Is all this content, since it is all words, approximately equivalent? Should the intern or outsourcer you’ve hired to post links on Twitter be the same person who writes your weekly blog post?

Obviously, the answer is, “of course not.”

In The Social Bootstrap guide to DIY Thought Leadership, I discuss 6 different kinds of text content that a thought leader needs on their website: articles, blog posts, sales copy, information, SEO filler, and hidden text.

So, who should be doing what?

If you are bootstrapping, you’ll probably do all of them yourself. That’s actually a really good thing, because once you are ready to begin outsourcing or hiring, you’ll actually know what needs to be done.

Here is a breakdown of the different hats you’ll wear (if you do it yourself), or the different people you’ll hire (if you can afford it).

Articles

Straightforward informational articles, like “What Is a Living Trust?” or “Notes of the Melodic Minor Blues Scale” can be written by any knowledgeable person. It helps if the writer has subject matter expertise, but with things like Google and Wikipedia, that isn’t really necessary. What helps the most is the ability to explain things simply, and an understanding of online search behavior.

This is the sort of thing entrepreneurs frequently outsource to content mills. That’s understandable, since they don’t expect this to be “thought leader content,” but rather, they often think of this as primarily search engine schlock. That’s not the best way to think about it.

Your potential clients, whether they show up through a search engine or from a business card, are going to check out your website. They are very likely, if they’re in the mood to buy something, to check out lots of other people’s websites as well. Good informational articles are not primarily about search engines. Good informational articles are about those people who are trying to learn about your service or pop-ups, and who would buy your products or services if they were well-informed enough. Obviously this means that your product or service needs to be good enough that a well-informed buyer would choose you over anybody else. Assuming that your product or service is good enough, actually educating your buyers about estate planning, or piano scales, or what ever, is a huge benefit.

Therefore, informational articles should not just be something that you push deep into your site, hoping search engines will pick it up (they won’t), but rather something that people can find easily from the front page of your site, if they have a mind to be looking for it. And so therefore, good informational articles should be written well by someone who knows how to write well.

That might not be you. But, it should be someone that you hire or oversee. It could be a freelance writer, or an intern, or your husband-but a content e-mail or a bolt article purchasing site is not the way to go.

Blog Posts

You should write blog posts your self. Blog posts are the public face of your company, at least online. Blogs should be written by the person whose voice they are in. That is, employees should write blogs as themselves, not as you. And you should not outsource blog writing if you can at all help it. Blogging, and all social media, is about authenticity and interaction. If you can’t find time to blog, and are thinking about hiring someone else to do it, considering hiring someone else to do all the things you’re doing currently, so that you’ll have time to blog for yourself.

Sales Copy

Words that are directly a part of your sales funnel (“Buy now!” or “Sign up today for a free demo”) should be written by a professional copywriter. Blogs can ramble. Informational articles can be a little bit confusing as long as everything works out in the end. But sales copy needs to be efficient and effective.

Is there a difference between “learn more,” and “try a free demo?” How would you know?
A professional copywriter, along with deliberate use of Google Optimizer, will get results far and above what you will be able to do yourself. If you are selling things online, and you do not have previous verifiable success doing so, a professional copywriter who understands e-commerce and A-B testing should be an early investment.

Info

Basic information, like your address, your phone number, and even your name and occupation, you should be able to write yourself. As I mentioned in my book though, understanding how people structure searches in Google can help you turn basic information into yet another attraction marketing opportunity.

SEO Filler

You should have good basic informational articles that are easily accessible from your home page. Those are not SEO filler. SEO filler is when you have 10 or 15 different articles explaining “The Basics of Prenuptial Agreements.” Nobody who is searching for information on your site needs all the different permutations: Prenuptial Agreements for Beginners, Understanding Prenuptial Agreements, Newly Engaged Person’s Guide to Prenuptial Agreements, What Is a Prenuptial Agreement?, An Introduction to Prenuptial Agreements.

No, no. No human cares that you have 15 different versions of that article on your site. However, assuming they are different enough, Google prefers that sort of thing. You are creating more opportunities for someone to land on your site.

These don’t absolutely have to be as well-written as your primary informational articles. A content mill is an okay way to go (assuming they aren’t duplicating content, and assuming the content is written by native English speakers), but probably not the best way. Bulk article purchasing sites, especially like those that cater to attorneys, are especially not the way to go because you are usually buying a set of articles which they have also sold to 100 other professionals. There is no search engine benefit to duplicate content.

Your best option here is probably to hire freelance writers yourself through something like craigslist.com or elance.com. This takes a little bit more hands-on management than a content mill, but there is no additional profit margin above the writer. This allows you to either save money or spend the same amount of money and get higher quality writing.

Just make sure that before you hire or purchase, you have done good keyword research and understand how search engine optimization works.

Hidden Text

Hidden text is all the stuff on your website that humans never see, or at least never look for. URL structure, metadata, file names, hover text, alt tags, link titles…

If you retain an SEO firm or a web designer, all that should be their job. Otherwise (and even then) you should have an understanding of what all these things are, and you should have the ability to correct them.

The most important thing here is preplanning. You could always add another article later. You can reformat your information. You can try new sales copy. But it’s very difficult (well it can be) to change your URL structure after your website has been running for several months or years. It can be damn near impossible to change your file structure on your server. You will never ever go back and add alt tags to all of your images. The more of this that you can do ahead of time, the better.

Learn More, Teach More

You can learn more about text content for Thought Leadership in my book, The Social Bootstrap guide to DIY Thought Leadership, which you can purchase at Amazon or read free online. (See Chapter 5: Words, Words, Words)

Or, even better than learning more from me, is teaching me and other people what you already know. If you have a little bit to say, leave a comment. If you have a lot to say, write your own blog post and a link to it in the comments, so the rest of us can find it.

Here’s where it’s coming from:

Commenting on Blogs

By far, the most traffic has come from commenting on other blogs. In particular, one comment I made on a Smashing Magazine post, with a link to a related post I wrote, sent a few hundred people to my site. Since I saw that happen, I’ve been making a more concerted effort to comment on other blogs, and it’s paying off. If you only have time to do one thing to drive traffic, I recommend you comment on other blogs.

Participating in Forums

I’m active in a few WordPress support forums, particularly the Atahualpa theme support forum. Basically, I try to be helpful, answer questions when I can, and ask a few things from time to time.

Unique Content / Long Tail Search

I don’t really rank on Google for anything special except my own company name. But I get tons of single-serve keywords, mostly for people looking for information about the Atahualpa theme, which I blogged about a while ago.

Networking and Personal Promotion

The rest of my traffic comes from handing out my business card, speaking at events, and running a meetup.com group.

What hasn’t worked…

So far, I haven’t gotten much traffic from twitter, which is completely my own shortcoming. I just always have better things to do than be on twitter all day, and I can’t work with it running in the background.

What about you?

How do you drive traffic?
And how did you get here?
Leave a comment, let us know…

This post is part of the Brogan 100.
Learn more here and here.

Therefore, deep niche service is primarily an SEO function.
And any good SEO strategy starts with keyword research.

Let’s say you want to start a niche informational product.
Before you fall in love with an idea write down all of your possible areas of expertise/interest.

Expand them (use a mindmap, perhaps) into as many smaller categories as possible.
Think of words and phrases someone might search for if they needed information about each topic.
Use a thesaurus, and Google Sets to find more ideas for topics and words.

Then hop over to the Keyword Tool. Check out small groups of related keywords in batches. Save data from interesting results in a spreadsheet.

Look at the top performers. Any keyword phrase or set of related phrases that gets over 10,000 searches a month is worth looking into. Go to regular Google search and see what the organic leaders are for each of the phrases.

Poke around the sites of the top four or five results. Look at the source code. Look at the design.
Does it seem like a total accident that this site is at the top?
Or is it obvious that someone has a vested monetary interest in being there?
How hard would it be to get into first page ranking?
Is this site what a searcher would be hoping to find?

Obviously, what you are looking for is an under-served market. Once you’ve identified that, buy a keyword-rich domain name, set up a blog, and start writing.
And start creating a product of some sort.

If you do it right, you’ll start drawing worthwhile traffic about the same time you have a product ready to sell.

Niche served.

This post is part of the Brogan 100.
Learn more here and here.

• The weight of all the really big animals put together isn’t as much as all the weight of all the small animals put together.
• The sales totals of the few blockbusters is not as huge as the combined sales of all the movies that only one person a month wants to watch.
• The money made by the Fortune 100 isn’t as much money as moves through the millions of small businesses all over the world.

There, now you hardly need to read the book.

(Just kidding, you should read it.)

Since the book came out, a new phrase has emerged in the internet marketing and search engine optimization world: long tail search.

The idea being that for all the “perfect” keywords that get used by thousands of people each day, there a tons of “long tail” searches- long strings of unusual words that only get used once because somebody is looking for something specific.

Deb Ng, over at The Freelance Writing Jobs Network, just published a list of some of the weirder long-tail searches that have gotten people to her site. For each of these strings, she was #1 on Google at the time. Here’s a few examples:

• “Working on coffeeshop tax deductible”
• “Write dirty stories for Playboy.”
• “Meatball sub”

The list, along with Deb’s funny commentary, are worth reading.

I, too, have had a few interesting Long Tail arrivals, most notably:

• how to get a graph of entrepreneur
• risk and reward of entrepreneurship
• thesis vs atahualpa
• wp plugins that keep people on my site

This brings up a few points…

More Content

The Long Tail is awesome, but it’s impossible to plan for. You can’t know what random string of weird words someone might search for in the future. The only way to “optimize” for the long tail is to have a lot of content. The more words you have, the more combinations of words you have, the more likely that you’ll have that one odd phrase or word-string that someone is looking for.

For those of you still “thinking about it,” it’s time to realize that blogging is the easiest way to get lots of good long tail (and tall head) content.

Real Content

The cheapo boilerplate content that some companies pedal for SEO purposes wipes out any longtail usefulness. It doesn’t matter if someone reaches your sight after searching for “wp plugins that keep people on my sight” if the page they land on is schlocky seo fodder.

Blogging, especially thoughtful blogging over time, provides useful landing pages for all those weird, long tail searches.

Make sure that your blog theme (or template) is set up so that every page is a worthwhile landing page.

Focused Content

While more blogging is better than less blogging, it’s a good idea to focus your blogging on topics related to your business. This seems kind of obvious, and yet lots of business owners think that posting about their cats is a worthwhile use of time. (It isn’t.)

The more you blog about your business and your industry, the more those long tail searches will be potential customers or subscribers, because those searchers will find that they’ve arrived at a blog that they actually care about.

Big SEO opportunity

Clearly, there are no sandwich shops that have bothered to optimize for “meatball sub.” This seems like a huge opportunity, since there are over 8,000 searches each month for “meatball sub.” I’d be happy to work with any sandwich shops on this matter.

And so I thought- thank goodness, I was wondering where my next blog post would come from. This dude’s freakin’ awesome.

The business started as a business school project (-slash-) outgrowth of his parents’ florist business. Over the last six (I think) years, they’ve grown to over $12 million in sales. Mostly through organic search. That’s incredible.

For most of the time they have been in business they have ranked number one for 71 of their 72 desirable keywords: Easter Gift Baskets, gift baskets snacks, birthday gift baskets.

So naturally- everyone wants to know how they did it.

Well, at first- a bunch of things you can’t do anymore.

Early on, they were paying bloggers to link to them. (Don’t do that!) A bit black hat, yes- but the links were fairly high quality. Useful to the consumer. Informative. The relevance of the links was so high (in reality) that Gourmet Gift Baskets was one of the last sites to get penalized by Google for this sort of behavior (more on that in a minute).

They also paid some sketchy SEO company to do… well, they didn’t really know. Stuff that would get you banned today (link farms, cross-linking subdomains, dummy sites with auto-content). It didn’t get them banned (back then), but it was expensive and didn’t really help at all.

They started creating useful, informative content- well linked articles with unbiased information. That worked really well. Ryan described it as, “pretty gray hat stuff.” The content was good, the links were unbiased (he linked to competitors where appropriate, to educational resources, and so on)- he was able to get high-trust sites to link to this content: dot-edu and dot-gov sites linked to some of his stuff. It worked great!

Trouble was, they were being a little (or completely) manipulative in the way this content was published and controlled, and how he got people to link to it.

Ryan checks his Google rank on all major keywords every morning. One day- they just disappeared. Google got wind of what they were doing, and how they were manipulating content, and they got slammed. After a few weeks in the Google confessional known as resubmission request, Gourmet Gift Baskets pulled back onto page one (near the bottom) in time for the holiday buying season.

The strategy since then has been two pronged:

• Be less evil.
• Diversify

Be less evil.
Step one was less black and gray, more solid white hat SEO stuff. Deep in the site are these fantastic educational articles about gifts, gift baskets, food, holidays. A boatload of content that a regular visitor doesn’t see (there’s no navigation to them). The only one he mentioned was Ukrainian Easter Eggs.
They produce all this fantastic deep content, which links back to their home page. They then attempt to find people to link to that content. This creates indirect links back to the homepage- a sort of SEO funnel of goodness.
Expensive, time consuming, slow.
But effective.

Diversify
At its peak, over 80% of their business was coming from organic search on Google. While lots of people would kill for results like that, any good business person will tell you that you shouldn’t be so incredibly dependent on a single source of income. What if the algorithm changes? What if they get banned or penalized? Ryan estimates they lost about $2 million of sales the holiday season they were at the bottom of page one instead of the top.

Additionally- they’re maxed out. How do you grow an online business when everyone who looks for your product finds you? They can’t think of any more keyword phrases to optimize for. They have more or less hit the wall with revenue from organic search- and they’re spending $90,000 a year to keep it that way.

So the company is starting to move backwards into traditional media, forward into Social media, and sideways into a whole new way to generate SEO goodness.

The coolest SEO strategy I’ve ever heard of
When Ryan first said, “We’re gonna break world records!” I thought he was speaking in that overly-enthusiastic sales guru hyperbole I’ve grown accustomed to in the last few years. I was wrong.

Gourmet Gift Baskets is going to bake the World’s Largest Cupcake!

How big do you think the current world’s largest cupcake is? You’d probably think in terms of a Volkswagon, right? No, sadly- the current record holder is an embarrassingly small footstool of a cupcake.
151 pounds.
Lame.

Ryan’s cupcake is going to be 7,151 pounds! Now we’re talking. Custom fabricated cupcake mold. The world’s largest electric oven. A cupcake the size of a car. This dude is serious.

With a little bit of wheeling and dealing, a bit of creativity, and a whole lot of bootstrapping, this whole thing is going to cost around $20,000. Much less than the $90,000 a year he’s been paying. And what higher quality links they’ll get. This is beyond white-hat/black-hat. This is Wizard’s Hat SEO.

To Do
You there. Entrepreneur. Internet marketer. SEO guru.

Stop trying to game the system. Gourmet Gift Baskets is a great case study in SEO trickery- what used to work, why it worked, and why it doesn’t work anymore. If you’ve been doing SEO for more than two years, you probably need to forget everything you know.

Do something different. Something ridiculous. Something at least the size of a Volkswagon.

And don’t put all your Ukrainian Easter Eggs in one Gourmet Gift Basket.