I‘ve just read a fascinating post by UK Internet Marketer Frank Haywood about the SEO strategies he’s used to climb the Google Search Results for an extremely competitive search term.
For anyone using Wordpress in particular, his post contains tons of valuable advice regarding which plugins to use and how to fully optimise your blog.
But what I found particularly noteworthy was how Frank used the post as a list building strategy.
Here’s how he did it…
- A few days ago, he made a regular post revealing that he’d managed to climb from page 30 of Google to page 19 for the keyphrase “Internet Business” in just 2 months. Now that may not seem like any great shakes until you consider that search term is highly competitive with over 19,400,000 competing webpages on Google.
- In the same post he promised to reveal the exact SEO tips he used to improve his ranking in a future password-protected post (made today) but only for anyone signing up to his blog notification list.
- He then password protected the new strategy-revealing post (using the Post Password functionality in Wordpress’ Write Post admin area on his blog). The post title however is still viewable to anyone arriving at his blog.
- After posting, he sent a broadcast message out to everyone on his list to let them know the password.
- Frank then offered to provide the password for $10 (which is money well spent in my opinion) to anyone not already on his list.
It’s certainly a novel approach for a blog. I havn’t seen it anywhere else which is surprising given how easy it is to password-protect posts in Wordpress.
I wonder if we might see a trend towards this type of subscriber-only or pay-per-view posting in the future?
What do you think? Post a comment below and let me know
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Graham, I just found your post from the link on Frank’s page.
As you rightly point out, it’s a great post, but the ‘hidden’ lesson was the technique of generating opt-ins to his list.
It seems to me that offering valuable information in return for a sign-up is likely to increase as people discover its power. It didn’t get Frank ridiculously huge numbers of new subscribers (pretty good figures though), but it did get him people who were willing to take some action. And that has to be a good thing.
Well, 220 extra subscribers isn’t too shoddy. I wouldn’t mind that kind of result from a couple of posts!
It will be interesting to see people’s reaction to these types of posts. It already looks to be dividing opinion, judging from the comments on Frank’s blog.
I guess, some will have their noses put out of joint by having to subscribe or pay when they’re used to getting free content. Others will see nothing wrong with it as long as the content is good.