Ok… first of all, company websites almost NEVER do a good job of “selling” the product or the opportunity. If cannot tell within 5 seconds, from their site, what it even IS, then it isn’t going to work to persuade people to join or purchase. Generally, if all you are using to promote your direct sales business is the company website, you are losing every person who goes there without having a personal introduction from yourself. In fact, that is the only thing company websites are good for  – to send someone to once they ALREADY want it. They aren’t good for anything else.

Search engines will never index your company site either – to them it is the company site, not yours, and yours is the same site. Many promotional sources won’t allow you to promote there either. Kinda hampers your ability to get the best free traffic.

So… My first advice is sound, even though I am a web designer.

Get a website of your own. You’ll have to research company policy on this, they’ll have requirements to meet, and they vary widely from company to company. If you work with a web designer, they need to know what those requirements are too, and they need to help you comply with them.

Use this website for the following purposes:

1. Introduce the BENEFITS, which should be two concise and meaningful statements, one about the product, one about the opportunity.
2. Talk about what YOU like about it, and why it makes sense to you.
3. Discuss comparisons of this program with other business programs.
4. Present relevant and current information which supports claims made by the company.
5. Introduce YOURSELF, and begin the relationship building process.
6. Your pages are all linked in with a “go get it” type button, which leads them to the company website, and tells them to use the signup button, or to view product listings (best if you take them right to where you want them to be, if you can). YOU do the pre-selling. Just let the company be there at the END of the process.

Once you have that, you can then feed ALL of your social networking traffic to that. Not only that, you can interlink a website WITH your social networking, operate a blog if you want (right in the website), and you WILL get additional marketing benefits from it IF you do it right (we teach this in many of our blog posts, and also offer consulting and training for it).

You can build an entire marketing network if you have your own website, and the website sits as the hub of the wheel, with other things coming into it, and linking together.

Without it, your marketing efforts end up fragmented, and separate, and you chase yourself around trying to drive people here, or there, and not knowing where to send them, or how to initiate contact.

With it, you can focus on about FOUR basic marketing efforts, and they work together synergistically. Those four efforts are:

1. Regular Tweets, which are piped into your FaceBook Profile, or updates to your FaceBook Business Page, which are then piped to Twitter, and then to your FaceBook Profile. Social networking WORKS, when you do it professionally, and when you focus on relationships and not on advertising.
2. Regular Blog Posts, which are piped into Twitter, then into FaceBook, and which are posted automatically in the sidebar of your website. Blogging also works, when you focus on building relationships, giving value, and not on advertising.
3. Answering questions on Forums, or Linked In Answers, and just being a real person, helpful, etc. Your choice where you do this, do it where it works. It works when you are helpful and interesting, and kind.
4. Building Backlinks – good quality directory links, high quality swaps, and article marketing links. You choose which suits you best, we usually recommend doing these in a specific way to simplify it. Backlinks work when you learn what constitutes a quality backlink, and don’t try to take shortcuts that sabotage the effort.

You may optionally use a newsletter – a good website can have a newsletter manager built into the site, where you can send newsletters to any number of groups, and which allows a signup box on every page to politely invite people to sign up. You don’t need to bribe people or push them into signing up, when you do it right, an invitation works wonderfully. We also teach how to do this effectively, in a number of ways. An opt-in list is NOT required for ANY successful business (in fact, more than 50% of successful business owners don’t even know what one is, and only about 25% of successful business owners USE one).

It is not a FAST process. But it is very POWERFUL. Lay the foundation right, and your website becomes the center of where you do business, even though you don’t spend any more time there than anywhere else, the website becomes your virtual sales person.

There are rules and skills about making each of those things work – you have to do them right, but if you do, they gain power over time. If you do them wrong, you’ll beat against a wall and never make headway.

We’ve worked with hundreds of people in direct sales, MLM, network marketing, etc. This is the method that works to promote online with this kind of business. The ones who get this working are the ones who can eventually break out of the “I have to contact go find every person individually in order to make every sale”. If you want people to eventually come to YOU, you need to have some permanent, search engine indexable presences out there working for you.

If you can WRITE competently, you have a tremendous asset. If you use it creatively, and maybe differently than you have thought, you can bring people in to teach them, and they’ll learn to trust you. But you can’t always do it in the way you first think about doing it. If you can’t write well, then you will need to hire more services, and investigate methods of networking which depend upon it less.

It is actually HARDER in many ways to promote a direct sales business than it is to promote an independent business. But if you think of your business MORE as an independent business, and treat it more like one, you can be more successful. I don’t mean ignoring the company requirements, just that you need to WORK it like a business, and MARKET it like a business, and not expect that everything that the company hands you is all that you need. It never is.

Choose a reputable company, commit to it, and then invest in the necessary foundation for marketing. Do it right, and you’ll never regret it.

We’ve all heard the story. “With all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”

I think that a lot of people blog or write articles with the same mentality. Not particularly caring about quality, but believing that if they produce enough manure, that somehow it will materialize into a pony.

Good writers try to write good quality every time. They understand that you write four or five articles, or maybe a dozen or two, for every one that someone else proclaims as “good”. Good article marketers and bloggers also realize that the really popular articles can’t always be predicted. So you write the best that is in you, try to make it good quality every time, and know that if you do that, you greatly enhance the odds that one of them will pay you back.

There are many “SEO” companies, a good many that are located in countries where English is not the native language, that produce “marketing articles” in something akin to an article mill. What boggles my mind is that anyone will actually PAY for these articles, but they do. And the writers are a plague on every article directory out there, the reason why you have a harder time submitting GOOD stuff.

The average article produced by them ranges from downright awful, to technically accurate and correct, but entirely colorless. Either one is purely a waste of time, money, and effort – and in some instances, we’ve even seen such companies create legal liability issues for their clients, because they wrote things that the FTC would consider to be misleading or dangerous statements. These articles do no good at all, search engines don’t really bother to COUNT most articles that are not linked outside the article directory itself.

A large number of business owners also crank out article after article, little caring about the quality, on the belief that if they wrote it, it MUST be good. They never check to see if their articles are linked, or even indexed in the search engines.

Article marketing works when it does, because people LIKE what is written. So the primary goal of a good article marketer is to create stuff that people WANT to read. Stuff that they enjoy, and then want to SHARE. Because the real power is in the sharing, not in the posting to the article directory.

In fact, posting articles to an article directory is a COMPLETE waste of time if they do not get picked up and linked, or reprinted. Seriously.

Blogging has similar requirements. Blogging works when people READ the blog. There are a gazillion blogs out there filled with nothing of value. If yours is just another of those, then people will forget it so fast that you’d get more mileage out of getting arrested and making the news. There is no distinction in owning a bad blog. 95% of blog posts are not read by more than one person – the person who wrote it. If you want others to read what you write, they’ve gotta LIKE it enough to take time out of their busy day to see what you have to say today.

An amazing number of people will pay for writing services though, without ever checking to see if the writing is even good! They think that somehow if they fertilize the web with enough manure, that something good will grow of it? There’s already enough manure on the web, and people universally ignore it. If people ignore it, search engines do too.

Quality, and enjoyability are the factors that make an article worth writing.

A traveler bought a donkey to haul his belongings. He had a long way to go, and could not carry all of his belongings himself. He chose a fine, strong donkey, from a breeder who was known for breeding sturdy pack animals.

The man loaded his belongings onto the donkey, and set out upon his journey. After a number of days, he reached a city. He entered the marketplace, and there he saw many merchants, selling all sorts of wares. One merchant caught his eye. He sold hats, for donkeys. The traveler thought the hat so interesting he just had to have it. He bought it and put it upon his donkey. It covered the donkey’s ears, and made it harder for the donkey to hear, but the man liked the hat so much, he hardly considered it. He did wonder why his donkey was less responsive to his commands, but blamed it on the animal.

He traveled on. In the next city, his attention was taken by a merchant selling leg decorations for donkeys. This he had to have! He quickly bought a set of four and fastened them onto the donkey. He thought they looked very fetching. His donkey adopted a funny walk to keep from bashing the leggings into each other, and the man found himself criticizing the donkey for being awkward.

In the next city on his route, he discovered a decorative pack saddle. It was far heavier than the plain one he had been using, and it did not accommodate the burden as easily. But he liked it so well, he strapped it to his donkey, and loaded his goods onto the pack saddle. The load was somewhat unbalanced, and some items had to be tied to the side with ropes, where they dangled and beat upon the donkey’s legs. At the end of the day, some goods were damaged, and the man was angry with the donkey.

A city later, he found a full body blanket for his donkey. It was meant for night use, but he liked it so well that he unloaded the donkey, put the blanket on, and reloaded the animal. During the hot day, the poor beast overheated, and had to rest more frequently than usual. The man cursed his donkey for being slow and lazy.

Traveling on, the man found a merchant selling shoes for his donkey. Not the typical iron shoes, but full covering, lace up shoes. He thought them so clever that he immediately put them on his donkey and happily paid a high price for them. The donkey could no longer feel the earth beneath it’s feet. It stumbled and plodded instead of stepping lightly. The man found he needed to hit his donkey to keep him moving fast enough.

The man was angry that his donkey was no longer the sturdy and sure animal he had bought. It frustrated him. He beat the animal to make it go faster, and to punish it when it stumbled, and hollered and cursed it when it did not obey his commands.

Finally, he could take it no longer. Arriving in a small desert town, he determined to sell his donkey for what he could get, and purchase a new one. In a hurry, and frustrated with his animal, he sold it and only removed his original traveling packs, leaving the animal to the new owner with all the trappings in place, and set off with his new donkey (a quick and responsive beast), with his eye out for new accessories to bestow on this new and “better” animal.

The new owner of his old donkey patiently removed the blanket, the pack saddle, the hat, the shoes and leggings, and rubbed down the tired animal. He fed it a good meal and rested it for several days. Then he placed a plain and simple pack saddle on it, loaded it with a sizeable burden, and marveled at the strength and sure-footedness of this donkey that had been described as a weak and clumsy thing. He set out on the road, soon passing the first traveler, who was making his way with his new donkey, slower and slower, as he again loaded it with unnecessary trappings.

It seems so clear when it is choices someone else is making regarding a donkey. But when it is our own website, and we think the next new gadget is “really cool”, we have a harder time making wise choices.

The rule is simple… If it does not help achieve the primary goal, don’t do it.

If you want your website to SELL, then don’t put things on that get in the way of that. Otherwise, your website will be less responsive, slower, and will stumble and fail to perform effectively.

The whole FaceBook Fan page thing has me really wearied. I get fan invites from everybody and their dog. Most of them don’t know me. Not really. If they have never bothered to make any kind of personal contact, why in the world do I want to be their fan?

Lately though, if you allow a Friend connection with anyone you do not personally know, the first thing you get from them is a fan invite.

I think that the whole fan page thing is sort of run wild. When fan pages were not so well known, you had a chance that people might want to subscribe. But now, since everyone has one, the competition and lameness factor has risen to such a fever pitch that it is now far more difficult to create an effective one that actually serves a purpose, or to get it noticed.

Now let me assure my clients that I don’t mind when they send me an invite. After all, I KNOW them, and I have a vested interest in their business. But I don’t subscribe to all of those either – some cover topics I am not highly interested in.

And I don’t mind when my real friends send an invite either. I KNOW them, and they KNOW me. There is a relationship there.

But I’m selective about which pages I subscribe to. There is only so much time in the day, only so much room for STUFF in my life. If I subscribe to a page, it has to MEAN something to me. If I don’t, it isn’t an insult. I don’t like lime green, I dislike jazz music, I’m death on get rich quick scams or anything that even comes close. Lots of other personal quirks… I choose based on my likes and dislikes.

Right up there with Fan pages, are Causes. I don’t do FaceBook Causes. They are pretty much a useless gesture. A bunch of people sitting around commenting on a problem, but nobody really doing anything other than joining. It doesn’t change a thing. If I want to change the world, I am going to get busy doing something effective, not just gathering a group of people to notice that there is a problem. And then I’m selective about what I take on also – there’s only so much of me to go around.

I don’t live my life on FaceBook. I don’t play games there, and I don’t expect life to revolve around it. I live out here, and drop in for newsbites once or twice a day, and drop a little info of my own. Beyond that, it isn’t even real.

Most fan and cause notices I receive are deleted without further investigation. If I do not recognize a name behind it, it doesn’t even show on my radar. I don’t think I’m unusual in that… at least in final outcome.

Maybe a lot of people DO subscribe without really paying attention to what they are doing. Those people aren’t valuable contacts. They subscribe with the same degree of attention they pay to your announcements.

The key to effective networking is relationships. You can’t build relationships unless you get to know people. A fan invite is an assumption of an existing relationship – smart people just don’t respond unless the relationship is already there. And if you KEEP sending them (I get them from some people several times a week, even though I consistently ignore them), you just annoy people. Annoying people you want to reach is NOT a good idea!

Spend less time broadcasting, and more time making meaningful contact. It will get you further.

I hear friends of mine recommend CraigsList to get business by advertising there. Frankly, I don’t have the time to waste. I’ve had several experiences with it, none of them good. The problems were enough that I find the entire venue to be a collosal waste of time.

First, I posted a business ad – nothing but spam came back from it.

Next, I posted several separate ads, for similar things, but distinctly different. In Canada, they were all allowed to remain active. In the US, all but one were flagged as duplicates, even though they were not. I got some spam from the ads, but nothing else.

I recently posted ads for three different laptops – Three different brands and model numbers, three sets of specs. One was allowed to stay, the other two were flagged as duplicates. An HP Pavilion laptop for $500 was flagged as being a duplicate of a Dell Inspiron for $300, and apparently so was the Dell Inspiron (different model number) for $200. No terms of use were violated in any way.

Oh, but before the items were flagged, I did have time to receive a total of six scam emails – CLEARLY scam emails, regarding the postings.

I don’t have time to wrestle with a careless company that can’t even determine when something is genuinely a duplicate post and when it is not. And I don’t have time for the spam.

One of my biggest gripes about it is that you can ONLY do local. Ummm…. Local for me is 300 people. My business is national. There is no way you can effectively use CraigsList if you have a national business. Let’s see… Pick one city in the US to advertise to. Just one. And you can’t advertise to another with anything remotely similar for another 30 days.

Who has time for that?

As a rule, I don’t usually post ads that expire in 30 days. I just don’t have time. Online ads are rarely effective anyway, and classifieds are some of the least effective.

And even if your ad DOES last for 30 days, nobody looks at it after the first three days. It takes time to write a good ad, time to get in there and post it, and then people see it for three days. Hardly worth the bother.

If you are in a small town, marketing nationally, or if you are selling something that people are not fighting over due to high popularity, CraigsList isn’t going to be an effective venue.

I never liked the idea of being thrown in with the prostitutes anyway.

UPDATE: I got half a dozen more responses from the remaining listing – all of them scams. Sloppy writing, incorrect English, and requests for a lot of information from me and promise of a cashier’s check if I ship it – not one mention of asking for more details, request for photo, or anything a real buyer would do. Classic for scams.

I am not an inexperienced seller – I have sold dozens of computer items on eBay and have an excellent feedback rating there. We bought and refurbished, then resold laptops for several years, so I know how to do so successfully. A complete lack of legitimate responses, and being flooded with scam responses is not typical for other venues where I have sold such items.

If you have an educational site, is it ethical to promote items on the site that you profit from, or is that a compromise of your informational integrity?

I have a business educational site. The purpose of the site is to promote scam awareness, educate people about what helps them really earn, and how to spot a good program or a bad one, the advantages of independent business endeavors, etc.

I have two clients that offer multi-level distributorship programs. There is no charge for either one. Both are ethical and have a good chance of returning a profit if someone works them.

I’ve toyed with the idea of joining both just for signups and sponsorships. One of them would require that I purchase items at least for my own use. They are items I am likely to use anyway. The other would not require purchases, and would allow me to function purely as a recruiter.

One consideration is TIME. Do I want to invest the time to really make them work. Since I have outlets that would allow me to plug in information to existing channels, I think it could work without undue effort.

The major consideration though, is ethics. Is it ethical for me to promote specific programs and profit for them on a site that purports to be unbiased?

The thing I’ve learned is that this is what people WANT. When they come to a “build a business” site, they want to be told, “Here are some honest choices.”

But I still wrestle with it. Still unsure of whether it lowers my credibility and makes me just another “work at home” site that exists to promote a program instead of to benefit the end user.

Forums and networks are HARD to get started. And once you get them going, it seems to be very difficult to KEEP them going.

We all like to think that when we begin an effort to get people together for conversation that there are millions of people out there who want to discuss the same things we do. But others rarely have the same agenda, even when they SAY they do.

Forums and conversational venues RARELY take off spontaneously. Getting them going takes a LOT of effort, and so does keeping them going. There are longstanding tactics that everyone uses – which sometimes are successful, but more often, just feel tired.

• Regular moderator posts.
• Encouraging members to spread the word.
• Contests.
• Controversy.
• Daily “topics”.
• Allowing ads one day a week (the result of which is, that usually, one day a week, you have lots of posts, which nobody reads, and that this is the ONLY day each week that you have posts).

We all do these things on our networks in an effort to keep it going. It may or may not help, and often it does not.

How do you know your network is dying?

• When the only posts are ones you make yourself (or your moderators make).
• When the only posts are on “ad day”.
• When people ask questions and nobody replies.
• When nobody ASKS questions anymore.
• When the majority of new signups are hit and run spammers.
• When your long time users no longer post.
• When your moderators start dropping out.
• When the only members you have that regularly do anything are the same people you associate with everywhere else online. Without new blood, networks die.

People online, as a rule, have a short attention span. While it is hard to get a venue going, it is even harder to keep it going for more than a year or two if you do manage to get it going. The initial burst of enthusiasm that people have over something new is short lived – about two months. You often find that once they lose that, there is nothing left and they wander off to see if someone else is more interesting.

Once you see those signs above, it is very difficult to bring it back from the edge of extinction. Oh, you can try, but often you are just beating a dead horse.

Nobody likes to admit that something didn’t work. But more venues fail than ever succeed, and the statistical difference between success and failure is monstrous. Perhaps one in a thousand ever even gets off the ground, and perhaps only one in a hundred of those keep going for more than a few months.

• A heavy marketing campaign can help.
• Listening to your users can help – if they talk. Often they don’t.
• Intense involvement on your part, and recruitment of other helpers can help.

But there’s no magic formula, and there is sometimes no way to rescue a venue that is in decline – the perception of decline can be almost impossible to reverse.

Often, it is simply best to go on to the next thing.

No, I’m not talking about Twitter collapsing under it’s own weight… not literally anyway. I’m talking about the process and change that any popular app goes through, and where Twitter is in the process.

Online, highly popular things seem to go through a process:

1. New and fresh. As such, EASY to get found, if the application is gaining popularity. It is easy to ride the crest of the wave, because you have relatively little competition, and a growing audience base.

2. Commoditization. It becomes common, others start building businesses off the side of it, and people start producing reams of “how to” instructions, touting the benefits, never mentioning that the environment they used to achieve the success is now no longer the same environment because it has grown so much. At this point, everyone is trying to jump on, it becomes a huge fad, and people say good things about it even if they are no longer true, because they are just DOING it, believing that it HAS to be good, not really analyzing the real effect. The company may go corporate at this time, instituting changes that are subtle, but which have major effects.

3. Exploitation. With popularity, comes exploitation. Spam follows any success. And it is not really controllable. As the communities respond to reduce spam, the spammers devise ways to circumvent the limitations. The environment usually ends up being about 10% what you want, and the other 90% trash. During this time, the company may respond to adjust the app to compensate – often doing so kills the spark of originality that made it grow so well in the first place.

4. Implosion. The combination of increased competition, and increased spam and corporate compensation for problems, combine to vastly reduce the effectiveness of the environment. It still grows, but the legit growth actually begins to decline, and the number of people using it in daily life for useful purposes declines. The spam growth continues to escalate, which makes it appear that it is still successful, but close analysis reveals that it is actually declining in real popularity. The big movers and shakers will become bored with it – some will hang on peripherally, maintaining a lackadaisical presence, others will wander off to the next promising thing.

5. Equilibrium or death. Somewhere, after going through all these phases, a state of equilibrium may reached, where either the spam is controlled enough that a sustained legit user base can be either mainained, or increased slowly, or, the venue gradually declines in legit use and the spammers take over. Alternately, the combination of uncontrolled exploitatin, corporate policies which strangle value, and loss of popularity gradually kill the environment. We’ve seen this happen with many online venues and with many marketing tactics. Only some really ever recover from the implosion, and those that do often do so at the expense of the value to the legit users.

I’m not predicting doom and gloom. Nobody knows WHAT Twitter will be after the implosion. But I think that it is either close to this point, or in the middle of it now. With very popular things online, it is inevitable. FaceBook has already been hit, and seems to be surviving, though the value is decreased due to the spam attacks and high competition in the venue. Linked In hasn’t really hit the Implosion stage yet because it hasn’t really taken off with that rabid popularity. YouTube is surviving it, though with reduced value, and MySpace has passed it and gone into slow decline. Google hit it, and is now in a slow decline, due largely to corporate policy which is strangling the value.

I don’t Twitter. I don’t have time. But if it were not for this impending implosion, I might have decided it was worth my time to try it out. But having watched many venues go through this, I knew that the value was temporary as it was at the time, and that if I neglected to get on board, it would pass, and something else would come along. If you miss out on Twitter, no biggie. There is more to life than Twitter, and something else will come along to replace the hype.

In general, the bigger the faddishness of it, the faster it fades into oblivion after implosion.

And if Twitter is your life, then you need to learn how to live!

They asked their members what they needed to do to make the venue better. Many ideas were submitted. Many of them had to do with the high amount of spam on the network. A “report this user” button was requested. Complaints flew about private messages that contained nothing but ads, profile posts that had ads in them, and comments that were nothing but ads.

A few weeks later, the company responded with a plan. They said they’d been listening to the community and here was their solution: Free members could not put links into profile posts, and could not email all of the members of the network. Paid members could spam to their heart’s content. If you paid, you could put ads on comments, profiles, and send them to all of the members in an email blast too!

This, they called “listening”. Too much spam, said the members. Instead of taking reasonable and logical steps to reduce the spam, they just decided to charge members to do it. The age old internet marketing answer to everything. Let them do whatever they want, just charge them for it. It is bad if they do it for free, but it is ok if the site owners are profiting from it. Profit again becomes the arbiter of right and wrong.

Google sets a marvelous example of this – penalizing people for paying for traffic, unless they are paying for it from Google. Restricting content on publisher’s sites if they want to put AdSense on their sites, but allowing Advertisers to break the rules. The almighty dollar rules.

The network in question (which will remain nameless in this post) goes on my ever lengthening list of useless time wasters. My account will be canceled as soon as I finish this post. A sad thing, because the network did have some potential. There were opportunities to interact, and ways to participate. But unfortunately, all so bloated with spam that it was an unpleasant place to be. Instead of addressing the problem, the company has decided to institute it as policy, that the problem is acceptable as long as people are paying to make it so. A paying few will drive away the heart and soul of the networking community. The best networkers will run at the sight of it, because they know that networking and advertising are two different things, and they are turned right off by blatant spam.

Not for me. I’ll go where I can associate with smarter people.

A client asked me today, how to get the long tail search engine traffic. Good question, and a good goal. Getting it has always seemed easy for me, but when I actually started to analyze why so many people fail to get it, and why some people just easily do so, I learned a few things.

First, it is important to understand WHY long tail traffic is so important. Think of a very big fish that dies on the beach, and all the seagulls swarm to it, fighting over that one fish. Hundreds of seagulls, and one fish that happens to look bigger than all the rest.

Meanwhile, all around, there are other fish. Smaller ones to be sure, but still enough. Maybe you have to go catch a few, and that takes a bit of work, but it certainly takes no more work than fighting your way to the front of the crowd to get one measly bite of the big fish.

Personally, I choose not to be a squabling gull. Recent research suggests that less than 6% of traffic comes from the top 10 keywords in a given industry. If you increase that to the top 100 keywords, it still accounts for only 20% of the traffic. So everybody and their dog are fighting over that 20% while the other 80% is pretty easy pickings.

There is a trick to it though. Common marketing instructions say to get it by having lots of content. They leave out some important information though. Because content alone is not enough.

• If it is reprinted content, it will lack the power. Good long tail content is ALWAYS unique.
• If it is the same thing everyone else is saying, it won’t work. Good long tail content is interesting… it gives people information they can’t get elsewhere. It has the “ah-ha” factor.
• If it is egotistical it is as much a waste of your time as the content is a waste of the visitor’s time. It has to speak to the needs of the individual who might want what you have, and it has to do so in a way that other marketers are overlooking.

Everyone who tries to go after the long tail tries to take shortcuts. So it doesn’t work. You have to be thoughtful, and you have to know your customers to get it.

Every VA in the world knows that if they write articles, they can market with them. So every VA in the world writes the same articles – “How a VA can save you money”, “Grow your business with a VA”. BORING! There are 200,000 copies of that same article, written by 200,000 different people, and not one of them says anything that a real prospective client wants to read.

If you want to grab the long tail, and profit from content writing, you have to start thinking out of the box. What are the real concerns of your customers? What are they really searching for online that they can’t easily find?

Forget keywords. Seriously. Long tail keywords happen naturally as a result of good writing, you simply do not have to think about them. If you start thinking about them, you destroy your ability to get them, because the power is in the variety – the happenchance that occurs with good writing.

Think about needs.

If I am considering surgery, I want statistics on morbity rates, but I also want personal stories. In fact, with that target market, personal stories may be the most powerful writing.

If I want a website, and I don’t know much about the technology behind it, I want someone to explain things in simple terms.

If I am looking for insurance, I may want to know what effect my health history may have on rates or ability to get insurance. I may want to know whether there is a medical exam, who does it, and who pays for it and how.

Listen to your customers. What are they asking over and over? What are they most concerned with? Answer those questions in ways no one else is doing. And make sure you give some information in there that gives them a key, or a grain of understanding that they can’t get somewhere else – that is the “ah-ha” factor. The meat in the article that makes them think, “Oh, NOW I get it!”.

The combination of those things – original content, stuff that is interesting and informative to your audience, unique writing with the “ah-ha” factor (that tells them something no one else is saying in quite that way), will bring in traffic and people who are already pre-sold. When you give them something they can’t get from just anyone, you’ll be pulling in people who want to work with you, specifically. And you’ll be astonished at how they found you – it will be something you could not predict.

Unpredictability is part of the power of the long tail. It is what makes it easy to just write, without worrying about doing anything other than creating good writing, and it is what brings them in to you rather than to your competitors who are just aiming at the top spots.

It’s been working marvelously for us – and by getting power in the long tail keywords, we eventually start moving up in the top ones. But I’d be happy if we never did that, simply because those long tail keywords are so powerful, we really don’t even NEED the top ones.

Let the other mindless gulls squawk and squabble. I’m content fishing on the fringes.