Starting a blog has taught me an unexpected thing or two about SEO. I didn’t expect it to matter this much, if I’m perfectly honest. In the past, I thought bloggers made quick money. Well, it turns out that isn’t the case. Most websites are getting most of their traffic from Google. This means that they’re forced to grow the “slow way”. If you want to get your blog going at any time in the next few months, you’re staring down the barrel of a fairly intensive social media campaign. A lot of online writing types start YouTube channels, some of them are great and get a lot of traffic, but YouTube usually ends of being a grind of its own. So, I’ve decided to keep writing. Something I’ve noticed as I write is how “forgiving” Google is. Google is perfectly designed to let you write anything you want and still be able to get traffic. If you’re blogging, you don’t need to worry too much about the nature of your content. As long as you’re using common words and language, have a well-organized website, and aren’t offensive: write what you want. As long as your content is user friendly and in demand, you should rank and have repeat visitors.
The title of your blog post isn’t the only thing that ranks on Google
You might think that your blog post is what ranks on Google. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t. Google is very smart. It has bots crawling your site, and they use AI to find the meaning of what you write. Any relevant part of your website can show up on Google. And Google is good at reading your website. If you talk about anything that’s searched, you can get traffic as a result of it. This means that the better content you write, the more traffic you get. It’s that simple. A detailed article will make you infinitely more money than one that was slapped together quickly, because the detailed article will cover a lot of different search engine topics. A long article will do better than a short one, because there’s simply more to search for and find in the long article. The good news behind this is that if your work is complete, you can make money quite easily.
People just randomly type stuff into google sometimes
Looking at Google data is like looking what’s going on in people’s brains. When you look at search console, you’re going to find that a lot the queries that you rank for are short. They’re just thoughts. Random questions. Half written sentences. People are just spitting out ideas. Sometimes they know what they’re looking for, but there are a lot of people who don’t. This even applies in the business-to-business context, albeit to a lesser degree. People have thoughts and ideas about everything. Search engines let you capitalize.
People do surf the web
They just do it less, because there are fewer good websites out there. The internet has become a winner take all game, and it’s in no small part due to the fact that United States and a few other major countries dominate the ecommerce landscape. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people looking for random stuff online. They’re out there, and they are searching for stuff. They just need to be reached and capitalized on in different ways. Running a blog for a long time is one of those ways.
Google culture won’t die for at least the next decade or two
There’s some evidence to suggest that a lot of people just search for stuff on video sharing sites such as YouTube and TikTok. But people who are older than 35 are still Googling things, even if the results are getting worse and harder to interpret. If you create good content, you will be found on Google in the long term. You just have to trust the process and keep working. Blogging is nowhere near dead yet. The landscape has just changed. There’s more written content online than ever, but you can also boost what you write using TikTok or YouTube. If you create a foundation for yourself in the world of blogging, you should be able to make money online well into the future. You’ll be able to transition into the world of making videos if you feel as though your audience is moving away from reading articles.
If Google looses market share, new search engines will pop up
Expect search engines from Russia, China, and other countries to surge in popularity. Expect other countries, ones that haven’t been named, to make their mark in this and other tech-related spaces too. There are so many large, poor countries that I would venture to say that we haven’t seen much of anything when it comes to the advancement of technology. Search engines will be around for the foreseeable future, even if Google creates problems for a couple of years.
Translation technology is on track to make blogging extraordinarily profitable
Translation technology is already quite impressive, but it’s not quite at the point where it’s completely trusted. Also, most of the world isn’t quite developed enough for people to be doing most of their shopping online. This means that there’s a gap in the market, waiting to be filled. As more and more of the world connects to the internet, and more and more text gets translated, bloggers who are performing well in English are well positioned to snag a share of display ad and ecommerce revenue. I predict that improved translation technology will make it such that large blogs (written in any language) will profit immensely over the coming decade. Anything that can be made relevant to speakers of another language, will be. This will also lead to some deflation. Influencers and bloggers who are unskilled and inconsistent will lose out. But those at the top will continue to benefit.
When you’re blogging or writing online, you need some sort of monetization plan. You can sell or promote products or take the route of plastering your site with ads. It helps to write about high-value topics, and to write a lot. The more you write, the better you’re likely to do from a traffic perspective. But you don’t need to agonize over what Google wants to see. Just run a real, good, helpful website. If you improve people’s lives or keep them entertained, they’ll be able to find you through Google, and keep coming back to your site provided you’re consistent. The consistency is really the key in all of this. Would you keep coming back to a website that isn’t constantly being updated? No, and that’s the real key to making money online, not agonizing over what type of article to write.
Thanks for paying attention.
