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!!)
June 16th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Interesting method and I am looking forward to updates on how it works.
To be honest I do not understand what you are doing, or how the html template works.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Agreed, it’s still a bit of a blur as to what you’re doing. A bit more technical detail would be a great help. Rgds Vince
June 16th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Uurgh.. put down the cornflakes.. that’s my breakfast coming back up again – come on Kirsty – you’ve got a wonderful womens lingerie site you could use for these examples!!
@Purple – we’re working on a feature that will allow you to enter custom descriptions into ECU, so you won’t need to know anything technical!
June 16th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I’m doing this exact same thing with a client of mine (who also runs a price comparison site) but taking it a few stages further. Thankfully they’ve got the technical skills I lack to make it all happen
June 16th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Now I understand what you mean about adding unique content to a feed! Thank you!!
Is the bulk posting script something that you can or would make available for your readers?
June 16th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Interesting idea, will be great to see if it works well for you? Would be interesting to know if removing the merc description and just having your own is better even though it means less text?
BTW – one thing I noticed in your examples Kirsty are that the RRP prices and the Now prices are the same, not sure it matters but thought i’d mention it.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
thanks for all the great info…could you share the contact of the programmer ?
June 16th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
“ranking for many of my target terms with their sites …. The result is they rank well for a huge range of search terms and enjoy a beautiful economy of scale within their business”
Regarding working smarter not harder, is “improved sort-of-blogging” actually going to help in competing with that? (That’s not a rhetorical question – I don’t know).
Maybe it’s time to get a programmer on your team Kirsty. There must be loads in Aus.
Myself I wouldn’t be able to sustain that volume of creative underpants description writing anyway, but then I’m a bit ADD (and, thank god, I can write code).
- m
June 16th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I have wondered about doing something like this, thanks
ps some of your links on your lingerie brands site don’t work, its saying something like unexpected ] in links.php, its been like that for about a week.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
@RobH – arrgghh! Thanks for the heads up. Fixed that now.
@matt – I’m not really intending to compete with large price comparison engines with this method I was only talking about them to show where I got the inspiration from and what I’d like to move towards. Theres a huge amount involved in what these guys create. I just wanted to see if I could improve on current productivity using a flavour of feed / unique content fusion.
@Razvan – ‘fraid not, it was almost a year ago.
@Richard – I’m nice but I’m not THAT nice!
@Vince – I absolutely won’t be sharing the technical details just the same as anyone else who has worked on something new for several weeks, lol.
@Russ – yeah I’m aware of that… still trying to work out what to do with it going forward!
June 17th, 2009 at 6:33 am
It’ll be interesting to see if google hit you for duplicate content..?? (how do their bots work anyway, if only we knew..)
I guess it’ll take a month or so before it shows on any stats, but this is a great idea..and I guess it also allows you to tie in nicely with the merc site once the user clicks the link…
Will you post in a couple of weeks to say whether this new method has worked??
June 17th, 2009 at 7:14 am
Hey Mark, yes I will post an update. It’ll probably be in about 8 weeks time which is the usual amount of time it’ll take Google to get upset about things.
That said, I can’t really see any reason why pages with content like that would be slapped. Not taking anything for granted mind you, but I do feel that a page doesn’t have to be 100% unique to be considered useful content.
My own feeling is that the Google bots make their calls based on a percentage. Get the percentage of dupe content wrong and you’ll soon know all about it!
I’ll let you know!
June 17th, 2009 at 8:16 am
In the longer term, do you think G will be able to differentiate between blogs that are really blogs (eg, like this, optimised for subsribers) and “blogs” that are really product sites being updated (and are optimised to SEO)? (I guess Feedburner will help them there, product style blogs (”plogs”?
) probably have a much lower subscriber rate than blogs.
On the other hand, while should they? OK so noone is writing real blogs about (for instance) underwear, but provided the site does what it says on the can, and is useful to visitors doing a product search, why should it matter?
June 17th, 2009 at 8:30 am
As always Matt it’s very hard to tell. I doubt they will unless sites of that nature become a problem for their index quality. However, a lot of businesses use blog based solutions for sites that appear static because of the powerful content management system and cheap web design option it provides.
Any targeting of “plogs” (love it!) would be more likely to be looking at busting people doing churn and burn spam type operations, I can’t really see Google having a reason to target them because, as you say, they are doing what they say they will!
June 17th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Lammo: That sounds amazing
any dates on that?
Kirsty: I know how you feel, 90% of my keywords are clouded by spammy sites like nextag.co.uk that have about 6 million backlinks and therefore rank for anything. Like you said it’s economies of scale and when you have a few million products ranking on page 1 life must be good lol
September 29th, 2009 at 9:24 am
[...] Did Blogging Smarter Work? Well… Kinda!! General Add comments A while back I made a post about a new technique I was using to bulk post shop-like pages to my Mens Underwear Site. You can refresh your memories here. [...]
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:33 am
Just keep the copied content small, even better to rewrite some parts, at least a few crucial words. I had bad experience with one of my sites by doing exactly the same way and have lost SE positions after some months in Google.