If you want to search engine optimize your writing, you’re in for some rough news. It’s really hard nowadays. A lot of people out there are getting lots of traffic, but the competition is stiff. The low barrier for entry to blogging has made it so that the internet has been flooded with articles. You need to have a decent amount of volume to even have a chance of standing out. If you’re located in the United States, you might want to hire writers and outsource content creation.
SEO = backlinks
If you don’t realize this yet, you should. A lot of SEO is simply a popularity contest. If your content is popular and linked back to, you get a lot of attention and traffic. If not, crickets. This means that once you have a certain amount of content, you want to look for backlinks. Look to Flippa.com to see what your competition is up to.
Volume
As I say a lot, the number one mistake most content creators make is not creating enough content. If you don’t create a ton of content, you have no shot of breaking into the 1-10% of content creators that are actually earning money from their craft. Write articles and then write more. Realize that the NY Time has 13,000,000 articles online. Your 130 is nothing. Write for a couple years and do it part time if you feel like it’s too stressful to put all your eggs in one basket.
Use social media
This is the real key, once you have content. If you have a lot of written content, a small social media push should be enough to put you over the top. Most people can’t both write a lot and be consistent with social media. If you can do these things, you’ll have more organic traffic than most, providing you’re actually helping people.
Get on Medium for D2C and LinkedIn B2B
If you’re blogging about “normal people stuff”, go with Medium and start your own website. Change the canonical links in your Medium articles. If your Medium audience grows large enough, paywall your stuff on Medium. That way you’re not just leeching off of Medium. LinkedIn is great for business-to-business bloggers. If you’re blogging for businesses, then it’s probably best to focus on LinkedIn. Don’t bother building your own website unless it’s to sell your service. B2B can be worthwhile even if you aren’t running ads.
Reshare on Facebook, Twitter, and Threads
You need to have Facebook. Whether it’s sooner or later, that is a must. Facebook has too big an audience for you to be missing out on getting traffic from. After that, go with either Twitter or Threads. Use a social media scheduler for both of the two that you pick. I personally like this one. It has a great free plan (20 posts per month forever) and is very easy to use.
Get on YouTube
I haven’t done this yet, and I know I should do it soon. But honestly, I don’t have the time. There are still some articles that need to be written. A solid YouTube channel is good promotion for your blog. Even if you aren’t super popular, there’s a chance people will look at your links. That’s SEO, because people might create backlinks. If you’re providing a service of actual value, a little goes a long way. Remember ecommerce stores are making 20 cents per view.
Realize you have no control over search engines, at the end of the day
This is why you want to have a presence on social media, especially after you’ve created a certain amount of content. You want to have a brand that people actively look for, not just depend on Google for 80% of traffic. You also don’t know which search engines will give you traffic. I get a lot of traffic from search engines that aren’t Google. Things are always changing. But people are always reading articles, and Google will always prioritize the people who users are looking for in the long run.
SEOing articles is simpler than people let on. It’s just 1) write good articles 2) reshare on social media 3) make an adjacent YouTube channel 4) repurpose the article on Medium or publish to LinkedIn(don’t publish to both LinkedIn and your site, as you cannot change canonicals on LinkedIn, publish only to LinkedIn and optimize social media). That’s all you need to do. If you’re able to effectively turn your videos into short video, you’ve won. It’s all you need to do to build an organic platform. The main issue with being a content creator in today’s era is the discipline it takes. Most people are not willing or able to do what it takes to succeed in content creation. You have to work hard. Oftentimes, that’s the real SEO problem people are having.
Thanks for paying attention.
