Aurora K When you start Content vs Keywords vs Backlinks blogging and you want to earn some money at the same time, there are three basic things to pay special attention to. I know what you’re thinking here comes the “pay attention, basic tips, three steps to sucsess” rubbish. Well, I sincerely hope not. It might be a long read, but i will try to explain and make you understand the three fundamental buildingblocks of a site and it’s sucsess content, keywords and backlinks.
There are two basic sites community sites, where you want to give interesting reading materials and build up a community of loyal readers and followers. And then you have a ad pushing site, where your only wish is to direct all your visitors to your adsense links, affiliate products, or ny other monetized part of your site. Sometimes you won’t see the difference until you start reading and see that everything is described as the best, you see alot of “sign up now to get all the benefits” type of slogans, all the links have a refferal code in them and you realize, there is nothing actually on the site, but promises about other sites, products sold on another site, or programs to join. This site is made to push viewers to click on ads and buy affiliate products and it’s sole purpose is to make money for the owner. As well as these sites may earn income, they will never beat a community site, when built up the right way. If you want to use your time on writing keyword based, slogan-filled sales text, be my guest. It will probobly start earning you some money online. On the otehr hand, when building a so called “communiy site”, you get to be yourself. You don’t have to force yourself to write unnatural looking posts and tedious advertising text.
Over time a community site will get a growing number of followers and subcribers, who read it for the content you provide and trust your judgement. So, lets jump ahead a year and assume both of these sites have beign kept up to date here we have two kind of sites, one with keyword based traffic and the other with a community and alot of followers. The community sites traffic is probably still growing, but the other website is most likely to still have the same amount of traffic for the past six months. So why does a community site actually make more money and have more visitors? It’s because of how these three variables content, keywords and backlinks, exsist. When you have a community site, you get more, alot more natural backlinks, hence you will get additional keywords and therefore you get more traffic from search engines and every visitor is a potential backlink, or a recommender. With a site purely build up to sell something, you will work your ass off to get the keywords, witch brings you traffic, but it stops there. Your visitors will most likely not link to your page and you will have to trade links with other webmasters in order to get higher rankings in google, but these backlinks are not worth the half of what the natural ones are.
Just look at some flagship community sites like allmusic.com, or imdb.com. Look and try to find all the places that are monetized on these sites. You will find that they have only one or two ads and maybe, depending on the site an affiliate program. For Internet Movie Database it’s one small adsense unit and a partnership program, selling dvds and that’s it. You can be sure this site makes alot of money with it’s loyal users and a growing search engine traffic. This is where the big money is in. It will take some time to build this, but if you choose a good niche, that you are knowledgeable about and write honest, unique content, you will get there. So all in all, i’m not saying it’s pointless to build so called sales blogs. It will make you money if you put some time in it, but why not consider building a community site, that you actually enjoy making and are proud of.
To finish off first and foremost, you need to have unique and interesting content. Any good salesman knows, that you can’t close a deal with cheesy marketing slogans anymore. The relationship between a salesman and a customer has grown closer to the one of two friends. By salesman and customer I mean any kind of give and take relationship, be it reader writer, or a seller buyer one provides something the other craves for.What makes this relationship work is trust and comfort. The people nowadays ask themselves, if your motives are what you say they are and if they suspect any bs, they won’t trust you, thus they won’t buy from you, read your blog, etc. So it’s very important to remember, that you have to be honest when writing. If you ask me what is the most important thing to get traffic, I would no doubt say it’s backlinks, but if you want to know on wich of these three (backlinks, keywords, content) to pay most attention to, it would definetly be content, unique and honest content and interested readers. You can build a database, a blog, a forum, it’s all the same, you need to have the content, to be big in the business! An added perk here is also, you will be more motivated and less bored while building your site.
