S.O.S.! Save Our Site!
Our tanker was a day off of Cape Farewell, steaming toward the Maritimes and straight into the mouth of an early spring gale – the kind the North Atlantic is unpleasantly famous for –- when the radio began to splutter the faint but unmistakable code that reads distress in any language: “S.O.S”…
Okay – we might be overdramatizing a bit. Maybe most of the time we aren’t really anywhere near the Maritimes when the S.O.S. arrives (although the distress part rings true enough). Actually, we’re usually at our desk checking the email.
Although it is technically correct that we PLR (private label rights) providers don’t have a Code of the Sea (or even the P.C.), it is a fact that we will do our best to come to the rescue. But it would be better for everyone if the Mayday!s could be avoided in the first place.
S.O.S. (Save Our Site!) situations are often the result of neglect, absent-mindedness, and/or misinformation. When someone puts up their website in the first place, they usually inject a great deal of thought (and often budget) into its creation. Then wait for something to happen. Whether anything good happens as time passes has a thousand variations — but eventually, whether successful or not, a sort of settling tends to happen.
And the direction of almost all ‘settling’ tends to be downward.
Neglect and absent-mindedness is common because of the misinformation. The misinformation is that time alone is an internet ally, since trust and traffic build after you’ve been around long enough to establish that you are not one of the fly-by-night kind of operations. This is just about precisely half true.
True, people and search engines sometimes reward longevity, but only the kind that they’re looking for. If you have a site that has been rock solid since 1999, hasn’t changed a whit since then, Google may decide that the rock in question is a tombstone. Most of their customers (and yours) are interested in finding outfits that are actively doing business with living breathing human beings. That’s why it’s a necessity to inject a steady stream of fresh and relevant new content on a regular basis via dedicated blogging, dedicated creative staff research, or (more efficiently)
canny use of the right PLR articles.
When those Save Our Site! calls come in, they’re almost always due to a period of neglect — failure to man the bridge. Suddenly the alarm sounds because inattention has caused everything to drift off course which threatens to dash the company website vessel onto yawning shoals of…well, seldom onto yawning shoals of coral.
More often, just shoals of yawning.
- Mitch
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Web Location Location Location!
If you’re the lucky one in charge of boosting your website’s traffic (maybe because you own the place), you’ve already come up against the need to spend copious amounts of otherwise productive time pursuing high placement on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Strong SERP placement is, after all, the precise equivalent of location, location, location in the brick-and-mortar world. If your store faces the busiest mall in town, boy! have you got business! On the other hand, if your store is across the alley from a back-street mortuary, it might as well be inside.
There is one huge difference, though. No matter where your hypothetical brick-and-mortar store were located, at least you would be able to count your competitors within a given radius. No such luck on the internet. There may be hundreds or hundreds of thousands of existing competitors, with hordes more able to pop up or disappear on any given day (see PLRHeadquarters’ SEO SERP count for an amusing live demonstration).
The Search Engine Optimization experts will advise you to test search using terms your target visitors are likely to use when looking for you. That’s good (as well as obvious) advice. What is also true is that all your serious competitors are doing the same thing, and since they all can’t place on the first page, there must be something more to it.
There is.
Links are involved, and life is involved.
Links are discussed everywhere, and building high-quality links should occupy something like 90% of your traffic-boosting time and/or budget. Life is the other factor (as in the opposite of death).
A dead site – one that never changes, and never offers anything new to return visitors – will inevitably fall from grace with the search engines as well as with the link partners you’ve sweated bullets to gain.
As usual, my major point here is the need for you either to devote the time to updating your site’s content at least a few times a week, or else find and subscribe to a high-quality creative PLR outfit. (I think you know a couple I’d recommend).
-Mitch
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Linking for Dromedaries
The above title may be a cheap trick , but it’s there for three important reasons. They will be fully explored in a moment, but first it’s time to disclose something of a trade secret:
It’s a thought that is discouraged by our Private Label Rights brethren and sistren. It has to do with the theme that PLR providers (as well as hucksters) are forever harping upon — namely PLR’s core value: the importance of fresh, relevant content to any web traffic-building campaign.
“Web content is just about the most important aspect of building your web site’s traffic!”, we will say. Or,
“It’s near the top of any list,” we will say.
If you come across these sales points when your eyes are bleary (probably from reading so many conflicting opinions about Search Engine Optimization strategies), you might just nod and read on instead of leaping to the implied follow-up question, “Uh…then what’s at the top of the list? What’s that most important aspect?”
Admitting this may be close to apostasy in the Private Label Rights community, but here it is, anyway: linking, not content, is what’s most valuable. Linking to quality sites in your keyword universe will move your site toward the top of the SERPs more quickly and more reliably than anything else. And maybe even keep it there for a good long time!
So why wouldn’t every sophisticated web entrepreneur just concentrate on link-building and forget about coming up with fresh content [by subscribing to a PLR resource like ours at PLRHeadquarters]?
First, wrangling links to quality partners takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and also doesn’t get you anywhere if the site you’re building isn’t worth visiting in the first place. Google and Bing! and Yahoo Search have campuses fully-manned with pocket-protectored software folks using megacomputers to keep on top of that determination. If your site is static, they’re going to notice.
Second, quality link partners decide whether to link to you after they’ve checked out your site’s content. If they’re true quality sites, they’ll check back, too – and more than once. They’ll drop you faster than a Texas hailstone if you let your site go stale.
Last –and we owe the blog at linksmanager.com a nod for this–:
“Never forget: The search engines are trending the rate at which you obtain links, so slow and steady beats fast and furious.” [our emphasis added]
In other words, effort over time works: blasting away in a hurry looks like what it is: a short-lived stab at popularity. In all cases, even while you’re tending to all the parts of the equation that will bring SEO success, the one foundation component that has to be there and has to be changing is your content. Either hire those writers, do it yourself (and abandon everything else you should be doing), or subscribe to a service that does what PLRHeadquarters does.
Now, back to the beginning: why is this entry called “Linking for Dromedaries”? Again, there are multiple reasons. First, “Linking for Dummies” is not only already taken, but it’s derivative and, frankly, just not original enough. Second, dromedaries are quite fascinating animals with a name you don’t see every day. At least not nearly as often as ‘camels’. Third, it got you reading and you’re still reading, so it proves the point that amusing and interesting content tends to get and hold readership. You might say it gets you over the hump.
(Then again, it might be better if you didn’t.)
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PLR SCAMS REVISITED (IV)
From time to time we are privileged to enjoy sharing the experience of the first-time visitors to the Private Label Rights universe. Often such innocents have run into the term “PLR” while investigating Search Engine Optimization techniques: he or she knows it has something to do with freshening a site’s content and making sure Google is aware of the fact. But ‘PLR’ and ‘Private Label Rights’ aren’t terms that explain themselves, so they warrant a bit more discussion.
Since searches for ’PLR’ is how a goodly number of subscribers find us, somebody from PLRHeadquarters is duty-bound to keep tabs on what comes up when you google it. Since I have a well-developed sense of humor, I’m usually elected. These forays never fail to provide chills and spills, scams and spams, and the same kind of general merriment experienced when you’re suckered into the Clown Toss “skill” game at the dimly-lit far end of a carnival midway (no offense to the gypsies, who actually do have a Code of Honor).
This last time, we decided to Bing “PLR value”. We found the resulting galaxy of values much unchanged. Try Binging it yourself, and you’ll come up with the usual Opportunities of a Lifetime. About 627,000 of them, to narrow it down. Click on 95% of them, and you’ll be urged to purchase subscriptions or packages or booklets or videos dealing with some subject or other (sometimes, apparently, ALL subjects). And you will usually be encouraged to sell them again, probably to the next person who Bings “PLR value”. And best of all, you are urged to charge more than you paid in the first place, and to keep selling them over and over again!
Who ever heard of a better bargain? Just think: you’ll make money with little or no effort (“97% of the work has been done for you”) and then just relax. The relaxation never stops. You’re supposed to sit back and watch the coin roll in…no, POUR in (assuming you bother to watch the Free Bonus Video about Thinking Positively).
These ubiquitous ‘PLR ’ offers are clearly aimed at inciting would-be internet entrepreneurs to set up their own PLR sites to offer the articles/videos/e-books they just bought to the next set of would-be internet entrepreneurs for sale to even more internet entrepreneurs who can set up their own sites, etc.
It’s a little like what happens the first time a child sits down in a barbershop: they look in the mirror and are amazed to find an endless progression of images of familiar-looking children getting more and more haircuts! And like the size of those images, these ‘PLR’ products somehow diminish in value until, by about the fiftieth iteration, all value sort of disappears in the distance. In case this business model seems vaguely familiar, we all recall Bernie Madoff, who perfected a much bolder version of a similar idea.
The good news is that after Binging ‘PLR value’, somewhere on those results pages, squished in between the 625,000 values, there are firms who in fact offer content that’s worth paying for (i.e., fresh, engaging articles written by real degree-holding English-speaking writers who never allow their stuff to be resold).
Other than (obviously) our group, I can’t really propose a foolproof way of identifying who those actual PLR creators are. But who they aren’t is a good deal easier — for guidance I refer you to my sporadically-updated monumental work on the subject, “20 Foolproof and Amusing Ways to Spot PLR Scams”. And no – it isn’t available for sale or resale (even though it is certain to drive massive targeted traffic and is certainly selling at the amazingly deep-discounted one-time-only limited bargain price offer while it lasts)…
Change change and more change
I was sharing a cup of coffee with a good friend and long-time client last week, and the familiar topic of watching TV/Movies on the Internet came up.
I admitted that after years of successfully avoiding watching ANY entertainment on cramped computer screens, I was finding myself sporadically having to do so, most often after forgetting to record something on the DVR. People like me have a fondness for BIG screens, not itsy ones. But lately I’ve come to notice how many pieces of video are only available on the web – especially the short, controversial (frequently hilarious) ones.
My friend was more easy-going. His kids keep sending him links, he keeps clicking on them; the consequential lean-forward viewing is inevitable. He’s gotten used to it.
So we are both arriving at the same conclusion: like so many other facets of present-day media, the value of resisting change seems to fade and disappear ever more quickly. PC Magazine, for example, advises against ever buying another old-fashioned DVD player (at the moment it’s surrendered to Blu-Ray, and soon enough online streaming will destroy them, too). Tweeting’s another case in point: fad or not, its allure is undeniably strong…enough to cause a planetary sensation. For a web owner to refuse to even consider its possibilities (especially the commercial ones) is about as defensible as a newspaper media buyer refusing to check out circulation statistics.
The analogy to Private Label Rights is direct. To succeed on the web, a site has to do more than greet visitors with the information or entertainment they’re after. It won’t even get the chance in the first place. It has to ‘get found’ first — and the proliferation of sites makes the odds of that happening by accident highly unlikely.
Originally, anyone could live with the straight-out-of-the-carton Company Web Site (just a Home Page housing the Company Blurb and the Stuff Being Offered; or maybe a premium version with a captive search box leading to the Exact Stuff Being Offered).
No more: to keep up with today’s changing search requisites, the Company Site has got to pump iron, bulk up with current content of pointedly relevant interest, and then keep on keeping on! Change change change!
But seeing as the Company keepers of the brand are correct to insist that the Company Blurb never change, and seeing as the Home Page really needs to provide exactly the same kind of visual continuity so return visitors feel warm and comfy — keeping fresh becomes problematical. If a Home Page looks and reads the same to the loyal customer, it also reads the same to the not-so-loyal search engine spiders (and they don’t like that so much). True, the Stuff Being Offered may or may not change – but unless that Stuff is totally unique, by itself those edits arent likely to score big points with Google or Bing or their arachnid minions.
Updated content (and PLR is only a very convenient way of achieving it), when created intelligently, and integrated gracefully, rewards the visitor with the latest in what he was seeking – which is exactly what the SERPs are designed to list.
However awesomely web site owners may have created their original sites, if they haven’t kept abreast of the search engines’ demands for new, changing content, they are increasingly likely to find themselves pitted up against competitors who have.
Like giving in to laptop video or tweets in the afternoon, accepting change means keeping time with the changing marketplace and its customers. And — who knows ?– if we hustle to the front of the parade, we might just become a leader!
Less than a 2009 PLR ‘Top Ten’ List…
The year just over — so what have PLR users and providers learned? I’ve been trying to compress the jumble of change and growth into something less breathless than a ‘Top Ten’ list. In fact, I’ve decided it’s more useful to just chuck the list and acknowledge the single preeminent trend: the now (finally) undeniable ascendence of web search knowhow as the clear in-your-face marketers’ top-performing gottahaveit Skill Set of the Year.
You hear the term ‘Web Informatics’ to describe the greater arena, but it’s all really devolving into ‘web search’, or ‘web search-for-marketing’, or — to be rigorously honest – ‘web search-to-snag-new-customers-to-keep-the-doors-open’.
Nowhere we traveled in 2009 could we find much more than a vestige of earlier reluctance to recognize the merit of practical PLR to focused search engine optimization strategies – most notably among proprietors of smaller businesses. The SES last March in Manhattan was an early indicator, for it turned out to be more than the usual nice excuse to spend a few days in the City. Despite the economy, the floor was fairly mobbed with small shop entrepreneurs; they looked and talked less like techies and more like business people; and many of them seemed a bit longer in the tooth than in previous gatherings. Most seemed focused and determined in a distinctly non-hobbyist sort of way and not nearly as distracted as usual by the Gotham diversions (and keep in mind this was long before we knew that even the Tavern on the Green would find itself among the fallen!).
We chatted and eavesdropped and observed. By the final day, we’d seen what amounts to an economics-driven sea change in web enterpreneurs’ perspective. Whereas two or three years ago a typical small company website may have been gathering dust as little more than a vanity accessory for the boss (or else a project to keep Junior interested in the family biz), by the end of the year just about every content consumer we deal with had redrafted their priorities: the site had to be more than competitive – it had to PULL, it had to RANK; it had to PRODUCE!
Sigh. Here we’re in the content, not the web redesign business. But the number of sites that now have to actually perform means, quite often, sites that have to be redesigned from the ground up, because now it’s really serious.
But of course it always was.