How To Post Like A Pro

To make money online with a blog – you’re going to have to learn the how’s & whys of how to post like a pro. First, let’s review just why you want to learn professional posting.

First – can we agree that traffic is the key to making money online? If no one sees your blog – no one is exactly who’s going to buy affiliate offers… Most people are not going to buy right now anyway. No matter how good the deal, no matter how perfectly the solution matches a problem, people don’t march in lockstep. So you’re working the percentages… if you can get just 3 percent of your visitors to buy something – and you have 10,000 visitors a month – let’s do the math – 3% of 10,000 is 300. If those 300 people buy an affiliate product that pays you just $20, you’ve earned $6,000 that month.

But let’s lower that down… let’s say that only 1% of your traffic will buy an affiliate product that pays you a $20 commission – now you’re down to a mere $2,000 extra a month. Would that make a difference in your retirement?

1% conversion is actually on the low side, and if you’re in a good niche, as I’ve recommended, and you have at least 100 posts on your website, 10,000 visitors is certainly a likely number after your site has been up for 1-2 years.

Why Do Blogs Fail?

• Lack of a clear niche or target audience. If you don’t know who you’re writing for, it’s difficult to create content that will appeal to them. This can make it hard to attract visitors and generate traffic. If you’ve disregarded my advice to stick to Fitness/Health and Make Money Online – it can be easy to fail.
• Low-quality content. If your content is poorly written, boring, or irrelevant, people won’t stick around. There’s no excuse for not being able to write high-quality content in today’s AI world… it’s all too easy to create great content.
• Inconsistent publishing schedule. If you don’t publish new content on a regular basis, people will forget about your blog. More importantly, Google will. If you publish at least one new article each week, Google will stand up and take notice. If you go weeks & months between posts, Google will also take notice – and not in a favorable way!
• Lack of promotion. Just because you have a great blog doesn’t mean people will find it. You need to learn how to post like a pro and promote your blog through social media, email marketing, and other channels.
• No clear monetization strategy. Before you start a blog, you need to have a clear idea of how you’re going to make money from it. There are a number of different ways to monetize a blog, but you need to choose one that’s right for you.
• Not taking blogging seriously. Blogging is a business, and it takes time and effort to be successful. If you’re not willing to put in the work, you’re not likely to make money from your blog.

But perhaps the number one reason of all for why blogs fail is a lack of understanding and patience. What you write today won’t be noticed by Google until it gets around to it, and takes an average of 3-6 months or more for that article to rank high enough for people to notice and click on it.

Many people will start a blog, end up doing everything right, a fast-loading blog on a good niche – and even post 20 or 30 articles, and think that they’ve failed because not much traffic is coming in… then they quit. The sad truth is – they were 70-90% of the way there – and they just quit too soon. When you learn to post like a pro – a critical key is your mindset. I’ve written an entire post about the proper mindset.

I’m speaking from experience, I know beyond all reasonable doubt that I’ve quit too soon on earlier websites – simply because I wasn’t getting the traffic and money flowing in that I felt was in order. I’ve learned from my mistakes, and hope that you’ll never find the need to make such mistakes – if you don’t have a year’s worth of work, and over 100 posts on your website, you have no reason whatsoever to think your site is a failure.

Indeed, there are a few smart people out there that make a habit of making offers to buy such websites, knowing that they can simply continue a good thing – and end up in profit. I’ve seen a few examples on Youtube – of websites that were bought cheaply simply because the owner wasn’t patient enough.

There are just two major sources of traffic. I’m sure someone has put a bumper sticker on the back of their vehicle – with their website listed on it (I’ve seen ’em!)… and I’m sure that somewhere, the local news mentioned someone’s website, and they got a flow of traffic – but for serious traffic sources – there’s only two: Search Engine and Social Media.

And with those two traffic sources, there are just two ways to utilize them – buying paid advertising, or getting free “organic” traffic because of the content you’ve posted. So let’s take a look at those four traffic methods – and see what’s the best way to get traffic:

As we can see from this chart, the best traffic is Organic Search Engine traffic – You do the work once and continue to reap the benefits for many years into the future. One thing I didn’t discuss above is the speed of the traffic – the first three (particularly paid ads) can be very fast – it’s not improbable to be getting a thousand visitors a day or more – through paid advertising. Organic traffic, on the other hand, can take months to build up – but will continue for a long time with either no additional effort, or very little additional effort.

Yes, it’s certainly possible to make money from Social Media – but it’s a more difficult task – they aren’t there because they’re looking for the solution to a problem they had – they’re there because they want to be entertained for a while. It’s not nearly as easy to capture their interest as it is when they are LOOKING for your solution!

The Battle Of Two Theories…

Now that I’ve shown you that you need to capture organic search engine traffic by writing posts – There are two different SEO theories about how to post like a pro in order to capture that traffic. I compare them to the Shotgun and the Sniper’s Bullet. I personally use a combination of the two and highly recommend that you think about the advantages and disadvantages of both.

The Shotgun Post

The Shotgun is to write in a natural style, covering a topic as completely as you can. Your aim is the magic number 2,000. You want your posts to be 2,000 words long. To be more precise, somewhere in the vicinity of 1,700 and 3,000 is the target to aim for. The reason for this is that instead of spending time trying to optimize your post’s SEO – you’re going to spend the time simply writing. Google once tweeted “Fun fact: 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before.“

In using the Shotgun – you’re aiming directly at search terms that NO-ONE else is optimizing their posts for – you’ll end up with high-ranking web pages that rank for the oddest things.

Now, in times past, and even still continuing today – 500 is the magic number – people want 500-word posts. I think that’s quite silly – what can you cover completely in just 500 words? Keep in mind that Google’s goal is to present to its searchers the VERY BEST POSSIBLE WEB PAGE for a person’s search. Do you seriously think that Google would, as a general rule: prioritize a 500-word article over a 2,000-word article? I think not.

Indeed, a study that I heard about (and sadly, can’t find to reference it!) took a look at the top ranking posts. The study concluded that the AVERAGE word length was 2,400 words for these number one ranking posts.

And actually, you can do the same study yourself – type in the keyword for the topic of your niche – and take a quick look at the first few results – how long were the articles? Short? Medium length? Or far more likely 2,000 – 5,000 words long.

And given today’s AI possibilities, it’s not even all that difficult to write longer articles. I often ask AI to give me a list – then I expand out the list myself with my own unique writing – and since the ‘Skeleton” of the article has been proposed by AI – it’s really easy to fill it in. If I get writer’s block, I can ask AI what they would say on a particular topic.

So the Shotgun posts will rank for keywords you don’t even know exist (and indeed, may never have been searched for in the past.)

The Sniper’s Bullet Posts

A sniper’s bullet rarely fails to strike what it’s aimed at – but requires expertise. This type of post should constitute more than 50 percent of your posts. Some websites use nothing else, but I reject that – and prefer long “Shotgun” posts from time to time.

In this type of post, you are aiming at a very specific keyword target – one with enough monthly searches to be worthwhile, yet with low enough competition that you stand an excellent chance of ranking on the first page of a Google search. These posts may only bring in 100 visitors a month, but this is how the average person can compete with big business. You’ll never rank on the first page of Google for the keyword “Credit Card” – but you may well land on the first page for “life time free credit card”

I found a website with a rather low Domain Rating of 19, just 33 backlinks, ranking number four on the first page of Google, behind some sponsored links. It ranked on the first page with an article just 591 words long. You can easily do the same… And since this website is about saving you money, here’s exactly what I did to find this keyword:

I went to my Google Adwords account (it’s free), and typed in “credit card” – then I sorted by the average monthly searches. Here’s what I found:

I sorted by Average Monthly Searches, as I figured that low search numbers would not encourage competition – yet there were still four sponsored ads on that page. I’m sure I could have done better with more than a few minutes of searching.

Don’t be discouraged by that “10-100” search number – it’s actually quite a bit higher due to the way Google searches operate.

Now, I just searched for “Credit Card” – but Google also allows me to take a look at other possibilities. First, switch your browser to “Incognito Mode,” go to Google, and type in “credit card.” Autocomplete will kick in, and you’ll see something like this:

You can put a letter in front of the word, or a letter at the end – and see many other possibilities. How valuable is this? As Danny Sullivan, Google employee, posted about Auto Complete:

How do we determine these predictions? We look at the real searches that happen on Google and show common and trending ones relevant to the characters that are entered and also related to your location and previous searches.

https://blog.google/products/search/how-google-autocomplete-works-search/

Notice that Auto Complete is related to your location and previous searches, this is why you need to be in “Incognito Mode” … but more interesting is that Google is telling *YOU* what people are searching for – and it’s FREE! How’s that for Cheap Affiliate Marketing? Learning *what* to post about is important if you want to post like a pro.

Once you have some interesting keyword ideas, simply log into your Google Adwords account, and take a look at the search volume. Now yes, if you’ve got money to burn, you can pay $99/mo and get an Ahref account, and look all this up more quickly. But I’m not interested in spending money I don’t need to… what about you?