In this post I am going to flesh out and expand on some of the ideas on how to get those sites which are far away from your money making disc0 to get linked to naturally, create content and help build your list.
This blog is too young to get many of the big players of SEO/SEM to give it much thought, so I am not completely surprised on not being “corrected” me on a couple of comments i made in How to Pick a Niche and Dominate Pt3 (though i do think i am in ::emps:: and Contempts Readers, w00t).
First off, although building PDFs, *nars and Videos are are really powerful tools that everyone should be using to get optins, it is something that either gets expensive to outsource or time consuming when you are trying to build the large collection of sites you need for Farmers and Distillers.
Generally Farmers are created by mashups, databases and the Madlib/directory of information style sites. They have a huge bounce rate and generally the surfers who come don’t come back.
What we need to do is make those sites much more sticky. The trick is to “interactify” your database data. What i mean is most easily explained by an example:
Lets say you have a pair of the most common databases out there, namely a database of famous quotes and a database of bios.
Lets also say that this far from your disc0 that the term “English Authors of the Romantic Era” is close enough to your disc0 of “Antique Victorian Lamps.”
Take your database of quotes and mash it up with your bios to give auto blog posts of the following format (use the slow drip rss wordpress rss feed generator i have in the free scripts section).
Quote Quizzes, For Links, Content And List Building
<head> <title>Romantic Era Authors Quote Quiz For Aug 24th </title> </head> <body> <h2>From What English Author is the Following Quote</h2> [%random_quote%] <span onclick='javascript:deSpoil()'> <b>Click for Answer</b> [%answer_from_db%] </span> <h2>Bonus Points if you can guess the context</h2> <form action="freecontent.php"> Name <br> <input type="text" name="name"> Email (we never spam) <br> <input type="text" name="email"> Answer:<br> <textarea name="answer"></textarea> <input type="submit" value="See If you are Right"> </form> <div class="comments_that_dont_look_like_comments"> [%list_of_context_answers_with_vote_on_correct%] </div> [%email_a_friend_this_quizzs_tree_spots%] <h2>Author Bio</h2> [%author_bio%] </body>
So how do you use this bad boy. First you get the site indexed, submitted to directories, blasted, etc…
People start coming in and because its like a trivia quiz for something people are interested in, they will wish to prove themselves. It only takes thinking and clicking for the first “action.” This gets them engaged.
If they get it correct the will like to inflate their ego even more by posting the fact that they know the context. It will be simple answers at first, but its not hard to get a discussion going.
You have captured there email address at this point, so in a day or three you send them an email “So you think your know your way around your Hawthorns and Brontes, Then Check this Out” With a link that goes back to your quiz site which fires off one of those “opaque are you 18 thickboxes.” The thick box says “click here if you would like these quizzes and would like to get more quizzes and fun facts in your inbox once a week (we never, sell, spam…)” If they click “Yes” then you just got an optin, if they say “no” then you redirect them to an affiliate Landing Page and remove them from your email list (or if you want to get advanced, you put them in another funnel).
Whatever you do don’t just spam them. If they aren’t interested leave there inbox alone.
After your database runs out of quotes, you can hit up the list again with a second round of emails, which pulls the “top voted” context answers for each post (assuming at least a few upvotes) and say, hey “Hey Alice Bob thinks, The House of the Seven Gables is a Real …, is this correct?” This email has a similar link back to the main site, with a the same thickbox to ask for an optin (assuming “Kevin” hasn’t already opted in).
With this really simple setup, you have turned a crappy db into a source of optins, content generation and if you are lucky some back links. Also you have the “email to friendS” so this could, in theory, go a little bit viral.
Now this is just ONE good example of how to turn farms and distillers into “something more.” There are many more along the same lines, i am going to give one more example which even gives backlinks (but does require more coding).
There are many ways to turn “trivia” into games, walk down to your local board gamers store and you will be inundated with examples of such games (shout out to all my fellow board game geeks!).
You can scrape trivia questions from everywhere and turn them into a simple game.
The trick is in sub-categorizing the trivia questions to fit a long tail term.
Similarly there are “daily card” type self generators which don’t even need a real database. For example, your daily bingo card. You start with the basic template, and you scape some Creative Common Pictures and mash them into your “bingo card” template. Another example would be a baby-name meanings crossword puzzle pdf, which the user can print out.
Look in your local newspaper for more examples.
You can also make up your own ideas for “cards” or trivia. Take your pro-ball stats and have them compare who has a higher free-throw percentage Shaq or Jordan.
How about Iron of the Day, where you say “Whomever is on the 9th hole of Whereever Links, its 150yards to green, what Golf Club does she use” (note: i know nothing about golf so this might be a completely nonsensical question, but you get the point).
To get banklinks, “Widgetify” all your “Cards” sites. Let people paste a piece of code to there myspace/dashboard/facebook/blog/whatever and that has a backlink that you check for from time to time. Of course these sites have a input section for “corrections” in the form of free content.
The bottom line is that all these sites can be created with just a basic template for each type of site and then you just toss it the correct type of data for your long tail.
Asymptotically these sites take the same amount of time to generate “the next site” as it does to make a category->sub-category->data style database site, but you get better quality from it. Of course there is no free lunch, so these sites tend to have less pages than “normal” database sites.
Hint1: Stumbleupon.
Hint2: Games for Kids, Message for Moms.
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3 Comments
““click here if you would like to these quizzes and would ”
spot the typo! great post.
Very inspiring post!
I just found that blog today (via contempt) and I really like it.
Keep up the good job.
Shesek
Thanks shesek, i just looked over you blog and seems we share a love for coding. You might find my whereyoubeen script kinda interesting to look at, look in the freescripts section.