August Flanagan

“People treat SEO like it is black magic, but at the core it is very simple: Content + Links = You Win.”  – Patrick McKenzie

Create content. It’s the golden rule. The one thing that you HAVE to do if you want to attract new visitors, create a following, and ultimately sell a product or service.

“Write about what you know.”, “Become an expert in your field.”, every time I hear these mantras I feel like curling up in the fetal position and making groaning noises for 5-10 minutes.  I understand why people say these things, but what about all of us who are working on something because we see an opportunity, not because we are (or want to be) experts in the field. I’m not alone here am I?

Recently I’ve been working on a website related to the TOEFL exam (Test of English as a Foreign Language – a requirement for any non-native English speaker who wants to attend university in the U.S. or Canada). Building a website is easy enough, and we’ve even hacked together a couple of prototypes of the new tools we hope to soon offer test takers. But how are we going to reach our audience?  Well…I guess we’ll just have to become experts on the TOEFL exam, create a new blog where we share our wisdom through regular posts, build a massive following, and then sell our products to them.

I’m going to skip the sarcastic list of problems with this approach and just get to the meat of this post, namely how we created content and became an authoritative source on a question all TOEFL test takers want to know – “What score do I need to get into the school I want to go to?”, all within one week.

If you spend even 5 minutes browsing any popular TOEFL forum you’ll find all sorts of questions like “What’s the minimum score I need to get into M.I.T.?” Well, we found those questions too, but we didn’t find a good answer. Of course, you can go to M.I.T.’s website and dig around in admission requirements and you’ll find the information you need, but why couldn’t we find a simple list of all U.S. universities and their TOEFL score requirements? Probably because one didn’t exist. AH HA!

All of a sudden there was something we could offer that no one else could. From here on out it was a pretty easy process.

1. We hired a woman on oDesk for $50 to complete a spreadsheet with the scores for 260+ universities in the United States.  She worked quickly and had it done in less than two days.

2. I wrote a simple Ruby script to translate the CSV file into an html table, and published the results on our website.

3. We posted this to Wikipedia’s article about the TOEFL. It was reviewed and accepted by an editor thus making us the only authoritative list of required TOEFL scores for U.S. universities.

4. Wikipedia is now the number one source of traffic to our site and since being re-crawled by google we are starting so see a big increase in traffic from searches for scores for specific universities (e.g. TOEFL score requirement University of Washington).

The link attributed to the author of the quote up top goes to a great blog post about building this type of content. That said, I’d really like to hear from anyone else who has experience building this type of content? Do you have any strategies for picking out niches inside your target audience?