I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no.

The internet doesn’t need another mediocre top 10 list. And don’t even think about writing another Twitter etiquette rant, because that dead horse has been beaten into a quivering, bloody pulp.

But you need fresh content, and you need it fast. So what are your options?

If you have 50 bucks a month to spare, I recommend signing up for Magnetic Web Content, a new weekly newsletter featuring headline and web content ideas. When it comes to web content, Lyndon Antcliff is ridiculously talented, and I have no doubt that the newsletter can pay for itself many times over in links and traffic.

But if you’re strapped for cash, Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions tool is a free and easy way to find ideas for new content and catchy headlines. Unlike typical keyword research tools, this tool returns questions that real people are searching for.

To use it, simply search for a broad keyword related to your niche. For example, let’s say you run a beauty blog and are looking for new post ideas. According to Wordtracker, here are a couple dozen questions that need answering:

Questions about “hair”

• how long does your hair have to be to get cornrows
• how to braid hair
• how to cut hair with clippers
• how to cut your own hair
• how to curl hair
• how to cut men’s hair
• how do i make my hair emo
• how to layer hair

Questions about “hairdo”

• how do you do a finger wave hairdo
• how to make a beehive hairdo
• how to cut a wedge hairdo
• how to do a 1950s hairdo
• how to make a sarah palin hairdo
• how to romantic hairdo
• how to make a poof hairdo
• how did the mullet hairdo get its name

Questions about “hairstyle”

• how to cut a bob hairstyle
• what hairstyle is best for my face shape
• how to choose a hairstyle
• how to make a ballerina bun hairstyle
• how to cut an inverted bob hairstyle
• how to get rihanna’s new hairstyle
• how do i find the perfect hairstyle
• what is a good hairstyle for thin hair

Seen enough? Go try it yourself.

Photo by Eleaf.

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

The Poor Man’s Magnetic Content Tool

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It’s Freebie Friday!

In case you missed last week’s big launch, Freebie Fridays is where I answer real internet marketing questions by real people. Because I’m all about keeping it real.

Last week, we talked about ways to market your blog when you have no money. This week, we’ll discuss Google Alerts, a free tool that can help you manage your online reputation, discover new link sources and brainstorm new blog/article ideas.

Question

Did you know you can research anything with Google Alerts, so what would you search for: love, money or what?

Answer

Since I run an online business, I use it to keep track of any mentions of my name or business name on the internet. Then I have the results delivered by RSS to Google Reader (although you can also have them delivered by email).

Google Alerts is a great (and free) way for any business to track new link sources and stay on top of online reputation management. For example, if I were a restaurant owner, I would want to know right away if a blogger posted a negative review so I could find out why, correct the problem and minimize the damage. Of course, I’d also want to know about a positive reviews, not only to thank the blogger but to join the conversation with that blog’s readers.

I also use it to find new ideas for my blogs. For example, if I wrote a blog about credit card reform, Google Alerts would send me any news articles or blog posts on that topic. Speaking of which, another great way to find new ideas for your blog is the Google Hot Trends list, which updates every hours with the fastest-rising searches of the day.

Freebie Fridays is a weekly feature where I answer internet marketing questions submitted by a reader or found in the wild. Got a question? Get in touch here.

Photo by lucianvenutian. This week question was discovered on Yahoo Answers.

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

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It’s no secret these days that internet marketing can do wonders for your online business. A well-executed online marketing strategy can rescue your website from the depths of mediocrity and set you on the path to fame and fortune.

But SEO can’t save you from yourself.

A poorly thought-out business model, reckless management and uninspired employees will ruin your business, regardless of whether you’re an online store or a traditional brick-and-mortar shop.

If any of the following 7 statements apply to you, buy some cruise wear … because you’re about to take an extended voyage on the S.S. Failboat.

1. You believe that your customers use the web just like you do.

This is a common fallacy that many small business owners fall victim to. You think you’re the Average Joe, but the truth is that there is no Average Joe. The truth is in your analytics data and your usability test results. And honestly, how many Average Joes do you know that are running online businesses? Don’t sell yourself short.

2. You charge more than your competitors without providing any added value.

Customers are getting more and more savvy about comparison shopping online. If your pricing is higher than your competitors, you’d better have a damn good reason for it (commonly referred to as a Unique Selling Proposition). It boils down to one simple question: Why should anyone choose you instead of your competitors?

3. You make decisions on gut instinct because it’s easier than analyzing data.

Look, I’m not really a big fan of math. (Unless I’m counting dolla bills, yo!) But there’s just no getting around it — website analytics data is critical to making sound business decisions. Buckle down and get familiar with your website’s vital statistics. There are so many excellent resources online and offline that can help you make sense of the data.

4. You fail to invest the time, money and manpower your website needs to succeed.

Despite what you may have heard from the “make money online” guys, long-term online success is hard work. Don’t cheap out on your consultants and employees, and make sure they have the tools and time they need to do their best work. If you want to pay $1.00 for some guy in Pakistan to regurgitate bland 500-word blog posts, prepare to get exactly what you paid for.

5. You change your mind constantly and don’t give ideas a chance to mature.

Organic rankings generally take some time and patience to achieve. Paid marketing can mature through testing and refinement. If you’re expecting top results by next Tuesday, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. You should be confident enough in your strategy to allow several months to pass before abruptly switching course. If you’re not confident in your strategy, why are you doing it?

6. You ignore customer complaints until they report you to The Consumerist.

My job is to send you highly targeted leads and maximize your online sales. What you do with those leads and sales is largely out of my hands. I can’t force your sales reps to return phone calls and respond to emails. I can’t make your products ship faster. I might be able to help you clean up the negative reviews about your company online, but wouldn’t you rather I didn’t?

7. You spend all your profit on yourself instead of your business growth.

Hindsight is a bitch, ain’t it? A year ago you were jetting off on exotic vacations and tooling around in your shiny sports car. Now you’re checking the bank account several times a day, laying off employees, cutting budgets and wondering how soon it’s all going to fall apart. If this isn’t happening to you — yet — get a grip on your finances now.

Bonus points!

8. You make business decisions while drunk at a strip club.

This is not about morality. I lived happily in Nevada for 10 years, where prostitution is legal, grocery stores have slot machines and the bars stay open until dawn. But I can tell you from personal first-hand experience that a night at the strip club never ends with stellar decision-making. (Really. Never.)

What did I miss? Leave a comment!

T-shirt template courtesy Angel A. Acevedo.
T-shirt slogan inspired by Think Geek.
Barbie photo by Spigoo.
Care Bears guy photo by star5112.
Zombie photo by ellie

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

No, I Will Not Fix Your Business Model

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Ever since I left my in-house SEO job to become a freelance internet marketing consultant, I’ve quickly come to realize that I’ve been living in a bubble. For years now, I’ve been reading the top search industry blogs and interacting with other marketers in social media, with very little connection to the “real world” outside of this community.

In the real world, I’ve found that most people know very little about internet marketing, and what they do know is frequently influenced by spammers and scammers. Unless you have a good mentor (or a very highly tuned bullshit detector), you can easily be led astray.

So today, I’m introducing a new weekly feature at the SEO Woman blog called Freebie Fridays. Every Friday, I’ll answer a specific internet marketing question submitted by a reader or found in the wild. Today’s question was discovered on the Yahoo Answers Search Engine Optimization board.

Question

How to market a blog PLEASE HELP?

I have a blog I want to market I don’t have any money. So does anyone have any suggestions. maybe marketing suggestions on free marketing.

Answer

If you don’t have any money, you still have a lot of options in social media.

First, search for some blogs on the same topic and start leaving comments on their posts. Try to write something unique and insightful, rather than spamming your link or just, “Nice post,” and you’ll have a better chance of getting your comment approved.

Join forums related to your topic and participate in the discussions there. Start following people on Twitter, get some people following you, and share your link occasionally when you write a new post. Join a Facebook group related to your topic and share it there.

Again, the goal is always be as genuine as possible. You can’t rush into social situations and start dropping your links everywhere. If you want real humans to visit your blog, you have to treat them like real humans.

Have an internet marketing question for SEO Woman? Contact me here for free SEO advice.

Photo by Lance and Erin.

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

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You can now get the latest SEO Woman blog posts through your Kindle for $1.99 per month. Amazon offers a 14-day free trial on all blog subscriptions, so you can check it out before busting out the credit card.

With that said, do I honestly believe anyone will subscribe to my blog through Kindle? I guess anything’s possible, but it’s highly unlikely. So why did I bother (other than the phat 60-cent payout)?

As Aaron Wall points out, this is “a great opportunity for filling up branded organic search results with non-negative authoritative pages.” You should also get listed on local search and secure your brand name on social media platforms.

If you’re a blog publisher, it’s free to sign up and only takes 5 or 10 minutes. So get going!

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

SEO Woman Blog Available on Kindle

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It all started when I accidentally deleted our entire product catalog.

Try for a moment to imagine the panic that gripped me, a fledgling webmaster only a few months into her new awesome job, as I realized what I had done. Heart racing. Palms sweating. The barely controllable urge to flee and hide in a dark corner somewhere.

See, about 5 years ago, I helped move our e-commerce store from the Miva Merchant platform to Yahoo Merchant Solutions. I barely knew basic HTML, and Yahoo lured us in with their supposedly newbie-friendly Store Builder. Switching platforms was a pain in the ass (some things never change), but our e-commerce future seemed promising.

And then I nuked the whole site.

We spent the next several hours on the phone with Yahoo’s euphemistically named customer support reps. If you’ve never had to call Yahoo for support, here’s the basic routine:

And so the seed of my hatred for Yahoo was planted.

After several experiences with Yahoo support, I learned that it’s much faster and less crazy-making to just figure it out yourself, ask someone else or accept the problem and move on. I also learned that creating our website in Yahoo’s Store Builder was the worst idea ever.

If you’re thinking about using Yahoo’s Store Builder, consider the following fundamental flaws:

• You can’t access your .htaccess file. Forget about 301 redirects. If a product is discontinued or you have to rename the page, wave goodbye to all your link juice.
• You can’t edit your robots.txt file, so you can’t block the search engines from sensitive areas of your website. But that’s OK, Yahoo already decided for you what should be blocked.
• You can’t access your database. A limited amount of information can be imported and exported through the Catalog Manager. Oh, but you’re not really supposed to use the Store Builder and the Catalog Manager together. (This is how I accidentally deleted everything.)
• All of your URLs are on a subdomain (store.yourwebsite.com). You can redirect these to www.yourwebsite.com, but that will introduce a whole slew of new problems, like the inability to upload a sitemap file to your root folder (which is now named site.yourwebsite.com).
• Yahoo creates Store Editor pages using a proprietary programming language called RTML. If you don’t want your store to look like every other Yahoo store out there, you’ll have to learn RTML … but Yahoo won’t provide any support or even a basic manual. You have to rely on third-party ebooks to even begin to understand it.

As far as I’m concerned, these five issues alone are deal-breakers. That’s why one of my final decisions at this job was to migrate the whole shebang over to the upstart Magento e-commerce platform.

Do you have any Yahoo horror stories to share? Please leave a comment!

Photo by Nautical9

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

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I don’t usually do newsy blog posts, but I’m pretty excited about this very recent development over at Google Webmaster Tools. They just released a freshly redesigned interface, and I’m a total sucker for a well-designed interface. I want my tools to be pretty, dammit!

Here’s a closeup of the new interface (click to see the whole page):

And here’s the old interface (this one is clicky too):

I’m not going to go crazy with the screenshots because I don’t really feel comfortable going into that level of detail out here in public. Don’t get me wrong, I know you’re cool, but that guy’s kind of a nutjob.

Anyway, go check it out for yourself. You will be pleased.

UPDATE: As it turns out, there is one particular statistic that I am willing to divulge. Feast your eyes on these juicy keywords.

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

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I quit my in-house SEO job last month to become a freelance internet marketer. Even though I made the decision to leave, for the first couple of weeks I was so angry and terrified I could barely function.

What was I thinking? What have I done? Why would anybody pay me to promote their website when there are so many talented internet marketers to choose from?

It took some serious mental readjustment before I was able to pull myself up from the muck and start believing in myself again. But I didn’t do it alone. In addition to the support and encouragement of my super-sexy husband, I found the courage and self-confidence I needed by reading about the struggles of other internet entrepreneurs, many who’ve been through far worse than me.

I keep several of these posts bookmarked so I can reread them when I need a little kick in the pants. Here are a few of my favorites:

My Entry to Internet Marketing by Rae Hoffman

I don’t think I can adequately express how much I admire Rae Hoffman without sounding like a cyber-stalker. (“Did you ever know that you’re my heeerooooooo?”) Rae is living proof that even when life tries its hardest to stomp you into the ground, you can be successful online with enough determination, smarts and — most of all — hard work.

What To Do When You’re Scared Shitless by Naomi Dunford

With her shaved head and her delightful potty mouth, Naomi is quickly becoming one of my favorite people on the internet. This post was exactly what I needed to read when I quit my job … so much so, that I burst out crying when I read the headline (and I’m even getting a little teary-eyed as I type this). In short: It’s OK to be afraid, as long as you don’t let it control you.

The Snowboard, the Subdural Hematoma, and the Secret of Life by Brian Clark

For Brian, it took a life-threatening snowboarding injury to make him realize that he needed to pursue his passion and stop playing it safe. Sometimes I seriously wonder whether it’s possible for me to succeed without suffering through some horrifying, tragic event … and whether by writing this thought down, I’ve just invited fate to bitch-slap me.

You Are Better Than You Think by Andy Hagans

As far as I know, Andy’s never been a single mom or had a traumatic snowboarding injury, but this was one of the first posts I ever read by an online entrepreneur that really inspired me. Andy reminds me that if I want to be successful, I need to be myself, be confident in my abilities, and for the love of god, just get started. You’ll never succeed if you never try.

Who inspires you? What words of wisdom can you share with a struggling entrepreneur like me? Please leave a comment below!

Photo by A National Acrobat

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

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You know you need to improve rankings and sales for your e-commerce store, but maybe you’re too broke or too hesitant to hire a professional internet marketer. Without further ado, here are a few powerful ways you can improve your chances in the search engines without knowing a lick of code.

Rewrite your product names

Manufacturers come up with some pretty dumb product names. (I’d love to meet the marketing whiz who decided to call this line of pool care products POOLIFE.) They also don’t tend to be overly concerned with popular search keywords, but you must be if you want to succeed online.

Here’s an example:

Bad: Flip Ultra HD
Good: Flip Ultra HD High-Definition Video Camera

Do this right now:

Make sure every product name in your store includes common sense keywords. By common sense, I mean that if someone asked you, “What is a Flip Ultra HD?” you would reply, “It’s a video camera.” If they asked, “What does the HD stand for?” you would say, “HD means high-definition.” Spell out exactly what you’re selling, but don’t go overboard and stuff every keyword you can think of in there.

Rewrite your product descriptions

If you’re the only store in the world selling your product, congratulations! You can skip this section. But if you’re like most e-commerce store owners, you must make sure your product description is unique and features plenty of those common sense keywords. Why? It’s called duplicate content. If the search engines see 100 different stores with the exact same product description, they’ll try to pick the best store rather than show all 100 identical results.

Do this right now:

If the manufacturer’s product description is written in paragraphs, you can reformat some of the features and benefits into a bulleted list. If you already have a bulleted list, you can rearrange the bullet points, combine two points into one or break one point into two. If there’s more information in a separate PDF brochure, rewrite some of that copy on your product page. You can even bust out a thesaurus and substitute words with the same meanings.

Add text to every category page

A lot of e-commerce stores I’ve seen have absolutely no text on their category pages, or they hide perfectly good text in pretty images that search engines can’t see. This is SEO suicide. Search engines love plain text like a fat kid loves cake, so feed them plenty of juicy category text, marinated in common sense keywords and seasoned with tasty brand names.

Do this right now:

Check every category page on your website and write a few hundred words about the type of products you’ll find there. Make sure you integrate those common sense keywords and mention the brand names you have for sale. Talk about the advantages of using that type of product, or features your customers should be paying attention to when deciding on a particular model. Consider adding definitions, especially if your products are somewhat obscure or technical.

Here are a couple examples:

“Love to take pictures of your kids? Look for a digital camera with a ‘burst’ or ‘rapid fire’ feature that shoots quickly (before the little ones lose interest and run off).”

“A spirometer is a medical device used to measure the volume of air entering and leaving the lungs.”

Extra credit

Improving your standings in the search results can take time, so this extra tip will help you increase sales right now with the customers you already have. If your shopping cart offers a “one-page checkout” feature and you’re not using it, go switch that on immediately. A multi-page checkout process is mentally exhausting, and many customers will abandon their carts rather than suffer the ordeal of a five-page form.

Got any more low-tech tips for improving e-commerce stores? Please add your 2 cents to the comments below!

Photo by basykes.

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

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Man, did I dodge a bullet or what?

As a former journalist, I’ve been watching the slow, sad decline of the print industry with the sick fascination of a rubbernecker at a scene of a car accident. Daily newspapers laid off 5,900 journalists last year, and no amount of whining and complaining to the government is going to bring those jobs back.

Let me say this as clearly as I can.

Print is dead.
Stop trying to reanimate the corpse.

Many unemployed journalists are moving online to write their own blogs and web-only news sites. That’s nice. My Nana just got a Facebook account. These days, anybody’s grandmother can publish content online. Promoting and monetizing content is the hard part.

This new wave of digital journalists will eventually discover internet marketing as they struggle to attract readers and advertisers. And if they stop trying to reinvent their former habitats online, many of these unemployed reporters could make stellar internet marketers.

Here’s why:

If they’re anything like I was 10 years ago — idealistic and embarrassingly self-righteous — the main obstacle standing between journalist and successful careers in SEO is an inherent distaste for marketing and advertising. Many young reporters see themselves as white knights or Robin Hoods, defending the little guy and raging against the corrupt establishment.

Ironically, I have discovered that I’m still helping the little guy (small business owners) and raging against the corrupt establishment. I’m a lot less idealistic and self-righteous these days, but I haven’t had to sell my soul to make a buck.

I’d love to hear from other former journalists who ended up in the search marketing business. Please feel free to add your 2 cents to the comments below and share this post with your colleagues.

This post was inspired by Bellwether Brains by Todd Mintz at the SEMpdx blog. Photo by Eric Ingrum.

Post by Adrienne Doss from seowoman.com.

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