Imagine you go to a Rolling Stones concert. On the way, you listen to all the best tracks on the stereo: Paint it Black, Angie, and Start Me Up. You arrive at the concert and find that the band decides to play only new songs you havent heard before. You know theyre doing it because they want you to buy the new CD. You feel betrayed, like the band is not faithful to you.
Since this Heavy Chef topic started, Ive been thinking a lot about profitable blogging. What does it mean to be profitable? This is a lot more philosophical than I thought, and a lot more thought-provoking than I ever imagined.
After spending the past 3 weeks intensely researching blogs, I realise that there is not a clear cut formula to success. Take Dooce for example. This is one of the Top 100 most popular blogs in the world. Whats it about? Not a heck of a lot actually. Its basically a dumping ground for the authors thoughts, feelings, photographs and fights with her hubby. Filled with images of her daughter, dog and husband (seemingly in that order), the blog is strangely compelling, like watching an intelligent Big Brother.
My esteemed colleague Mike is a world champion at driving traffic to websites though a suite of crafty techniques that he uses. These include ‘focused phrases in the content’, bolding key words and carefully worded links. These serve a website well, but Im starting to wonder if this is a smart move for the venerable blogger? The reason being that once you add these crafty tricks to a bloggers arsenal, its almost like preplanning a dinner conversation.
Put the function before form (form in the verbal sense) and you’re in danger of losing the plot.
As in my previous post, form must marry function. If the function is to, say, draw attention to cat grooming, then trying to conform to a set of rules will sap the writer of the creative urge to write. If the writer truly loves cats, then surely the subject matter should naturally come up enough times in a post to warrant search engine interest? (Mike, your advice is called for here!)
After all, it’s not just a case of the audience being faithful to the blog, it is also a case of the author being faithful to his audience.
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3 Comments
We must be careful not to view search engine optimisation (SEO) of blogs as something that stiffles the true essence of what you want to get across. I’m starting to get a little concerned that because my posts this last month have predominately talked about how to make your website profitable by increasing traffic via SEO, that our clients working on their blogs start to think this is the most important thing.
The one key discussion that keeps coming up is the dilema between deciding whether to a) optimise your blog, or b) write naturally about the subject matter relevant to your blog.
We’ve got to get out of the frame of mind that option (a) is the antithesis of (b), whilst bearing in mind that worrying too heavily about option (a) can effect how you do option (b).
Funnily enough I’ve spoken to Sophia from The Cape Table Club today about this very same topic. See feels that she can no longer write her blog as she is too worried about getting her effective keywords included in the text and it is stifling her creative juices. If this is the case; throw your keyword list in the bin!!!
As you know, this month we have been working on promoting the keyphrase “profitable websites” via this blog and the way I work it into the text is to write my post naturally about a particular topic of interest. Then when I’ve finished try to insert it if possible. If inserting it takes away the core message of what I am trying to say then I don’t insert it! If inserting it causes the copy to read badly, I don’t insert it!
SEO isn’t an instant win, its a long term process (although this month we’ve seen some great results already). Fred’s totally right in his post and one should actually view the SEO of Blogs as one option available to you. It works for some and not for others.
In the end, the success of the site will be down to the quality of information you write. It doesn’t matter if you get 100,000 people a day come to your blog. If it isn’t good they won’t come back. However to view SEO as an evil that stops you writing quality posts is wrong. Its finding the balance and ensuring it works for you. Its hard enough writing some days, so if adding keywords becomes an extra hassle and stops you writing altogether, then don’t add them in, but don’t expect a quick win with the search engines either.
Quote Mike “The one key discussion that keeps coming up is the dilema between deciding whether to a) optimise your blog, or b) write naturally about the subject matter relevant to your blog.”
Isn’t it more predominant what the ‘blogger’ wants to establish (e.g. blogging about your hobby, blogging about your business, or blogging about random thoughts)?
Any written piece, be it website editorial, be it a bloggers random thought, be it a business novel, should be written ‘naturally’ otherwise it will never appeal to anyone. Interesting blogs can have some disappointing posts once in a while, but as long as the base is ’sound’ and the writing is natural, don’t think those once will do much harm then.
Or m2p: keep it natural and the SEO will follow.
(p.s. can we have spell checker, please? Copy and pasting into and from Word takes my natural writing flow away ;-)
To sum it up: A good blog is all about getting the balance right: Write about something that’s easy for you to write about, make sure you write often about that one thing, and then use some smart marketing tricks to get traffic there.