Exclusive Interview With Neil Shearing
Of ScamFreeZone.com

Part 2 of 5

LA - One question I wrote was how to blog, and you've touched on that. I guess questions people may have are: What topics? What length of articles? How often to post? For what length of time to post?

NS - Well, that's actually a really good question because you don't want to make a rod for your own back. You don't want to start publishing say 3 blog posts per day and then realize that you can't keep up that momentum and drop down to 2 per day then 1 per day then 2 per week and 1 per month. Googlebot will just stop coming to your site unless you have some really, really good links, because it will say well there's not going to be any fresh content.

So, what you want to do is be consistent and do say one blog post per day, or maybe just one per week. As long as you're consistent with your publishing schedule and you can keep that going then Googlebot will frequently come back to your blog looking for the next piece of content and the next piece of content and the next piece of content...

So it's not as important as to the exact publishing schedule whether you should post 2 per day or 3 per year, it's more important I think to be consistent in what you do.

I don't think the size of your blog post actually matters that much, I think it's more important that it's original content and that it's well-written and that other people find it valuable, because if other people find it valuable then they may use trackbacks or they may mention it and just link to your blog or they'll be other ways, they may bookmark it, they may use some social bookmarking tools to share it with their friends.

So it just needs to be useful, original content, not something that's been scraped from anywhere else - not something that is duplicate content elsewhere on the web because it's just not going to provide any extra value. Google wants to rank sites highly that are of use to the people that are searching Google, so if you give them what they want you will rank highly in the search engines.

And I think it is important that you write well. You can mix up the blog posts, you can have long articles with lots of links and well-researched articles, and then throw in a couple of light hearted ones that are short, because you don't know what people will prefer; you don't know what people will look for, what they will bookmark or share with their friends, so it's good to have a mixture.

And there's no rule that it has to be over 50 words or it has to be over 300 words or it has to be less than 10,000 words. Like I said, as long as it's of high quality and it's original then that's much more important than the size of the article or mentioning the keywords 12 times per blog post and anything like that.

LA - That's actually one question I was going to ask. Let's take your example of weight loss coconut oil and this is purely ...

NS - (Laughter) I don't know anything about that by the way.

LA - And this is purely a guess on my part, but let's say if you use the Google AdWords tool or even a tool like Wordtracker, and let's say you end up with 2,000 keyword combinations related to that. Would you say that over time you take each of those keyword combinations and create an article around them or really just use those as hints for what you're going to write about, and maybe over time just happen to use the keywords?

NS - I wouldn't create an article around each individual keyword because the main rule to remember - the main way to succeed - is to create high quality articles and then go after getting links into those articles, quality links into those articles. Because it's the links that give your article the authority in Google's eyes and then if anyone comes through and spiders your content or rips off your content or scrapes your content, they will put it on their pages but their pages won't outrank yours because yours have the links.

It's important to realize that Google does not care who created any piece of content, what they care is showing the most relevant result containing that content and you need to make sure that's yours.

So if you create 2,000 pieces of content you've created a lot of work for yourself because ideally you would then want to go and get links into each and every piece of content, and getting links is the most difficult part of SEO, not creating the content. So instead of 2,000 pieces of content I would maybe create 20 around not the individual keyword phrases but the overall theme.

So maybe there's weight loss coconut oil, weight loss coconut ... I don't know, I can't think off the top of my head about different phrases around that niche, because I'm not an expert in it, but you could do the research and see how you could group together different phrases.

A good way to think about it is - how would you categorize all those different phrases? Can you break them down into say 10 different categories? If you can, then create an article effectively around each of those categories and mention the keywords that you would put within those categories in the article. Then you've got 10 much bigger, better quality articles that mention all the other keywords and then you only have to build links into 10 different blog posts. That will do much, much better than 2,000 articles each mentioning one keyword phrase that you don't build any links into.

LA - I haven't had to use WordPress extensively, I've used in the past services like Blogger for certain things. But with WordPress you can actually add articles to the system and then set it up so they're published over the next week or two is that right?

NS - Yes you can do that.

LA - So you don't actually have to be at the computer each day - you can have a whole bunch of articles and then program them to be added over time?

NS - Yes.

LA - All right, that's great. Okay. And I'm attacking the questions I've written in no particular order. Maybe for someone who's short of time - what would be your suggestions or opinions about outsourcing, particularly the writing?

NS - It's good if you're time poor and cash rich. Then you have a little bit of money and you'd rather use your money than your time. You can outsource, but outsourcing itself is difficult because a lot of people will actually not write quality articles so you should test who you're going to hire first.

Don't say "I want 200 articles on X" because if they come back with 200 articles that are rubbish or 200 articles that they've sold elsewhere (so they're already duplicate content), you're going to have issues. You'd have to start with a small test and then if the person produces high quality articles and they are original you can give them more articles to do but you also need to keep on top of these people, manage them effectively, make sure they don't fall behind, make sure they don't decide to go on a holiday they didn't tell you about.

There are a lot of pitfalls to outsourcing, it's not a panacea that is an easy thing to do and you just say, "Okay I'd like to do this but I'll just outsource it and then I can be on the beach instead".

You go from actually managing the blog and creating the content yourself - basically doing everything yourself - to having to manage people. You need a graphics guy, you need a content creator and you need someone to do the SEO. You need someone to do this, that and the other. So you go from managing everything yourself to managing other people and it just is a completely different skill set that you need to acquire over time.

It's not easy to start outsourcing tasks. You need to be precise about what you want accomplished, you need to be precise about the time you need the job to take, about the amount it's going to cost. You need to set things like milestones. So are you happy to wait for 200 articles to be written and then have them all given to you at once at the end of the month, or do you want 50 per week for 4 weeks?

There's an awful lot that goes into outsourcing that people just don't consider when they say, "Oh well I'm just going to outsource all this."

It's possible, its definitely possible and it can save you time, but I would say if you're going to start outsourcing then start small and recognize that you're going to face problems and that it gets easier over time like anything else. It's like if you don't know WordPress you start off slowly and get used to it, outsourcing is the same thing.

LA - Right I agree, in my experience the quality level of work you get from outsourcing can differ wildly and the most expensive is not necessarily the best. For example, I found someone through ELance.com maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and I've used him for years now. I've sent a huge amount of work his way because he's very good at what he does. But then I've tried to find writers in the past and sometimes the quality is okay, sometimes it's not so great, sometimes people just disappear on you, so...

NS - Yes exactly.

LA - And often you find people who are very good at what they do and they're less expensive than people who aren't good as them. So price isn't always a measurement necessarily of quality but it does take time to find good people and build a team of people you work with regularly.

NS - And there's also the problem of where they are on the globe as well. If you have an outsourcer who's say in the Philippines, you need to realize that their business day is going to be completely different to yours and you may only be able to chat with them for half an hour a day or something, so that can also be quite tricky.

You may only be able to exchange a couple of emails per day, which makes the whole process more difficult than if the outsourcer was in the same country as you and working the same business hours as you, in which case you can have much more of an exchange of information on any given day than outsourcers who can be from all over the planet.

In fact you can make that work to your advantage. I remember Paul Smithson I think at Xsitepro.com who was telling me how he had a team of coders in India, and a team of coders in, I think Britain, and a team of coders in America maybe, I'm not sure of the actual places. And he was saying how one team of coders would work for 8 hours, pass it on to the next team of coders who'd work on it for 8 hours and then pass it onto the next team of coders when they woke up so he had 24 hours a day covered which I thought was absolute genius myself. But it takes a phenomenal amount of organization and management to be able to pull that off.

LA - And actually with some services I think you have to pay a monthly... well it's almost a retainer, you have to pay 'X' amount per month but what you're basically getting is a project manager who then looks after your team, some companies do offer that as well.

NS - Yeah that's how my Russian coders work.

LA - Oh right.

NS - I've had umpteen different Russian coders over the years but I've only ever had the one project manager. And fortunately he's been excellent and he understands English very well and maybe the coders don't, well I know the coders don't (laughter). No coder seems to understand English... even the English and American ones don't seem to understand instructions in English but they understand PHP I think and that's about it.

But yeah, so my Russian project manager coordinates the actual work at his end with the Russian coders and makes sure the job is done and if I want changes made then I relay them to him and he relays them to the coders. So yeah, I've had that system in place ... outsourced for all my software coding and server maintenance and stuff like that.

LA - Okay. Well what would be your comments about... let's say someone sets up a blog and they've set up Google Analytics on every page so they can keep a close eye on traffic - where it's coming from, what keywords people are searching for and so on.

Can you offer any suggestions for someone looking at exactly what's going on with their site and responding to that in order to make it more popular? How to do more of what they're doing right?

NS - Yeah one of the things I like best about analytics and web stats in general is that they will show you the exact keywords you're getting searches for. So you may have put up a page that is focused on weight loss coconut oil, but you may be getting tons of searches for weight loss coconut oil California or something.

So if you see that in your analytics or in your web logs then that's a good indicator that there's a ton of free traffic out there if you were to build a specific blog post around that phrase and then get some links with the correct anchor text pointing at the phrase. So analytics can be really useful for that.

Google Analytics will show you the bounce rate of your blog, so how many people as soon as they see your blog hit the back button and go back to Google, and that's an important determinant because, like I say, Google really wants to give their visitors, their users, their best, most relevant pages they can and if they're sending visitors to your blog but those visitors are hitting the back button then there's a problem and Google... I don't know if they'll directly penalize you for it, but they won't particularly want to rank your pages at the top if they think it's not giving the visitors the best, most relevant results. So that's something to keep a close eye on.

If that bounce rate gets up high - 60%, 70%, 80% - then you may want to change the layout of the blog, change the theme, add some other things to make it 'sticky'... maybe some videos, things like that.

Also if you do go with Google AdSense then you get a higher proportion of the value of the click if the visitor has been on your page a longer time, and a good way to increase that length of duration is to put on some videos from YouTube, some relevant videos, because people may read your blog posts, watch the video and then click on the AdSense ad and you should earn more per click then if they've spent a longer time on your site.

So yeah, the bounce rate is important, the actual keywords that people have been searching and ended up at your blog is important. I don't think I use Analytics for a lot more than that though, just to work out which pages are getting the lion's share of the traffic and why.

LA - Okay. Something you've mentioned which I think is important we cover in more detail is links, how to get links to your blog. What would be your suggestion for that? Let's say there's a brand new blog... someone listening to this has purchased a domain, they've installed WordPress, they've let's say added 10 articles to the blog and they're adding 1 article a day, so what's the next step?

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