Today’s Topic for “I Don’t Have Time for BS” Wednesdays: What Makes a Search Expert? What Makes ANYONE an Expert?

You may remember a few weeks ago when I said I was planning on writing a guide to how to spot a phony expert. I intended to do it right when I thought of it, but the whole issue struck a nerve with me.

I mean, here it is, the dawn of an age where communication is the most open, immediate and interactive as it has ever been in the world. Despite economic barriers that still exist for some, in relation to even having access to the web, via cell phone or not, this is still an age of unprecedented free flow of information.

With a cell phone, my grandmother in Africa could find out whether the guy who owns the shoe shop she wants to order from in the UK is worth the extra price.

(Yes, my grandma would still buy fashionable shoes in the UK. She is FLY.)

And yet, the question is – would she? Or would she trust “the expert”?

There’s the rub. Who IS the expert? Yeah, I know, they’re everywhere now. If you sneeze, eleven gurus say “bless you”. I get it.

In fact, that’s my point. Everyone I’ve never heard of is a guru now. The fact that I continue to reject that particular title is deemed insane – you’re supposed to be able to make truckloads more money if everyone calls you the Guru.

But I don’t want to be called that in an age where it means nothing – whether I deserve it or not is far beyond the point.

There was a time when if you were called an expert, it meant something.

There was a time when if someone said you were an expert, they meant that they read that one of your peers with a pristine reputation for moral integrity, honesty, a fellow expert with a proven track record, had called you an expert, and that they trusted that person so much that they automatically transferred that title to you.

There was a time.

I don’t mean in the last 90s. I’m talking mid ’08/ late ’07 – eons in Web time, I know, but humor me.

As recently as a year ago the word expert had a very defined parameter. one didn’t throw around the word lightly.

Let me be clear here.

I’m not picking on the person who is just starting their online career and has realized that compared to the business owners in their community whose leads are drying up, that their 250 targeted Twitter followers is a group that has value.

If you’re charging your lookie-loo neighbors a couple of hundred bucks to teach them how to use Twitter, more power to you. In fact, anyone who isn’t going around calling themselves an expert with no factual basis is okay with me.

The issue I have now is that the way the word “expert” is being used has changed dramatically in reference, but not in conversational usage.

Meaning, a person calling themselves an expert no longer distinguishes a person who, say, knows everything there is to know about golf, who has the track record to prove it, from the person who has just played more holes than you have.

The new “compared to the lay person, I’m an expert” culture is rampant particularly in social media.

Which would be perfectly okay if it were stated – understood even – that the person who is supposedly an expert is only one under those strict circumstances. But it’s not.

It’s a social lie of the highest order and it’s screwing up business for everyone including them.

I’m not going to sit here and lie, and say that the only reason I’m concerned about the spread of the un-expert is that I want to protect you from harm, dear reader. I admit I’m somewhat of a bleeding heart and that IS part of the peril. But a good part of this is self-interest.

I’m sick and tired of cleaning up after the so-called expert. It used to be enough that I could perform traffic miracles. Now I have to un-do utter catastrophes first.

I’m too old for that shit.

So it seems like a good idea to attack the issue at its source. And that is the ability of the false expert to self-stamp oneself as such and not be run out of their respective vocation at the end of a virtual sword.

I’m hoping we don’t need to bring dueling into the age of the Web, but a slap across the face with a still-warm glove seems befitting such an offense.

Because the word Expert has been pillaged.

It USED to refer to a rare person who was at the top of their game.

A person who didn’t just study a topic, but was a thought leader.

A person who didn’t just teach about a subject, but did what they were teaching you, who exploited their own techniques for personal gain – because they *gasp* WORKED.

An expert used to be who hadn’t just used the technology but had tested it on themselves, who was a pioneer, who helped shape the industry, who knew the insiders.

Someone who could prove their knowledge about what it is they know, who could answer questions about it off the top of their heads.

In the same way a good mechanic isn’t a good mechanic if they have to consult a text book about a typical oil change, nor should a good expert be dodging a direct, basic question about their area of expertise.

We’ll come back to how to actually spot the phonies in a bit though. First, I want you to understand that I was never fully in support of the Gurufication of information that existed back in the days of yore, either.

Admittedly, there was a bit of elitism to the “Expertization” of a person lo those many months ago.

You had to pay your dues and it was a pain in the ass.

If you hadn’t spoken at a conference, there were some that didn’t take you seriously.

Others felt the calling card was that you had written a book that could be ordered on Amazon and shipped to your house in a box, even if that meant that at press time your information was so old and outdated as to be ridiculous.

Still more felt that until you put together a $1000 package and sold a certain number of them … or drove a certain car … or had a certain type of house…

The point is, to some people you weren’t an expert unless you also pretended to have a certain type of expertise, a certain amount of money. THAT nonsense we can get into another day, I’m just saying, the days of the expert, proper, weren’t perfect.

But those days were changing. It got so, as in the rest of the IT world information publishing borders on, what you knew and your ability to duplicate results from what you knew, were collectively more important than who you knew or what car you drove.

And even without those changes, those days were better than this.

“Oh, what’s the harm, Tinu” say some of my friends.

“What’s the big deal if that loser says they’re an authority on that topic. THey aren’t even your competitors. You don’t even move in that circle. You wouldn’t get out of bed for twice the money they make from the little scams they’re running.”

It does do harm though.

It does matter.

And those of us who are knowledgeable just sort of sitting back and laughing about it isn’t helping. Some of my peers even think “Well, if those folks are dumb enough to fall for it, imagine how much you can charge them when they come crawling to you.”

Which is even scarier, to me.

Let me reassert before I continue, once again, that I’m not an angel.

There’s no future in frontin’, I’m not perfect by any stretch. But there are limits to what I’ll do to make a buck.

And if you’ve been following me for more than a week, you know good and well that I need all the help getting to sleep at night. So I’m sure as hell not going to be kept up by a moral dilemma.

To me?

It’s not even a dilemma – I can’t sit around here and say nothing when it’s becoming a part of the web culture for people not just to screw up, but to purposely set out to harm people, and get away with it..

I’ve screwed up before. There are screw-ups I’ve been a part of that weren’t entirely my fault that I still try to clean up after, two and three years after they take place. I’ve got a couple of debts I want to pay back even though I’m not legally obligated to lift a single finger to help.

But there’s a huge difference between wanting to help survivors of an accident you had a part in causing and purposely plowing full speed into a school bus with your head tilted back to finish your beer.

My point is, more often than not, these nut jobs are doing their dirty deeds On Purpose.

And the only reason I don’t name names in public is because I believe in the goodness in people and that sometimes good people do desperate things that they consider borderline, in order to get ahead.

I used to be one of those people who thought you were supposed to choose between honesty and making money. First I chose the money – I was in my early 20s and much dumber than I am now.

Then I met genuine, kind people who had mountains of cash and none of the stress I had in my life.

So I chose again. And when I chose honesty, and the willingness to be broke if I couldn’t make money other way helped me find out that I didn’t have to choose.

So what am I saying? What is the point of all this long-winded drivel?

That I believe we should come together and share guidelines on what to check before you buy something from someone online, especially services. I believe we should blog about the blatant fraud going on in our respective industries and, when necessary, challenge it.

Of course, not viciously, and not with assumptions – just because a person only has 100 Facebook friends does not mean that person isn’t a Facebook expert. For all you know those 100 people are all CEOs or Millionaires or only family and friends.

At the same time, we’ve got to get beyond this idea that having 5000 friends on Facebook automatically makes you the expert. That’s just insane.

Under the right circumstances, you can even get 1,o00,000 people to sign up for something that’s free and doesn’t require a credit card number, provided you can find that many people interested in it. Just get in their path, and offer them something of equal or greater value, for signing up.

(There’s your free traffic tip for the day.)

But getting back to it – why do I care?

The same reason I always have, money. The easier it is for me to make, the faster I can make more of it.

Okay seriously, now. I’m gonna put myself out here a little bit and speak from the heart.

I founded this site to keep people from getting ripped off. That’s what used to happen when information wasn’t out in the open.

There was less to pay attention to and higher stakes if you screwed up – if you were going to shop online, the majority of us checked thoroughly, if only to avoid the scrutiny of those who were sure just the act of using a credit card online would get us ripped off.

Now maybe there’s so much information, we’re listening to the first person who gets our attention. Perhaps, maybe, we’re getting a little lazy with our research — or maybe the new information is burying the access points to how to do the research, I don’t know.

Could be that the new people online just don’t know any better than to trust people who SAY they are experts, because in the offline world, you can’t just SAY you’re a doctor. Maybe the credentials are assumed.

Anyway, as the start to my pledge, my next post is going to be about how you can spot a phony in fields you may not be familiar with that I am.

I think that’s also part of the problems – I have no idea how to tell the difference between an okay Lincoln town car service and an excellent one, so I always go with whatever is linked from whichever travel site I’m making my reservations on.

So for search, social media, and website promotion experts, I’ll tell you what to look for and who, as far as I know, knows what they’re talking about. We’ll start with guidelines for search next, since that’s what the theme of the week is.

If you have some guidelines, leave me the link, or send me a tweet. Maybe we can put up a master list some place, or find a way to start some kind of association with an independent evaluation body made up of consumers through Get Satisfaction or something like it.

So if you have ideas about that, let me know too. It’s high time that integrity made a comeback around here – don’t you think?

Getting a whole lotta free business related gifts. There’s over 300 of them, but it’s all over at midnight.

Some of the stuff:

• “Moron-Proof” System to “Smart” Selling ” On eBay…
• Advice from 58 of the Internet’s Top Money Makers
• Mistakes with Master Resale Rights
• Smart Google Kit
• List Building Made Easy
• “The Art of Money Getting” by P. T. Barnum
• Google Adsense Quick Start Guide

Some of these promotions have a lot of junk products in them, but this is quality stuff. That’s the reason I didn’t tell you about it before – I didn’t have the chance to research it.
If you sign up by midnight, tonight, let me know by leaving a comment, I’ll give you a free, brandable copy of Introduction to the Blog Virus on April 12th. I’m not giving this away in the promotion. It’s just for people who use my link to sign up.

Part One of this step is Choosing Your Topic, otherwise known as “What the Hell Am I Going to Write About?”

With choosing your topic, you want to strke a balance between writing about a popular topic and not writing about the same thing everyone else is writing about. For example, I sometimes write a lot about Google, RSS Feeds and Yahoo, and Alexa Internet.

Now, a lot of people write about Google, or Yahoo, here and there about RSS Feeds, and not so much about Alexa. But I picked those three topics because they are things people want to know about. Then I took those topics and illustrated how I solved a problem I had or a challenge I was facing with one of those topics.

So get out a piece of paper (or launch a text file), and put at the top, the heading “There Should Be a Book About” and think of topics related to your product, service or web site that has to do with that title. Then write down five things you think there should be a book about.

Next, write the heading “This Week I Learned An Easier Way to…” and make another list of things – try to stick to things problems other online entrepreneurs face.

Third, write the heading “My Product/Service/Site Solves the Problem of…” and finish that sentence up to ten ways.

With what you have before you, go to Wordtracker.com, and find some keywords related to that issue – find some really both a low traffic general one and a high traffic targeted one – not the top general keyword, a lower rated one with high KEI (their factor for indicating that you’d have a low competiion keyword with high traffic).

Now let’s look at what you have.

With your list, you can pick several topics to write about. You may even be able to combine two. The ones that relate to the minor keyword that you can repeat one or two times in the article, and could perhaps write a sentence about including that keyword, will help you the most.

Use the low traffic keyword you found to make your title. So if you found that “Britney Spears poster” is a low traffic keyword, and one of the topics is “Where to Find the best Britney Spears poster” is your article title, and you know you can mention Britney spears and the word poster several times in your article, you’ve got a winner.

In the next step, we’ll write our article. Hang on to that high traffic keyword info, we’re going to use that later.

So to summarize:

You need to invest in your business. You will have to put in money, time, knowledge, or whatever else of value you can come up with, and eventually, a combination of all these things.

Also:

If you want other people to invest in your business, you’ll need to set up a value exchange. The results you get will hinge upon the level of value you give for the level of value you get.

So who is John Galt?

I can’t answer that for you. You’d have to read Atlas Shrugged for yourself, and decide on your own. That link will give you the ability to find the book at the best price that the market bears.

If you are looking to make a livable income from your endeavors online, or offline, that book can teach you a lot about money, and how to release yourself from the grip of a value-less exchange.

Well, that was fast.

Remember this morning when I said that search engines could buy my love? Well, I’ve been bought again.

Too bad for Yahoo, MSN and Amazon that this came from Google. You can read the article in Internet Week. Here’s what the announcement said today at Blogger.

Did you know that you can turn your blog into a source of revenue with Google’s AdSense program?

Would you like to sign up?

And it takes you to a special AdSense page that has the Blogger insignia on it. It’s not much for explaining how this is any different for existing AdSense users, or where you can insert the code — but I’m assuming that even if you’re using Blog Spot, you can just cut and paste the code in there and go. I imagine for new Blogger AdSense users it’s self explanatory, with instructions and all.

I haven’t noticed anything different about the NavBar that would make AdSense automatically included, but I’ll keep you posted. But again, I’m an existing user so that’s probably what the difference is.

Everytime I think of getting a divorce from Google, another really swaying declaration of love comes through….

Imagine if you could make more from AdSense that you would from product or services sales…. I wonder how the tides would turn….

I make 70% of my income from sales of ebooks I’ve written, one about Google, one about using RSS to get more traffic, and about 15% of those sales come from Clickbank affiliates.

I make about another 7% from affiliate sales, around 13 percent from additional consulting that comes as a result of my ebook sales, and about 10% from limited advertising on my site – I’d sell ad space in my newsletter, but I don’t publish on a regular basis yet.

As you can see, I make the most money from sales of my own books. So how do can anyone do this?

I’m a little tired, so I’m just going to put these forth as steps. If it is a popular topic, I’ll fill in the blanks in the newsletter a little later.

1- To start, I researched what audience would be most appropriate for me to cater, to given my knowledge and experience so far. I didn’t want to just start another site about making money online, because at the time I’d made the most money from advertising, at prices un-heard-of now. I wanted something with low competition and a healthy enough market to sustain me when I came to dominate it.

2- I chose a niche narrow enough to serve on my own, but wide enough to grow. I had decided early on that I would prefer to work with people new to the internet but not to business – I’d teach them to save time and money in gettng people to their sites, because that’s what I already knew how to do.

3- I employed all the free ways I knew how to get traffic, in order to establish myself.

4- I researched and tested lesser known techniques on my site and those of my new audience, then used this book to learn how to compile my rambling thoughts into a format that I could sell. (I got much better in my second book, and in upates to my first one. )

5- I gave away 90% of what I know, in the form of this site, as well as the original one, in a 2500 page member section with more free information, a couple of free ebooks and a newsletter. I kept building my list and using 100% free methods to get new people to the site to try what I knew for free. What is now my second most effective source of free traffic has been my news feed.

6- At a certain point, the traffic you can get for free plateaus, then peaks again. Many techniques that generate free traffic end up costing you in time. At those junctures, I supplement my free traffic with inexpensive advertising in ezines, joint projects/ventures, and other sources of paid traffic, such as pay per click advertising.

That’s pretty much it, rinse, repeat with new product or site(s).

With my poetry sites, I’m working on building a network of sites for poets and spoken word artists. It’s not like it was when I first began to perform in the early 90s… every time I turn on Def Poetry Jam I get my feelings hurt… but that’s really another story for another day. This sidebar was just to let you know, with content sites, once you pass the 100,000 page view mark, you can start hosting advertising. You might not make a living off it, but if you find the right niche, the extra money doesn’t hurt.

I think that’s it for Money Mondays. Remember to come by on Google Tuesday!

When the whole banner ad thing tanked, before the popularity of text ads evolved, I really started to miss my extra income. At the time, $300 extra dollars a month was like getting an extra check. I hadn’t gotten a good high tech job yet, and at the time I was working a temp position at a place where I never dreamed I’d be hired permanently and getting a salary that made an extra $300 a month look like chump change in less than a year.

So I started looking around online for a way to make extra money. I’d ben a part of Allen Says Warror site since 1998, probably – there’s an ebook with a testimonial from me. I was going by my full name, Atinuke Abayomi-Paul, before I figured out that no one on earth can say my name properly.

I lost my membership info to that site no less than five times in the space of a year and a half, and each time, Allen patiently re-sent my information. (Now he has an automated system – I had to re-create my reseller information again a few minutes ago.) The last time he sent it out to me, he was particularly nice to me, which inspired me to choose his products to resell.

I’ll never forget the feeling of my first online sale, it’s that same feeling you get the first time you make money that’s all profit….. It was easier than I ever expected – all I did was advertise the link in every free way I knew how. Took about two weeks of consistently promoting the links, but I did it.

The experience led me to start doing research on what I could make money from – and it was simple to learn how to do it from watching what Allen did. In addition to applying his system, I had to buy a product, try it out for myself, and if I liked it, then I could suggest it to other people.

One key thing I noticed that the pages that sold the product I chose did, was that it didn’t try to sell on the first try. It captured the person’s information, then gave them a sampling of great information as follow-up.

One day they either dropped out or realized the value. it was really that simple – after a certain point, it was a numbers game. For each product, a certain number of people would like what was being offered. Then you just had to figure out how to either get the offer in front of enough people, or find products the pepple you already had targeted would enjoy.

So how can you profit from affiliate sales? I find the easiest way these days is to join Clickbank and find products to try and then promote, that are aligned with your site’s content, the promote them to your list with honest testimonials every now and again.

The only problem is, it’s hard to search Clickbank’s site. They make it into a directory style, so you have to go through page by page. An affiliate portal I belong to created a searchable download of all the products in Clickbanks’s database, which should help in finding something to promote.

Happy Hunting. I’ll be back with my last tip about how I make money now.

The first money I made online was really non-marketing.

I was around in the days when you could build a really good site, build up its content, and host banners for other people, filling your remnant space with non-exclusive ads from companies that had good run-of-network CPM payouts. I cashed in on impressions only for our main sites back then. $300 – $600 ( See an archive of the main site my various partners and I ran from before we changed the domain name.)

We were also briefly part of About.com’s network of poetry sites. Ah, those were the days. Shortly after about two years of constant checks from advertising, rates dropped and the money wasn’t worth the quality difference for our visitors to continue to display banner ads. Around that time, I started looking for alternatives.

Can you still make money from advertising? Sure, but until you build up to at least a mlliion page views per month, don’t expect to make thousands of dollars from it. But if you read that last article, you know that the key is to “spend less than you earn”.

Still, the money is out there. You just need to do your research, increase your traffic so that you’ll start getting accepted to the existing programs, test different formats and placements, track the results, and turn the whole thing into a system.

(And if you build a list at the same time, you can either charge for the ezine itself, or run advertising in each issue. But that’s really for another day.)

So where can you find advertising to run on your site? Obviously the preference is to have a mix of advertisers that will pay you per impression, as well as per click.

To earn money from clicked ads, I find that Google AdSense is easy to set up, and after you learn how to work with the system, can pay enough so that they’ll actually send you checks (the threshold before they’ll go out is $100). We’re going to feature a site that teaches many of the tricks of the AdSense trade tomorrow on Google Tuesdays, as well as the reason I think you should really sign up for AdSense today, whether or not you think you’re going to make any money from it.

Another program, that pays you via paypal once your account balance hits $5 is TextAds.Biz.

You display text ads on your site – advertisers can run ads just at your site, or throughout the Network.

But what I like even better is that you can place filler ads on your own site advertising whatever you want – rotating text ads for your audience on your own site, free. Great for Affiliate products.

Mommie Dearest was on HBO Signature a little earlier. Thank God for cable or I’d be bored out of my mind working from home some days.

Not that my work isn’t fun-filled and interesting. The bulk of the job I created for myself is writing or traffic-generating, two activities I love.

But one of the key benefits of creating yourself a career you can do on the computer from home is watching TV during your down time. Guilt-free couch potato-ism is where it’s at, baby.

And that ramble takes us to content type number three- Paid Content.

I pay you $20, and for a year, you’ll give me all the information I would need on some subject. Or I give you $200 one time and you give me a crash course on my favorite subject.

Neat trick. So how do you do it?

For this example, we’ll use HBO and one of my favorite sites, SnapFiles.com

To get my money, HBO does one simple thing. I don’t think they do it well enough, but it’s on a fair enough level to get my money again the next month, and that’s really a long ramble that I don’t have the muscle to type about today.

To get my money, SnapFiles.com does one simple thing. They do it better than everywhere else, and I think they’re really the only ones doing it.

For both HBO and SnapFiles.com, it’s the same thing, even though it’s not.

Can you guess what it is? Here’s a hint.

Still stumped?

Alright already, I’ll tell you. You’re no fun to play with, you know that? (Kidding!)

HBO and SnapFiles.com did some research to find out what I was missing from the free version of TV and freeware sites respectively, then charged me a fee below my threshold to access it.

That’s it.

Why would I pay for TV? It’s free. At least that was what ABC, CBS and NBC said to HBO, after they were done rolling on the floor in laughter, and pointing in mockery.

Who’s laughing now? HBO, and they’re doing it at the bank.

Why would I pay for freeware? Free software is, well, free. Because SnapFiles.com saves me time and money, not to mention hard drive space. I get deals on shareware, and if some piece of freeware is suddenly no longer offered, I know they have an archive of it at their site.

The second part of that is most important though – they charge me a price below my threshold.

I’d probably pay $300 a year just to have all the HBO channels if it didn’t come with my cable systems. Why? I’m a film junkie. I love films. Movies are my hobby. I like to watch them, discuss them, be inspired by them for my art (I really AM a poet. Seriously. Won a few minor awards and everything).

If my only choices were signing up with a DVD site for $30 a month, and worry about returning the films I get to see 8 at a time, or knowing I could pay for 8 channels playing movies 24 hours a day, the math is easy. $360 a year for limited volume but predictable, or $300 a year for easy access to more volume of less predictable titles.

Same thing with SnapFilesPro.com (the paid version of SnapFiles.com).

For free, I can hunt down the freeware I want, one at a time, or for $20 a year I have all kinds of neat features. Please – I spend $50 ordering take-out. $20 for service and flexibility is right on the money for me.

You can have a paid content site even with information that’s available freely on the Net. What you’ll have to do is dedicate your time to finding what information is best, testing it for validity, keeping your updates fresh, and providing excellent service.

Maybe not with sunglasses, but who said you could only have one site?

Find out what people want to know more about. Pack your site with 100 page of Original Content that is hard to find, that they can’t get anywhere else, that goes beyond what’s in a free article… you get the idea. Invite 20 peers over with the bribe of free membership and get the discussions going. Make sure the area is sufficiently password protected, then start selling access to the site.

Harder than it sounds, but possible.

Well it’s definitely nap time for me. I’m going to have myself a bidi and hit the hay for a few hours. Happy Friday to you.

The second type of content you have is advertiser-supported content. On the web, this is the type of content I see people screwing up the most often.

To see what I mean, let’s go back to the TV analogy.

Here on the West Coast, the movie Oscar, starring Sylvester Stone just went off. While I was watching the movie, there were commercials. The one I remember most was for Cancer Centers of America.

Now I ask you. What the hell does Cander Centers of America have to do with the film Oscar?

Not a damn thing – at least not on the surface.

So why would CCA run their commercial during that movie? We’ll come back to that in a second. First, let’s talk about your site.

Maybe you sell sunglasses. So you build a site that is a store about sunglasses, and everyone and their mother will beat a path to your store anytime they need a pair of sunglasses, right?

No way. Thanks for playing “how to go broke with a website”. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

Here’s where the model goes wrong: unless your store is located within the online equivalent of a mall like ebay, and people are there specifically to shop, that really isn’t what you want to do with your site.

People don’t turn to a channel on TV to buy things, unless of course they are looking at QVC or the Home Shopping Network. They turn on the TV to be entertained, to get information (like the news), or because they’re lonely and they want voices in the background.

So how does this relate to you?

Well, think about why people come to the internet. If your site is about sunglasses, you don’t want to just build a store. Why?

Even when someone goes online to find a pair of sunglasses, unless they’re already signed up to get updates at your site, they’re probably going to an online chain site like Target, a site that will put them in touch with places to buy sunglasses, like Ebay.com, or they’re going to a search engine to look up something like “best deals on Raybans”.

Knowing this, you should realize that your site model is a little backwards.

Your products are the advertisements for your site, they aren’t the content. I didn’t come online to surf the web equivalent of an infomercial – though, under certain conditions, that model can work..

But normally, if I’m a potential shopper, I came online to be entertained, to find information, or because I’m lonely and I want someone to reach out to me.

And if I came online just to buy a pair of sunglasses, there’s only two ways you’ll get my attention – if I find you in a search, or, if I already know about your site and you’re smart enough to remind me that you’re there to help me.

Given that information, how should my site be set up to catch that buyer at the right time?

There’s two modes that you’re going to get your potential customer who needs a pair of shades. Either you’ll get them in their surf mode, or you’ll get them in their buy mode. Your site needs to be set up to capture them in either mood.

Or mode.

Come on, you know what I mean…

Anyway, what I’m saying is, don’t hide all the sales pages on your site but don’t scream BUY SOME SUNGLASSES either.

The main pages of your site should be funneled to one purpose – getting some way to follow-up with the surfer. You want them on your list, subscribing to your feed, joining your community, whatever. On TV, they’ll tell you a story in the form of your favorite show, with characters you grow to know and love, despite the fact that they’re fictional. Or they’ll give you a decent movie, with promises of a different film that you’ll enjoy if you come back to the bat place at the same bat time tomorrow, later that day, a week from today.

In a word, content.

And every site has it. Some have content in the form of yucky gate way pages that you run away from as soon as you see them. Others have 12 pages of pretty dry, but useful, information. Then there are sites that seem to have a new page, or a new product, or a new tip posted to their forums, just about every day. You like the content, but you can’t possibly keep up with the volume. So you join the newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed, or join the community because you don’t want to miss anything.

Did you get that?

Set your site up to have more content than can be consumed in a day, with the promise of more. Good content.

Now here’s the thing. You have a site about sunglasses. What are you going to put on your site that someone who needs sunglasses will want to come back for every day?

Maybe you have the lowest price sunglasses that will get to my house the fastest, guaranteed. Perhaps your site has the now famous “Whether” report – telling me whether or not I’ll need sunglasses today in my home town or at over 2000 locations in the world. Or your site has the Shady Destination of the Day, a short spiel on what fabulous sunny place I can’t afford to go to but love to dream about, complete with pictures.

Whoever said the entire content of the site had to be about sunglasses directly?

I sound crazy, don’t I? Well let’s go back to the TV model, shall we?

I was watching the film Oscar. And there was a commercial about Cancer Treatment Centers of America. Do I have cancer? No. But someone I know does. And the people who ran that commercial took a gamble on a little thing called demographics. They figure I’m between the ages of this and that, and I make this amoung of money, based on stats they get from the Network, so the best time to show this information is the time that I saw it, among others.

Now it doesn’t quite work that way online. But the issue of demographics teaches us something. If you look at your web statistics, or poll your audience, you’ll be able to figure out what interests they have in common, and you’ll be able to target advertising towards them. Your product can be the commercial, or you can use someone else’s, through Google AdSense or sites like TextAd.biz – you just don’t want to go sending them off until you have presented a way to get in contact with them again.

And if, ultimately, you can’t find a way to make your topic appeal to the group that would want to buy what you have, it may be time to go back to the drawing board and research another topic to specialize in.

I’m inclined to think that a lot more models work on the web than people think. I have a friend who co-owns the top selling watch site to advertise on eBay. He makes a pretty, shiny penny. From watches for crying out loud. There’s got to be a niche for you too.

So to sumamrize, with the incidental browser at your site, you can entertain them with your content, inform them with articles about what you’ve calculated may be their interests, or build a community where they can talk to other like-minded people.

Now for the person in the second mode – the buyer.

As we’ve discussed, you will get the buyer through a search, or from keeping up with the contacts you already have.

In the first instance, this is just another selling point of the content-rich site. If you’ve got great, fresh content that ranks well in one of the major search engines, you will get that keyboard traffic. But you have to know what I’m likely to type in – it won’t be “sunglasses”. It will probably be “Raybans for less than $20″ or “cheap sunglasses”.

And how do you know this? You go to Nichebot.com or some other keyword research resource and find out what I would type., or you go to Google AdWords and buy spots for a bunch of related keywords that I’ll type in.

In the second instance, you know that odds are, when I fire up my computer and go online, I’ll either check my email, or my news feeds before I open up my browser. It’s just something people do out of habit, log on, read the mail, check the news – probably habits that were transferred from the offline world. The first popular internet service providers kind of forced it on you – if you have AOL, you’ll see the Mail button and a bunch of news before you ever get to thw Web.

Normal people – not web heads like us, but the average Netizen – don’t get a whole lot of email that they read. They may only check it once a week.

Now if I open my email and I have 20 new items in my Inbox, I might see a note from my mom, some spam that made it through the filters, your notice about this week’s sunglasses specials, a chain letter from a pal at work, and my joke list.

I go to click on Mom’s note and something triggers my memory of why I logged on in the first place – that’s right, I’m going to Bora Bora on Saturday, I want some sunglasses!

And there’s your lovely note with the cheapest deals.

Done.

So the next time you prepare yourself to start a new site, or add a page to your existing one, or are thinking about remodeling, think about content. Think about the way content and advertising is approached on TV. Not all the examples will translate. But it may give you some pointers on how and why to arrange your site to make more sales.

On to type three, after these words from our sponsors.

The first type of content you have is completely free content. On TV, you’ll see this on public channels like PBS. Does PBS make money? Sure it does, through donations.

Do people ON PBS make money? Sometimes. During their pledge drives, they often have people on like one of my favorite people in the world, Wayne Dyer. I’m a Wayne Dyer fanatic. True story.

Last time he was on during the pledge drive (that I saw), he gave away books videotapes, etc. And they didn’t make money from him directly. But after sitting there and watching his show, if you enjoyed it, you would find out through your own investiagation that he had more products to offer than the ones on the show.

Now, with your website, can you make money from this type of content? Sure. This is what happens when you write articles – you give away some of your content, the audience gets to come by and see what else you have to offer them. If you give a free ebook away at another site or through a newsletter, it’s the same deal.

And you can make more money if your site is set up in the second way we’ll talk about in just a moment.