Only My Mom Loves My Blog”: A Case Study
Part 1
No matter which way you’re generating passive income, you need to be seen as someone with the answers, who genuinely cares about your readers or followers. We’ve talked about natural, organic SEO. This is primarily the heart of your market position –
Here’s a fact:
You can manipulate the search engine results far less than you used to be able to, even three years ago – and that applies to both “black hat” techniques, or white
For example, a recent post on Problogger, “Why Nobody Cares About Your Blog”, unleashed a storm of comments (164 comments). The author, David Risley, was speaking of the importance of speaking to people, not at them. In page after page of answers, 3 common refrains repeated over and over again.
1. An overwhelming number admitted they had low to no traffic – many of them after genuinely diligent keyword research, original content, and several months’ (even years’) work invested
2. Another noticeable, if smaller, segment of this group had noticeably poor communication skills. It was no surprise they had a dismal lack of readership.
3. We can disregard this one, for our purposes: (Each commenter was writing a personal blog just for himself and wrote to say that he or she didn’t care if there was any traffic.)
Checking out several of these blogs, and found some total gems. Of these gems, however, 2 “themes” common to self-admitted “unsuccessful” bloggers emerged:
1. The blogger seems to have made no attempt other than SEO to position themselves to their target market – he or she was not linking to social media, did not have high Twitter or Facebook profiles – and were talking about things relating to their own needs and experiences, hoping to connect
2. Even though the blogger‟s content was superb, the niche he or she had chosen was far too broad. The chances of people finding them organically, as a result, were microscopically small.
Part 2 coming soon
Always Progressing…
p.s. Save Time and money and grab your copy of 7 Proven and Innovative Ways to Earn Passive Income.
Archaeologists Uncover the Best Passive Income Program
Oh come now: You didn’t really expect an example of the best passive income program unearthed from the depths of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus in Sakkara, surely? Although we can take lots of wonderful lessons from ancient history, online passive income generation is not yet one of them.
But what are forensic digital archaeologists going to say about the subject in the far distant future. (Say, about 5 years from now…) Will they look back, and say “Information product creation turned out to be the most versatile passive income strategy!” – or will they take its other great rival, affiliate marketing, and create holographic brain chip shows about “The Fall of the Super Affiliates”?
Flippancy aside, it’s amazing what razor-sharp vision hindsight can bestow. But for now, all you can do is pick the passive income plan that works the best – and the most naturally – for you.
If one plan isn’t right, don’t be afraid to switch chariots, mid-race. For example, you may start out determined to be a niche blogger, with a small fortune invested in several domains and hosting packages (before somebody finally tells you about reseller sites). But several months and several hundred dollars into your experiment, you suddenly realize… you hate niche blogging. That free Special Report you created as a sign-up bribe to your “1,001 Liverwurst Recipes” blog did so well, you’re thinking of switching your passive income generation to original info products.
That’s perfectly alright. Most top entrepreneurs will tell you they had several “failed” experiments, before they finally hit on the perfect business model.
And don’t worry – all that work you put into learning niche blogging will come back to reward you, when you unearth and repurpose all that content you wrote, a year or so from now.
Always Progressing…
P.S. Everyone knows passive income is one of the best ways to earn more and work less. Grab you copy of Passive Income now.
SEO a Little Unnatural?
Search engines love content. It is what they analyze to determine the validity of a webpage and website and with this in mind, some have focused their writing efforts on pleasing the search engine. Is this a good ideal? No. You see search engines don’t buy your products or services, people do. Let’s say you are Jake’s home improvement store and writing an article with the goal of trying to get people to purchase their Christmas tree at your store. ”Decorating your house for the holidays” is the title you have chosen for your article. And this is how the article begins.
Trees are decoration and should be bought at Jake’s home improvement store as soon as possible. When you purchase your tree at Jake’s home improvement store we (the people here at Jake’s home improvement store) will trim your tree and bag it and put on top of your car for your drive home from Jake’s home improvement store to put up your tree.
Not horrid but not smooth by any means and I would not continue reading any further. This is why it’s essential that you write your content for your audience first and the search engines second. It is difficult to combine the two because keywords don’t always fit into an article or blog post naturally.
Here are three steps to write your SEO content and still sound natural.
1.
Research your keywords and keyword phrases. Choose one to focus on in your article and then set it aside.
2.
Time to write, think of your main keyword, but do not try to use it. For example, if your keyword phrase is, “Jake’s home improvement store” then you’ll write an article about how to decorate for the holidays, without worrying about if you’re using the keyword phrase or not. Your entire focus is on writing a quality article for your audience.
3.
Once your article or blog has been written , go back through it and see where the keywords fit naturally. Keeping in mind that there are some things that the search engines will be looking for. In an article regarding “How to decorate for the holidays the search engines will expect some relevant words such as tree , lights, decorations etc. When inserting your primary keyword or keyword phrase keep in mind the places the search engine spiders are going to look.
* Your headline
* Your subheadings
* Your first paragraph
* Your last paragraph
* In the body of the article
TIP When using your keywords aim for a density of about three to seven percent. Anymore and search engines might recognize your content as being keyword stuffed. To determine percentage simply take the number of times you use your keyword and divide it by the total words. Therefore, if you have a 450 word article and you use your keyword 18 times you have a keyword density of four percent.
So what do you think ready to get natural with your SEO?
Generate new links.. pt 2
#4 Write press releases and submit them to online press release websites. Be sure to include your website link at the end of the press release so media representatives can contact you, but also so you have an incoming link and interested visitors can find your website.
#5 Reciprocal links. Some reciprocal links are good as long as they’re coming from relevant websites. The trick is to balance reciprocal links with one-way links. Mix up your linking tactics so it looks natural to Google.
SIDENOTE link farms & link exchanges While links to your website are important for a good page ranking, search engine spiders don’t accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality website. A link farm is a Web page designed to profit from linking to web pages and Google and the other major search engines will penalize you for participating, paying, for links.
Link exchanging is essentially a link trade, “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” It’s okay to do this in small doses as long as the website you’re trading links with is relevant to your website. If your website sells dog-training products and you’re trading links with a furniture website then the search engines are going to discount the link.
#6 Add a blog to your site. It is a spectacular way to generate fresh content. Guest blogging on relevant blogs works a lot like article marketing, you generate links to your site in each blog post you write. You can also include links back to each of your web pages and allow your readers to reprint your blog posts as long as they keep the links in place.
#7 Become a tweeter. Participate in social networking. Posting tweets, and Facebook posts create incoming links to your website. In addition, when you comment on forums and other blog posts you also create incoming links via your signature.
Don’t try to do all these at once you could get overwhelmed, instead focus on one tactic at a time adding to your SEO strategy as you grow.
Generate Incoming Links
The first thing search engine spiders look for, when they are labeling and indexing web pages, is content, as you might already know. Links coming into and out of your site are the second thing that the spiders look for. The links coming into your site have more weight than the ones leaving your site, which is what makes generating incoming links a very important search engine strategy.
Here are seven ways to generate incoming links.
#1 Content is to websites what location is to real estate. People, other website owners, link to relevant content. If you write and publish tons of quality content, you’ll receive tons of incoming links.
#2 Online directories. While there are many directories that charge for a listing, there are also several that will list your company’s site for free.
- Freeonlinewebdirectory.com
- sbfx.net
- freeonlinedirectory.info
#3 Article marketing. Writing articles and publishing them on other sites including article marketing sites, is a great method for getting inbound links.
- articledirectory.com
- ezinearticles.com
- articlebase.com
- goarticles.net