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