Dear Writers,

Tonight LetterRep resumed making writer payments.

As stated in the earlier blog post, I made the first payments 30 days prior to today (as we have always made them) and then began making several payments from the payment date when I stopped payments, August 8th, ‘09.

Close to 25 payments were made. I’m not sure if we can keep up that pace, although it would be nice. I’ll try. It really depends on how well LetterRep does.

On that note, LetterRep has been doing very well lately and it seems to be in some part because of the SEO changes we made. There are still a few more things to be done. One of those parts is to write a keyword-rich paragraph or two for each of the category pages on the customer side. Here’s an example of a customer side category page: http://www.letterrep.com/Letters_of_Recommendation-c-85.html .

If any writers would like to assist in writing the paragraphs, they will appear at the top of the page and I will gladly allow writers to leave a signature below their content.

If you’re interested, please let me know which category(ies) you would like and I’ll send you the keywords.

Thanks for everything.

Sincerely,

Rob

Dear Writers,

The title of this post is true. Payments will begin next week.

Thanks is too small for the patience you have shown in allowing the developer time to get the site back on track.Without the time and relief from writer payments we could not have made it.

The work we did during this time focused on three things:

1) Fixing some parts of the site that were vulnerable to hackers
2) Moving the site to a new server on a new host that allowed us a level of server access to protect the site, and
3) correcting the shortcomings identified in August’s search engine optimization (SEO) analysis in order to speed up the recovery of the loss of visitor traffic caused by the hack attack.

The majority of this is complete. Some SEO work still remains. We’re getting to it slowly.

Here’s how payments will be handled.

Currently, LetterRep is several thousand behind in writer payments. Unfortunately, we cannot pay them off all at once. So, in order to resume payments as usual, from next week’s payment start date (probably Tuesday or Wednesday - still waiting on a bank notification) we will begin paying from 30 days prior as payments have always been made. For example, if we begin payments again on November 17th, we will make our first payments from 30 days earlier, October 17th. We will also begin making payments from the day we suspended payments August 3rd, making as many payments as the site can afford at one time. Please keep in mind that LetterRep still has to pay bills so not all funds earned can be used for writer payments.

In time we will catch up. Again, thank you for your patience.

The lesson learned from all this is that LetterRep cannot sustain itself in its current form. We also were reviewed over the past several months by some venture capital firms who passed on the opportunity to fund us. Together, we found that LetterRep is not scalable for Web 2.0 and in order to grow it must change. We are looking at options now. More to follow.

The only truly American holiday is coming soon, Thanksgiving - at time when we show our thanks to all those who have affected our lives. None deserve thanks more this year from me and LetterRep.com, than all of you writers.

Thank you.

Rob
admin@letterrep.com

Dear Writers,

I am sending this out in an email blast to ensure you see the information below.

Tonight is the night! This evening, sometime between 8pm and 12am, when you try to go to http://www.LetterRep.com, you may find that it no longer exists. That won’t last long!

At some point during that time, I will have our domain registrar, Network Solutions, point the domain name servers from the IP address on the host where LetterRep currently exists to the IP address on the new host. While it used to take a few days for the tables in the servers to associate our domain name with a new IP, now it only takes a few hours. By Saturday morning/evening (depending on where you are in the world) you should have no problems reaching the site.

Some things, however, cannot be tested until the site is up: Secure purchasing, for example. We need the site active and operational so we can check to ensure the payment process works and get all the ‘kinks in the hose’ worked out. This blog will need to get turned on and likely some other unseen things will need tweaking.

I ask each of you to please check as many nooks and crannies of the site, both customer side and writer side, as possible. If you find a problem, please let me know immediately: rob [at] letterrep.com.

With the new site you will see lots of changes: SEO-friendly URLs, auto-redirect from bad links, improved page titles, meta tags, ALT tags and keyword tags, etc. These are the obvious changes. Other, less obvious, have been done as well.

As I’ve mentioned in some detail in the past, writers will soon be able to add a description/article of their letters as they post them. I have held off asking anyone to get a headstart on this mainly because linking the keywords in your text back to the site is an important part of process; however, because the site is moving, any links built to existing pages will need to be changed.

More about all that in another post.

Let me know if you have any questions.

~Rob

Dear Writers,

Thank you all very much for your responses to my last blog post requesting examples of copywriting. I forwarded a scattered variety to lots of different ad/pr agencies and will spend the next week calling and generating more leads. Of course, if anyone else has examples they would like forwarded, please send them along.

Our guest blogger, Nelson Duffle, was unable to chat during our scheduled time on Friday and is away this weekend. He has asked if we can talk on Monday. After we’ve had a chance to talk, his articles on copywriting for corporate advertising departments will be posted for anyone who may need some instruction on copywriting and the standards expected at the corporate level.

Next, the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) changes we are making to the site took a little longer than the developer anticipated. Our plan was to move the site to the new host this weekend; however, moving requires changing the domain name servers to the site’s new IP address and normally takes two or three days to update worldwide, which is why we planned it to be done over the weekend. Instead of rushing the SEO changes in order to move the DNSs, we’ve decided to be patient and wait till next weekend. As a safeguard against hacking, the developer wrote some code to turn the site off completely if a ‘hack attack’ occurs and send emails to both him and me announcing the attempt. If by any chance you to come to the site and it is down, you’ll now know why.

The exciting news I have for you, however, is about Search Engine Optimization.

In case you don’t know, “Content is King!” What that means is that sites with lots of content on them relating to the site’s primary focus and loaded with lots of relevant keywords linking internally to the site rank higher in search results than those with very little content. That’s why free sites usually rank higher than pay sites.  For example, 4hb.com consistently outranks LetterRep and all the other letter sites appearing in Google because it gives away free letters. (Their business model is/was about home business and office supplies. They just use the free letters as a means to attract visitors to the site. Incidentally, the letters they give away are some of the same letters we use in our ‘1200+ Free Letters’ section.)

In any case, one of the major shortcomings identified by the SEO analysis team was the lack of valuable content on LetterRep that the search engines can find. While we have 9000+ very valuable letters, all of those are trapped behind our payment process and cannot be spidered by the search engines. So, for all intents and purposes, all we have on the customer side are the few pages the search engines can see…only about 12 which are dynamically updated with data from the database.

So…how can we provide relevant content related to our letters?

The REQUESTS!

Yep.

It occurred to me that the customer requests already make up the content describing each letter that only require editing without us writers having to compose content from scratch for each letter.

In the SEO development being done by the developer, a block will appear at the top of the ‘Submit Works’ page showing the customer’s original request. Alongside will appear a list of keywords, which I just finished researching that are relevant to the category of the letter.

For new and existing letters, writers will be asked to click the links to edit their letters, and to do the following:

1) REMOVE ANY PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE REQUESTER: NAME, TELEPHONE NUMBER, EMAIL ADDRESS, PHYSICAL ADDRESS, ETC!!!!!! (I cannot emphasize how important this is.)
2) Edit the request into a statement about the letter, instead of a request for one;
3) Use a smattering of the keywords I provided to describe your letter;
4) Link the keywords back to the letter you are writing. (We’ll make this part easy.)
5) Click submit. We have a turnkey method in place to post to several different locations with one click.

The LetterRep site will handle all the rest. LetterRep will post your edited statement about the letter a) at the top of YOUR letter’s purchase page, b) on the external sites we’ve already set up. Those sites include: Twitter, Tumblr, Delicious, Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and Scribd, among others. (This is why we need the keywords linked - to point visitors from those blogs directly to your purchase pages.), and c) in time, we will post the articles in a new directory of this letterrep blog with your name…something like, letterrep.com/blog/RobNoyes or /RobN or whatever.

When the development is completed, I’ll add some pics.

This is an important step in LetterRep’s recovery from the hacker’s affect on our search results. I hope all of you will participate. Those who do participate will receive the direct advantage of finally being able to link external sites directly to their letters.

Once again, thank you, thank you, thank you all for you patience and assistance.

Sincerely,

Rob
admin[at]letterrep.com

Hello All,

It’s been a while since the last blog update I sent out. I hope you read it, if not, suffice it to say that we hit a rut and we’re digging our way out. Here’s the status…

There’s mostly good news.

The developer has almost completed the search engine optimization improvements to the site that are required to help LetterRep climb back up to the top of the search results. Once those are complete, which he states will occur this week, LetterRep will move to the new host (we’d planned on moving earlier, but couldn’t). We’re planning the move for this weekend so as not to miss too much traffic. While the SEO improvements will help us in customer search results, the new host will allow us to protect ourselves more.

The little bad news I have is that another hack was attempted on the site. With the help of a very sharp writer (thanks, R.M.) we caught the intrusion and saved LetterRep this time.

Now for some really good news…

As a result of the hacks in June and August and the effect it had on visitor traffic, I have had no choice except to look for other sources of income for LetterRep. The search brought me to the advertising world in hopes we might find some work there. To my surprise, it has. The advertisers I spoke with need copywriters, article writers, and press release writers. These jobs will pay outside of the normal LetterRep 30-day system and will earn writers $25.00 per job upon acceptance by the customer.

Are you a copywriter? B2B or B2C? Experienced in ‘Persuasive Marketing?’ If yes, send an email with some examples of your work.

For those of you who are not sure if you are copywriters, I’m not going to leave you out. We will soon have a personal friend and corporate advertising executive, Nelson Duffle, whose worked at organizations like Fidelity Investments, who will give us some basic instruction on copywriting and what is expected by corporate marketing/advertising departments. He’ll also explain how you can land those jobs yourselves.

Here’s the next bit of good news…

An ad agency is interested in having LetterRep writers compose articles for its business customers who are, understandably, too busy running their businesses to maintain their own blogs. Customers will provide writers the premise of the articles and the keywords to be used in the articles and writers will compose them, post them to the blog and link the keywords back to the customer’s website. This work will pay $25 per 3 or 4 paragraph article and again be paid outside the normal LetterRep system. The ad agency is looking for writers to perform ongoing work for customers. In some cases the customers need 2 to 3 articles per week.

The final bit of paid work looks like it will be an add-on to the article writing…It’s community-building.

The same business customers who are too busy to write and post articles to their blogs are also too busy to maintain their social media portals: Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, Friendfeed, etc. The businesses know their customers are there so they know their businesses need to be there, but again there just aren’t enough hours in the day for them to answer comments and post links and participate in social-media activities.

The ad agency is interested in hiring the same writers who compose keyword-rich articles to serve as social-media community builders. This service would be an additional fee to the $25/article fee.

Are you an active and experienced social media, social networker? If so, send an email. (I’ll also be putting this out from my Facebook page.)

In addition to all of this work will be miscellaneous web-copy, press release and sales letter work for writers with that talent. If you have any of this experience, please send examples.

Okay…that’s it for now. I have composed another article and I will post it as soon as we get moved to the new host. (To give you an idea of its content, its about how we will be providing the customer’s request for each of your letters and asking you to rewrite it into a statement about the letter to increase the content on the site.)

As always, thanks for your time and patience.

~Rob

Hi Everyone,

More posts coming soon, so I’m gonna make this one short.

If you’ve been watching the requests as customers submit them, you will see in some cases customers will submit a work for a specific writer. In most cases, these requests are pretty straightforward in their titles, things like, ‘Request for R.N.’ or ‘Request for Rob’ or ‘Requests for Writer R.N,’ etc. We call these ‘Exclusive Requests.’

Is this the best way for customers to submit an exclusive request? Maybe not, but asking the customer to learn exactly how we wish for them to submit a request is like asking them to clean their money before paying us. Training them is most wisely done after the fact.

The point of this post, however, is to ask (code for ‘insist’) that all writers honor exclusive requests by NOT submitting letters in response that compete with the requested writer. Golden Rule, kinda thing here. In some cases these writers have spent considerable time discussing the customer’s letter via chat or email and it isn’t fair to have that work wiped out by someone who didn’t make the same effort.

If you see an exclusive request that you feel is interesting enough for you to compose a letter in hopes that it will be purchased in the future, feel free to write one and submit it under the ‘Not from Request’ option. It won’t be tied to the request and I will gladly make it live.

Ok…as always, let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely, Rob

Hello Writers,

I’m writing to give an update on Chat. As some of you may have noticed, we have temporarily removed it from the site. Here’s why…

Writers repeatedly brought to our attention the problems the scrolling feature experiences. We initially thought we could fix it quickly so we left chat up while we worked on it. The problem proved to be more difficult than an easy-fix.

We think we’ve found the solution to it. It appears that the issue lies with the size of pictures that have been uploaded. While some pics were uploaded small enough to allow for very smooth scrolling, others were uploaded with extremely high resolution and slow the system down as the scrolling feature attempts to render the higher resolution picture. Eventually, we will create a feature to limit the size of pics that can be uploaded. In the meantime, we’re manually fixing the pics manually.

A second problem we’re experiencing with Chat is the amount of load it is putting on our server. This is a problem that is really only solved by adding more server power. We’re in the hunt for that now.

One feature we added to help out the server is limiting the writers who appear in Chat. Some of you online earlier today may have seen us testing the feature where only those writers who are online appear in the large chat window. Writers who are offline do not appear. In the short term, this solution fixes both the scrolling problem and the server load problem. However, as more writers login the scroll is enabled and the server load grows.

The final thing we’re working on is the addition of your pic on your letter purchase pages. (To get to one of your letter purchase pages, go to the customer homepage, click a category where you know you have a letter, find one of your letter titles in the list and click it. The following page is your letter purchase page.) Look for the area of the page inside the brown box that reads, ‘Sign me up for E-tips on the best strategy for writing these kinds of letters.’ This box is being replaced with your pic. If you are online the ‘Ask this Writer’ text appears…if you are offline, ‘Email the Writer’ text appears and is linked to the messageboard.

One writer who did have some hits from customers in chat explained that customers seemed to be looking for advice. Her strategy is to continue giving advice to encourage the customers to return. Our bigger strategy and the point of giving you direct access to the customers is to figure out how to turn the chat conversation from providing advice to selling your letters.

Hang in there. We’re just getting started.

~Rob

Chat is live and working! Check it out on the customer homepage: LetterRep.com

Want to be part of the testers? Upload a pic!

For this early stage of chat we limited the testers to those who had at least 10 letters and who had uploaded a pic. Unfortunately, this criteria prevented lots of prolific writers, some with hundreds of letters but no picture uploaded, from being testers.

We need you!!!

Upload your pic today so we can add you to the test group.

Let me know when you have so I can add you to the group. (admin[at]letterrep.com)

See you soon!

Hello Dear Writers,

We are close…we are very close. The developer tells me we may be able to go live with chat Friday. It looks good and it works very well.

Several years ago, the company responsible for the (in my opinion, ugly) design of LetterRep said that the site needed a personality…someone with whom customers could connect upon arriving. Back then I paid a model and a photographer and posted the pics of someone, not a writer, all over the site.

The model is now gone and the writers are LetterRep’s personalities. It’s a much better fit. Chat has been designed around you, the writers, with an emphasis on giving you better opportunities to connect with and assist customers. There isn’t just one goal - there are lots of them: 1)More sales; 2)Opportunities to collect more information; 3)More satisifed customers by leading them to letters better suited to their needs; 4)Building rapport with customers so they will return to you for more letters in the future. There are probably other goals and good reasons for them.

Now, a really nice Chat app has been loaded. If you have ever used Facebook and Facebook chat then you will be no stanger to ours. It’s virtually the same…we’re just going to use it differently. Here’s how it works:

1)Customers arriving at the customer-side of LetterRep will see something like this:

A few things to know about this page are the writers are going to be arranged by # of Letters, Availability (online or offline), and eventually Rating.

The ‘First|Scroll left|Scroll right|Last’ will be links allowing the customer to scroll the row of writers without reloading the page.

Also, the ‘[#] letters’ above the pic but below the names will soon be linked to a page showing just that writer’s letters.

Next, the ‘Rating.’ This is completely subjective at the moment. As far as I’m concerned, all of you guys deserve 5 stars, so I gave you 5 stars. I, however, am a biased party, so we are determining a fair way for customers to assign a rating to writers. A cumulative score by customers, somehow rating letter quality, quality of the assistance experience, etc., will someday replace my biased scores.

The pics, for the time-being, will be linked to chat for that writer. Soon, we will link the pics to the upcoming writer mini-sites.

‘**Online**/**Offline**/Ask this Expert’: This small piece of LetterRep is driven by a technology called AJAX. As I will explain below, writers can turn-off their availability so they can do things like upload letters. When availability is turned off, the writer appears offline. If a writer is truly signed out, he/she also appears offline. If, however, a writer is online and fully available the ‘**Online** Ask this Expert’ text appears below the picture. AJAX also assists us in dynamically reorganizing the writers by those who are online coming first in the list and those who are offline appearing further to the right.

When the customer clicks the writer pic or the ‘Ask this Expert’ link, the chat window below appears:

Before moving on, please notice that the ‘Ask an Expert’ link remains, even after chat is initiated. We are working on changing this so that ‘Ask an Expert’ changes to ‘Currently Chatting’ automatically. At the time being, writers can click the settings icon (it’s the small flower-like icon in the bottom right of the image) and change their availability as explained above. More on that later.

In the image, the customer has just written ‘I need a letter of recommendation for dental school.’ The writer responded and from the writer’s side the writer is conducting a search for any letters he/she may have to suit the customer’s need. (Currently, search from the writer’s accounts only searches the writer’s own letters. This will likely expand to all letters on the site once we work out a referral program between writers.) A Search block now appears on the writer-side homepage and on each writers’ ‘My Live Works’ page. Here’s the search result from this writer’s account for ‘dental school’:

You will notice below the search result the text ‘Link to join’ and a link. The writer highlights this text, copies and pastes it into the chat window. After entering, the link is sent via chat to the customer and appears like this on the customer page:

In some browsers, like mine, the link does not appear underlined, but the link can be clicked by the customer to be taken to the letter purchase page. At the moment we are working on the page to be loaded behind the chat window rather than opening in a new window or tab.

As mentioned above, a writer can set his availability as it appears to customers. To do so, writers must click the small flower-like icon and choose their setting:

(At the moment, The ‘My Status’ and ‘Disable sound notifications’ appear. We will remove these distractions soon.) Clicking Available changes the customer-side availability of the writer to ‘**ONLINE**. Clicking Busy change the availability on the customer-side to ‘Currently Chatting,’ and clicking Invisible changes availability to ‘**OFFLINE**.’

Let me know what questions you have at this point.

**STAY TUNED FOR PART II**

~Rob

Hello everyone,

I hope all are well.

Thanks to everyone who posted a pic. There’s still time to upload one if you haven’t already.

I’ve been working with the developer on Chat. He is several days away from finishing the coding. Afterwards we’ll spend a few days configuring and testing before it’s fielded. Bear with us.

Closer to completion…the survey results are in. I’m providing these to you as a precursor to Chat for you to begin gathering an understanding of the general customer mindset. The value is when Chat is finally available you’ll have some idea of why a customer arrives at LetterRep.com and the difficulties they encounter so you can assist and steer them toward the purchase of your letters that suit their needs…or to the service of YOU writing a letter for them.

Here are the overall visitor results:

The key choice of interest above is ‘Ask an expert.’ ‘Browse’ and ‘Learn about products’ are almost the same and, as you can see, make up roughly 60% of all visits. ‘Ask an expert’ was chosen as a survey choice because it was felt, based on voicemails, answering messages and customer service emails that customers definitely come to the site looking for assistance. That’s why we’re adding Chat.

Customers are basically in search of free stuff - no question about it. Other sites that employ Chat have gone as far as requiring customers to input their credit card info before allowing access to the assistant just so the assistants can call a stop to the pressure for answers by requiring payment before any further assistance is given and the customer is that much closer to completing the sale. (I’d like to hear your thoughts on this…I’ve opted not to include it in this version of chat, but I’ll consider adding it if a large enough group feels it would screen the freebie-seekers from the true customers.)

Chat will allow us, the writers, to perform our normal work online and then, as customers click the ‘Ask an expert’ link appearing below our pics, interact with them - answering questions to assist, as much to help as to demonstrate to the customer that we, the chatting writers, have the product or service they need.

The goal for Chatting will be for writers to take the 60% of browsing-customers who click Chat and the 30% of assistance-seekers who click Chat, ask and answer questions about the customer’s needs, build trust and rapport, and lead them to the writer’s own letters or to a page to hire you exclusively to compose a letter for them. (We’re creating a writer’s side page to help you quickly find your letters and provide letter purchase-page links to the customer. You’ll also have a link to paste to the customer in chat to have them hire you exclusively to write a letter.)

Here’s the next bit of interesting data from the survey - The comments customers made when answering the open-ended questions: (Bear in mind that I removed some ‘fluff’ from the survey that didn’t make a difference in the results: Entries, such as, ‘asdfjkl;‘ ‘I wanted free stuff,’ ‘I don’t like surveys,’ etc.)

Question 1: What do you value most about the [company] website?

Question 2: Please tell us why you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today?

In the first list above, with a few exceptions, the value customers assigned to LetterRep was the ability to work with a professional.

The second list is almost a unanimous annoucement from customers that they are/were unable to find the letters they need.

Chat can fix both of these. Here’s how…

Writers who take the time to professionally and courteously work with customers will satisfy the professional requirement from List 1. Building trust will be key! Learning the protocol of how to interact and finally sense when a customer is ready to buy will take a little time, but be patient and keep trying.

As you start to become successful, let us know. We’ll use your methods to build a general protocol for all writers…and, since you can only answer one customer at a time, it won’t be taking away from you.

As for the second list, I find it a little hard to believe…for goodness sake there over 9000 letters on LetterRep. Either not know how to search or not wanting to search is more likely the problem. Nonetheless, in the interest of improving our own sales, we’ll gladly conduct the search for them. That, however, may require help from the site, and, please trust that I’m all ears if you have a suggestion to make it better. First, the development team is creating an ‘Assist a customer’ page (those of you who were around for our earlier attempt at Chat will remember that link). During your chat sessions with customers, writers will be able to click the ‘Assist a customer’ link in their writers accounts. Within the accounts, writers will be able to search their own letters. I made this bold because it is only stage one of Chat. In time we will add the ability for writers to search all letters on the site and earn money through referrals. As for now, it will just be your letters that you can search. Searches will be based on the information you collect during your chat session with the customer. While determining the customer’s needs, you will be able to search on the ‘Assist a customer’ page and have results displayed and accompanied by links. We’re still working on the process, but you’ll either be able to copy-and-paste the link or click on it to have it pasted into the Chat window to be sent to the customer. When the customer clicks the link, they will be referred to the payment page. An additional link on the page will refer customers to a page for hiring you exclusively. This is just the stuff we thought of. As you conduct your chats, please, please, please let me know what would make it better and easier!!!

Chat will look a lot like Facebook’s chat, for anyone who’s used it. Please take a look at the survey comments above, and if you have any questions, please let me know.

Rob
admin[at]letterrep.com