Blogging is fun.
It is more fun if people read and share what you write.
There are a lot of ways to get people to find you. You can send emails to friends with a link to your blog posts, run ads to promote your blog or be found via search engines.
Being found via a search engine is the most efficient of all these. It can be lucrative too if you rank for right topics. There are bloggers who make $40-50,000 every month with their one blog post ranking on top of search results. This is not the norm but you can make money if a lot of people see what you write.
However enticing this may be, truth is search engines don’t just show any page on top of their results. You have to put in the effort to get there.
How do you do it?
You create and publish content Google values.
These days Google looks for a definitive piece of content, that offers authoritative knowledge on a single topic in one place. You need a lot of time to write such a piece.
But most of us don’t have 10-20 hours to sit down to get away from work and write a definitive piece of content.
What to do then?
You can try an alternative approach. With this approach, it will take months to create a definitive piece but it is still worth it because with this approach you will be able to create several such pieces parallel to each other.
This approach is also aligned with how most creators work. They don’t publish definitive content at will. They publish some insights and their thoughts about a topic in one blog post. Later, they publish more about the same topic. It may take them 5, 10 or 20 blog posts to cover different aspects of a topic.
Do you plan to follow this approach?
If you do then write what you want to say when you want to say. Create a hub page around that topic. Use a phrase or keyword that gets a lot of traffic in the URL of this page. You can take the help of a friend who knows about SEO. You can also use a plugin like Keyword Everywhere to find your keyword.
Add whatever blog posts you have written or the new ones you write on a topic, to this hub page.
This is what I have done with my advice about writing a book. I keep adding whatever I write on this topic to the book writing hub page.
This approach works in more than one way for me and can do the same for you.
For starters, I don’t need to promote different blog posts. Promoting the hub page is enough. When someone asks for my advice on this topic I can point them to this page. If my work as a book writing coach and this page gets visibility, other bloggers and media can just link to this one page.
To make the page stronger, I can take whatever I write in a year on this topic, merge, edit and convert it into one definitive page that can go up to 10,000 words or more but will give the readers all that they need to know about writing a book.
I can even create an outline for a book and write a blog post each based on one point in the outline, and keep adding my writing to this page until I have enough for a book. I now need to bring everything in one doc and I’ll be pretty close to an unedited book draft.
This is not all that you need to please the search engines. But with this approach, you can come up with very high-quality content, something that is at the core of getting found via search engines.
Once you have this right, as a next step you can learn how to promote this page. It is easier said than done but it can open the floodgates of new traffic and opportunities for you.
Take for example a topic of book writing. When you look at phrases related to this topic, you’ll notice that the phrase ‘how to write a book’ gets the highest traffic (74,000 searches/month) of all phrases.
Now for anyone ranking at number one for this term will get one-third of total search traffic. You are looking at 24,000 visits in one month. This is more than enough to build an audience and business around. I have one blog post on my blog that received more than 400,000 visits since I wrote it so I know this is real. You will do fine even if you rank at number 2 or 3 for a high potential keyword.
Practice this approach with one topic. Create content, put it on a hub page, merge it and then promote it. You can convert it to an ebook or a print book. Once you go through all steps for one topic it will be easier for you to repeat it for new topics.
Now think, what will you do with all the traffic that will come to you?
If you want to chat about it, write to me.