Remember that childhood game guess who? Where you have to guess what character your opponent has chosen by asking questions about them. We are playing the marketing version of this game today, and I will take you through how I apply this technique to bestfootballgoals.info.
Once we’ve played Guess Who IM we then need to play IM Snap and match these to a monetization method. We will look at how we can make money, and then start to apply this.
After all this we will look at the easiest way to get started with these on our site. This will be in part 2 which follow in an hour or two…
Guess Who IM Edition
Yeah I know the name sucks, but that is basically the game you are playing here. I have a list of 10 questions that I personally use when looking at a new site, and this is the first (and probably only) time I will reveal it.
What is the Subject/Niche of the site?
Does it attract a majority of Male or Female readers?
What is the estimated age range of my readers?
Will my usual reader have a Credit Card?
Will my usual reader have a PayPal account?
Do I expect the majority my readers to have their own computer, or use a public computer?
What other interests are commonly linked to my Subject/Niche?
What social networks do I expect my readers to belong to?
How do I expect my readers to find my site?
Does the user have a specific pain or problem we may be able to solve?
After answering these questions I usually have a good profile of the people I expect to be using my site. You have not got write essay answers and brainstorming/mindmapping is totally appropiate here. For the profile of bestfootballgoals.info see the video or download the file here.
Snap IM
The next stage is to use our target profile to match what we are going to be able to do “help” our users. One of the biggest problems I find here is that since the Made For Adsense period (where you wanted your site looking ugly so people left it as quickly as possible by clicking an adsense link) quality seems to be at the back of most people’s mind. It’s ok to make a quick buck occasionally, but that is not what we are doing here!
It’s easier to get your users to do the advertising for you, than to spend days doing SEO. Because of this I invest heavily in content for all my sites, not just keyword targeted but aimed at giving something important to the user… Once you do that the user actually starts to trust your website for delivering what you promise, may tell friends about what they’ve found etc.
It is at this stage we moneytize that user, not by selling them the answer to the question they asked to get to our site… But instead by upselling them into something related. For example for bestfootballgoals.info depending on the profile of our user we can upsell them a goal scoring training program, a football betting system, football ringtones, football screensavers…
The posibilities are endless, generally the only time any of my sites will show adsense is if I have nothing better (aka more profitable) to show the user.
Lets make a list of things we think the user may be interested in for bestfootballgoals…
Today is a little more interesting, there are several things we need to do including working out a bit more about what our website is about. We are still in the housekeeping phase, however what we do today will set us up well for traffic later…
By the end of todays task you will have:
An understanding of why I think Social Networking is important
Twitter set up and configured
Youtube set up and configured
Facebook page set up and configured
A list a keywords related to your site
Add the first post to your blog
Why I believe Social is important
Over the last few years the use of social networking has changed rapidly, and now everyone and their pet seems to have at least account somewhere on the social net. Major brands now find Facebook so appealing that they even base multi-million dollar TV Advertising Campaigns around people ”Liking” their page on the social network.
However what I consider key (and often overlooked) is that Social is based around human intelligence and interaction. For many years Google and other search engines have tried countless mathematical algorithms to determine the best results to a search query. The number of websites which have links to your website, the types of website that has links to your website, how many blogs meantion your website… All of which could be artifically manipulated.
Now if you picked someone of the street and asked them how they cooked a curry they’d tell ya, no mathematics involved and without being influenced. Its the same on Social networks, I’ll ask what films are good to watch, which is the best garage to use… And my friends will answer me. It fixes the problem of artifical manipulation.
Now all Google needs to do is work out just how to link the two together, in the meantime we can be prepared, and also get shed loads of free traffic. Generally a social network will allow us to link to our website from a page on an authority site and also make other users aware of that page or account.
Twitter Setup and Configuration
Google has already done great things for Twitter, and linked it directly into Google search. If something suddenly gets a lot of attention (Tweets), and someone search for it in google they will be shown the Tweets related to it in the search results!
Enter your site name, email and a password you want to use and click Sign up
Now play with your username until you get one with good keywords, less than 15 characters long and is avaliable… Your address will be twitter.com/username – Click create my account
Enter the confirmation captcha code and confirm
Now enter your subject/topic into the Search box and click search… Look through the people that are found a click Follow on any people you think are perfect for your niche/topic
Goto the email you used to sign up and open the email from Twitter. Click the link in the email to confirm you own the email address…
Now if you click the down arrow in the top right corner and then click settings we can edit our profile. First thing to change is the Timezone.
Click the profile button of the settings page. Enter a Location (somewhere important to your niche is always good), your website address and a quick description about your site. I usually put “owner of http://website.com” in the end for an extra link as people are curious and will check your website out. Click Save.
Now click the design button of the settings page. Click on a design you like and then click save.
Click the twitter logo on the top left, enter a tweet in the the What’s Happening box and click Tweet to post it to your profile. (The number next to the Tweet button is how many characters you have left for your message).
Now click Profile on the top menu to have a look at how other people will see your profile.
Watch the video demonstration here:
Youtube setup and configuration
Youtube gets so much traffic that even 0.00001% of it would be amazing for us to capture. Also we get our site name and link onto another authority site so it’s all good. Many people are put off by the thought of video, however I will show you later in the series that video is simply for anyone…
Enter your email, and play with the username until you get one that matches your website. Enter the post code, DOB and click Accept.
Now make up a password, untick the Web History box, and then enter the Captcha.
Now go to your email account and find the email from YouTube, open this and click on the confirmation link inside.
On the confirmation page click the account preferences link, when this page loads click the Profile Setup link on the Left.
Enter a description about your website, and then your website address. Enter a city + hometown important to your niche. Scroll down and enter keywords related to your website in the Intrests box.
Click Save Changes
Watch the video demonstration here…
Facebook Page set up and configured
Probably the monster in the world of social networks, even my friends goldfish has it’s own facebook account! However we are going go for what facebook calls a business registration which means it is seperate from our personal account.
I usually limit myself to the last two options here as they seem to be the least regulated… Pick a category then enter a Page Title, accept the terms and conditions and click Get Started. Enter the Captcha…
Enter in your email address, a password, your DOB and the captcha code. Tick to accept the Terms and Conditions and click Sign up now.
Now goto your email to find the confirmation email from facebook, open this and click the confirmation link. This will take you straight to your new page.
If you have a photo related to your topic/subject, click upload image to add your photo to the page.
Click Edit Page, then click Basic Information on the left menu on the next page.
Enter a sentence into the about box, a quick description and then your website address in the websites box… Click Save Changes.
Click View Page, then on the page menu click Info to see the changes you’ve just made.
Click Wall on the page menu, and write a quick status saying how you are launching a new website and how exciting it is!
Watch the video demonstration here…
Find some keyword ideas related to your site
I’ve never been big on keyword research, I always believe that with quality content traffic will follow. To get started I look at what google expects to find on the website based on the title…
Enter your site name and a couple of variations. Do the Captcha and click Search.
Scroll down and set it to show 100 rows.
Click the download button, select the CSV for Excel format and click download. Save the file and when it is downloaded open it.
Google gives us the competition for each keyword on a scale of 0 – 1. If you know how to sort it by this in excel do this and save it for later to make it easy to find the lowest competition keywords.
This will then be used to add posts to the site over the next few days. Watch the video here…
Add your first post to the blog
There’s no point having a site if it has nothing useful on it, the first thing that I will add to a blog is a general post on the subject/niche. And now I have some rough keyword ideas I will be able to write a quick 400-500 word post to get the blog started.
Login to your wordpress and click Posts
Click Add New
Select the categories you want your post to belong to.
Enter a Title, and then write your post below.
You can click Save Draft which lets you come back to it later, or click Publish to make it visible on your blog.
This will automatically ping most of the search engines to tell them that new content has been added… This is good as it encourages them to come find you, instead of you having to go find them.
Video demonstrating this is here…
Summary
Today we have also spent some time laying the groundwork to grow, not only do we have 3 very strong links into our website. We also have a way to engage with an audience, and more important for them to engage with us. I honestly believe that Social Networking is going become crucial to search engine algorithms as it provides easy access to human reviews of websites or ideas. I will cover how we can use these mediums to generate traffic later in the challenge, however now we have the basics done we will start thinking about how we can monetize and profit from our work.
