Online Businesses and Internet Marketing

May 26, 2010

Build Your Successful Product Websites that People Love

You just launched a new product. You want people to tell others in their social network. You want word of it to spread like a virus from person to person, eventually resulting in more buzz, attention and sales.

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And you want to do it using the internet. Purely online. No TV, newspapers or radio. No print ads. Assume you’ve already done all of the above (you should have) and just want an online strategy that will work.

There are many things you can do. Every experienced online marketer will agree that the first step is to set up a home base or launch pad. Some website where people can find you and your product online. Some place where you can funnel attention and traffic towards. It’s where you pitch your work. It’s what people will be sharing.

This article will talk about how to create an effective website to promote your new product (or just about anything you want).

How People Usually Promote Products Online

The most common way of promoting a new product involves the development of a new website or web page to showcase it. In both cases, the goal is to provide information about the product, capture attention, generate interest/desire and sales.

If a new webpage is built, it usually takes the form of a straightforward sales page and is hosted on an existing domain. If a new website is developed, the sales page format can be extended into an informational site with a community built around the product.

It’s impossible to say what works for every product out there. So let’s avoid generalities and assume a specific scenario. Say your product is a new book and you want to promote it. Here are some of the common methods used:

Method One – Set up a landing page for the book on your existing personal website or blog. A product page is also often created on the publisher’s website or a distributor like Amazon.com. This is usually a page with promotional blurbs or recommendations, along with a synopsis of the book and reviews from the press.

Method Two – Buy a new domain name exactly similar or related to the book’s name and set up a website just for the book. This will include a blog where you can share knowledge by posting essays, articles related to current events or updates/news regarding the book. Press reviews, testimonials and author bios are included too.

From what I’ve seen, all book authors or publishers take either one of the above two approaches. If you’re really savvy and smart you’ll do both method one and two: Optimize your own personal website and set up a new hub just for the book. Connect them together.

Then proceed to put up regular articles, not veiled infomercials for the book but actual content that informs and benefits the general reader. Provide value first. Sales is almost an after-thought. First thing to remember when creating successful product launch websites.

Develop a Laser Like Focus on Delivering Maximum Value

value focus
Image Credit: Dashu Pagla

Let’s retrace our steps. You want people talking about your book and telling their friends and family. You want word-of-mouth to spread naturally and ripple outwards. Every day you want someone who has never heard of you to discover your book and tell someone else about it.

In order to do that you need to increase the value you offer to everyone who lands on your website. You need to sculpt that value until it has a laser-like focus. It should be extremely engaging and incredibly tangible.

For most book marketers, method one and two is the extent of what they will do. But it often results in a pretty boring website. And boring doesn’t help you to get word of mouth.

Here’s what I think: Method one and two do work. But they aren’t focused enough to deliver maximum impact. People can be easily distracted online. After getting to your site, they first have to orient themselves and then after that, search for the value you offer. What’s so cool about you or your book? What’s your message? Why should I care about your book?

Imagine being a visitor who lands on your website. What do they see? A bunch of testimonials and blurbs floating around somewhere to the side, a blog with content related to the book’s topic, news of a book signing in a city they don’t live in and even if they do get so far… a bio of someone they don’t know and most probably won’t care about.

Is that the best way to encourage word of mouth? Refine your website. Make it better.

September 16, 2008

20 Important Tips about SEO

1. Keyword research:

This is vital for setting up content groups on your site. Knowing what actual phrases users are actually searching on allows you to use the most appropriate keyword or phrase within relevant content on your site.

2. Build content:

Might seem obvious, this part, but it’s important you spend the time to build useful, unique, content about your topic. Copying & pasting content from other sites could get your pages flagged as duplicate content and might land yu in legal hot water due to copyright . Try to build about 100 actual, content rich pages to launch your site with. More or less pages is fine. Each page should contain 200 plus words.

3. Mind your metas:

While only the DO NOT stuff keyword in there, be factual and make sure each individual page has a dedicated tag assigned - in short, don’t use one set of tags across your whole site.

4. The actual pages:

Make sure you use proper coding, don’t try to hide text thorugh matching colors of text to background and keep the file sizes down - under 20K is good. Don’t go crazy with javascript navigation, etc. - keep it simple: the spiders will be able to crawl it & index it and your users will love it.

5. Images & Alt Tags:

Cover this base - if you use an image on your site, take the 15 seconds to put in the tag which describes what the image is about - be factual, use a relevant keyword or phrase in there, and keep it short. DO NOT stuff this with keywords.

6. IP Address:

Get yourself a dedicated IP address. You can use shared hosting, but make sure you have a dedicated IP addy.

7. WWW v. Non-WWW:

Get this point sorted. When you type in http://domain.com, it should redirect you to the http://www.domain.com version of the domain. You should use the 301 redirect protocal to accomplish this. Should you be on a server running Windows, the process will vary, but the reuslts should be the same. Many hosted solution providers WILL NOT make this adjustment on the server for you, so be aware of this - it’s important.

8. Keyword density:

Don’t sweat this - just make sure you use the keyword in the title of the page, again in the title of the content (use

9. Keywords in URLs:

Again, don’t sweat this point - if you can, great. So long as using the keyword makes sense and is related to the actual content of the page. This doesn’t really make or break rankings, though, so don’t beat yourself up here.

10. Hyphen, underscore or dot:

When you have a keyword phrase (multiple words) being used in a URL, you’ll have to decide how to introduce a space between the words. Some folks recommend leaving them together, no spaces. I prefer to use the hyphen ( - ) or the dot ( . ) to separate words. Don’t use the underscore ( _ ).

11. Inbound links:

Once and for all - the only links of any real value to your rankings will be one-way inbound links from sites with similar topics. Reciprocal links (and all versions thereof, such as triangular link schemes, etc.) are next to useless. The engines discount any value from these. In fact, your first thought when linking should be to provide useful resources for your users and to obtain inbound links which may provide traffic to you. You’ll want to persue one-way inbound links here, too, but be warned - it’s tough. Quality counts, quantity doesn’t. Watch who is linking to you like a hawk. Bad link neighbors can cause you to get a black eye from the spiders, too. If you are actively policing your link strategy, as you should be, you’ll see problems coming and be able to take action. Did I mention quality counts and quantity doesn’t?

12. Directories:

Pay for Yahoo if you’ve got the $300. Submit to DMOZ and forget about it for at least 6 months. There are lots of other directories, but research them carefully. Lots of junk directories have come around lately - you want a directory which simply allows you to put your data in and provides one link back to you. Watch for directories which promise to put your link “across their network” or for submission tools which promise to submit to hundreds of directories each month. Both should be avoided.

13. Analytics:

Don’t use a hit counter - get actual analytics which will allow you to see where folks are coming from and what search terms they’re using to find you.

14. Sitemaps:

Make sure a simple, html, sitemap is avilable from your main page - spiders love these and it’s an easy way for them to quickly index all the pages of your site - you want this.

15. Spam tricks:

Let’s be honest here - if you have to ask if it’s a spammy tactic, it is. Don’t try to split hairs - spamming is spamming. You will either get caught by the engines themsleves and cease to exist in the index, or someone will report you (I would) and you’ll cease to exist in the index.

16. Chasing Page Rank:

OK, get over this NOW. First off, the PR value you see in the toolbar is roughly 3 - 4 months old - Google’s not using the data you’re seeing to rank your site, so why do YOU care about it? “But you want high PR sites linking to you, right?” - What you really want linking to you are sites which have similar topical content to your own. PR is irrelevant. Topic is relevant.

17. Validate your code:

Spiders like clean and simple. Show them code which is broken, dead links and stray tags and they’ll get the idea you’re not serious about this. Validate your code, page by page, and take the time to correct any errors the reports show you.

18. Keep building more pages:

The old article suggested “build one page of new content per day”. I still like Brett’s idea here, though I prefer to invest a weekend and create a bunch at a time - personal preference - just remember to follow the basics for each page.

19. Optimization/Submission software:

Humans optimize, software either spams, or goes out of data with it’s info. Seriously, software which claims to be able to optimize your website, simply cannot - it cannot make the changes, it does not read up the latest news and it does not go to the conferences and speak with the engineers from the engines. It can give you numbers, and construct tags for you, but after readin this far on this page, you can do this on your own. As for submitting your site, well, here’s the biggest clue to look for: if the software claims to submit to the engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., it’s bogus. You DO NOT submit to engines, you get links form other sites and spiders find you by crawling those links. As for submitting to directories, automated submission software often does not follow the rules as outlined by the engines. In many cases, due to image-based passwords designed to stop automated scripts, software tools are useless. Submit only by hand, and only to useful directories. The bottom line is software doesn’t optimize, humans do.

20. Paying for services:

This is a plug for all of us who do this for a living. It’s not rocket science, I’ll grant you, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and need a helping hand, shop around. Some charge hundreds for advice, some charge tens of thousands. Some use spam tricks, others (like me) don’t. Ask for references and call them.

This Article is written By Brett_Tabke:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm

September 12, 2008

How to Say Nothing in 500 Words (A Lesson on Writing)

The ability to write well is very useful for our personal and professional lives. It helps students, business people, politicians, writers, bloggers, marketers and everyone who has ever needed to arrange words together to convey ideas or opinions. The written word has become an essential means of social communication: mastery of it helps you to enthrall and persuade an audience that would look upon you favorably in return.

It goes without saying that learning how to create compelling content is a part of one’s success as an online publisher. Reading widely and deeply while consistently honing your writing skills helps a great deal in bettering your prose. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to read a few stylebooks/essays on writing by professional teachers or authors.

One of these essays on writing is Paul McHenry Roberts’s How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words, a brilliantly humorous introduction on writing college compositions. I discovered this essay today and read though easily in one sitting, possibly because it was so well-written and entertaining. It’s a perfect example of the writing techniques listed within.

Here’s a quick summary of the 9 main points mentioned. I’ve extracted some of the key paragraphs from the text but be sure to read the full essay because these points are elaborated in much greater detail with some excellent examples.

Avoid the obvious content.“Say the assignment is college football. Say that you’ve decided to be against it. Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your mind. Now when you write your paper, make sure that you don’ t use any of the material on this list. If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else’s too. Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are keen and perceptive ones, that’s splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or indefensible, you are still ahead so long as they are not everybody else’s reasons too.”
Take the less usual side. “One rather simple way of getting into your paper is to take the side of the argument that most of the citizens will want to avoid. They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the that looks to you hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly on that side.”
Slip out of abstraction. “Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is moving from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and figures, the illustrations. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. Don’t say, “Sororities teach girls the social graces.” Say, “Sorority life teaches a girl how to carry on a conversation while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucer.”
Get rid of obvious padding. “Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences lean and tough… You dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of the topic and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure out the details. You illustrate.”
Call a fool a fool. “If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with “in-my-opinion’s” and “it-seems-to-me’s” and “as-I-see-it’s” and “at-least-from-my-point-of-view’s” gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words. Writing in the modern world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. But you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and force.”
Beware of Pat Expressions. “Other things being equal, avoid phrases like “other things being equal.” Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup… No writer avoids them altogether, but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.”
Colorful Words. “Some words are what we call “colorful.” By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of “Her heart beat,” we may write, “her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced.” Instead of “He sat in his chair,” we may say, “he lounged, sprawled, coiled.”
Colored Words.. “When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before. The word mother, for example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear mother you probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things..The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.”
Colorless Words. “A pet example is nice, a word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual conversation but which is no longer capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing…Slang adjectives like cool (”That’s real cool”) tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to everything, lose their original force, and quickly die.”

Learning how to create content using concrete, lean, colorful and vivid prose with unique perspectives will help you to get more readers, customers and supporters. But bear in mind that its not just about writing in a fancy way to entertain. It’s also a conscientious way of differentiating yourself from thousands of similar writers/thinkers in the same field.

Tips in Image Search in the SEO Picture

One of the major trends that emerged from SES San Jose is the increasingly important role of image search. This article will talk a bit about how and why it's growing, and strategies for optimizing your web site to receive this type of traffic.

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., August 20-23, 2007.

First let's start with a few data points that illustrate why image search is increasing in importance:

1. In his keynote interview with Chris Sherman on Tuesday morning, Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, said that 50 percent of the results they provide on Ask3D do not come from traditional web results. Note that my own examination of this shows that there are still 10 blue links, but there are also image results, news results, and other relevant data provided in addition.

2. In the Image Search session, Shari Thurow stated that 15 percent to 16 percent of web searches are for images. This is just a stunning number!

3. Shari Thurow also offered up the data point that usability testing shows that users are more likely to click on an image link than a text link. As experienced SEOs know that means you lost the anchor text opportunity with that link, but you can easily address that by putting the pretty image links up top, and having a general purpose menu in the footer of your page using text links.

4. From an examination of sites I monitor, Google Image Search has become a steadily more important referrer, and often is one of the top 5 referrers. This is true even on sites that are not really that image-centric.

One of the major things that is driving this is the advent of universal/federated/blended search results. The integration of images into the web search results in a more integral way is providing greatly increased access to the available image data. In addition, more and more people are becoming aware of just how rich image search has become. People are getting high quality results, so conducting an image search becomes a natural reaction of more searchers when the need arises.
Image Search Optimization

So now that we know that image search represents a significant opportunity, I will now draw on the rest of my SES San Jose 2007 notes related to image search and lay out the basics of image search optimization.

As an obvious first step, figure out how images can and should fit into the user experience on your site. This is a non-trivial step. Then, determine how and where you can obtain original images for your site. Image search engines don't like duplicate content any more than web search engines, so you need to obtain your own original images. Once you have this in place, here are the major steps you can take to optimize for image search engines:

1. Use keywords in the alt tag attribute. This is a critical step, as it is the one best opportunities you have to unambiguously label the image. Bear in mind that there is a huge amount of search volume that includes words like: photo, picture, image, pics, pix, or locations. Regarding the locations, if your image is a picture of a physical location, include some location information in the alt tag attribute.

2. Note that the title tag attribute is usually ignored. Don't waste your time on it.

3. Pick a logical file name, that reinforces the keywords. Using hyphens in the file name to isolate the words in the keyword is an OK to thing, just try not to exceed two hyphens. Do not use underscores as a word separator.

4. Use a descriptive file name, in a similar fashion to the alt tag attribute.

5. Pay attention to the file extension too. For example, if the image search engine sees a ".jpg" (JPEG) file extension, it's going to assume that the file is a photo.

6. Basic web page optimization applies too. For example:
* The title tag of the web page
* The text nearby the image
* The overall theme of the content of the page
* The overall theme of the site (or section of the site)

7. Also important is to get links to the page with the image on it. This could become an entire link building discussion in itself, but one simple way to do this it to post the pages with images on them to del.icio.us.

8. Avoid duplicate content on your site. If for example, you have a thumbnail, a medium size image, and a full size image, you don't want these to all be indexed. The best way to handle this is to use robots.txt to prevent the crawler from looking at the versions you don't want indexed (most likely this would be the thumbnail or the full size image).

A couple of other interesting points emerges from the discussion. One of these was brought up by Liana Evans, which was that reputation management issues apply to image search as much as it does to web search. You should be aware of what pictures are out there of you, your brand, or your company, and you should actively work on making sure that the most common results that come up are pictures that fit the image you are trying to create.

In addition, image theft is a real issue, and is hard to stop. One thing you can do is to place some text in the image, such as "photo by ..." of "image by ...". While this does not stop photo theft altogether, it does require the person taking the image to do some editing to the image before they can use it.

In summary, image search can bring great results for your business. Of course, you want to make sure that the traffic you get is relevant to your site, and that those visitors might ultimately do what you want them to do on your site. With that in mind, step back and take a look at how optimizing for image search might fit into your overall web strategy.

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.

How to Make More Money with Your Website (without Getting More Traffic)

It’s possible to increase the amount of money you earn from your blog or website without increasing the amount of traffic you currently receive. While the amount of traffic greatly affects how much money you earn, all income sources can be tweaked to generate more revenue without an proportionate increase in traffic.

One simply needs to strategically optimize your website in order to best accommodate whatever traffic you are currently receiving.

This article will provide some useful details on the various methods and principles you can immediately use to improve the overall net revenue from your website or blog.

Main Principles to Follow for Greater Income

There are three main principles you should remember when trying to increase the overall income for your site. These are conversion, leverage and diversification:

* Conversion. If you want to make money from the same ad space on your blog without an increase in traffic, you need to develop greater conversion rates for affiliate programs and contextual ads. This includes restructuring your website to highlight specific webpages, projects or advertisements.

* Leverage. To expand your income beyond on-site advertisements, you need to start using your site as a platform towards something a specific service or product that brings in an external income.

* Diversification. To increase your overall earnings, you also need to gradually develop a diverse income stream by experimenting with multiple ad programs and monetization strategies which fit the overall content and direction of your site. This also involves the development of content that can be easily monetized.

5 Ways to Gradually Make More Money from Your Website

These five methods are practical explanations of how you can apply the three principles outlined above to your own website or blog. Consistent application of these methods will ensure that you increase the income generated from each site.

1. Make an Effort to Use Affiliate Links Regularly

Reviews of products like books and software or other websites will allow you to generate income via affiliate links. Conversions for affiliate links will always work best when combined with personal recommendations within content.

Strive to write objective reviews of these products or websites on a regular basis. Write one review every week and you’ll gradually develop a substantial archive of monetized content accessible by search engine traffic and other visitors.

2. Develop and Display a List of Recommended Websites/Products

This list of websites should be prominently displayed on a sitewide level although you can choose to display it on its own webpage. Each of the recommended websites should preferably be linked to a presell page on your website.

This can come in the form of a review post or a short note detailing your experiences with the website or product. I highly recommend creating your own presell page, instead of sending your visitor directly to the affiliate product or website because presell pages will lead to higher conversion rates.

3. Focus on Conversion: Optimize your Existing Ad Placement

Income generated from on-site advertisements can vary a great detail depending on placement, particularly if they are contextual CPC or CPA ads. Try experimenting with ad formats and placement on your site while monitoring your click-through rates and ad earnings at least once every week.

This should gradually give you a good idea of where to best place your ads for maximum earnings. You can also choose to place ads on specific areas of your website for greater overall performance. For instance, effective monetization of your single post pages will provide an additional source of income.

4. Diversify Your Income: Try New Monetization Tactics

Diversification of your income is one method to make full use of your blog’s earnings potential. Sign up with new ad networks and run ads to test if they produce equal or higher earnings. Some websites work very well with Adsense, others would probably do better with text link sales (aff) or direct ad sales.

A good way to pick up different ad-models is to observe the various sites in and outside of your niche. How are they monetizing their site? Can you apply the same method to your own site?

Another method of monetization would involve offering premium features or content for subscribing members. This requires a substantial amount of work but may work if your site already has an established audience which trusts your product or brand.

5. Leverage Your Blog to Promote Your Services or Business

If you have a particular skill such as web design or writing, I would recommend putting up a page on your site promoting your services. This aim of this page is to let visitors know that you are available for hire and will encourage interested visitors to contact you for assignments on specific projects.

This indirectly increases your monthly income by providing a revenue source on top of your regular monetization methods. David Airey is a good example of a freelance graphic designer who leverages his site to promote his services.

David’s blog clearly shows that he is available for hire and prominently displays his portfolio. A collection of featured articles on topics such as graphic design, advertising and branding demonstrates his knowledge on the topic to prospective clients. It also helps that he has optimized his site to rank well for local search terms like ‘graphic design edinburgh’ and ‘web design edinburgh’.

Building Traffic is Still the No.1 Priority

While the above methods will definitely increase your online income, building regular amounts of traffic to your website is still of primary importance because it exponentially increases the amount of money you can earn from every single ad format or program that you run.

Should you need more information on traffic building, do check out my category of articles specifically on how to get more visitors to your website.

Strategic Collaborations: A Powerful Way to Promote Yourself

Sometimes you can’t do everything yourself. You don’t have the budget to launch a big marketing campaign. Or you don’t even know where to start. One of the best ways to promote your website or business is to work together with others to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

The legal form of this is known as a joint venture, where two or more parties create a new entity by contributing equity and sharing revenue, expenses and control. Another form of collaboration is known as a strategic alliance, whereby the parties involved pursue common goals while remaining as independent organizations.

No matter what you call it, collaboration with others will benefit you in ways that go beyond what you can do on your own. Think about it. Each involved party comes with their own established audience, reputation, brand, networks and strengths. Some of them may overlap with your own but usually, they’ll reach people or own assets you don’t.

Some people may have more media contacts. Some may have a specific skill (e.g. design, programing) and others have an audience or customer base that you’re trying to reach. Partnering with them for short or long-term initiatives is a smart way to promote your business, on top of all the online marketing that you’re already doing.

How can you collaborate? The possibilities are endless. For example, you can run joint contests/competitions, set up incentivized referral networks, promote a co-op web product, create content together, exchange ad space or trade skills for exposure. There are many ways to collaborate for mutual benefits. It’s just about finding what works for you.

So how do you get started? Four simple steps:

1. Identify your goals. This is what you want to get out of the collaboration. Your goals will determine who you should work with and having a clear idea of what you want from the beginning will give you an immediate idea of what kind of marketing strategy you want to take, and hence who is most suitable for you.

2. Determine what you can offer. Make a list of benefits you can offer to the opposite party. For example you might have specific personal skills or a website with a built-in audience. Perhaps you’re launching a new product and give away free samples of it away. In other words, this list consists of what you can do for the other parties.

3. Create a List of Potential Collaborators. Start writing down a list of people you want to work with based on your goals, what you can offer and who you think will be potentially interested. Make the list broad: there’ll always be people who’ll turn you down so you want as many secondary options as possible.

4. Pitch the people involved. Draft up an email template and send it off to the people on your list. Try to customize your pitch by using each recipient’s name and including unique information/comments. Keep the emails short and frame them in terms of benefits. Alternatively, try pitching over the phone or a face-to-face meeting. Remember to follow up before permanently striking a recipient off from your collaborators list.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. There’s no harm in reaching out to people, all you have to risk is your pride. When it comes to partnerships, you’ll be surprised with the people who will be interested in working together. Don’t automatically write yourself off, especially you have something valuable to offer to another party.

If you’ve never tried any strategic collaborations before, why not start today?

The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems

Many have made money and built reputations by solving problems. Doctors cure the suffering of illness, psychiatrists help heal the troubled mind, lawyers protect names from being tarnished, consultants offer marketing advice and a dazzling array of products help to remove any inconvenience you might possibly encounter in your daily life.

Many people are solving problems. They’re all offering solutions to people who need them. Some are giving them away for free. Others are selling them for a price. When problem and solution is a perfect fit, a relationship of trust is built between two parties. If this helps me now, it might help me again. If this solves my problem, it might solve my friend’s problem too.

There’s a connection. The problem solver becomes more popular as more problems are solved for more people. Every time you solve a problem in a way that’s better than others, you add undeniable value to the person in need. After performing a search engine query on a topic, what pages do you bookmark? The ones that offer you the best possible solution.

As a business or website owner, you have to face the challenge of getting people to consume what you’re offering, be it free content on your blog, a piece of merchandise or premium service. You’ll have compete with other problem solvers in the market. Other blogs, other companies in the same field, other service providers. All offering different solutions.

For instance, there are many different products to solve the problem of dirty dishes. A plethora of different washing fluids, sponges, machines and racks. In most scenarios, there are more solutions than there are problems. Solutions themselves become problems to be solved.

Most of the time problem-solvers are already engaging your target audience but that doesn’t mean you should stay away. There’s always room for another solution, especially when its one that addresses the problem with more elegance, more force, more precision or more style.

First, identify the problems facing your target audience. Go deep into the user-generated recesses of the web: monitor forums, social networking websites, blogs and places where people interact and talk online. Understand the problem more deeply than your competitor. Go after nuance. Absorb feedback on current solutions. Know what they want but isn’t available.

Then, create a solution that builds on the flaws of other solutions. Or one that completely circumvents the existing paradigm by addressing the problem from a different angle, using different methodology or a combination of existing solutions. Be daring and creative.

Try going wider for broader appeal or swim in narrower channels to reach hardcore fans in order to gain a support base. The same applies to online publications like blogs on specific topics. What problems do your readers have? How are you solving them with your content? If solutions already exist elsewhere, how can you do better so you’ll be the go-to site?

Nobody is able to constantly solve problems in the best possible way to please every single person. All solutions have flaws because consumers evolve. People are also going to look elsewhere because of of boredom. But understanding exactly what problems and solutions are out there, allows you to better score points or gain favor with any audience.