Devlounge

Design, Develop, and Grow

Create a Product You Would Buy That’s Missing in Your Industry

By

I got this great business idea from 37signals’ blog, Signal vs. Noise. Basically, you identify a product that you wish existed in your industry and then create it.

There are many benefits with executing this idea.

First, if you are willing to buy the product, then there are probably other people who will pay for it too.

37signals creates web apps that they use themselves. That’s one of their criteria for their products. If they won’t use it, they won’t create it. They were not satisfied with the existing chat software so they created their own chat software, Campfire, that met their needs. Not only did it help them communicate better, but other businesses find it useful and pay a monthly fee to use it.

Second, you won’t have a lot of competition.

My sister is fashion expert. One day she was looking for a kimono style dress. However, she couldn’t find one that met her specifications. She wanted something modest, feminine, not shiny, and without big, unflattering flowers. So, she decided to create her own custom dresses.

With her unique style and no prior online business experience, she’s already started getting orders for $200 dresses on her online store.

Third, there seems to be a flexibility with new products.

You will often attract customers who will find other uses for your product or service. So, your customer base is usually larger than what you had planned.

For example, Twitter’s slogan is “What are you doing?” But how many people actually use Twitter that way? I find that many people use it to share links and converse with other people instead of writing what their doing.

My sister recently was asked if she could design a wedding dress.  She never thought about doing that but because she has a unique product, someone felt open to ask her to use her skills in a slightly different way.  Not only did she get a new customer, but she can charge much higher for wedding dresses.

Finally, don’t just apply this principle to products.

You can use it on a more macro level.  Consider creating a resource blog post that you wish was on the web.  For example, on my gaming blog, I create in-depth strategy guides that help me play better.  I create it for myself to remind me of relevant strategies.  I find that many gamers also find it useful.

So, if you’re a designer or developer, maybe you’ve created some cheat sheets to help you with your job.  These cheat sheets would make excellent web content that can improve your personal brand.

Over to You

Have you ever created something that you wished existed in your industry?

How to Increase Sales by Submitting Articles at EzineArticles

By

I’ve been pretty excited to start getting the first couple orders for an online dress store I run with my sister. She creates the dresses and the content while I do the marketing. I’ve only spent a couple hours so far marketing the site so it doesn’t have a lot of traffic yet.

Still, we’ve had success getting sales by submitting articles at EzineArticles. EzineArticles doesn’t send a lot of traffic but the traffic converts better than most other traffic including search traffic.

To use this article directory effectively, I’ve been doing these three things.

1. Inserting Relevant Keywords in the Title

One of the biggest reasons to use EzineArticles is their excellent rankings on Google.  But you can’t just submit an article and hope to have a good ranking.  You need to include relevant keywords in the title. These keywords show up on the title tag, which helps the articles rank well, since the title tag is one of the most important search engine ranking factors.

We sell kimono style dresses so I had my sister create an article entitled “4 Things to Look For When Shopping For a Kimono Style Dress”. Also, we targeted related keywords like floral print dresses. She wrote an article entitled “Floral Print Dresses – A Brief Overview and Shopping Tips”.

2. Using Relevant Anchor Text for our Links

EzineArticles allows you to insert two links at the end of the each article. Also, you can choose the anchor text for your links.

By using relevant anchor text, we’ve been able to improve the rankings for our site. For example, we used the anchor text kimono style dress and we’ve seen an increase in our ranking for that term.

3. Submitting Articles that Showcase Our Product

We try to create articles that will presell the reader to our product. This means choosing a topic that makes our product look good. For example, in the article “4 Things to Look For When Shopping For a Kimono Style Dress”, we gave four elements that women should look for in a kimono style dress. At the end of the article, we told the reader that our dresses had all four elements.

So, it’s implied that the reader doesn’t have to go searching for a dress. They could check out our store and see that our dresses were quality dresses that incorporated all four elements.

Over to You

Have you tried submitting articles at EzineArticles?

If you have, what was your experience?

3 Principles for Turning Your Site Into a Brand

By

About a month ago, Aaron Wall published a landmark blog post where he showed that Google was placing a lot more emphasis on brands in their search engine results pages (SERPs). In the post, he showed examples of well known brands that started ranking for popular keywords.

At this point, the algorithm change seems to only be affecting short keywords with a high search volume instead of long tail keywords.  Still, this could be an important trend in the SERPs.

Consider Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments about brands back in October (also from Aaron’s post):

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

With Google’s new emphasis on brands, it’s important to have brand building as one of the pillars to your SEO strategy. Here are 3 principles to keep in mind.

1. Have a long term mindset.

Famous brands like Nike and Coca-Cola were not built quickly. Brands take time to build.

It will take consistent quality effort for at least a couple months, if not years, to turn your site into a brand. However, the payoff will be huge when you hit the top rankings. Plus, your rankings will be hard to overtake since most people don’t do this hard work of brand building.

2. Create viral content.

A site becomes a brand when it receives enough mentions on the web that a huge number of people take notice.

The most efficient way to get mentions is to create content that people will naturally pass around.  You as one person can only do so much marketing.  Therefore, get your visitors involved by creating useful and/or entertaining content that they’ll want to share on the web.

Here’s one way to do this.  Check what’s popular on social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Twitter, and then create something similar for your own niche.

By the way, when I say content, I’m talking about apps, videos, podcasts, and even your product. Adding viral component into your product is a great idea.

3. Network with other webmasters online.

You can create an awesome piece of content but if no one knows about it, it won’t spread. You need to give it a little push.  That’s where being friends with other webmasters comes in.

If you have these online friends, they can promote your content and get the ball rolling.  Not only that, but having other webmasters promote your stuff builds up the credibility of your brand.  It’s more credible if someone vouches for you than if you vouch for yourself.

So, how do you find and build these friendships?

That’s for another blog post but the main principle to realize is that profitable partnerships require “give and take”. For example, you can promote their stuff (links, tweets, social media votes, forum posts, etc.), let them know about it, and they’ll often reciprocate.  Also, try taking interest in their work.  They might check out what you’re doing.

Your Turn

Obviously, there’s a lot more to developing a brand than these three things.

What other principles do you have for turning a site into a brand?

3 Common Link Building Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

By

Many webmasters have realized that a big part of SEO is getting links to their site. Armed with this knowledge, they make an effort to build links to increase their traffic from the search engines. However, their link building efforts are often ineffective because they make common mistakes. Here are three of those mistakes.

1. Quantity over quality

If one link is great, then five links is better, right? Not so fast. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on the quality of the links. A link from a popular site is much better than 20 links from low quality, spammy sites. In fact, no amount of low quality links can be as effective as a link from an authority site in your niche.

You could even get penalized for having too many low quality links. Don’t take the easy way out. Go after quality links and ignore low quality sites in your link building efforts. Think of it this way: the harder it is to get a link, the more effective that link will be. Do the hard work (networking, creating great content, guest posting, etc.) to get those links from quality sites.

2. Not using relevant anchor text

If you have a chance to choose the anchor text, use keywords instead of your site name. For example, instead of this link devlounge.net, use this one web design info.

Now, if someone links to you without them asking, don’t ask them to change their anchor text. That’s annoying and bad practice. They already linked to you. No need to bug them. But if you submit an article to an article directory or write a guest post, you’ll usually have control of your anchor text.

Many people will link using the titles of your pages, so try to add keywords in your titles.

Also, don’t use the same anchor text for each link. If you vary your anchor text, you’ll rank for more keywords.

Update: My friend, Ryan, left this useful comment.

I would like to just throw in the idea that with Google’s recent shift towards Brand emphasis, it can actually be a good thing to get lots of links with A) your site name and B) your site domain as the anchor text. Obviously its also good to mix things up and get varied anchor text, but I think that if there is too high a concentration of varied anchor text it looks unnatural.

I think Ryan has a great point. It’s a good idea to repeat anchor text if your anchor text is your site name or your site domain. Many people naturally link this way anyways. Plus, you’ll get more mentions on the web for your name and domain, which will make your site look more like a well known brand.

For more info about Google’s brand emphasis, check out this article.

3. Only linking to the home page

If you just link to the home page, then your home page will have a chance at good rankings. But what about the other pages on your site?

Each page including the home page can only target a few keywords effectively. You need links to the other pages to rank for a lot of keywords.

Also, I like getting links to the other pages since they are usually better pages for your visitors to land on. The other pages have more specific information than the home page and that information can make a great first impression to your visitors.

Finally, it can be easier to get a link to the other pages. For example, you could create a really great piece of content, give it its own page, and then email other webmasters and ask them to link to it if they like it. This could be hard to do for the home page.

Over to You

These mistakes are not the only ones. What link building mistakes have you seen?

How Helping Other Bloggers Can Increase the Traffic of Your Blog

By

One of the things that has helped me get traffic and links to my blog is simply helping other bloggers.

I often link out to other blogs and sometimes I’ll get a link back. One day, I took this linking out strategy a little bit further. I did some SEO on a post where I linked out to a popular blogger. This post got a number #1 and sent him a lot of traffic over the next couple of days.

Next thing you know, I checked my logs and I saw a lot of traffic coming from his blog. He had published a post welcoming my readers and included a link back to my blog in the post. Also, he added me to his small blogroll. I get a good amount of traffic every month from the blogroll link.

What’s great is that I didn’t ask him to do any of those things. I just helped him out and he returned the favor.

In another instance, I found a useful WordPress plugin for blogs in my niche. I emailed a few WordPress bloggers about it and one of them wrote about the plugin and linked back to me.

Now helping others doesn’t always work. Some bloggers are too busy to help you. But you’ll find that many bloggers will reciprocate and help you. As humans we naturally feel obligated to help those who help us.

Some Actions to Consider Doing

Here are some ideas for helping bloggers.

  • If you have a influential account on a social media site like StumbleUpon or Twitter, try promoting another blogger’s post. Make sure to compliment them on their post and tell them that you promoted it.
  • Create a really good guest post and send it to a blogger. If your post gets published, do your best to promote it.
  • Bloggers will often talk about their goals and projects. Think of ways you can help them accomplish their goals and projects and then take action on one of those ways.
  • Buy a product through their affiliate link and thank them for recommending that product.

Your Turn

What are some other ways you can help your fellow bloggers?

About Devlounge

Want to read more about Devlounge, or maybe you want to contact us, or even advertise? Oh, and don't forget to subscribe to updates!

The Best of Devlounge