What comes first? The keyword research or the content?
Either.
It’s entirely up to you.
Sometimes a subject area really interests me. And I’ll write. 15+ hubs about Roman Emperors, 15+ on Greek Philosophers, 15+ on weight training… I’ll write because it interests me. I’ll do a bit of a search on the simplest of keyword phrases, provided there’s at least some kind of activity in people searching for this information I’ll use the most searched terms as tags. Provided of course they are relevant to my content.
Occasionally I’ll write about something that fascinates me and I don’t care whether there are people searching for it, such as my hubs on the “Multimillion Dollar Home For Sale” and “ASCII Art“. With the first one though I did use a URL that is a fairly popular search phrase. But otherwise it doesn’t matter to me at all how many people visit those hubs, I did it for the love of it (actually, I did the “Multimillion Dollar Home For Sale” one because it was an opportunity that fell in my lap and it was such a unique experience I wanted others to have a taste of what I saw). I could also put my How To Hub hubs in that group, they make me $0 Adsense. In fact I’ve switched off ads on all those hubs.
Then there are times where I’ll do a bit of digging with half a clue and the keyword tool and find out what sort of keywords are pulling in high priced CPCs. I’ll then target a keyword phrase and I’ll do research. I’m not talking keyword research, but content research. I’ll hit the books and write an informative and factual piece. You won’t see those in my list of hubs on this account, I have them scattered around over several accounts. Each catering to its own niche.
I hardly ever, in fact 90% of the time I don’t ‘promote’ these hubs. No backlinks, no nothing. I let them get found by the Search Engines on their own merits. It’s slow to start but when they do get found by real humans, they’ll find good solid information. While not as exhaustive as my last two hubs (on Vitamins and Minerals) they’re about 700 or so words in length.
I must be doing something right if I’m using HubScore as an indication of quality, because these hub accounts sit in the high 80s and low 90s and that’s without them having any forum interaction.
So here’s what I suggest:
1) first and foremost, aim to write good, original and useful content. Even before you claim a hub URL. Even before I’ve really started writing, or I’ve just written the introduction (the first text capsule) I’ll write sub-headings for each part of my hub. There will be a whole bunch of questions that I’ll want answered if I were finding out this information myself, in fact I am finding out this information myself, so these headings/questions are like guideposts to me, I have to find the answers to them.
2) do some keyword research, before and during the writing process. I’m often thinking at 110%. Sometimes I’m writing and I see that something I’ve mentioned could be explained further, but to do so in that article will distract from its primary focus. So I’ll save another text document and jot down some notes. I’ll look into it later. While I’m doing this keyword research I’ll be finding out how many people are searching not just the keyword of my article, but the questions/headings. Sometimes I’ll be spot on and have a great results, other times I’ll discover by rewording it differently I’ll go from “Not Enough Data” to at least a few thousand potential searches a month.
3) I might be 50% of the way through writing my hub when I go grab the URL. I like to keep it as short as possible and if not then I like to keep it as simple as possible.
4) I’ll fill the text capsules with my proofed and spell checked content. And of course there’s the photos, Amazon and Ebay capsules and whatnot, but that’s a whole other discussion. Now’s a good time to read it all again once saved in the hub but before its published.
5) I’ll use a combination of the most searched terms and the highest average CPC as the tags.
6) Publish! And then off to satisfy my next whim or whatever tickles my fancy.
Don’t try and dominate keywords that have very little traffic. Or an average CPC of US$0.05. Of course I could also warn against going to the other extreme, but so what if there’s strong competition, have a go at punching above your weight class. Maybe not every time. Mix it up.
Instant Success
Photo by Pierre Amerlynck
Then I woke up.
And I think there are a lot of other people who need to wake up too. The ones that want instant success… who are confused as to why there hasn’t been sudden large amounts of human traffic landing on their webpages… and with the little traffic they do get wonder why no one has clicked.
It takes time. It takes talent.
It takes patience. It takes persistence.
It takes experience. It takes effort.
And you can do it. One quality article at a time.
Lightning Doesn’t Strike Twice – Groundbreaking Ideas
I originally wrote and posted this on Joel Comm’s AdsenseChat a few years ago. The information is still relevant, in fact even more relevant today than it was back then, as more people flock to the internet and view it as an opportunity not unlike the Gold Rush era of the 1800′s.
Photo by Michal Mogmil
It’ll work once, but chances are it won’t work twice.
You may be able to apply the same principles to your own idea, but don’t expect success if you’re trying to clone it.
Lets say you’ve got a great idea for a website. Original, unique… never been done before. I have a lot of those ideas, and usually they don’t get further than writing down the idea in a text document, and a quick SWOT analysis.
More often than not I have more ideas then I have time for, but also lacking a few vital ingredients: resources (the necessary skills to pull it off, I’m not a php coder with mySQL knowledge) or money (paying someone to do that bit). Or in the very least invest in a bit of promotion outside of the 101 things I can do that will provide the tipping point.
Sometimes we have these ideas independantly of any outside influence or expsoure and we find out that someone has already done it and either found success, or failed miserably.
Other times we think we’ve found these ideas but they are in fact ‘borrowed’ from elsewhere. Which is the whole “lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place” that I’m talking about.
Lets take for example the Million Dollar Homepage. Remember that?
Brilliant idea. Wonderfully executed. Made the guy a million dollars. I found the site when he was only $7,000 from the start of his venture. I even bought a $100 worth of pixels.
If you were aware of the site while it was powering on to it’s million dollar goal you may remember that it ‘inspired’ a LOT of other copycat sites. They sprung up like weeds.
None were as successful as the original.
At the time I showed the site to a friend of mine and he could see how well MDHP was going and he said “We can do that! We can make an Australian one!”.
I knocked that idea on the head before he got too carried away.
Not too long after Joel Comm had an idea, and it was inspired by the MDHP. It was called www.500words.com
He was selling off words. Keywords. Rather than pixels.
He didn’t make a million dollars, but the amount of money he made and in the time he did it, was phenomenal.
Again, others tried the same formula. And failed.
Now the interesting twist to these two examples is that both entrepreneurs tried to use the same idea twice, and fell short of the mark.
Alex of MDHP launched www.pixelotto.com and had it been successful, he and some lucky subscriber would have made one million dollars each. In the end he made about $153,000 from the venture. Now that’s not bad really. I wouldn’t complain about earning that or winning that.
Joel launched www.499sites.com and probably sold about 20% of the 499 links.
No doubt the money made isn’t something to sneeze at. And if it were offered to me tomorrow you’d hear no complaints.
But the purpose of what I’m saying is… lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place.
Both parties who did so spectacularly well with their ideas in the first place, weren’t able to reproduce the magic the second time. And if they can’t do it, what hope would any of us have?
Don’t follow the leader. Don’t copy another persons groundbreaking idea because you’re hoping it’ll work for you.
By all means study it. Look at the mechanics of it. Study the formula that is fueling it. Find the source and see if it can be reinterpreted.
It reminds me of an interview with Phil Collen, the guitarist for Def Leppard who was talking about a Police song, it may have been “Sending Out an SOS” and he played it on a guitar while the camera rolled. He said how he loved the riff but he couldn’t just take it as is, so he inverted it. He played it a different feel and you could clearly hear the distinct Def Leppard tune. It was remarkable. Side by side you could see how he was inspired. But separately they were both unique. And both songs were chart topping successes.
The same with Joel’s 500words. He had a track record of success on his own before the million dollar homepage was even dreamed up, but when he saw it, he saw a different way of doing it. And he did. And he probably set a record for Virtual Real Estate sales.
But trying to pull off the same trick twice… well you’ve read my opinion on that.
137 Years Worth Of Content
Popular Science Magazine have partnered with Google to offer their entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements.
It’s delivered like a Google Books embedded page, so you can read, but you can’t copy and paste any text. Which will no doubt stop (to a degree) the scrapers who misappropriate other peoples textual content and publish it on blogs and other publishing platforms.
The partnership also extends to the development of a better search, and predictably: Google Adsense Ads.
Is the publisher of Popular Science listed on the Stock Exchange? Because I think they’re about to make a lot of money from increased advertising revenue!
Check out the Popular Science Archives.
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