Tiffany Dow encourages folks to create a series of posts that all relate to progress using a particular product (you can see more about her WSO in part 1, here) and so, in the spirit of doing the right thing, here is a follow-up to my earlier post.
SNO Review SEO
I’m fairly sure by now, that Google doesn’t absolutely hate my site (faint praise, I know!). It’s been running for a few years, there’s a fair amount of content up on it and I’ve made a few posts every month – hardly a race to the finish line, eh?
As a result, I do see my posts appear quite quickly on the first page, they often hang around for a while and using the new author tweaks has also given them that shiny new “here’s me” picture when they do show up.
So, I was fairly pleased when my review of Cashing in on Shiny New Object Syndrome showed up on page one – mind you, you can’t get much more long-tail than a 7 word phrase 🙂 Imagine my joy, when it then disappeared off the map completely – I’m talking somewhere out beyond page 15. I got bored looking for it!
I worried that I’d been penalized for using an image with an SEO-style “alt” tag as the first thing in the post. Google seems to have taken to actually showing that alt text in the post summary if you don’t set the text explicitly in something like All-in-one SEO and I worried that it showed up as being too SEO’d.
Anyway, today it is back on page 1 and is up to slot number 3 without me doing anything to prop it up, so I need to remind myself to chill out a bit during the Google dance.
Is a WSO a good target?
All of that preamble brings me on to what I think is the biggest potential failing of the whole “Cashing In” idea.
In fact it may be a failing of the whole IM world in that regard.
That failing is this. If you are going to invest a load of your time and money in a WSO for review purposes, you have almost NO guarantee that the WSO owner will keep that thing running for longer than a firefly’s lifetime. Now, ideally, if you are doing a long-term review, you want the product available for sale all of that time (if you like it).
A case in point would be the recent CPA Superstars product from Kenster – I’m happy to supply opinions about the materials inside the course, but it’s highly likely that they will have closed the program before you even read my review.
How useful is that?
Not only that, but just say I get my review up mere seconds after the release. Well first, it will definitely be a facts only review, but secondly, what if Google decides to hide my post for a few days? All advantage is gone and it would have been a total waste of my time (maybe).
I’m not sure how to combat that problem with WSOs and the tendency for larger releases in the whole IM field to have very limited “windows of opportunity” means that they are very similar.
What it probably means is that the plan will only work for much smaller releases on the forum, ones which have a decent lifetime ahead of them. Unfortunately, these are probably going to be the ones which have less of a “blockbuster” launch and pricetag…..and we all have to eat sometime.
I suspect my long term view of Cashing in on SNOS will be that I’m reviewing WSOs as a service to my readers (not as a revenue stream in its own right) and maybe you’ll all love the reviews so much, you’ll buy other things from me.
Does that feel like a deal? Anyone want to tell me I’m living in cloud-cuckoo land?
