5 Ways NOT to Become a Search-Engine Optimization Blogger

Your Path: SEO Software > 5 Ways NOT to Become a Search-Engine Optimization Blogger

First in an ongoing series

So, you want to become a search-engine optimization blogger and use the latest SEO and SEM techniques to write successfully about your chosen topic? I’ll be the first to admit — it is extremely difficult to make money with a blog. Thousands, if not millions, of people think that they can create a blog on Blogger, WordPress, or any other platform, slap on some Google Ads, and watch the money roll in.

Well, that’s not how it works. And to paraphrase one of my favorite ’80s films, anyone who says differently is selling something (and it is usually a scam). I have been blogging on current events at my Considerations blog since 2006, back when I was a Boston journalist and newspaper-editor, and I make roughly $100 a month with Google Ads. My writings there are more of a hobby and a way to keep my passion for journalism alive after I moved into the online-marketing field. I’m not going to get rich. And that is the level of revenue after even after I had optimized the site — along with hundreds of individual posts — for search engines and receive approximately 500 hits per day from organic traffic (the best-converting kind of traffic) at the moment as a result.

Search-Engine Optimization Blogger

So, here are the reasons why your blog will not make you rich (don’t worry, I’ll be more positive in the next post in this series):

1. You cannot write well. I’m sorry, but it’s often true. Everyone has his particular talents. I’d like to believe that as a former newspaper journalist, I can write well — but I know little about, say, calculus, physics, or football. If you cannot form coherent thoughts on paper, outline an argument, provide examples, use logical methods of argumentation, spell properly, and write with proper grammar — few people will bother to read what you write. Just remember the level of writing you see in most online discussion-forums, and you’ll realize that most people, in fact, cannot write well. But if you want to become a serious blogger, then you are probably not one of them.

2. You are not original. There are 1,001 bloggers who pontificate each day and say things like, “Barack Obama/Sarah Palin is a moron! And here’s why.” Well, what differentiates you from the other thousand? Why should I take the valuable time to read you specifically and not the others? What can you cover that no one else does, and what can you cover better than anyone else? The near-infinite number of websites has shifted the focus in publications from general-interest to niche-interest. Say that your hobby is collecting Spanish wines, and you are an expert on the topic. There are thousands of political bloggers, but perhaps only a few who comment specifically and only on Spanish wines. You will have a better chance of becoming famous in that niche. On the Internet, it is better to be a large fish in a small digital-pond than the inverse.

Over at Considerations, there are three types of posts of mine that generate the greatest interest and traffic:

Through the combination of my personal experiences, my journalism background, and my later business education, I write what I hope are posts on these topics that garner significant visitors, social-media sharing — and, of course, Google Ads clicks. I can only cite their traffic as evidence. Whether or not you agree my my thoughts is immaterial — the point is to write about what you know and preferably what no one else is covering as well.

3. Your design is unprofessional. I never want to “bite the hand that feeds” since I am grateful to the WordPress platform and the hundreds of developers who create free themes, templates, and plug-ins — but many of them leave much to be desired. While everyone knows that no one should judge a book by its digital cover, the fact remains that people do — especially in a world today of short attention-spans. To be taken seriously, your blog needs to have a professional design and layout. Any twelve-year-old kid can create a basic WordPress blog — yours needs to be a lot better.

4. You do not market yourself. Clicking the “Publish” button in your blogging platform is just the end of the beginning of the road to becoming a professional blogger. All of your writings are useless if people do not find them — and if people do not find them, then you will have little success — whether your goal is to gain advertising-clicks or just to get your name out there.

5. You have no patience and little follow-through. If you are the type of person who gets a great idea, starts it, and then forgets about it weeks later to move onto something else, do not try to become a serious blogger. As I stated above, it takes months — or years — to become even moderately successful.

Now, readers of mine are probably asking an obvious question: Why should we listen to you when you are making only $100 a month after blogging for five years? Well, my honest response: I did not know what I was doing for most of the time. I started the blog as a print journalist long before I knew anything about SEO and online marketing. Just one example: my blog was at samueljscott.wordpress.com for years before I moved it to the present domain just a year ago. This was a tremendous mistake (for reasons I will describe in the next post in this series), and the overall results should only be measured against the time since I founded the new domain.

So, my point is to help others to learn from my prior mistakes (which were numerous — and it has taken months to correct them) and avoid them at the outset. This two-part series will focus on how not to become a search-engine optimization blogger — and then how to use SEO to become successful. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

Lost Blogs: How NOT to Become One of Them

Second in an ongoing series

Here is a (unfortunate) rule of digital thumb: Ninety-nine percent of the content on the Internet is, to use a polite phrase, less than stellar. And your writings will become yet another one of the many forgotten, never-read, lost blogs on the Web unless you pursue the right SEO, blog-content, and online-marketing strategy.

In my prior post “5 Ways NOT to Become a Search-Engine Optimization Blogger,” I listed specific reasons why your blog — whether personal or business — will not become successful. At the risk of becoming too pessimistic, I will provide several more. (Do not worry — a future post in this series will offer advice on what writers should do).

Your Content is Generic and Essentially Duplicated. Google’s recent “Panda” update to its algorithm (see here and here) has been much-discussed in online-marketing circles, but this gist is simple: Google wants — with good reason — sites that offer original, researched, quality content to rank higher than so-called content farms that use anything akin to article-marketing automation. One blog post or article of the former is better than ten articles of generic content that insert a keyword into every few sentences. Prose quality is better than keyword-based quantity. (For more information, I recommend the analyses here, here, here, and here.)

The take-away: Why should anyone read your post or article on topic X rather than that by anyone else? Solve this problem, and you will produce quality content and gain better search-engine rankings as well.) I do not mean to toot my own digital horn, but I want to provide evidence that I practice what I preach. At my Considerations journalism group-blog, I wrote a lengthy article two months ago on the differences between how men and women communicate in dating. The post targeted the low-competition and high-traffic keyword “why women lie” (in addition to “women communication.”) According to my latest data, the post now ranks ninth in Google for that keyword despite any further SEM efforts on my part. I merely took the time to research and write quality content, and I do the same for every blog post there and here. Research and write, research and write — the same rules for writing a good doctoral dissertation or journalism article still apply online.

People Are Blocking Your Website. Try this example. Do a search for anything in Google, click on a search result, and then hit the “back” button in your browser. Your cached (saved) search-results will appear — but with this addition:

At the bottom of the organic search-result on which you clicked, the option to “block all [the domain in question] results” will appear (unless you are using one of the few browsers that do not support this Google innovation). The search-engine giant now allows people to block entire domains from future search results. (Google’s blog provides more information, and the company’s Chrome browser has an available blacklisting add-on.)

The take-away (though it should be obvious): Do not do any deceptive, annoying, or malicious. Do not aim to rank highly for a keyword that is entirely irrelevant to your website — for example, getting traffic by targeting a popular TV show to draw people to a forex or gambling website. Do not have so many advertising pop-ups that your website makes people never want to return. And so on. Once a person blocks your website in Google — for any reason — you will lose that person forever. Just imagine this one example multiplied by thousands or millions of online searchers.

You Are Not Using Your Time Efficiently. As I wrote in one of my first posts on this blog on SEM wikipedia, the entire field of Internet marketing can seem complicated and cumbersome — the entire process can involve content creation, on-page SEO optimization, link building, social-media marketing, and so on. Each part is important, and devoting one’s time entirely to just one aspect leads to less-than-optimal results. As an example of how I work each day, I recommend my post on “How to Become a SEO Blogger Over the Social-Media Week.”

Don’t Become One of the Lost Blogs

Still, as I write here to the point of possible redundancy, the goal is simply to write SEO-optimized, quality content on a site that encourages social-media sharing well. The rest — from Facebook “likes” to backlinks from authoritative websites — will then take care of itself. For more information, I recommend my prior posts “More-General Keywords: How NOT to Get Traffic” and “Famous Blogs: How to Work for Yourself With One.” There are many important considerations to know to ensure that your online work does not become regulated to the countless number of lost blogs whom no one reads and which deliver little benefit to your personal website or online business.