I think I've read every single of patrick's posts :-)
What I've done is to have a blog at www.giftcertificatefactory.com/blog - Each blog post was made after keyword research and attracts quite some long tail traffic.
However, I must say it's quite a boring job to do that (I'm not THAT passionnate about gift certificates, to say the truth). You might be fine outsourcing content creation, but for this first site, I wanted to know what it took to do it.
If I'd do additional content creation, I'll most probably outsource it :-)
You know how many bingo activities I've ever written? SQL query Eight, out of the 1,000 or so on the site.
I strongly, strongly suggest you spend one week writing a custom CMS which hooks into your certificate generation backend and then pay somebody $10 to $15 an hour to write boring copy about [pet care gift certificate], [massage therapy gift certificate], etc etc etc. All you need is an underemployed American recent graduate. They exist in spades and many of them are trivially reachable online.
Story in a nutshell: I wrote CMS to make pages about bingo cards, got a teacher to use CMS to create pages and attendant bingo cards, used this as bait for long tail searches. They look for very specific things, I generally have exactly what they are looking for. This is my Rumpelstiltskin machine: in goes straw, out comes gold, or at least a modestly successful business selling niche software to a few hundred thousand visitors a year.
Close variations of this technique have worked for businesses with diverse interests not limited to elementary education. (Their stories are not generally mine to tell, but Thomas has shared on HN that this was a win for Matasano.)
The reason this is motivational for non-toy businesses is that a one-time software investment plus minimal management overhead plus money equals scalable customer acquisition, and money to scalable customer acquisition is a very motivational formula.
Hey Patrick, thanks for the comment. I've already got a backend for a designer to create new certificates, but not for creating new articles.
I had postponed doing additional work on this website because at the time it was doing very little revenue. Now that traffic is up and I tweaked the ads, it might be worth it to spend some time as you suggest.
Tip: Instead of writing the articles via your keyboard, get a good voice-to-speech machine (like the iPad) and simply free-talk about the topic. In 30 minutes, you can write on quite some topics. Totally unique content.
Great idea! Does anybody know if there are any good dictation apps for Android that would work while driving in a car? All of my attempts at doing voice dictation to Google maps while driving have failed miserably. This would be super productive to do while driving around town.
No, it does add some long tail traffic, but most of the traffic comes from people typing 'gift certificate template' (goes to the homepage) or specific templates, like 'spa gift certificate template' (from where I'm sitting, the first 3 results point to my website).
What I've done is to have a blog at www.giftcertificatefactory.com/blog - Each blog post was made after keyword research and attracts quite some long tail traffic.
However, I must say it's quite a boring job to do that (I'm not THAT passionnate about gift certificates, to say the truth). You might be fine outsourcing content creation, but for this first site, I wanted to know what it took to do it.
If I'd do additional content creation, I'll most probably outsource it :-)
Thanks for the additional ideas!