Many of my best articles come from email questions put to me by readers.
In this case, we have someone asking what to charge for private web design training.
The email:
i’ve been a member of your newsletter for years .. BIG FAN!
i recently met a guy that owns/founded an SEO company here in New York that works from home and is VERY successful/wealthy… he asked that i teach him photoshop and flash cs3.
i have NO IDEA what to quote him.
Source: internetnews.com
Written by Andy Patrizio
In the 1970s, a quintet of spray paint artists called The Fabulous Five turned New York trains and subway cars into their canvases. New Yorkers were impressed with art that stretched as far as 10 cars while the Transit Authority and hardware stores where the five stole their paint were furious.
Dealing with Massive Content Development JobsWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 24 of December , 2007 at 10:52 am
Just the other day I got an order for forty articles on an obscure topic that requires research to be done in no longer than two weeks. The topic is complicated and requires a certain amount of research, yet I have the utmost confidence in my ability to complete it. I have been in the content development game for some time now and my approach to massive jobs works, for me at least.
If you are creating your own topics or keywords for your content, it is a little bit easier. Sure, you will need time to do a little keyword research, but you get to face the job on your own terms. If not, it doesn’t matter, but you will have your work cut out for you.Group your keywords by topic. Try to break the list down into five or six loosely related groups.
Getting Geographic with your KeywordsWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 21 of December , 2007 at 2:57 pm
Don’t miss out on the benefits that localized content can offer you. It is often an untapped market, especially if you are providing specialized services. The fact is that those of us that have been online almost as long as the Internet, have gotten very good at searching. Late adopters have not done too badly either. Now most people enter at least one geographic keyword when they search.
When I am producing content, I tend to start big and work my way down. I might start with something like: “Pool filters USA,” “Pool filters America,” and “Pool Filters United States.” That is three articles there, it is not really localized, but it is including some geo-targeting. Next, I would drop down to something a little smaller, “Pool Filters California.” To further reduce the area, “Pool Filters Los Angeles.” To go local, “Pool Filters Orange County.”
Design Content, Does it Really Work?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 2:45 pm
Design content not only works, it works wonders. Recently, I had the pleasure to be involved in a massive writing project for a swimming pool cleaning products company. They had been around a while and had a pretty big network marketing presence, but had never really done the Internet thing. That being said, when it did come time for them to jump into the web marketing, they did it right. It was a big budget project, they had already chosen their keywords and they chose well.
They sell enzyme based products for cleaning swimming pools. Type in “Pool Enzymes” and you get a massive field of 430,000; not as bad as some markets but still pretty crowded. I produced a total of about 30 premium articles for them and was well compensated for my efforts. The work was tough going, due to the amount of research involved and all said and done it took me just under a month for it to be completed to my satisfaction. The articles and web content were all highly optimized, but not overly so. I developed the content with the goal that it was going to be good to read. I didn’t worry about keyword density. There were very few articles that had more than one keyword per paragraph. Some did not have any.
Search Engine Optimization Journal???s Top 20 Design Blog ListWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 12:40 pm
We have researched and compiled our first annual list of some of the most useful Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Blogs???other than the Search Engine Optimization Journal!
Please feel free to visit these blogs as they provide excellent information! Please let us know if we missed any blogs off of this list.
1. Matt Cutts: Design, Gadgets and Design
Blog URL: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Design news and tips coming straight from a Design employee who is recognizably one of the biggest names in the Design industry.
Landing Page Optimization, Quick Design TipsWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 20 of December , 2007 at 9:59 amAre you planning some landing pages? Here are five QUICK design tips for speeding up the process and creating better landing pages.
Did you notice what I did with that preamble? That ought to give you an idea of what this article is about.
Use a style sheet - CSS is popular for a reason. If you don’t know how to make a style sheet, go to Amazon and buy a book. It is easy to learn and one of the most important aspects of modern web design.Use fixed width columns - Monitors now come in all shapes and sizes. A big part of landing page optimization is the visual optimization. Fixed column widths let you know exactly how the page is going to look on your visitors’ screens.Use a quality page editor - I am partial to Dreamweaver. A good web page editor is expensive, but has a lot more versatility. Your pages should end up optimized for both IE6,7 and Firefox.Get colorful - I like a simple color scheme with my landing pages. I usually use red and blue for keywords. I am also partial to text highlighting, for which I use yellow.Optimize your images - Make sure that the images that you use are optimized. Dreamweaver does most of this for you, but you will need to manually enter a title for each image.
Cash for Links, it Works but be CarefulWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 21 of December , 2007 at 8:57 am
The following helpful advice was taken from Marketing Pilgrim. I think it sums up some very good advice for those of you that want to build up traffic through link buying. Link buying is a strategy that works, but is increasingly frowned upon and tends to fall into the black hat category these days.
1. Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content. If you sell ring tones, that link from an online florist will stick out like a sore thumb! 2. If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away. 3. If the site labels the links as ???sponsored??? or ???paid links??? or anything like that, walk away. 4. Be selective in your targeting. Don???t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it. 5. Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you???re asking for trouble. 6. Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker. Those ???earn money selling links???banners? Yeah Design can see those too! 7. Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn???t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you. 8. Point the links at different pages within your site. Don???t buy lots of links for your homepage. 9. Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable. 10. I guess I should round this out to ten.
Drawbacks of PPCWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 7:45 am
I tend to shrug off PPC in favor of good old-fashioned organic marketing whenever possible. I have a number of reasons for doing this:
PPC produces a finite result - once your budget is expended, it is gone.Distinguishing buyers may avoid PPC ads - People that have been around the Internet block, may unconsciously screen out obvious advertising.PPC is not a guarantee of leads - PPC merely guarantees traffic not leads.
PPC has a definite place in web marketing, but I will always prefer what can be accomplished through the right balance of keywords and text. Great content can work wonders.
Keyword Research the Old Fashioned WayWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 18 of December , 2007 at 2:00 pm
There are tons of keyword research tools out there and there are some that are very good, but don’t forget the benefits of brainstorming. Brainstorming comes up with some great keyword ideas and once in a while you will think of something that a computer program just won’t come up with. Customers are humans and the human edge does come in handy from time to time.
Brainstorming is always the first step of my keyword research. I aim to come up with as many short phrases as I can possibly think of in one sitting. Going through the phrases that I would type in is the easy part, thinking of things that others might type can be a little more challenging. The more you do it, however, the easier it will become. Some people are better at brainstorming than others, but those that are really good at it can save themselves a lot of time in their keyword research.
