Guest Post by Aaron Wall: Why Most Bloggers Need a Day Job to Afford a Cup of Coffee
Written by Aaron Wall (contact - e-mail) -- November 27th, 2007 | Recommend This
The Problem
Bloggers create large pools of relevant content, and due to the social nature of blogs many bloggers have built up significant trust with search engines. But, as mentioned in Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells report,
some bloggers get thousands of visitors a day, but can hardly afford a cup of coffee for their efforts.
The big problem with blogging is that there is an echo effect to it, and bloggers end up chasing the same keywords that other bloggers are targeting, and many of these have limited commercial viability.
The Solution
Instead of comparing your blog to other blogs, you can step outside of that echo chamber by comparing your site to commercially oriented sites in your field. Blogs have significant authority and Google’s algorithms tend to prefer to rank informational pages to commercial sites, so you should be able to outrank commercial sites for some of their most important keywords.
Search Google for shopping or commerce related keywords in your field and find sites worth replicating. Then go to Compete Search Analytics and pull down their analytics reports, which will show you the top keywords sending real traffic to competing sites and blogs. You can refine this data one step further by using Google’s Traffic Estimator tool to sort keywords by estimated value. Even if you don’t know where to start, Compete.com Search Analytics offers over 100 categories of keywords, which help you find keywords worth targeting and sites worth replicating.
You should still write all the blog posts you usually would, but from time to time I recommend digging into Compete Search Analytics and Google to find topics that are financially viable. Why not leverage your blog to pay for that next cup of coffee? :-)
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November 27th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Heck, Aaron, the Compete report is probably cheaper than your cup of coffee! — don
November 28th, 2007 at 10:17 am
That’s because they don’t have a firm grip on a good marketing strategy. Driving tons of traffic to any site is the only way to succeed.
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November 29th, 2007 at 5:28 am
Agreed Aaron, but I can afford a coffee at starbucks at the moment. All because of blogging :D
Nice piece of advice though.
Cheers!
Mani
November 30th, 2007 at 4:32 am
agreed
I have one blog on blogging and one blog on mortgages. Do prizes for which blog earns 100* more for same traffic :)
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:47 am
The problem, I believe, lies with the fact that most blogs do not seem to have a purpose. More accurately, the owner of the blog does not have a purpose. I’d argue that if you are an acknowledged expert in your field, your blog naturally gets more authority, the keywords are better suited to get ranked because you know more about the subject and use the right words by default. Thus, rather than analyzing it or optimizing for keywords, I’d say that a blogger should get a job first, learn about the subject ( and be able to afford the coffee ) and then start blogging….Just my 2 cents.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:04 am
As usual Aaron you are right on target. Nevertheless, lots of bloggers do so because they like to “listen” to themselves and really have nothing of substance to contribute. I would suggest that you are talking about the others. Thanks for the post