Here’s what we’ve done so far:

1. How to buy an after-market domain name.  Check!
2. Pick an ugly wordpress template.  Check!  (Design will be changing soon.)
3. How to design a real estate business card.  Check!

On my blog, I want to dig deeper into #3 and explain how I made an ugly business card much prettier with the help of a few friends.

Step 1) Learn The Pen Tool

I really liked the wavy lines in this sample design.  It looked classy and professional.

So I IM’ed my good buddy Justin Youens and asked what tool was used to create that?  Adobe’s Pen Tool.

So I start playing around with it, and here’s what I got.  Pretty awful.  LOL!!

Justin then got on Skype screen sharing with me and showed me how to set a point, drag the handles, set another point, etc.  (Here’s a 28 minute YouTube video showing how to use Adobe Illustrator’s Pen tool.  It says pretty much the same thing.)

Step 2) Less (Anchor Points) is More!

I’m a minimalist by nature, so I knew I didn’t want to get too crazy.  So I set the first anchor point in the upper right, made small handles.  Set the next point in the middle, small handles.  Third point, off the card to the left, small handles.  Fourth point on the bottom left.  Fifth point on the bottom right.  Then tie it all together by clicking on the first point in the upper right.

Next, copy the shape, move it up and to the left slightly, send it backwards, and set the transparency / opacity to 66%.

Third, paste the shape again, move it to the bottom directly below the first all black shape. I also added a slight gradient for fun after watching this YouTube tutorial about Adobe Illustrator Gradients.  I thought about doing more gradients, but didn’t want to break my minimalistic design.

Step 3) Fonts Really Matter

So I had my basic design.  Time to add the words.  Here’s the default, Myriad.  And wow, talk about cheeseball city!! 

At this point, I was laughing at myself thinking, “I’m never going to make this look any good.”  I forwarded a screen shot to my buddy Chris Drake with the words, “I don’t know why anyone thinks I need help with graphic design?” to which he replied, “LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Good point Chris.  I then spent 2 hours scrolling through Mac’s FontBook looking at different fonts.  I wanted something more soft than sharp, more playful than serious, but not too playful.

I tried out the Foot Lite MT, but it was too sharp.

Giddyup Std looked great on the name, but bad on everything else.

I finally settled on Giddyup Std for the name and Minion Pro for everything else.  It was starting to look a lot better.

Step 4) Fix Your Vertical Alignment

Casey Barthels is an AMAZING graphic designer.  Like, crazy stupid amazing.  I sent a screen shot and down-played my pride using the same line I used with Chris, “I don’t know why anyone thinks I need help with graphic design?” to which Casey replied “I know, weird! …hahahaahaha.” which made me laugh, but deflated my pride because he was right.

But then he said, “Actually man, that blows the doors off most non-pro design.” which re-inflated my tires. 

We yacked back and for a bit more over IM, and he told me to send him the file.  About 30 minutes later, he sent back this.  Notice the improvement just by focusing on horizontal and vertical alignment of the lettering.

Step 5) Touch-Ups

Sent another screen shot back to Chris Drake and got a “Boo yah!” reply.  So I knew I had something.  But Chris gave some great final tips on scrunching up the design areas so I could move Ashley’s image below the safe line to make sure we didn’t make her look bald.  Good call Chris!!  Here’s the final design.

Thanks

Big time thanks to Chris, Justin, and Casey for their help!  Ashley will re-pay you with…free real estate help.  Don’t you guys go getting carried away! 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll probably also enjoy How to design a real estate business card.

Jigsaw Magnesium w/SRT is my company’s top-rated, best-selling product.  Therefore, “magnesium supplement” and “magnesium supplements” are our most important keywords.  Right?

Well, because of some stupid, easily avoidable mistakes I was making, Lord Google wasn’t even putting www.JigsawHealth.com in the top 200 results for either keyword.  Not until I learned and applied Chris Drake’s 5 Steps to SEO Domination.

1. Choose a two-word phrase you want to rank highly on.

We chose “magnesium supplements” because Google AdWords showed this had the highest traffic.

Background: This was ironically both the easiest and hardest thing for me to do.  For the last two years, we’ve been trimming Jigsaw’s product line from 138 SKUs (unwieldy and totally unprofitable) down to the current 28, with the top 5 products accounting for 80% of revenue and 90% of gross profit.  I know that we’re a magnesium supplement company. But it’s hard to draw that line in the sand, at the risk of ignoring all your other kids.

So once you’ve chosen what to focus on, how do you apply it?  I’m glad you asked.

2. Modify your Title Tag

Everyone knows that Title tags are important to Google.  And I’ve always heard, “The more keywords you can shove in there, the better!” So you end up with pages names that are 300 characters long trying to get every long-tail term one can imagine.

Well, Chris Drake’s big on keyword density, which is also important to Google, as every one knows.  BUT…who really practices the discipline of saying, “I will *only* put Magnesium Supplements in my title tag.” to actually achieve keyword density?  There’s beauty in restraint. And it works, as you will see.

Important Caveat: Since your Title Tag is the text that displays in Google SERPs, it’s good to use *some* branding with a generic phrase like “magnesium supplements”.  The title tag we used: “Magnesium Supplements | Jigsaw Health”.

Tight baby…tight like a tiger! 

3. Change the design of the home page.

Our homepage sucked for SEO.  The copy was good and inviting, but it did nothing to help us rank.  There was absolutely NO FOCUS!

So we took a look at the decision we made in #1 and said, “Dammit, our company is about magnesium supplements.  That’s what our homepage is going to reflect.“  Now our “hero” graphic (bottle) and primary call-to-action (”Learn More” button) are related to our core — Jigsaw Magnesium w/SRT.

We also added body copy laced heavily with the magnesium supplement keyword.  This copy is not so much for reading as it is for optimizing and increasing keyword density, though each section is designed to appeal to one of the four buying modalities.  (Bonus points if you can tell which goes to which!)

4. Creative H1 and H2 tags.

Chris Drake really nailed it with this one.  It seems Google has increased the importance of H1 and H2 tags.  Check this technique out:

Here’s what the visitor sees:

But here’s what it looks like to Google (with CSS disabled):

Here’s the source code:

Result of #2, #3, and #4:

In about 4 days, Lord Google bumped us from outer-space to 27th for “magnesium supplements”.  About 10 days later, we were the second listing on page 2 (position 12)!!

But frankly, page 2 is still outer-effin-space. When was the last time you went to the second page of search results?  Hell, when was the last time you scrolled to the bottom of page 1?

And 60 days later — today — we’re still stuck in position 12.

Which leads me to #5…

5. Get relevant inbound links.

The SEO gurus I have read say, “What you say about yourself (ie. title tag, body copy, etc.) accounts for only about 20% of your Google rank.  Meanwhile, what others say about you (ie. inbound links) accounts for 80% of your keyword ranking.”

Sh*t.

Getting links to a cat playing keyboard is one thing.  Getting links to a vitamin company?  BORING!!!

So now you know why I wrote this post.  =)  Sure, the info in steps 1 – 4 are totally effective.  But I’m being a link whore right now!

So how will I go about getting more inbound links? For starters, I sure would appreciate anyone out there with a blog that thought this article was interesting and wants to throw up something like this in the first paragraph of your review:

“I read a wicked cool SEO article about Jigsaw Health, which sells kick arse <a href=”http://www.jigsawhealth.com”>magnesium supplements</a>.“

If you post something, may God shine his love and light upon you.  (And hopefully you’re not doing something lewd or illegal when that happens.)  And come back here and leave a comment linking to your link.  I’ll send you a prize which in all likelihood will be a roll of toilet paper.

(And if you don’t post something, may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your groin.)

At this point, some of you may be asking, “Why did you choose to use your homepage and not the actual product page?”  Simple.  WAAAAAAAY more existing inbound links to our homepage than our product page.  So in a way, we kind of hijacked those links.  And I think the presence of those links had as much to do with us sky-rocketing through the SERPs as #2, #3, or #4.

But no one really knows the inner workings of Lord Google, do they.

6. BONUS!  URLs matter.

Notice how Google bolds the word magnesium?  Yep.  This helps your keyword density.  (I’m gonna be doing quite a few page renames and 301 redirects in the near future.)

7. BONUS!  Cut out the clutter!

Here’s a peek at the new slimmed down design we’ll be launching in a few weeks or months.  Minimize and streamline baby!

Mucho Gracias

For teaching me these 5 Steps to SEO Domination, I show ENORMOUS gratitude to my friend Chris Drake, who founded the unhackable secure web hosting company, FireHost.  Link juice baby!  =)

And much love to Jeffrey & Bryan Eisenberg who have taught me so much about doing business on the web, conversion, persuasion, focus, buying modalities…I am in your debt.  These guys are the real deal and can help you improve your website conversion rate.

Leave a Comment

I’m dying to hear what you think.

UPDATE: We’ve moved from #12 to #11.  Keep those inbound links coming peeps!

It was a fantastic class.  I especially appreciated learning about the physiological differences between men’s and women’s brains. (At lunch Michele and I talked about how this might relate to Skip Moen’s, The Scriptural Role of the ‘ezer.)

Our homework assignment was to write copy for one of the four “buying modalities” that she discusses in her book.  (I blogged about buying modalities in my post, Why the First 30 Seconds at Mint.com are Way Better than the First 30 Seconds at Your Website.)  I chose to write this text for the “Spontaneous” modality, mostly because I don’t feel like I write very well for that modality.

Spontaneous is characterized by words like “flamboyant”, “unpredictable”, “unconventional”, “free-spirited”, “dynamic”…greatest fear = “boredom”.

Here’s my first take, which was created the last 2 minutes of my morning shower, plus another 5 while dripping wet:

You mean you’ve already done the work for me?

We know you love adventure, romance, galavanting around Italy shooting bad guys and blowing up evil lairs with your secret agent lover.

But Vitamins? ugh…Boring!!!

And yet you know, know, know that you need em, need em, need em!!

Well our expert team of agents at Jigsaw Health has meticulously pieced together the exact combination of nutrients you need every day into one product — Jigsaw Complete.

And with our handy packets, you’ll be out the door in minutes when you get that assignment in France.

So don’t put this quick purchase off another minute! There’s no commitments or contracts. Just a simple phone call to our agents at 1-800-007-0077 or order online at our secure, secret portal, jigsaw007.com. That’s 1-800-007-0077 or jigsaw007.com.

And don’t worry, your secret is safe with us.

The class got a kick out of me commercializing it up with sound effects, etc.  And to be honest, I spent more time on the explosion sound than the copy.  But that’s just how I roll.  (Sorry Michele.)

And then Michele and the other students got all editweapony on me!  Maistro, play Take 2:

(Changes bolded)

Your life is all action!

We know you love adventure, romance, galavanting around Italy shooting bad guys and blowing up evil hideouts with your secret agent lover.

But Vitamins? ugh…Boring!!!

And yet you know, know, know that you need em, need em, need em!!

Our cracker jack team of agents at Jigsaw Health has meticulously pieced together the exact combination of nutrients you need every day into one product — Jigsaw Complete.

And with our grab-and-go packets, you’ll be out the door in minutes when you get that assignment in Istanbul.

Don’t put this purchase off another minute! There’s no commitments or contracts. Your next assignment, should you choose to accept, is to go to jigsaw007.com

Not bad, eh?

Btw, I threw together this “secret agent” landing page for jigsaw007.com.  And I might just actually have this spot produced professionally (or at least, more professionally) and then buy some space.  What the hell…stranger things have happened.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.  Or just buy Jigsaw Complete and use the 007 coupon code for $10 off so I can see if it really worked.

Thanks to the members of the Pokey Little Pup-inators class for a great 2 days. =)