies
• why it is important to mix link types