So what's the competition like?

Hi folks and welcome to the 256 new people who have joined my newsletter.

Hopefully by now, you have started your first blog and have began to write some content for it -but don't worry if you haven't - still time.

This post will probably be more beneficial to people that haven't started blogging yet. But if you have started, it will help you with future blogs.

One of the hardest things when blogging is getting folk to come and visit to your blog. Visits=cash.

After you start your blog, pretty quickly it will be picked up by all the search engines - usually within a week or two.

You don't have to do anything - they will find it as soon as you start posting to it. Just because you are in the search engines in doesn't automatically mean you will get a lot of web traffic.
The reason for this is, there are BILLIONS of websites out there, so it can be hard to get to the top of the search engines. Particularly if your blog is about a competitive term.

What do I mean a competitive term you may ask?

Well, something like 'home loans' or 'credit cards' would be a good example of competitive term. The reason for this is, there are a lot of paid advertisers trying to reach the top of google with the above terms. A lot of advertisers means the adverts that will appear on your blog are worth more.

This means people are always building content around these high paying terms.
You could build a blog around 'credit cards' but I would say your chances of getting ranked in the first couple of pages in the search engines are very low. If you do - the rewards are great.

The adsense clicks on a credit card blog may be £5 for ONE click!
But we'll forget about these terms for the moment.

Once you start your blog you should never expect a flood of traffic, as it takes a bit of time and depends on a huge amount of variables that will decide the amounts of traffic you get.

In the future, before you start a new blog, go to google and test to see if there is a lot of sites competing against you for a particular subject.

I'll explain this with the use of an example.

Say I wanted to start a blog about for instance 'contact lenses'.

I know it's a weird subject to start a blog about, but it's just an example. I went to www.google.co.uk and typed in 'contact lenses' and noticed there is over 57 million pages competing for that term.

It tells you on the light blue band near the top that says 'web'.
That is a LOT of pages, but in reality if I started a blog about 'contact lenses' you probably be on pages 10-20 without too much effort.

The reason for this as you go down the listing you find the results become less and less relevant. That sounds good, but it's not really what we want - if possible we would like to be on the first page or two.

Now type in 'contact lenses London'. That a bit more like it - just over 12 million pages competing for that term. So by adding in the word 'London' there are 75% LESS pages trying to get to the top of google.

I might then go on to write a post on my blog all about 'contact lenses London'. I would mention it in the heading and maybe 4 or 5 times throughout the blog post.
My next post might be 'contact lenses Manchester'.

You see what I'm getting at?

It's easier to get high in the search engines if you post is more tightly focused on a subject.
I wouldn't take it too far though.

For instance, you wouldn't want to start a post on a blog all about say 'green and blue contact lenses London' as simply hardly anyone will be searching for that term.

So next time (or the first time) you start a blog it can pay do a bit of research just to check there aren't too many sites competing against you.

posted by ron @ 7:28 AM 1 comments