When your blog is already highly trusted by Google and has over 50,000 subscribers, it would seem that anything you say is instantly popular. For example, Shoemoney had free internet marketing guides, as does John Chow– and anything they put out immediately gets a ton of traffic. But what if you’re starting from zero? It’s a catch-22.
Consider the case of Keith Wilcox, a stay at home dad turned professional blogger just two months ago. He had zero experience blogging before, doesn’t have programming experience, but does know a lot about parenting, home schooling his kids, and fitness.
Consider Velina Lujan, a Boulder massage therapist whose business was struggling, after suffering a yellow pages rip-off. She put her site on wordpress, too, wrote articles, and started driving traffic.
Here are the steps they both followed– brand new to blogging– to start getting enough traffic to make a living. Not a crazy, superaffiliate lifestyle, but one that a normal person could sustain– one that is possible for you, too!
Are you following these simple steps that they did?
They put up a wordpress site, which takes all of 5 minutes to do. Go to wordpress.org or use one of the many free or almost free hosting sites that can one-click install your blog. We don’t have to go into all the reasons why wordpress is great for SEO– it just works.
- They wrote about a topic they know DEEPLY— in this case, parenting issues and how to do a great massage. Keith put up Hooked on Phonics video reviews, as he is good in front of a camera, while Velina wrote articles on Boulder elder care. If you don’t like to write, but enjoy making videos– do that. If you prefer doing podcasts, ditto. Just start creating great content about something you are passionate about, since odds are that it will be expert content that others will want to read and share with friends.
- They connected with similar users: Most bloggers stop at the above and wonder why they don’t get traffic. Keith spent days assembling the Top 115 daddy bloggers on the web and attracted attention from those site owners. He developed relationships with these folks– and started exchanging posts between each other. Those guest posts back and forth demonstrated to Google that he was a trustworthy site, like the ones that he friended. If you aren’t connected to these other guys, Google will think you’re a spammer.
They began reaching out socially: Velina tied in her Facebook profile and added 157 friends. Granted, she doesn’t have thousands of friends, but the ones that are there are good quality and drive traffic to her site– especially clients that are repeat customers. She also started doing some Facebook advertising, setting up geo-targeted campaigns– and this was much more effective than traditional Google AdWords PPC, which is quite expensive in the United States.- They did not SPAM: Meaning no fake content, no paid links, no cloaking– just good old fashioned networking combined with solid information. The results grow over time and you build great reputation with the search engines and human users.
Sounds like magic? You’d be surprised (or maybe not) how many people WISH that they could be successful, but don’t actually take steps to do it.
How much effort does it take?
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For a niche that is low in competition— such as for the term “unnecessary baby products“– 100 blog posts should be enough to start to get you traffic– so that’s just one blog post a day for 100 days, and each blog post will take you only 15 minutes. Can you do that?
- For a moderately competitive niche, maybe “alaska garage sales“, you need perhaps 1,000 posts to get to rank on the first page of Google or Yahoo!.
- For a term like free ringtones, that’s ultra hard– you might need 10,000 or 100,000 posts and links to be competitive. That’s the area where social media, linkbaiting campaigns, and large teams come into play.
But if you’re just one person and you don’t need more than a couple hundred dollars a day, winning on low competition terms– to dominate your small niche– should be more than fine. I wish you the best fortune on your blogging journey!
This post was guest blog by Dennis Yu.