I have had some success with my Microsoft Office tips and tricks site - The New Paperclip.  It still astounds me the power of the Internet – a few hundred simple tips I have come across over the past few years have now been read by almost 1 million people! 

The scale of it all excites me – more people in a month read my posts on The New Paperclip than most magazines in Australia!  One post alone, which took me about 4 minutes to write, attracts almost 500 unique visits per day!  Every day! 

… and the best part is, it earns a little bit of play money on the side (very handy now that our twins have almost arrived).

Speaking of the twins, with the prospect of one salary about to hit us square in the face, and a hefty mortgage to pay (as of next month, we are officially in what the experts call “Mortgage Stress“) I have been trying to diversify my online interests, put to the test some of the things I have learned, read about, or just interested in, and hopefully put into practice what I learn during my day job.

I have four projects on the boil at the moment.  One I would say is in a “shippable” state, the others  just early ideas and concepts that I will continue to develop over the next few months.

Project 1: Content Marketing – ShortcutCourse.com

This project is a spin off of The New Paperclip.  This site is focused on selling a 5 day audio course that I produced in late 2009.  The course helps people learn and gain confidence in the key keyboard shortcuts for Word 2007.  All in just 15 minutes a day.

The key lessons I have learnt from shortcutcourse.com:

1) Price matters.  At first I priced the course at USD $50.  Sales = 0.  Dropped the price to $24.95, and it started to sell (slowly, but still selling every now and then)

2) Creating your own content to sell, no matter how easy you think it is, is actually quite difficult.  But you know what, close to 100% margin thanks to the digital nature of the final product makes the effort worth while.

Project 2: Search Affiliate/PPL Marketing – BrisbaneVirusRemoval.com

This project is really my first foray into serious affiliate and search engine marketing.  So I found a highish paying affiliate program for a product I know a little bit about, in a market that has lots of vendor competition, but not much third party action… and then localised it.

What I realised from the success with The New Paperclip is that taking complicated content and making it personal, easy to read, and easy to understand can drive a lot of traffic to your site - and that is the strategy I plan to take here – but instead of Office tips and tricks, the content will be focused on helping people understand viruses, malware, spyware, and adware – and more importantly, how to remove them!

Early days yet.  Not much traffic.  But still learning lots

Project 3: Content Marketing / Online Retail - mbaSlideLibrary.com 

The concept is simple.  You are a high powered executive.  You have an MBA (or wish you did).  You don’t have the time to create your own business plans or presentations.  You run your business using PowerPoint (just like, surprisingly, many other organisations).  You would be happy to pay $$ for a complete business plan, where all you need to do is plug in the figures, not worry about how it is structured.

So, MBASlideLibrary.com is an online retail site where you can download that business plan, marketing plan, or that slide of Porters Five Forces.

Well the retail site is there (thanks to Shopify)… I just need to pull my finger out and get the content up there to actually sell (see the lessons I learned from Shortcut Course above!)

Project 4: Hyperlocal Journalism – (to be announced soon)

This one is still on the back of about 14 different pieces of paper in the office, but in the next few weeks I am going to launch a hyper local site for my suburb.  This project was been inspired by reading “Made to Stick” – there is a great story in there about a  very successful local newspaper aimed at locals, for locals – that kills traditional mainstream newspapers.  Whilst there are two or three print local rags in our suburb… print news is dead (oh no he diiiidn’t). 

And to be honest, they do not contain much news – lots of copy and paste press release content – and a lot of advertising (A LOT!).  Considering there is a proven market for a local audience that local small businesses are willing to pay money to get in front of, and that no one is doing anything like this locally, in a cost effective way (seriously, why print 11 000 copies of a newspaper when WordPress and a nurtured email list will do the job far better), I know that in 6 months I will have the media channel for our suburb.  THAT IS HUGE!

(did I mention that this old Internet thing still excites me!)

Now – across The New Paperclip and these four projects, I think I might be stretching myself a bit thin to do all really well, so I suspect I will re-evaluate around July and drop two of them.  But that is the beauty of online marketing – it is cheap to test, and cheap to enter markets (well most, apart from porn and gambling).

Are you from Brisbane and interested in discussing online marketing, or marketing in general over a coffee or beer?  Give me a shout  – paul@paul-woods.com

The first tweak I made was to not focus on keywords, or backlinks or any other sexy SEO topic.  I know this might sound a little backward, but I actually focused on the reader first!

That’s right!  This wasn’t to increase my pagerank or anything like that… all I did was make it easier for someone using a search engine to make a decision on whether or not to click the search engine result that pointed to my site.

Obviously I was making it pretty hard for readers to make the right choice, because almost overnight (as soon as Google spidered my site again) traffic DOUBLED!  That’s right… DOUBLED!

How easy is it for your potential readers to decide if a page on your site is worthy or not?  Do a search and see what title comes up.  If it is long winded like “The New Paperclip: Tips, Tricks and Tutorials for Microsoft Office…” and does not have anything to do with not only the specific content of the page, but the search terms that the person used… then you are in big trouble!  You need to tweak straight away!

To learn about how I specifically made the tweak to my blog post titles using WordPress… click here

Remember – SEO isn’t all about the search engine – really it should be called Human Search Optimisation – because at the end of the day it is the reader looking for the content, not the search engine.

Actually the topic of Human Search Optimization sounds pretty interesting, I might see if I can dig up some more information or insight about it in the coming weeks.

The problem:  Whenever one of the pages on The New Paperclip comes up in a search page, the title on the search result means absolutely nothing to the searcher.

To illustrate, in the example in the image to the left, you can see the SERP for the search phrase "word 2007 comments" in which The New Paperclip has #1 spot.  But if you were searching for "word 2007 comments" you would not click on search result #1.

Why?  Because the title of the search result has nothing to do with the search phase.  You and I both know that if we were searching for "word 2007 comments" that we would all click on "Using Comments in Word 2007 documents" before "The New Paperclip: Tips Tricks and Tutorials for Microsoft Office…"

This problem is caused by a default behaviour in the popular WordPress blogging platform that I use.  Essentially it puts the blog title first, before the post title – hence why every single listing  I have on SERP anywhere has the same generic boring irrelevant title

So… how to fix the problem?

Well, I have upgraded to WordPress v2.5 which has a new feature as part of its core functionality (used to be a plugin) which allows you to swap the post title and blog title around.  Check out how to do this easy tweak here.

So Tweak 1 in my Search Engine Optimisation Challenge is complete.  Have no idea when Google will pick up the change, so stay tuned for the results over the coming weeks.

I learnt a lot (it was a very good way to come up to speed on the new products)… and I managed to make a little money on the side thanks to Google Adsense… emphasis on little!

Despite having the #1 spot on Google SERPs for "Word 2007 Undo" and 35 other keyword combos out of my Top 100 keywords… more important things have come up in my life…

Now, after 8months I am brushing off the cobwebs over at The New Paperclip as part of my "I actually looked at my Google Analytics analytics and saw heaps of obvious stuff I can do to improve this website" challenge.

For the last three months, the stats have been pretty static, but there is a slight downward trend – not a good thing.  And that has been reflected in the monthly revenue figures in Adsense.

So… for the next quarter, I am challenging myself to do achieve the following goals:

• Increase visits 500%
• Increase page views/visit by 100% over the last quarter
• Increase revenue by 300%

Where did I get those numbers from?  Gut feel.  What techniques will I use to get near those goals?  Again gut feel – unless any of you have any ideas you want to share!

That being said it will be interesting to see what can be achieved over three months focusing on key SEO optimisation techniques, and maybe some fresh content.

The baseline has been set today.

• Visits: 0% increase
• Page Views/Visit: 0% increase
• Revenue: 0% increase

Time will tell… the final results will be in 30 June.  But I will keep you updated on progress along the way.