It all comes at once – well it does if you leave the important but not urgent off your daily list. Well, that is how it is for me, time to step up to the plate and get on with it. The module here is all to do with finding keyword optimised content … so here we go … with less scripting than I would like.
So it appears now I am two weeks behind on the Challenge. Well done Ed Dale for suggesting weeks off in between the modules – you are a star.
My delay has been with reconditioning almost a hundred old domains and bringing them back. About forty hours of setting up WordPress, headers, templates and analysis on them.
… And I had to do it MANUALLY!!!
The thing that really hurt me though was that I have recreated all these sites almost totally manually – and for me who has been so used to writing scripts for site creation in the past it has been a shock of immense proportions and needing quite a bit of stamina to complete.
I decided I wanted to keep everything as manageable as possible and stick to familiar code and templates. I don’t want everything to look exactly the same but if I use the TwentyTen template built for WordPress 3 and make children of them then I can work on making them look unique later easily and quickly. So the first thing to do was to make headers for each of them.
With the help of Xheader I managed to do this in under 8 hours. I was pretty impressed with that but I kept thinking what scripting I would add to the program while going through each one. I must stop thinking script…
As an aid to keeping my mind of scripting I listened to Seth Godin’s Tribes and lots of Tony Robbins stuff that has been loitering on my hard drive for ages.
I decided that I must get Dragon Naturally Speaking or similar and catch ideas or content on the fly while I do any manual work. Then I will feel at least a little productive.
Back to the modules – Ed introduces the fact that you need to create content and gives a few techniques as to how to fuel up on the information you need to fill your niche. This is a section that can catch many people out, the content needed for a niche is one of the most important stock you can have but it is difficult – unless you do it many times over.
Ed talks of the WOW facts from the late Gary Halbert, a resource that I can recommend that has this and more is at the archive at http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/.
The idea behind todays’ lesson is gathering together the information using a few of the tools like EverNote. I have for years been using OneNote because it ties in with all the other Microsoft Office apps so nicely and it works very well for this. Again I am stuck with this technology because I know I can script it whenever I need too.
Another tool in the arsenal is Web Content Studio by Dr. Andy Williams. Another person I trust in the SEO world, especially when it comes down to keyword optimised content. I found out for myself that having the right phrases and words in a web page helps place it higher in the search engines with less effort on the backlinking – every bit helps. The LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) principles behind this have been around for a long time and it is definitely in the Google algorithm in one form or another.
The Web Content Studio now that I have got used to using it, which did take a while is now one of the fastest ways of getting ideas and writing content – it is right up there in my mind with Market Samurai and I now cannot give it enough praise. Just for ideas and seeing what is related to a niche the keyword spider is great for pulling them out from the top of Google.
The Twitter Search is new to me, in the sense of using it for gathering content. I will see how this works over time but it was an interesting one to add.
The Google Alerts sending to Google Reader is one of the most effective ways of keeping on top of changes in a niche too. Always worth the time setting this up and following it. I just wish I could script it a bit better… 🙂