Hello Everyone,

It is only appropriate on the eve of the American holiday of Thanksgiving to make this announcement: On November 25th, 2008, the total number of custom-written letters submitted by writers to LetterRep.com reached 5000. That number didn’t last long, though. Today, the site is already up to 5041.

A huge thanks goes out to all LetterRep.com writers for their contributions. While the 5000-letters point could not have been reached without a great number of writers submitting, in some cases, 200 or more letters, please let us recognize individually the writer, Chelsea Rodriquez, who made the 5000th submission.

Good timing, Chelsea!

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday as its sole purpose is to allow the opportunity to give and show thanks to all those who somehow impacted ones life.

On behalf of LetterRep.com, I would like to extend a very gracious thanks to all of you, the LetterRep.com writers, for your efforts during this past year and during all those years before. Without you, LetterRep.com would not have succeeded as it has done so far. Thank you all very much.

If you will be celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, November 27th, I hope you have a very happy one. If this holiday is not celebrated wherever you live, please know that tomorrow, and all days, thanks and appreciation is given for you and your efforts to LetterRep.com.

Happy holidays to everyone!

Sincerely,

Rob Noyes
LetterRep.com

Dear Writers,

I will be adding customer testimonials to this page and sending it out periodically. I promise to only use the initials of writers.

23 November 2008

Dear LetterRep,

Just wanted to say thanks for the great customer service and
working hard to have a great site/service. I recently had a
letter composed for me by L.R. regarding a letter of explanation
for my EMT license. The letter expressed my topic and opinions
very well. I now hold my state EMT license due to the help of
a great letter. LetterRep.com will be my first stop for
future letters.

Thanks,
Jesse K

Ms. D,
Thanks a million. You have a gift. You took the previous letter
and made it even better with the additions.

Demitrios

Hi Rob,
I just wanted to let you know that I received the letter that Ley Reyes wrote for my brother’s visa. The response was so quick and she really put an effort to make such as heartfelt letter, it was exactly what I needed. You really have a good knowledgeable and professional writer! Please give her the necessary credit on her amazing job.
I e-mailed your website to all my friends and family, I’ve told them how quick the response from your site. I am absolutely sure that I am going to need you guys a lot in the near future. Thanks again.

Myrna

Hello Writers,

Most of the last several articles have discussed driving traffic to your letter purchase pages. In order to make your pages relevant to the searches potential customers are typing into search engines, your pages must contain the same keywords customers are using.

Here’s a tool to help you find keywords to put in the Signup Page Display Content to make your pages more highly relevant:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Also, here’s a page on optimizing your letter pages for search engines - from the masters, Google.

Google Search Engine Starter Guide

Let me know what else you need. I’ll do what I can to help.

Rob
admin@letterrep.com

Hello Writers,

In this post, I am taking some examples of letters and finding locations on the net where links to them can be posted, in an effort to demonstrate the thought process used for finding locations for you to post links to your own letters.

For this example, I am using letter titles from the category ‘Letters of Explanation.’ Specifically, I chose to use the letters entitled ‘Hardship Letter for Mortgage Company’ (keywords being ‘hardship letter’ & ‘mortgage’), seeing how this is very topical at this point in time.

WRITERS - THIS SHOULD SEND UP A FLAG FOR YOU TO THINK ABOUT THOSE LETTERS THAT ARE NATURALLY CYCLICAL, SUCH AS, RECOMMENDATION LETTERS FOR SCHOOL, RECOMMENDATION LETTERS FOR ARMED FORCES ACADEMIES, APARTMENT REFERRAL LETTERS, SANTA LETTERS, VALENTINES DAY LETTERS, MOTHER’S DAY LETTERS, ETC., ETC., ETC., SO YOU CAN COMPOSE AND MARKET THOSE AROUND THE NET AT THOSE DIFFERENT TIMES OF THE YEAR TO YOUR ADVANTAGE.

Personally, I think finding ’social’ locations on the net where people are discussing the topic of your letters is the most productive method, since people would rather read comments from others about a subject important to themselves, than by simply reading a static website of one single opinion. With that in mind, I am searching for blogs with articles where the ‘mortgage hardship’ letters will be useful.

To get us started, I went to Google and did a search for Blog search engines. Here’s the link to my results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=blog+search+engines&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

IceRocket.com - Blog Search was one of the first I found.
I entered ‘hardship letter mortgage’ (without single or double quotes) and got 384 results, such as…

Link 1
Insight into Real Estate Short Sales
… are pending and homes that have been sold in the last six months. It will help strengthen your case for accepting a lower amount of money for your home. You should also include bank statements and other proof of income and debt, as well as a detailed hardship letter, which explains exactly why you feel …

- in this case, the blogger did not offer the ability to post comments, but she can be contacted. Offering to write an article on the important points to hit in a ‘Hardship Letter’ would make a decent follow-up to this article and she would very likely accept - as most newsletter and blog authors are looking for content on a regular basis.

Link 2
Mortgage Aid: Who is Worthy of Help?
… to jump through a few hoops, of course, including having to write a “hardship letter” to explain why you fell behind on your payments for a “good reason.” Good reasons could or could not include job loss, divorce, and medical bills. Borrowers will also have precious little equity in their homes …

- this article accepts reader comments - again, don’t make your comment sound too much like a sales pitch to your letter or you’ll get labeled a spammer and banned from the site…along with all the rest of us.

Link 3
Loan Modifications for Struggling Homeowners and Important Things to Know
… a hardship letter, maybe need to send in some information like bank statements, pay stubs, tax returns, and then you wait for an answer. It is pretty simple. The people that want you to pay them make it sound like it is impossible to do it with out their help, but it really isn’t that hard. Yes …

- here’s another site that accepts reader comments and is an ideal spot for your links.

Link 4
Does any body know how loan modification works?
… at the same interest rate? Call your lender and ask them to talk with loan litigation department. You can also look on their web for loan modification package- some of them have the packages ready. Be prepared to give then your current financial statements and hardship letter to prove, that your …

- another blog allowing reader comments, ripe for posting a link to your relevant letters.

The same search could be done in IceRocket.com, or any of the other search engines from the google link above for other common titles in the ‘Letters of Explanation’ category, such as ‘dropped class’ or ‘Chapter 13′ or ‘Bankruptcy.’

Try the different blog search engines, as they will often each produce different results, and post comments with links to as many of your letters as are pertinent.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Rob
admin@letterrep.com

Hello Writers,

As many of you have no doubt noticed, many of the requests, both prepaid and non-prepaid, appear with completely incorrect categories and often misspelled titles. It is not your fault that these fields are incorrect, but visitors browsing your letters posted in response to requests made with these choices are likely making decisions about your professional letter-writing competence based on the entries the original requesters made. It is therefore recommended that you change these fields to improve the professional appearance of your letters.

Keep in mind, the time is coming when you will be able to change these items before the letter is posted, but for now it must be done AFTER the letter is made ‘Live.’

Here’s how the changes are made…

1) First login to your writer’s account;
2) After successfully logging in, click the ‘My Live Works’ link;
3) The following page shows the list of all your Live Works;
4) In the right column, entitled ‘Action,’ click the ‘Edit‘ link;
5) The next page will show your editable letter with a dropdown field for the category and a textbox for editing the title.

You are free to change the title to whatever you would like. The system tends to refuse some HTML, but you can try <b>[text]</b> for bold & <i>[text]</i> for italicized.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Rob
admin@letterrep.com

Dear Writers,

LetterRep.com has a Facebook Fan page. But, it is in desperate need of some fans.

Here’s the URL to take a look:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/LetterRepcom/24636263869

Hope you will join.

And, friend me here. I would be proud and honored to have all of LetterRep’s writers as facebook friends and it might be an easy way to get a hold of me, if you need questions answered.

Either way, I hope to see you soon.

Rob

This post follows the post, ‘How can get my letters to sell?‘  article. In this article, I hope to explain how the best-selling writers on LetterRep.com have found locations on the net to drive customers to their own specific letters.

Finding locations on the net to post links is mostly about understanding three things:

I) Knowing how your potential customers think and where they search the net - searching Google for ‘where can I post my letters to sell’ will not find viable results. In order to sell to ‘letter-seeking’ customers you must put yourself in the position of customers who are searching the net of your products and search as they will search.

II) Knowing how to construct a search properly will produce better results - most people simply post a plain text search, such as: letters of recommendation. Most search engines, take your literal query and return pages that most highly meet the relevance of your keywords. For the query above, letters of recommendation, Google will look for all webpages containing the words ‘letters’ and ‘of’ and ‘recommendation,’ as well as those that contain the words ‘letters of recommendation’ - millions will result - including those sites with just the word ‘letters,’ those sites with just the word ‘of,’ and those sites with just the word ‘recommendation’ (Google may be smart enough now not to return pages with just ‘of’ but, still, millions will result.)

III) Using the proper tools - common search, via search sites, like http://www.Google.com, will find sites but not find places open to allowing you to post links. Instead, conduct blog searches, forum searches and group searches. These are where your customers will be searching an asking where they can find your letters.
I) Know how your potential customers think and how they search the net

As mentioned above, you need to think and search as someone looking for letters…not as a writer hoping to sell letters. Customers in search of letters think things like,

“I need a letter of [whatever]”
“where can I find a letter of [whatever]”
“who writes letters of [whatever]”

and, they visit sites where they ask these questions.

Writers think things like,

“where can I post links to my letters”
“I need to sell my letters to make some money”
“who needs letters of [whatever]?”

The best attempt of the writer searches above is the last, but instead of just searching the net for pages where letter categories appear, take a look back at the LetterRep.com custom letter titles, which, in most cases, are written by customers, and look for some trends within them at give clues to what customers are needing and hints to where they may be asking questions. From the letter titles, infer places on the net frequented by customers with this type of need. Let’s look at the following categories…

Example 1: Credit Letters

Scrolling through the list of custom letters titles at the Credit Letters link above reveals, primarily, two sets of keyword phrases that you can use to search for locations to post links to these letters. Specifically, the ones that stick out are:

‘Derogatory Credit’ and ‘delinquent payment.’

Neither of these are categories on LetterRep.com. They are, however, the most commonly used phrases in the titles of this category’s custom letters and suggest that customers needing these letters are likely to visit blogs, forums and newsgroups discussing the topics of ‘derogatory credit’ and ‘delinquent payments.’

Example 2: Character Reference Letters

In this category, the two obvious topics about which most custom character reference letters are written are ‘Adoption’ and ‘Sentencing Leniency.’

**NOTE**
Writers - if you look through the categories and you see your own letters with short titles that give very little or no description of the letters intent, understand that you are limiting your chances of a customer even considering your letters if your titles are too weak.

To fix your letter titles, do this:

1) Login to your writer’s account
2) Click the ‘My Live Works’ link
3) Click ‘Edit’ for the letter in question, and
4) Edit the titles of your letters
5) Read the post: How can I get my letters to sell?
**END NOTE**

The topics of ‘Adoption’ and ‘Sentence Leniency’ offer clues to locations where your letters may be of great interest, namely, sites dealing with adoption, surrogate parenting, foster care for one and sentencing, courts, prison, jail, etc., for the other.

Example 3: Job Application Letters

Scrolling through the page of Job Application Letters gives more ideas of locations to post links than can be easily posted here. Besides simply posting links on blogs, forums and newsgroups discussing human resources, careers, job placement, etc., each of the individual job subjects offer innumerable locations: Nursing - medical blogs of all kinds; teaching - education blogs, forums, newsgroups, etc., etc., etc.

Also, keep in mind that letters in the Recommendation and Reference categories will fit nicely into the blogs, forums and newsgroups where you post the Job Application letters.

II) Knowing how to construct a search properly will produce better results.

This is so true. Albeit, fewer will appear, the results will be much better. The most effective means of constructing a search engine search is to enclose the keyword phrase query in quotes, like, “[keyword phrase].” Enclosing the keyword phrase, “I need a letter of [whatever],” where [whatever] may be recommendation or condolence or reference, etc. will then produce results that are much more worthwhile - only those webpages containing the words ‘letters of recommendation.’

There are other neat tricks too, like, putting a minus sign (-) before keywords or phrases that you do not want to appear in the results, for example, ‘”letters of recommendation” -site:letterrep.com’, will produce all the web pages with the keywords phrase ‘letters of recommendation’ that DO NOT exist on the letterrep.com domain. Check out the ‘Advanced Search’ features on Google, or any search engine, for details on how to improve your searches. Knowing how to search will lead to much more concise and enjoyable Internet sessions.

III) Using the proper tools

Of all three points here, this one is the most important.

Basic Google, http://www.google.com, is on the mission to organize every website on the Internet. However, websites are not the best places to post links. There are some, so conducting a search from Google will produce some decent results, but more than likely the results that are produced from a basic google or any search engine search will lead to websites…and not sites where discussions relevant to the subjects you need will exist. I don’t want to discourage you, though; so, feel free to perform basic search engine searches for locations to post your links.

My advice, however, is to slant your searches to places where visitors discuss the subjects about which your letters are written, rather than websites about the subject.

BlogSearch is a blog search engine that specifically searches blogs. Using the ideas we discussed above, go to BlogSearch and conduct your searches. The results produced will provide links to articles about the subjects you query, and most important these locations will allow, in nearly all cases, for you to post comments in response to the articles and comments of other visitors to the blog.

Don’t be too over-stated - posts that sound too much like sales pitches can get you banned. Make yourself sound like the expert in this field - so much of an expert you write letters on the subject - as you submit your comments with links embedded.

Next, from plain, vanilla Google, http://www.google.com, conduct searches with your query in quotes, like, “delinquent payment” with the word ‘forum,’ ‘blog’ or ‘newsgroup.’

The syntax is like this:

“delinquent payment” +blog
“delinquent payment” +forum
“delinquent payment” +newsgroup

These will produce all the pages where the words ‘delinquent payment’ and the word ‘blog,’ ‘forum,’ or ‘newsgroup’ appear. Don’t lose heart if you find a lot of worthless places. Be creative and keep trying. It will pay off.

Finally, get a news aggregator, such as, Newsgator, http://www.newsgator.com. Newsgator lets you (under the ‘Settings’ link) setup keyword searches for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Then, Newsgator crawls the net for any articles that contain the keywords you choose. Here are the ones I set up in Newsgator:

NewsGator: Keyword search
for “adoption letter” (3)

NewsGator: Keyword search
for “help writing a” (156)

NewsGator: Keyword search
for “jury duty letter”

NewsGator: Keyword search
for “letter to a judge” (52)

NewsGator: Keyword search
for “need to write a letter” (17)

The numbers at the end reflect the number of articles where these keyword phrases appeared since I last posted links and cleared the list. As you can see, there are hundreds of opportunities here to post links to articles using the keywords I chose back to the letters on LetterRep.com under these subjects.

This may be incomplete and I would really like to hear from everyone on ideas you may have for driving traffic.

I am going to create categories for different subject areas here on the blog, but this question, “How can I get my letters to sell?” together with “‘My Reports’ shows my letters have gotten hundreds of clicks, but no one is buying them…Why not?” gets asked more often by writers than any other, so this post may just stay right here for easy access.

LetterRep.com’s most successful writer earned $2890 in 2007. She’s a terrific writer, but her skills are matched by lots of other writers on the site. What she’s done that other writers have not is maximize the opportunities to market her letters so customers come to LetterRep.com for hers only.

The three primary things she (and others do) is…
1) She puts a lot of effort into her ‘Signup Page Display Content‘ letter descriptions to help customers understand the intent of her letters;
2) she posted an average of 17 links per letter out on the Internet BACK to her letters; and,
3) she created Google Adwords campaigns for her top-selling letters.

She’s not the only one. The second best-selling writer on LetterRep earned $2610 by doing the exact same thing. There are a handful of writers who take the time to do these and other marketing approaches for their letters specifically and consequently their letters sell all the time - writers who have not taken these steps only sell occassionally.

Those writers who do their own marketing are the writers who earn the bulk of LetterRep customer funds.

There is no special advantage these writers’ letters get that those of other writers do not - no top billing on LetterRep, no preferred placement, no ‘under the table’ payments for appearing first in customer search results, etc. Everyone’s letters start off equally…this group of writers has simply pushed their letters further.

Less than 1% of customers to LetterRep ask for a refund because they are dissatisfied with the letter they chose. The writers who market their letters are (almost) never within that 1%. Here’s what customers typically see and how the best-selling writers maximized their letter descriptions…

1. Signup Page Display Content - Letter Descriptions for the Purchase page
If you have written and uploaded a letter to LetterRep.com then you have seen a page similar to the one below (I’m only showing the bottom half):

Writer Side Submit Works page

The very bottom boxes to the right of the text that reads ‘Signup Page Display Content:’ are the topic of our discussion here. The information YOU AS THE WRITER post into these boxes appears on the Letter Purchase page under the text that reads ‘This letter is written to….’ Here’s an example of a customer-side Letter Purchase page:

Customer Side Letter Purchase page

For the purpose of this post, I’m using what I consider a very weak example.

Look for the content that reads…
This letter is written to…
*Residency Program Director
*Residency Program Director
*Residency Program Director

The writer to whom this letter belongs added almost nothing of value for the customer to review. Unfortunately, the text that appears here is very typical of the text most writers enter. There are some that are worse…some writers have put a space in the Signup Page Display Content boxes, so nothing appears.

Understandably, and especially when one is rushing to post a letter in response to a Prepaid Request, a writer may be tempted to throw a few words into these blocks and submit. However, these pages, like all pages on LetterRep.com, get spidered by Google and other search engines. When a customer conducts a search, the search engine compares the customer search query to the index of content its spiders have collected and, as you can imagine, it is unlikely that anyone seeking a letter for submission to a ‘Residency Program Director’ will use simply these terms. Keep this in mind and review the customer’s request for clues to the text other future customers are likely to use in their own searches.

**NOTE** A quick search on Google for ‘Residency Program Director,’ produced zero results within the first 10 results pages for this letter on LetterRep.com. Check it out: Residency Program Director

Additionally, while the body of the letter you write in response to the request may appeal to the original requester’s needs, future customers will not see the entire letter as the original request does. New customers must rely on the information you provide in the Signup Page Display Content. In this case, they get very, very little from just these bullets to help them make a decision. Fill in the Signup Display Page Content boxes to explain the letter’s substance and help the browsing customer decide if this letter may suit their own individual needs.

Here’s a better example of the use of this box…

Customer Side - Better Signup Page Display Content

In the example above, all of the available bullet spaces have been used, making this space much more informative for browsing customers. Also, this letter is much more Search Engine Friendly.

Now’s the time to go to your letters and update these very important fields.

To change the Signup Page Display Content fields follow this process…

1) Login to the Writer’s side, http://www.letterrep.com/Writer/writer_index.php ;
2) Click the link in the left menu entitled ‘My Live Works.’ The next page should list all of your ‘Live’ works;
3) Click the ‘Edit’ link in the Action column on the far right and scroll to the bottom of the page to the fields entitled ‘Signup Page Display Content.’

**Note**

While you’re there…
Take a good look at the category and title of your letters. If they need updating and changing, those changes can also be done from the ‘Edit’ page.

2) Posting links to your letters
Finding places on the net to post your links is easy, but it’s the subject for another post coming right on the heals of this one. Stay tuned.

For now, here’s how to use your writer’s account to produce links to drive customers back to your letters. Take a look at this page…

Writer Side - My Live Works page

This is the writer side ‘My Live Works’ page. (BTW, it is also the page you reach for editing letters and described in the text above.) In the far right column under ‘Action‘ you will see the ‘Link‘ link. When clicked, this link pops up a page much like this one:

Writer's Letter Link page

With this page, writers can copy this link and paste it around the net in relevant blogs, forums, newsletters, comments, websites, etc.

**Note** Put ‘http://’ before the link. It will not work unless you do.

Here’s your Link Posting 101 class: Nowadays, you can normally just post a link and the site will recognize it as hypertext. To take a link like the one above and contextually embed it in your blog post, comment, forum, etc., do this…

<a href=”the link“>Hi, my name is Rob.<a/>

This format will make the text ‘Hi, my name is Rob’ hypertext (usually, blue and underlined). When clicked, it takes one to the hyperlinked page. As text, it will look like this:

<a href=”http://www.letterrep.com/letters.php?catID=27&letID=1194&writer=1″>Hi, my name is Rob</a>

Embedded, it ends up looking like this: Hi, my name is Rob.

Very easy!

3) PPC Marketing - Google Adwords
This marketing choice is completely optional but it drives an incredible amount of traffic directly to your letters. Go to Google Adwords and create an account. Google Adwords gives you need ways to track your Return on Investment (ROI) that show how many customers came to your letters and their actions afterwards, leaving, exiting, purchasing, time spent, etc. Your ads appear on relevant Google search result pages as ads on the right side of the page when the search terms you chose are used by customers searching letters. Likewise, your ads will appear on websites that use Google Adsense where ads appear in the body text of articles, blogs, etc., relevant to search terms you purchased.

This option may be for the most serious writer, but at $.10 per click for most letters, you can generate a lot of sales.

Ok…that’s it for me and this rather lengthy post. Let me know your thoughts.

Rob

Hello Writers,

Welcome to the LetterRep.com Writer’s blog.

Before we get too far along, please allow me to explain the status of our ‘multiple’ sites.

As many of you know, a new LetterRep.com site has been in heavy development for several months. Many of us have been wishing for a new site for many years.

Lots of time and work went into the new site which was designed around lots of suggestions and comments by both customers and writers. The most important of those comments was about writers having the ability to interact with customers, primarily to ensure they had all the details necessary to write a sufficient letter.

With that in mind, the decision was made to incorporate a chat feature into the site and around that chat feature the site was built. In June, we launched a ’soft’ release of the site to find that the chat feature, custom-made by the development team, was not robust enough to manage the traffic coming to LetterRep. Debate ensued over the right course of action for chat and it was decided that a third-party chat option was to be incorporated into the site. Between June and October, the site was redesigned around the chosen third-party solution. In mid-October, the new site was released. AGAIN, to our dismay, we found that chat was struggling with the our visitors. Additionally, many writers, the primary chatters on the LetterRep side of the chat, had problems installing the chat console application on Windows Vista and no console alternatives existed for Mac or Linux operating systems.

Once again, we are back at the drawing board.

The reality is that combining third-party applications, like chat, within other sites like LetterRep.com may be an idea that is ‘before its time.’ We have not given up hope for a solution, but we have taken steps in a different direction - the improvement of the live LetterRep.com site, until the chat app we need comes along.

One of the things added is this blog - a feature we implemented on the new site. Within it, discussions about topics relevant to LetterRep.com, old and new, will take place.

I hope you will join us.

Sincerely,

Rob Noyes
admin@letterrep.com