As you may know, outside of my regular work I also have a hobby website about coffee. It’s called CoffeeDetective.com.

This is a site I started 7 years ago, and I’m still adding to it and improving it today. How come? Because I’m a huge coffee lover and enjoy writing about it and helping people brew a better cup of gourmet coffee at home.

Another reason to enjoy writing my site is that it has become a second source of income for me and my family. Best of all, it’s pretty much passive income, through ads and affiliate partnerships. I don’t have to sell or ship anything. I just have to keep writing and adding great content to the site, which I enjoy doing.

Anyway, a few years after starting the site I decided to share what I had learned with other people by writing a program which explains, step by step, how to write your own money-making website.

Over a thousand people have now taken the program, and hundreds of new websites have been published. And some of those sites are now coming close to or even exceeding the income I make from my coffee site.

But as I walk people through the training process, a lot of people struggle with step one, which is to choose a topic for your website. A few people know right away, but a lot of people seem to struggle, trying to find a subject they will really enjoy writing about, and in a way that separates their sites from the crowd online.

But here’s the thing…when they finally find the topic they want, it was almost always right in front of their nose from the beginning. It was something already in their head…an existing interest about which they were already knowledgeable, to some degree.

In other words, your own topic for a money-making website is already there, inside your mind right now.

My own money-making website about gourmet coffee.

It’s probably a subject you already write about and share through social media. Or something you talk about with friends and neighbors. Or something you DO after work and at weekends.

I have also had people say to me that their day is totally filled with work and family, and that they don’t have time for hobbies or other interests. Well, one of our program members was in a similar position, having recently given birth to twins. So she wrote her website about raising twins.

The point is, you are probably sharing your knowledge and interests right now, with online friends and followers, not to mention family and friends.

Building a money-making website allows you to share all that passion in one place…your own website. This is a site you will own and keep adding to for many years to come. It will be a journal of your growing body of knowledge, and a chronicle of conversations you have with your readers.

And, of course, it will become a source of passive income, so you’ll earn money from what you love to write about.

If this sounds interesting to you, check out my program, How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites.

You can access the program right away, and then join my series of 7 weekly live training webinars beginning on June 18th.

I do the live training only two or three times a year, so if you want to kick-start your own website, get the program now, so you have time to go through it before the live training begins.

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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If you write web sites, for clients or for yourself, you probably know about the importance of linking.

Attracting inbound links from other websites is a great way to attract new visitors, and also sends a strong message to Google that your content is of high quality. (If your content was of low quality, other people wouldn’t bother linking to it.)

However, paying attention to links is not just about maximizing the number of quality inbound links from other sites. You should also pay attention to internal linking, within your own website.

Why does internal linking matter? A couple of big reasons.

- It helps your readers find related content on your website. Instead of having to search through your navigation system to find other pages they might be interested in, they can find the links right there within the body of the page, or listed at the end.

- These links also help Google make sense of your website. They let Google know which pages are related, and also the relative importance of pages on your website. Lots of inbound links pointing to a particular page suggest it’s an important page.

This means your pattern of internal links has to be considered and deliberate.

Instead of creating random internal links within your website, you should think about it and create a pattern of links that are helpful to your clients, and send the right signals to Google.

For your readers, you formulate a plan - and help them move forward within your site - by asking yourself the question, “If someone has just read this page, what else might they be interested in reading?”

Let me give you an example from one of my own sites and areas of interest: coffee.

On each of my individual coffee review pages, on which I review a particular coffee or blend, I add a link to my main coffee reviews listing page. That makes sense. If someone has read one review it figures that they might be interested in others.

Also, if a page is about a particular coffee from Costa Rica, I might also link to other reviews I have written of different coffees from Costa Rica. That also makes sense.

At the same time, I am letting Google know that all these review pages are related, and also…because I always link back to it…that my main review listings page is a very important page on the site and that they should recognize it as such.

I do the same if I am reviewing a particular coffee maker. Within each I will link to my main page on coffee makers. I’ll also link to pages that feature similar coffee makers, or other models made by the same manufacturer.

A few words about anchor text.

What’s anchor text? It’s the term used to describe the word or phrase that you hyperlink. Also referred to, sometimes, as linking text. For example, if I were to link from this post to my About page on this site, the anchor text might be, “about Nick Usborne”.

And if I were to link to the page on my coffee site about manual coffee mills, I would turn the phrase “manual coffee mills” into the hyperlink.

It’s from these hyperlinks that Google can figure out the relationship between pages.

However…I also make a practice of not always matching the hyperlinked phrase to the exact keyword I have optimized for on the destination page. Mostly I do, but not always.

So if my page about manual coffee mills has the phrase “manual coffee mills” in its title and headline, I might sometimes link to it from another, related page with the phrase, “hand coffee grinder”. Same thing, but a different term. In other words, I mix it up and keep it natural.

And that’s the key…create a linking framework for your site, but keep it natural.

If you are not doing so already, you should figure out a plan and create a framework of internal links within your site that helps your readers find the information they want, and helps Google figure out which pages are related, and which pages are more important than others.

However, as you do this, keep it natural. Do it primarily for your readers. Don’t do it with the mindset that this is a cunning way to get more traffic from Google.

Finally, it is absolutely in your interest to do this for your readers. Not only are you helping them find more of the information they want by linking to related pages, but you are also keeping them on your site for longer.

And Google will give you brownie points for that too.

Create that plan or framework now

If you haven’t been paying attention to internal linking, it’s time to get started.

Internal linking is an essential part of a site’s overall architecture and usability. It helps people find the stuff they want.

And if you do it right, it will result in getting more traffic from Google.

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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As a small company or a freelancer it can be tough to build a brand from the ground up.

Yes, you can create a logo and a tagline within just a few days. But a brand is a lot more than simply a cool logo and a snappy tagline.

And, no, you can’t build a brand within just a few days, a few weeks or a few months even.

Your brand will grow and develop through a combination of your own efforts, and the ways in which your customers see and respond to you. You brand is as much a function of customer reaction as it is a creation of your own making.

For example, if you sell a great product, but your customer service is horrible, that horrible customer service will become part of your brand.

You take the first step in creating your brand through design and writing. After that, once it’s out there in the wild, your brand will evolve. It will get some support from some customers, and take some hits from others. Your job is to both develop your brand, and to protect it.

When it comes to developing a brand, a lot of freelancers and small businesses think in terms of addition. They add more content, they express their brand through new channels, and across different media.

For example, one might add a YouTube channel, start pushing out images with Instagram, or write a ton of new posts that support the brand and its underlying message and promise.

But what most marketers don’t think about is supporting and building their brand by the process of subtraction.

When you add new information to grow a brand, you are taking a guess. You are guessing and hoping that the additions you make will have a positive impact. But you don’t know for sure because, like I said, your brand is in large part influenced by customer responses. And you don’t know how your customers will respond. That’s in the future, and unknown.

But when you subtract information to support your brand you can be much more certain about what you are doing, because you are dealing with the present, which you know, not the future, which you don’t know.

To start with, you might want to do an audit of all your existing content and identify pages and other content that doesn’t support your brand as clearly as it should, is attracting negative comments, or simply isn’t being read.

When you eliminate content that is off-message, confusing, or simply not supporting your brand and its promise, the remaining content becomes stronger and your brand becomes clearer.

Few people strengthen their brand by subtraction because it feels counterintuitive. People feel that building something has to happen through a process of creation, not elimination.

But this isn’t true.

When asked how he could carve a sculpture as remarkable as “David” out of stone, Michelangelo is reported to have said, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”

You can build and protect your brand in the same way.

Just remove everything that isn’t your brand.

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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Wouldn’t it be nice if there was just one easy way to improve every single page of copy you wrote, regardless of the product or service you were trying to sell?

It turns out there is.

It works for homepages and sales pages. It also works for emails and newsletters. Product pages. Shopping carts. White Papers. Radio. TV. Direct mail. Whatever.

It works whether you are selling weight-loss products or industrial fasteners. It works whether you are selling vacations or dental services.

Best of all, it’s incredibly easy to include this “secret” in everything you write.

I’m not saying this little trick is all you need to know about copywriting. Nor am I saying its use will cure bad copy.

But it will help.

Here it is...

Tell your readers, listeners or viewers it’s easy.

The easy way to whiten your teeth. The easy way to manage a huge sales force. The easy way to move your website to WordPress. The easy way to pick up more clients. The easy way to retire overseas. The easy way to build a garden pond. The easy way to find your true soul mate! The easy way to ship your products overseas. Ordering is as easy as 1,2,3!

We are all of us drawn to easy answers. It doesn’t matter whether you are a teenager trying to lose weight or a CEO trying to choose a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

In other words, the desire for things to be easy is universal.

Of course, when you step back from the keyboard and think about this, our susceptibility to the promise of things being easy is a little discouraging. Because in real life we know only too well that to achieve anything worthwhile, the journey is almost never easy.

But…however smart, thoughtful and realistic about life we might be, we are still drawn to messages that tell us something is going to be easy. We just can’t help ourselves. Over the course of a year we probably make tons of bad decisions, swayed by this simple promise.

This odd loop of wiring in our brains is something every copywriter needs to understand.

Regardless of what you are writing, find some way to include the promise that you are offering an easy way forward.

No, this doesn’t mean you should lie through your teeth. It means looking carefully at the product or service and finding some aspect of it that will allow you to make the promise.

It’s not so hard.

After all, if you are reading this, there must have been something about the headline that caught your attention. Right?

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

Read my ebook, Writing Kick-Ass Website Sales Copy

Take my program for online copywriters, Copywriting 2.0

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Social media marketing is, thankfully, coming out of its trendy phase and moving into its business phase.

For those of us who have been online for a while, the trendiness of social media has been somewhat irritating. The web was social before the web even existed. In other words, the Internet was social before the first web browsers appeared. Back then we connected with one another through Listservs and the like. It was 100% social.

Services like MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook didn’t invent social media. They simply made it more popular and improved its functionality.

One of the outcomes of the trendy phase of social media is that well over 90% of North American companies now have a presence on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Those companies jumped in because they felt pressured to be on those sites. If that’s where their customers and prospect were spending their time, they needed to be there too.

But most of them jumped in without any kind of strategy. And they didn’t bother integrating social media with their other online marketing activities.

Hence the next step forward, which is to integrate social media with a company’s online marketing activities.

There is a huge opportunity here for online writers and copywriters.

The geeks have taken care of the technology side of social media. The gurus have done the big sales job and moved companies into social media. And now it’s down to savvy online writers and copywriters to integrate social media.

Here’s what I mean by integration…

Most companies have online marketing calendars. They have a schedule and know on which dates they are going to be promoting their various products and services. Smart companies have an integrated content calendar that tells them which kinds of content they are going to be publishing in support of their marketing campaigns.

But very few companies have taken the next step…which is to integrate a social media calendar, in support of both their content and their marketing campaigns.

There is a big gap here.

And every gap represents an opportunity.

Here are 3 examples of ways in which online writers and copywriters can profit from the coming integration of social media.

1. If you are an online copywriter, working on some sales pages, you can expand the scope of your work simply by asking, “Shouldn’t we be planning some activity on social media to drive traffic to these new pages?” The answer is yes, you should. And this gives you the opportunity to not only write the sales pages, but also all the social media entries that can be used to support them.

2. If you are an online content writer, creating new site pages, blog posts, product reviews etc, simply ask, “Would you like me to optimize this content for social media? And would you like me to write some social media entries to support this new content?”

3. Or, if you want to help more broadly with your clients’ social media marketing, you can ask, “Would you like some help in integrating your social media with your content and marketing calendars?”

This is an easy opportunity. Most companies already have their social media pages up there. What they are missing is someone who can help them work up a social media calendar that is integrated with their content calendar and marketing calendar.

And the people best positioned to help them do this are the online writers and copywriters who are already writing their content and sales pages.

I smell opportunity here, and hope you do too.

NOTE: I have created a social media training program specifically for freelance writers and copywriters. It is published by AWAI, and you can find their information and sales page on the program here…

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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If you go back 15 years, when I started writing online, the rock stars of pretty much every website were the coders and the designers.

Writers? Not so much. Copywriters? Not at all.

Back then it was all about the technology and the look. I went to startup meetings where the coders and designers had been working on the site for weeks, or maybe months, and then came to me, almost as an afterthought, and asked me to add some words.

Sounds crazy, but it’s true.

And as you may recall, the internet crash of 2001 was caused in large part by hugely inflated values being attached to online businesses that really weren’t businesses at all. In other words, they didn’t make money. They just worked reasonable well, and looked good.

Also, when I was speaking at events back then, my message was that the web was actually all about the words. And that those words couldn’t just be cut and pasted from print or other media.

I didn’t always face a very receptive audience with that message. Particularly when I stood up in front of 500 designers and told them that their job was to showcase my words.

Fun times.

But after 2001, when a new breed of business people came to the web, there was a growing awareness that online companies needed to make money. All of a sudden business owners began to pay more attention to things like clickthrough, conversation rates, A/B split testing…and revenues.

And when you think in those terms you come face to face with the fact that you can’t achieve good results in these areas just with technology and design.

You need words.

In short, it has taken commerce online almost 20 years to figure out what the direct response industry had known for about 100 years…If you want results, you have to use great copy.

That’s right, when it comes to conversion rates and revenues, the true rock stars of the web are now the copywriters.

I’m not saying that the technology and design are not important. They are. But the copy is even more important. In my work with optimizing site pages, the biggest increases in performance usually come about as a result of simplifying the design and improving the copy.

The technology? Well, that’s pretty much a commodity now. For most sites you don’t need to write pages and pages of custom code. You just grab what you need off the shelf, or use an available content management system.

And if you think that every website is now well served by professional copywriters, you would be mistaken. Certainly there are some smart companies that figured this out early, and have quality copywriters in-house, or are already outsourcing.

But the majority of companies still haven’t made the transition from words as “filler” to words as sales tools.

And that’s where your opportunity now lies.

It’s a huge opportunity because you can approach companies with a pretty simple message:

“It’s the words that make the sale! If you would like to see your website convert more visitors into buyers, I can help you. I’m a professional online copywriter.”

That’s a message every online marketer wants to hear. They all have website, but few of them know how to convert visitors into cash.

And that’s what you can do for them.

NOTE: If you have yet to receive any professional-grade training in the craft of online copywriting, find out more about my program, Copywriting 2.0. Copywriting 2.0 is published by AWAI, and you can find their information and sales page for the program here…

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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Way back when I wrote copy offline, I was pretty much a one-trick pony.

I wrote direct mail. That was my thing. I have never written a radio spot. I have never written a TV commercial.

Back then, it was fine to focus on a single copywriting skill, because there was no connection between what I wrote for a client as a direct response writer, and what their agency copywriter wrote for TV.

Sure, we all worked to the same brief, keeping within the same campaign idea.

But the key point to understand is that the quality of my direct mail piece didn’t depend on my knowing anything about writing for TV, radio or any other medium. Why? Because each medium was separate from the other.

All that changed with the arrival of the web.

Online, everything is connected. (Think hyperlink.) Every page on a website is connected to other pages. Emails and e-newsletters are linked to site pages. Site pages are linked to social media sites. Social media tweets, updates and posts are linked back to websites.

This is a game changer for copywriters.

As online copywriters we can no longer do our best work in one area without at least a clear understanding of the bigger picture, and how everything is connected.

For example, if I were asked to write an online sales page for a company, I would do well to think about more than just the page itself. I would certainly ask about how the company planned to drive traffic to this page.

Just through internal links on the site itself? Or by email? Or through PPC ads? Or through social media? Or through all of these channels, and maybe more?

To put it another way, to write a great sales page I need to know my audience. And part of the challenge of knowing my audience is to understand where they are coming from.

Are these warm and trusting prospects from an in-house email list? Are they fans coming in through social media? Are they complete strangers who have come in through PPC ads? And so on.

Once I ask my client these questions we are going to get into a conversation about email, social media and PPC.

Or, just as likely, the conversation will be initiated by the client as part of the briefing.

It’s at this point that my client will learn whether I can hold an intelligent conversation not only about sales pages, but also about email marketing, social media and PPC.

If I can’t, he or she will experience a moment of disappointment, and the perception of my value in his or her mind will fall.

Not good.

If I can, the opposite occurs. The perception of my value rises. Suddenly I’m not just a copywriter for hire, but am also acting like a consultant, exploring the larger marketing picture.

This is why it makes sense for online copywriters to understand all aspects of writing for the web, through multiple channels. No, you don’t have to master ever channel, but you do need to know enough to hold an intelligent conversation with your client, and to do your work with a clear understanding of how it fits in with everything else.

The bigger your toolbox, the greater the opportunity.

Several years ago I was approached by a prospective client and asked to rewrite their homepage. This was a fair sized company in the insurance industry. Certainly I was qualified to do what they asked. But I wanted to know more. I asked about the major category pages one level down from the homepage. Were they going to be rewritten too? If not, then it would limit the changes I could make to the homepage.(Remember, everything is connected.)

We talked about that, and in the end decided I should rework the homepage and those second level pages.

Then I asked about all the other pages on the site. If I were to significantly adjust the tone and approach of the top level pages, this would have implications for many other pages.

No, I didn’t get to write all those pages as well. Nor did I want to. But I did get paid to fly in and talk to their in-house web team about what I was trying to do with the new pages, so they could adjust the lower level pages accordingly.

On another occasion I was asked to write a landing page. After talking about it for a while I learned they were going to drive traffic to the page through an email campaign. I suggested that I write those emails as well. Having the same person write the emails and the landing page would ensure a clean and powerful transition from email to web page.

I took the same approach with every client, and significantly increased my earnings as a result. But I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t have a firm grasp on multiple aspects of writing for the web.

If, like in my offline days, I had been a one-trick pony, and focused just on sales page, or just on homepages, or just on email, I would have limited my opportunities and would also have diminished my value in the eyes of my clients.

Where can you get professional grade training in multiple areas of online copywriting?

This is where we are going to transition gently into a soft sales pitch.

After working with corporate clients online for about 10 years, and after training many of their in-house teams in online copywriting across different channels, I decided to create a program based on everything I have learned and taught.

That program is called Copywriting 2.0.

As far as I know it is the only professional-grade training program that is focused on teaching copywriters multiple aspects of writing for the web. Once you have worked through hundreds of pages of printed materials, watched the 16 embedded videos and sat through numerous bonus webinar presentations, you’ll have online copywriting skills that are both broad and deep.

Like I said…if you want to maximize your value and your earnings, you want to approach your clients with a big, fat toolbox, stuffed with online copywriting skills.

Copywriting 2.0 is published by AWAI, and you can find their information and sales page for the program here…

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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When the topic of web content comes up, whether I am talking with a solopreneur or someone at a large company, I ask a simple question: “What is its purpose?”

Right now everyone seems to be focusing on the quality of content. I get that. Quality content is good for your readers, and good for increasingly picky search engines.

In particular, quality content builds reputation and trust.

However, we still need to come back to the question of purpose.

Let’s look at this at the page level and at the strategic level.

What is the purpose of that individual page?

Yes, you want to wow and impress your readers. You want to entertain, surprise or educate them. No cut and paste. No boring stuff. Each page of content you publish needs to add to your reputation.

But…what do you want people to do AFTER reading that high-quality page? Do they nod, smile and leave? If that happens, you just failed. Your wonderful page of content had no purpose.

Yes, I’m being a tad harsh. A quality page with no specific purpose may still increase levels of trust, or have some other fairly intangible benefit.

But why not make it work a little harder? A great piece of editorial content can still work to pre-sell one of your products or services. Or link to one of your products or services. Or prepare the ground for an upcoming launch or promotion.

To return to being harsh for a moment, if you spent years creating wonderful content, and attracted a regular readership of 100,000 people…but none of them ever spend a penny on any of your products or services…what was the point?

Or, to put it another way, what’s the point of creating a wonderful page of content that attracts 10,000 visitors in a week if none of those visitors buy anything, sign up for anything or even return to your site?

Nice content. No purpose.

Instilling purpose in your content at a strategic level

If you have a content calendar it should run alongside your marketing calendar, which should run alongside your business growth calendar. This doesn’t mean that your content should become promotional in any way. It simply means that your content is planned, written and published in a way that supports your overall marketing and business plans.

If you are launching something new in September, you can fill your August calendar with content that prepares your readers for that launch. Get them interested. Get them into a “gotta-have-that” state of mind – before they even know what “that” is.

In every business, regardless of its size, all marketing needs to point in the same direction. And yes, content is marketing.

Sounds obvious, right?

All this my appear self-evident. And in a way, it is. But I would venture that the majority of companies and solopreneurs online create content without it being part of a larger plan and calendar.

Very often, content is created simply because SEO experts, social media experts and content creation experts can’t shut up about the value of quality content.

Quality content is good. But it’s useless if it doesn’t move your readers one step closer to sending you some money.

Given the choice between quality content that doesn’t translate into revenue, and rubbish content that has people clicking through to my product, service and sign-up pages, I’ll go for the rubbish content every day.

Fortunately, well-planned quality content can also directly support revenue growth. So you can have the best of both worlds.

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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First let me explain what Go Away Green means. It’s the color Disney uses in its theme parks for any object or building they don’t want people to look at.

Garbage bins, fences, administrative buildings…stuff like that. They want your eyes focused on the rides, stores and scenery, not on the infrastructure.

The idea of Go Away Green is that it’s such a boring and unattractive color, your eyes just pass over it until they latch on to something more interesting.

The concept of Go Away Green is important to grasp when creating anything that is a combination of attraction + structure.

This certainly applies to web design and yes, also to writing and copywriting.

The “attraction” in what you write is the story you tell, the core of your message and the supporting information that surrounds it.

The “structure” of your writing represents all the words and sentences you use to set up the opening, create transitions throughout and wrap things up at the end.

Every piece of writing requires some structure to hold it together. That’s OK. But when a page of writing includes too much structure or scaffolding, then you have a problem.

To get an idea of what I mean, think back to the last post or article you read where you found yourself skipping over a few lines. Or you found your mind wandering as you tried to stay focused. Or where you felt you had come to the end of the piece, but there were still ten more lines to go. Or it felt like the writer was trying to lead you through the text like a dog on a leash – “Think this now, and think this now.”

That’s writing in Go Away Green. Too much structure in proportion to the content. The readers’ eyes and attention are likely to slide away.

In a theme park you are there for the day. The Go Away Green simply moves your attention over to the next attraction. On a web page, you don’t have the same kind of hold on your readers. They are not there for the day. Your hold on their attention is tenuous to say the least. So if they hit too large a patch of Go Away Green in your writing they are likely to do just that…go away.

The internal structure of a piece of writing should be invisible, or as close as you can get. Cut away as much of the structure of the writing as possible.

If you find this hard, and find yourself over-explaining in the opening or writing too many transitions from one point to the next, it may be that you are trying to cover too many topics within a single article or post.

Try sticking to one topic per page of content. That’s any easy way to minimize the need for structure.

Keep it simple, and stay away from green.

Related ebooks I have written about writing for the web:

Popcorn Content - the craft of writing short-form content for social media

Killer Headlines for Web Content

101 Web Content Ideas, Tips and Resources

Writing Kick-Ass Sales Copy...

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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Like many people, I have spent the last couple of years furiously trying to figure out what Google is up to.

Over that period, some of my websites have seen an increase in search engine traffic while others have seen a decline. And no, I haven’t always been able to figure out exactly why each increase or decrease has taken place.

It used to be relatively easy to figure out what Google was looking for. Not any more.

The Panda and Penguin updates in particular had a huge impact on people who thought they knew what Google wanted.

Yes, many sites that deserved to be impacted saw their listings drop off page one.

But there were many false-positives too. People who had worked hard to play by Google’s rules suddenly saw their traffic drop significantly. It was toughest of all on those people who really couldn’t see where they might have gone wrong.

Some obvious fixes, like increasing the quality of the content on the site, attracting more high-quality inbound links, and making sure you didn’t over-optimize your pages didn’t always do the trick. Then there were other issues to consider, like the Venice update, the impact of Google+ and the ongoing introduction of Google Author Rank.

Confusing stuff for all but the most technical SEO experts.

And, if you did see some recovery after spending dozens or even hundreds of hours improving your site, your anxiety level remained high because of a nasty little question in your mind.

“What might Google do next? What if I invest all this time on improving my site today, but then get hammered by a whole different update in 3 months?”

Fair question.

Here is what I’m doing… And, let me qualify all this by saying that while I have a firm grasp of SEO, it’s not my core expertise.

First of all, I pay close attention to all the updates and changes coming from Google, and I make changes as and when I can. In other words, I don’t ignore what’s happening out there. But nor do I stress about it too much.

And I reduce my stress levels most of all by no longer freaking out over getting my top pages listed on page one of the Google search results.

That may sound odd. After all, if you have optimized your home page and second level pages for some strong keywords, why wouldn’t you want them listed on page one? Well, you would, of course.

But if those pages are no longer appearing on page one, and you are in a competitive subject area – which most of us are – then these are the keywords and pages that will stress you the most.

While Panda was going through its various revisions, I watched some of my most important pages disappear, appear and then disappear again from page one. Meanwhile, I would see totally awful sites and pages appearing in the spots that had previously been mine.

When you can’t quite figure out what’s going on, or why, and horrible pages are appearing in the number one, two and three positions, it’s time to step back, stop chewing your fingernails and regroup.

As soon as I realized I no longer knew how to get those site pages listed on page one, and no longer understood why crappy pages stuffed full of ads seemed to be doing so well, I stopped struggling. If I know how to fix something I’ll fix it. If I don’t, then tinkering around without a clue as to what might work is a waste of time and a source of stress.

Now what I do is make sure my most important pages are of high quality, well optimized, with strong inbound links, and not breaking any rules…and then leave them be.

Next, I use the time saved to create more long-tail pages. In other words, pages which are of interest to people, albeit fewer people, and which are a great deal less competitive.

For example, in the world of coffee information websites, of which I have one, the term “how to make coffee” is hugely competitive. I have a page optimized for that term, and it used to float around within the first 5 results on Google. Not anymore. And I have stopped stressing over that. However, long-tail terms like “organic coffee pods” are less competitive, so I can still rank highly for them.

Whatever Google has been up to, it seems that it is still pretty easy to get a long-tail page listed on the first page of search results. And then, of course, I add links to those pages which move people forward to my most important pages.

By creating more and more long-tail pages which do well in the search results, I have found that I can more than make up for when some of my more important and competitive pages fall off page one.

Best of all, I can still keep building search engine traffic to my site without all the stress that comes from fighting a battle in which it’s hard to figure out the rules.

For me, stress-free SEO now comes from creating as many long-tail content pages as I can.

Related resource:

101 Web Content Ideas, Tips and Resources...

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…