SEO is Serious if You Want a Blog that Makes Bank

Everybody is an authority on something. I’m an authority on Star Wars canon, as much as I regret admitting that. Most people are authorities on useful things, like how an automobile runs or how to perform surgery on the pituitary glands. If blogging is to become something they talk about in the future, it will be because blogging, through the power of approaching universal internet-access, has allowed almost anyone anywhere with a computer and a connection to share their views, news, and advice with just about anyone else with access to the web.

But this is the disadvantage to anyone who wishes to make money from blogging. You’re
competing against millions of other voices for the limited number of readers out there and more importantly the limited supply of clicks that make the cash come in. This is further complicated by the fact that other than simple word-of-mouth, online marketing strategies usually lie outside the means of the amateur blogger. The only way people are going to find your blog is if they find it while exercising a Google-style search. This is itself one of the cruelest catch-22s in the blogging world, because without awareness of your name and the name of your blog, how is anyone ever going to find you?

The Power of the Search Engine

The fact of the matter is you have to incorporate search engine optimization into your blog
content before you even decide what to blog about. This is where a savvy online marketer would
come into play if you can afford one, but you don’t need that kind of support to get started. That’s
because all you really need to understand about SEO is that if you write about topics that are
consistently popular searches online, it increases the likelihood that you’ll have people eventually
find your blog.

The best down-to-earth example of this is the case of Neil Patel. Patel is an online entrepreneur
who just recently got the prized accolade of being hailed a web “influencer” by the Wall Street
Journal. One of Patel’s latest projects has been the creation of a blog that gives readers detailed
poker tips. He used what he had learned from years of playing poker to offer a wide range of
insights into the way the game is played online.

The Power of Popularity

The important thing to know here is that online poker is an incredibly popular topic. Chances
are Patel would not have thought starting a blog reviewing cleaning chemicals was a good
idea. It’s not that a blog with such a topic wouldn’t get some attention, it’s that strictly talking
statistics, more people are likely to perform a search for “online poker advice” than “cleaning
agent review”. You might think that a less searched for topic would get more attention than a
blog faced with more competition, but you’re forgetting that while maybe a few thousand people
will Google how to pick the right cleaning agent in a month, millions of people will be Googling
online poker advice. You’ll be competing with dozens of others no matter what you blog about,
so when the amount of searches is only in the thousands, the established sources will collect
most of the visits. Subjects that are searched by millions using thousands of different phrases are
more likely to net a base audience for a small site that builds.

The thing you have to remember is that the content of a blog is like any other commodity – its
profit potential lives and dies at the mercy of popularity. There’s a very good reason why making
serious cash out of content is almost entirely a corporate affair. But breaking into the blogging
business is not impossible if you’re able to exploit the power of the search engine to work in your favor. It might not be the most inspiring of motivation, but seeing what people search for is the
best way to know what to write about if you want to make money doing it.

Tagged as: Blogging, business, established, marketing, neil patel, poker tips, SEO, sources