Aaron Wall on Why Most Bloggers Need a Day Job to Afford a Cup of Coffee

The Problem

Bloggers create large pools of relevant content, and due to the social nature of blogs many bloggers have built up significant trust with search engines. But, as mentioned in Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells report,
some bloggers get thousands of visitors a day, but can hardly afford a cup of coffee for their efforts.

The big problem with blogging is that there is an echo effect to it, and bloggers end up chasing the same keywords that other bloggers are targeting, and many of these have limited commercial viability.

The Solution

Instead of comparing your blog to other blogs, you can step outside of that echo chamber by comparing your site to commercially oriented sites in your field. Blogs have significant authority and Google’s algorithms tend to prefer to rank informational pages to commercial sites, so you should be able to outrank commercial sites for some of their most important keywords.

Search Google for shopping or commerce related keywords in your field and find sites worth replicating. Then go to Compete Search Analytics and pull down their analytics reports, which will show you the top keywords sending real traffic to competing sites and blogs. You can refine this data one step further by using Google’s Traffic Estimator tool to sort keywords by estimated value. Even if you don’t know where to start, Compete.com Search Analytics offers over 100 categories of keywords, which help you find keywords worth targeting and sites worth replicating.

You should still write all the blog posts you usually would, but from time to time I recommend digging into Compete Search Analytics and Google to find topics that are financially viable. Why not leverage your blog to pay for that next cup of coffee? :-)

Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book. He provides search engine marketing consultations via Clientside SEM. He and his wife recently published the Blogger’s Guide to SEO.