If you’re like me, you have lots of ideas for information products that you’ll eventually create and sell. I continually update lists of potential products, and for the best candidates I create folders and Word documents with ideas for developing and selling the product.
As many of you know, I’ve been a full-time freelance writer since 1994. My most recent information product is Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers: Manage Your Time, Make More Money, and Get More Enjoyment from Life, which I launched in early March.
There’s a good chance I’ll eventually teach workshops where I share my writing productivity techniques. And of course, when I do that I’ll also create a product from the workshop — a workbook and audios or perhaps videos.
So shortly after I launched IPFW, I also set up a site just for the workshops.
#1. I wanted a separate website that can get its own Google juice and draw traffic.
Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers has its own website and sales page, but freelance writing is a very competitive niche. Thousand of writers have blogs, many of them quite good with a lot of traffic. Having a second site with tightly targeted keywords makes sense as method to reach more people.
#2. I chose a domain name with important keywords.
The domain contains three important keywords: freelance-writing-workshops. I used my Google Adwords account to research good keywords, and then I bought the domain for a few bucks at 1and1.
Search engines give significant weight to keywords in domain names. I think this is the main factor for my results, which I discuss below.
#3. I wrote a post that’s rich in keywords.
You’ll note that I use important keywords in my post, and that I mention states in the western United States. This increases the possibility of getting longtail traffic from someone looking for a writing seminar in Arizona, for example.
#4. I plug both my writing ebooks.
If someone finds the site, there’s a good chance they’ll click on the sales pages for one or both of my two ebooks.
#5. I can eventually sell a workshop product on the site.
A sales page would be much longer than the current post and would likely help pull in more search engine traffic. Plus I could direct traffic to the site from other sites and through word of mouth.
The Results
Traffic has been minimal so far. However, I a few people have clicked over to my ebooks.
The site has a Google Page rank of 1, which is a good start.
Putting “freelance writing workshops” in the three main search engines (without the quote marks) gives:
- #5 on page 2 of Google
- #5 on page 1 of Yahoo
- #1 on page 1 of Bing
Why You Should Do the Same
One of the key factors for SEO is the length of time you’ve owned a domain. Having a site up, even if it only has a bit of content, can help you in search engine results down the road when you decide to make the site a higher priority and put up more content and get back links to it.
Why You Shouldn’t Do the Same
There’s a strong argument in favor of having your products and services as subdomains or pages of your main flagship domain. That way all the information helps build the page rank and authority of your flagship domain.
For the most part I plan to have my future products as part of my flagship websites: here at Selling Information Products Online and over at Intelligent Productivity. But in some instances, like the case here, I’ll also have separate sites pushing specific products. (Important: If you do the same, make sure you write different sales pages for each site so you don’t get penalized for duplicate content.)
My Other Domains
I have 14 websites. A half-dozen are these small sites with keyword-rich domain names that are important for products I’ll create in the future, most of them related to my other main site — Intelligent Productivity.
Your thoughts and suggestions? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy?
