It’s always too late when you realized it and the feeling of your wasted efforts is not a nice one. You could have taken a couple of years to build up an authority for a certain topic or niche and when you are finally seeing some results, you see that the visitors you are getting are not the ones that you have aimed for. What went wrong? The keywords seemed relevant enough, but why are not the visitors? You start to ponder and think, then the truth hits you. You have been working on the wrong keywords. You feel like a rotting numbskull.
Words are such subjective things. One word can have 3 different meanings and one phrase can be translated to 10 different things by 10 different people.
In a another blog of mine a number of years ago, I started off working on the term, “Home Based Business”. The aim was to make some money with affiliate products like e-courses and ebooks on how to make money online. To me then, it meant having or doing a business at home. Which again to me meant that you do your business with a computer earning money online. I did not see the bigger picture and thought since, to me having a home based business means doing business with your computer at home without having to go to the office and staying there from 9 to 5, it meant the same thing for others. In does.. in another way.
What a big foolish arsehole I was and it took more than a year to realize that. To millions of others, a “home based business” meant baking cookies at home, meant selling peanut butter from their grandma’s secret recipe, meant sewing new clothes for the neighborhood, meant stuffing envelopes, meant a million other things except making money online with your computer. The realization came only when I saw hits coming from search phrase like, “how to start a home based business selling cookies” or “how to run a business from home rearing puppies” and likewise terms that are related to my keywords but NOT related to my topic. Though there are considerable searches for phrases like “Starting a home based base business online” and so on, the competition is stiff and so broad for me to do any good Any sales? You don’t even have to guess.
Having said that, I doubt there is no fool proof way of pin pointing a term that would mean the same thing for everyone unless we narrow it down to be very specific. This is something that has been taught by SEO gurus for ages but not adhered to by many. Like me, for instance, because I taught I was smart and I taught I understood.
Related posts:
- Getting The Right Keywords. When I started this blog, I promised to share what I have learned and for the past week, I learned that getting the right keywords and using those keywords in our blogs will play a big part in the success of our blogs. I guess most of you thinks that...
- Using WordPress Blogs For Affiliate Marketing The main source of income for this blog is through affiliate marketing. The square banners on the left are all affiliate banners which makes me a small commission each time someone clicks on it and makes a purchase or a sign up. Some might be skeptical and ask, “Do...
- A Day In The Life Of One Who Really Makes Money Online Sure you have read a thousand and one blogs of Make Money Online gurus who tells you that it is easy to make tons of money online. Just start a blog, they will tell you, insert Adsense, they continue, sell some affiliate products, they advise. You will make easy money....
- Using WordPress Themes For Bans I often doubt myself when it comes to SEO and getting traffic to my blogs and sites, so I depend a lot on some very generous blog buddies for tips and guidance in this area where they are real experts. Along my way into building Bans, I learned that the...
- When Does A Blog Start Making Money I have a blog. It is less than a year old, has 8 post in it and it has not been updated for nearly 9 to 10 months. The blog has no regular readers, no subscribers, minimum incoming links, has a Page rank of 1 and absolutely no comments. Traffic...
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Costa,
I love the photo! You spend a lot of time posting about keywords, and as a newbie blogger of only six months, I’m not sure I get the true importance of this aspect of blogging.
I try to put in keywords that align with the post, and when trying to use a wordpress keyword plug-in I click ‘tag the net’ and it often just lists all the words in the post.
Is there one place where a newbie can go to get the real insider’s understanding of keywords? It might have been on of your posts that mentioned the keyword ‘mp3′ was one of the hottest at the moment, so I did a voice recording of a post and added ‘mp3′ to the keyword list…it has yet to produce a hit. I realize there is more to it than just adding a keyword…but what is the other stuff?
What is the trick to getting clicks from keywords???
cheers
Curtis
Hi Curtis,
If you really want a recommendation, I would recommend The Keyword Academy, run by Courts and Mark.
Read the articles there and if you find it helpful, sign up for their membership to learn the finer details.
Basically, if you get the right keywords working for your blog, you get all the search traffic. That’s why it is so important to pick the right keywords for your blog.
For example, if thousands are looking for “how to write a novel” (taking your blog as an example) in Google everyday and your blog is at the number one position of the Search Results page when they search for info on how to write a novel in Google, nearly all the thousands will click on that first result and thousands will flock to your blog.
The knowledge lies in how to find that strong keyword and how to optimize that keyword so it goes to the first position in the Search Results.
As in your mp3 experiment, you do not simply put in the keywords in the list and hope Google will find it. You can have a strong keyword with millions of Searches daily, but if your blog is not optimized for it, your post will not appear in the Search results and that’s why you don’t get results.
Unless, of course, if there are no one else writing about that particular word or term. Then Google will have no other choice but to put you in their results. That’s why, SEO gurus tells us to find keywords that are hotly searched, but sparsely written about by others. This way you have an easier time ranking for that word.