Well another week down, it is amazing how quickly days go by and when I look at what was achieved I always feel I could have done more.
Most of this past week has involved organising and publishing content for two of my websites. One related to my ECommerce brand and the other is a current Adsense website that I am looking to push more in the direction of an affiliate website.
I used PeoplePerHour.com to find 7 freelance writers for my Ecommerce website. I gave each of them different but similar article titles and asked them to write a 500 word article. Ideally all writers would be great and I could look to hire any one of them again for future work, but if only one was good it would still be a success.
I was happy with the quality of work of all writers, although some were definitely better (or at least better suited to my website) than others. One issue however is cost. Prices ranged from £8 to £15 across the 7 freelancers I chose. While this is not ridiculously high for me £15 is too much because I need lots of content and this would eat into my budget too quickly.
The £8 freelancer did good work but before I push on with more content I am going to let these articles sit on the website for a little while and see how I feel about them in a week or two.
My Adsense website content was a little different. Each piece of content is a tutorial that people should be able to follow easily. I decided to test Upwork.com. Upwork is a freelancer website that rose up after the merger of Odesk and Elance, two massive freelancer websites. I set my cost per article at $10 to see the quality I could get. Again I am looking to get lots of content created.
I got 10+ applicants for my job post, I chose 6 and gave each a different tutorial topic. 4 accepted my job and to date 2 have completed it. I was impressed by the standard of these articles, because for $10 (£7) I had doubts about the quality.
The 2 freelancers who completed the job were American but managed to write for a UK audience as I instructed. I need to publish these articles and this is a job for next week.
A while ago (probably a year or so) I read a blog post by Brian Dean at Backlinko.com. It was about researching content ideas and finding content that other people had published that did very well in terms of backlinks and social shares. Then the idea is to create a similar but much better piece of content and publish it.
Next was all about promotion. Reaching out and communicating with the people and websites that linked to the original piece of content that inspired the new content created. The goal is to get backlinks and social shares. Also on top of this interaction with other influencers and authority websites related to your content was needed to add more high value backlinks.
I tried with limited success in the past to use this method. I created detailed and good quality content and started my outreach. But I did not push this promotion enough and the impact was limited. I really needed someone to push this outreach because this is not my main skill set.
So this time I am going to do just that. I contacted my local university about their intern program and had a meeting to discuss the possibility of an intern coming to work with me for a few weeks. It actually looks like I am going to do what is known as a structured internship where a student will work with me 2 days a week for 12 weeks. I will pay this student but the university also provide some financial support.
I’m going to get the intern to create a whole content/outreach program for my ECommerce website and judge for myself how successful this approach is. I hope it is a success because I will then repeat the process of my other websites to boost their authority, traffic, and sales.
I’ll wrap this up now but I’ll just mention that other areas I have worked on this week are my Google Adwords campaign for my online course, a bit of app/software work, and some accounting stuff.
Thanks
Neil
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