My Latest Method For Working Smarter – Super Blogging!
I know you all must be sick and tired of me going on about how important it is to not only work hard but work smart. I also know I’ve been moaning terribly about all the new methods I’ve been working on recently so thought it was high time I actually shared one of them with you.
Working Smarter & Taking My Blogging To New Levels!
I’ve been deeply concerned recently about making more of the time I spend working. One thing that has really been frustrating me is seeing all these clever guys such as Compare Store Prices ranking for many of my target terms with their sites. Whilst I’m writing content for each and every brand I target plus oodles of accompanying articles, sites like these are cleverly manipulating feeds, melding it with some unique content, and adding value with a good resource which is created en masse with their clever feed wizardry.
The result is they rank well for a huge range of search terms and enjoy a beautiful economy of scale within their business. Just look at Compare Store Price’s Alexa ranking – isn’t that a fabulous thing to behold on an affiliate owned site?
Clearly I Lack The Ability To Do All That…
But I did wonder if I might be able to fuse my own content with feed content on a much smaller scale, and create a quicker and more efficient to generate some useful content of my own.
So without further ado here’s what I came up with…
*Click the image to see the page on my mens undies site (opens in new window)
What I’ve done is used the merchant’s feed and one of their short descriptions for each product and then created a second longer description of my own in another field, combined it with their image and price data, and output it into an HTML template I designed. I used a bulk posting script a kind reader roughed out for me to get my content into a Wordpress post in this structure.
This Improves My Efficiency Thusly….
Instead of being able to write up and post 4 reasonably sized product articles in an hour, I can now do the necessary to come up with 10 of these (still perfecting the methodology so may be able to improve upon that a little).
For those of you who like more numbers (as I do) this means that in one hour per day I can create 170 rather spiffing looking blog articles per month. I’m also pleased to announce that because it’s a “different way” of writing I can still do another couple of hours writing my “normal” articles without getting bored.
I’m Still Not Sure How It’ll Work…
It could be that this is not enough for the search engines to consider it unique and useful content, but I think I’ve re-worked the merchant’s products from the feed, added a good whack of unique text, and created a useful resource.
I’ll be very careful to keep a reasonable balance of this type of content with stuff that is more “traditionally” written, and won’t be posting huge swathes of this stuff all at once – but I’m certainly very pleased with the initial small test I’ve done. Of course, like anyone who starts to use merchant feeds to help generate content I’ll no doubt find that many merchant’s feeds just aren’t much cop and I can’t work with them terribly easily.
Anyhoo… this is the product of quite a bit of thinking for a good few weeks, so I’ll be interested to hear what y’all think about it. If nothing else, I think I’d be able to use this method to write content more quickly by simply completely removing the merchant description and using a longer one of my own.
The Next Step…
Is to think up a way to use my current sites and their content successfully in combination with lots of different merchant feeds, creating even more efficiencies of time (Reckon it’ll take me more than a few weeks to work out mind you – few years perhaps?).
P.S. My sincere and abject apologies once again to John Lamerton for yet another mens underwear related example which will no doubt put him off his lunch (sorry John!!)
This post is from: Kirsty’s Affiliate Marketing Guide – Affiliate Stuff UK
My Latest Method For Working Smarter – Super Blogging!
