Rich, you just received $5000 worth of consulting from Miriam.

Let's say you start all of these new websites.  You spend a little work on this one, a little work on that one, a little work here....  then when your customers want to review you some will go to this site, some will go to that site, some will go to another site...

What do you have after that?  A collection of hotdog stands.  Nothing impressive.  You have a bunch of websites that are not much different from your weakest competitor who didn't work very hard.

When you enter competition in the SERPs you enter a melee.  You are being attacked from the front, side, behind, above and below.  The best way to win is to go in like a Rambo and start kicking ass.  If you go in without working hard, you lose.  If you go in with a bunch of hotdog stands you lose a bunch of times.

So, if I was you, I would focus all of my efforts on one website.  EmpireElec has a long way to go.  Put good informative useful content on there for each of your service activities.  What to do before you call the electrician for lots of your most common situations.  Be generous, inform people, save them money, weave yourself a huge white hat.  No time to do that? Then buy adwords, use the YellowPages.

About those domains... I would allow them to expire and buy beer with the savings.   You have one domain.  If you don't have the time or the engergy to make it kickass you are not going to do it with a dozen of them.

Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells.   Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.  We know that because we hear it  * Every Day * in our customer reviews.

The ads that we run do not say buy from us.  We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website.  At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses.  Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad.  Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site.

The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store.  We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot.  Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed.  We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles.  We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information.  It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products.   They can also click an ad to our competitors.  But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.

** Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?**

Bad?  No way.  It is the smartest thing that you can do.

I spend a lot of my time writing content that explains how to use, repair and select products.  These are posted on my site and they always have links or standard-size banner ads pointing to the page in our on-site store where the item can be purchased.

If you have an article on how to repair a product, and offer links to where the tools, replacement parts and supplies can be purchased then that is a genuine benefit to the reader.  It is actually useful content.   And, the reader will feel good about buying these things from you because they just learned something from reading your article.  And, because you demonstrated your expertise the buyer should be comfortable buying your recommendations rather than going to another site, searching, and questioning... "is this what I really need?".

I am spending a lot of time this month and spent a lot of time last month writing content for the purpose of driving sales.

Hi Matt.  I really like this question, but even more, I like that it is pinned to the top of Q&A and hope it will stay here for a week or more.  I would like to learn what others are doing on this and other topics.   I hope that "pinned questions for discussion" become a regular thing in Q&A.

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CONTENT CREATION:

1. My site is an info site and I currently have a "future content map" that contains enough articles to keep me writing long after my death :-)Most of the articles that I write are on that map, some are not.  The thing that determines what I write today is a "motivation to write" that is triggered by an opportunity to acquire a few really nice photos or graphics to illustrate a new article perfectly.  I believe that a great photo or graphic at the top of the page can be more important to an article's success than what I write. The visitor needs inspiration to start reading and more photos to help "pull them down the page".

2. Once I have the motivation to write, I don't write.  Instead I spend one or two days reading the best information that I can find on the topic.  This might be on the web or in the collection of books at my office, which grows because I often buy a new one as I prepare for writing an article.   While reading I have a couple sheets of paper that I fill with notes.  These are ideas, topics that I want to cover in the article, sketches, calculations, etc. that can be used in the article.  Once that is finished I write a title, then the subheadings, and then arrange subheadings in order, with an effort to have a photo or graphic to illustrate each subheading - but that is not essential.

I have been active in the industry served by my website for the past 45 years, I could just jump into writing the articles, but a day or two of preparing before I write makes a big difference in the quality of what I produce.   My goal is to write a general article that contains… 1) the basics of the topic, 2) the questions that people are asking, 3) what they should know that they are not asking, 4) misconceptions that are out there, 5) a few surprises that most people don’t know about.

3. The actual "writing" is done in the HemingwayApp, which helps me keep sentences simple and spelling/grammar correct.  Writing might take one to three days, and when I get close to finishing I leave the article to work on another motivation.  Then, days, weeks, months later, I return to the article to improve it, add new ideas, new photos, etc. and bring it to completion. The interruption allows me to consider the article with a fresh mind.  At this point the article often goes to a professional editor who helps with clarity and solves any language and punctuation problems.

4. Then the article is placed on a webpage.  Lay-out is important to be sure that the photos are placed in relevant locations and ads are placed where they will be seen and engaged.  After that I read the article one final time and make adjustments to the text and image captions, so that they work well with one another.\

CONTENT DISTRIBUTION INTEGRATION and ONSITE PROMOTION

I don't distribute my content to other websites.  It is too hard to produce to give away.  So, I make sure that it is carefully integrated into my own website where it will be seen by lots of visitors.   This starts by placing an attractive image and link to the article on the homepage.  Then on its relevant category pages in an obvious position.  It will be moved in the future and placed on the page according to its click-earning ability.   It is also added (according to relevance) to "related content" boxes, "suggested reading" lists that appear on every page of the website.

When an article is highly related to another on the site I will place small ads for it within the body of the related article.  I also have lots of hypertext links on my site - similar to Wikipedia, and most new articles have dozens of those links built to them.  I am lucky that my visitors like my content and promote it for me.  That allows me to get right back to work on the next article.

RECEIVING DISTRIBUTED CONTENT

I receive lots of solicitations from people who want to contribute an article to my website.  Guest authors have contributed about 15% of them.  Most people who contact me write… “Hey Egol, I really like your website and could write a few articles for you.  Are you interested?  I can write about any topic.”

They don’t identify their expertise, they don’t say what qualifies them to write for my industry, they don’t show me relevant samples of their work.  After following up on them for a few years I learned they were a  waste of time.  If I listen to them for a minute on the phone or read the first paragraph of an article proposal, I can tell that they don’t have the language of the industry.  Now, I delete these offers.

I am not a noob in the industry, but there are a lot of topics that I refuse to write about because I don’t know enough about them.  The people who have contributed guest articles usually contact me saying…. “I don’t see anything on your site about Brass Widgets.  I have been researching/teaching/building/writing about them for the past X years and would be glad to write an article or two that explains this/that/etc.  Here’s a couple photos of my recent work”.

This person has photos, I can find info about him online, if we talk by phone or exchange a couple emails before I agree to consider an article I can tell that he isn’t a noob.  I then send a message that explains what I would like to see in their article and ask if they are still interested.

All of the articles that I have received this way have been great.  They are written by experienced people who have a “message to get out” and not by people who are trying to make a quick score.  I usually pay them and send a gift when the article is published.

Thanks for sharing, Peter.

I'd like to see this info too!

My reply is....

When we made a couple of pages that had text revealed with a click, those pages were really really big pages, with about 5000 words total.  We just though that it would be easy for the visitor to make a short easy menu with the answers opening with a click.  It was an experiment that I had no intentions of doing other places, because I believe that text behind a click is not seen by lots of people.

So, we tried it.  Long tail traffic that was really valuable disappeared.

So, now, I put all of my text out in the open where everyone can immediately see it.

If I write text (and I write lots of it), I want it to be out there where everybody can see it.  I want them to scroll down the page, see every bit of it, whistle and say "holy smoke".

We publish all of this information on product pages.   Many of our product pages have a short product description and a short article below explaining how to select, how to use, common maintenance.   We often have a video down there.  These pages rank well in the SERPs because they have generous amounts of unique, informative text, that might hold visitors.  All of this info might help some customers to buy the product.  At the same time it might discourage some customers who might have returned the product because they didn't have full information.

Yep, content that is opened with a click does not pull long tail traffic.  It has been working that way for at least two years.

We had pages and thought that putting some details behind a click would improve the look of the pages.  Yep, it did, then the traffic flow slowly dried up.   Put that content back into the open and the traffic very slowly grew back.