extreme webmaster evernerve

As I have already stated in my tutorial on building educational websites, you can succeed in an over-saturated field if you follow certain rules. Mainly, the things that you should pay attention to are:

• Original content
• Positive differentiation
• Creating a community
• Marketing via social media websites

PSDTuts.com, the Photoshop tutorials website is a prime example of this. The existing Photoshop educational websites are countless. There is even a fair number of very old, established ones out there. With high quality tutorials. Yet PSDTuts managed to surpass them all.

PSDTuts has:

• More than 14,000 subscribers. This is a number of subscribers any blogger dreams of.
• The PSDTuts’ tutorials have been bookmarked on de.licio.us almost 7,000 times. You can’t even imagine how much traffic that brings in.
• The website’s Alexa rank hovers around 10,000. I bet that they have millions of visitors each month.

…and the website launched in July 2007 (their archives go only so far, that is). How did they manage to succeed? Let’s have a closer look at their website and I will tell you what I think.

Standing out in a sea of existing and established websites

What is so original about PSDTuts.com? First and foremost, the content. While other Photoshop tutorials websites have well-written tutorials, they mostly have lessons on producing various text effects, interfaces and similar widgets. Or they just serve as a hub that lists other people’s tutorials.

Check out some of the titles at PSDTuts:

• A Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text
• Create a Stunning Old World Look
• Creating a Mac Type Background
• Super Slick Dusky Lighting
• Stunning Digital Smoke Effects
• Creating A Fantastic Fantasy Night Sky In Photoshop

They sound cool, don’t they? Well, they are truly unique. I have found great Photoshop tutorials out there on the Web, but none come close to PSDTuts’ in terms of sheer originality and coolness.

If you take a look at any of their lessons, you will immediately notice that:

1. They were written by a professional, by a Photoshop guru.
2. They are highly relevant to current graphics found on the Web, in advertising and other media (movie posters, etc).

These two elements are the major factors behind the website’s success. Professionalism is easily recognizable. And cool content that goes along with the spirit of times is irresistible.

A small advice: You don’t have to be an elite Photoshop user, a top guru to produce these kinds of tutorials. You can even be average and still churn out great content. I know this from my own educational website. Even before I became quite proficient at my application of choice, I understood that it’s quite possible to try something new, test it and then write a how-to on it. Or you can hire someone to do it for you. So, remember that it doesn’t necessarily take years to create something great.

Polishing your product to make it more attractive

Positive differentiation means being better than the others by having better content, better looks, etc, as opposed to negative differentiation which makes comparisons with others and points out the benefits and characteristics which others don’t have.

A website like PSDTuts doesn’t need negative differentiation, because their content and professionalism speak for themselves. But, you have to add that magic touch of style to market your website better. Who doesn’t like great design?

The final elements which pushed PSDTuts to stardom are:

1. Site design
2. Content formatting

PSDTuts is one of the few educational Photoshop websites that has a true Web 2.0 look to it. First, the website is a blog (Web 2.0 by definition), and second, it is clean and simple, which is all the hype now. There is a logo, a menu, and a sidebar. Standard Web 2.0 fare.

The format of the tutorials is state of the art: Big screenshots look really attractive, much like in the tutorials you may see in magazines. This is stylish, flashy and easy to look at.

The screenshots are accompanied by text descriptions, which are simple and straightforward. Which also means that the author doesn’t need to invest too much time in writing — a very wise decision.

Creating an effective community

If you take a look at the blog’s sidebar, you’ll see that PSDTuts has its own flickr group. The users post their creations there, whether they were inspired by the tutorials or not.

What are the benefits of this simple but great idea? They are manifold:

• The users are more motivated and more likely to stick because there’s a community.
• It gets the word out (Hey, come see my creations at this cool flickr group…)
• It saves a lot of bandwidth, because they aren’t using PSDTut’s, but flickr’s resources.
• The need for a forum is eliminated — more bandwidth and resources saved. No need to waste time on forum administration, fighting spam, etc.

And what’s best, these same users will do your marketing for you.

Make your users do the promotion for you

Like I said above, anyone wants to have their work looked at, to be commented and talked about and have some advice on how to improve. These are the reasons why your community will promote your website. They will invite other people to your site via e-mail, de.licio.us, StumbleUpon and Digg.

Just one of the PSDTuts’ tutorials got more than 1500 diggs. This means tens of thousands of visitors. And hundrerds of new subscribers. Because, as I explained, once the Digg effect hits you, your marketing becomes viral. Your websites gets advertised by word of mouth.

When your users massively promote your website, you have achieved something of extreme importance: you can shove Google aside. You aren’t dependent on Borg anymore.

PSDTuts has a Google PR of 3 (nothing special, in fact, it’s low) and it shows up at the bottom of the second page of Google’s SERPs for the search term photoshop tutorials. But who cares, really, when you have millions of visitors each month? Screw Google.

Everything counts in large amounts

When you have reaped such success, it is time to put some money in your pocket, right? As SEO master Aaron Wall has repeated ad nauseam, the best way to earn money continuously and have a sustainable business model is to have a devout community who are all potential subscribers to your exclusive content.

PSDTuts has 14,000 subscribers and 800 members in the website’s flickr group. The website owner(s) have launched a monthly subscription service that gives you access to all the extra content for $9/month. That’s cheap. Really cheap.

Let’s suppose that 1,000 people subscribed. Remember, the website has millions of visitors each month, which means that a thousand subscribers would probably make 0.1% of all people who visit it. This translates to $9,000 each month. But I think that there are more subscribers and more earnings. And that’s without counting the money made from advertising, on which I can only speculate about.

PSDTuts offers $125 for a good tutorial written for their website. That sounds nice, but it’s really nothing compared to the revenues the tutorial will pull in. So far, there are 14 authors writing Photoshop how-tos for the website, along the main author, Collis Ta’eed. This means more free time for him.

Summary

Collis is a really smart fellow, because he figured out how the Web works these days and applied all the elements successfully. Here goes:

The 7 Web 2.0 rules for success

1. Original, unique and highly professional content.
2. Ease of use.
3. Appealing and eye-catching design.
4. Community of devout users.
5. Viral marketing via social media websites.
6. Monetising via subscription.
7. Website going on autopilot.

So, like I said before, I will repeat here: You can succeed even in an already saturated market. Just follow the rules laid out above and get to work.

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