Bloggers are born to make people’s life easy. So we shouldn’t compromise with their comfort zone to make business. However the reality speaks different. When it is about running livelihood professional bloggers have to excavate new strategies to survive in this field.
After all the stone has to roll and SEO writing has to continue.
In my previous post “Blogging industry will suffer soon: From blogger’s point of view” we discussed about the issues web-content-writing industry is going to face soon.
Now we will talk about the strategies and solutions. Both fresher and experienced bloggers can try these guidelines and feel the difference.
Applying them will help you –
- Streamline your thought process while writing repetitive stuffs
- Get new and interesting topic for your write-ups
- Add variety to your writing format, style and flavour
- Avoid boredom and feel of exhaustiveness
- Keep improving your writing skill and performance
Here are the 10 tips for you:
1. Avoid keyword-based Google search
Don’t Google out blindly as and when the keywords have been given to you. It is not a good idea to start with. You never know if the SERP results are worth any help to find new topic ideas. In most of the cases keywords are used for SEO purposes – to rank a site among competitors. Means, the chances are high that you will end up clicking on direct website references only, not a useful article or help guide. Moreover it takes time to search through the entire list since you are not sure what would fit your bill.
2. Know your client thoroughly
No matter what strange/ difficult keywords have been given to you to write on, take enough time to go through the client’s website first. You may take even 1 hour or so for this depending on total number of pages. This will give you an idea about client’s area of business, service/product profile, location, customer base, feedbacks, specialities and scope of improvement. This is a one-time job but will help you survive with the same keyword for long.
3. Develop your ideation skill
A successful writer is all about how good he or she is in detailing a topic. It is a quality that comes by practice and willpower. You have to collect new ideas based on a particular subject; nurture them of your own; dig out related stuffs meaningful to your write-up and then store them well. They will act as topic ideas and future references while you run short of resources.
4. Think like an investigator
Always scrutinize the information you have collected from website references. Do permutation and combination with other related searches. Develop new angles of a same story and record them in a notebook. Put emphasis on your imagination power and check how good you are in experimenting things. Go for a detailed analysis if anything strikes you. This will again give rise to new results, means new subject matter to cover on.
5. Learn to save your resources
Try avoiding general topics while writing on business specific keywords. It is good that you narrow down your choice of subjects to write on. You may call it vertical excavation. More you will enter deep better it is for you to find the branches and store variety of resources. For generic keywords go horizontally. More the related topic ideas you will collect to support the main topic, better you can associate them in your writing.
6. Learn analyzing competitors
Do a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis of the companies that are into same line of business. Thus you can generate new points of discussion. Use this information tactfully so that it does not sound artificial or biased. It is not necessary that you talk only about your client’s merits, so have to stick to a particular domain only. Keep the tone as normal as some experts are expressing their valuable and neutral views. Readers like to have complete information from a single source. Once you know your client and its competitors well, writing 100s of copies about it won’t be too difficult.
7. Know how to reproduce content and represent it to same set of readers
This is an innate quality that has nothing to do with the volume of content you produce. You have to add surprising elements to your article, does not matter you are covering almost similar topics again and again. This could be done by – modifying the pitching mode; styling the introduction part; shuffling the order and flow of content; adding or subtracting new points of discussion. You have to be expert in doing post-mortem of your content without damaging its natural flow. It takes time but you have to learn the skill to survive in this industry for long.
8. Compete against yourself
Set your own standard and then keeping crossing the limit. Know what you are good at and not. Follow successful bloggers around you, read their stories, their suggestions and secrets to stay long in this domain. This will show you new dimensions of blogging/content writing and also the routes to go after them.
9. Keep time for your self-study
This is not for searching topic ideas or resources to write your next article. Rather it is time to relax, and fuel yourself with valuable inputs. Blogging is not a mechanical job, hence requires you to be energized frequently. You can spend the hour joining some forum discussions, commenting on blogs of your choice, reading news or top stories of the day or reading favourite blogger’s views.
10. Make these points clear
- You are not in this job – only to make money
- You are here to increase your knowledge base too which comes free to you
- You have to keep enjoying the profession. More you learn, it will be easier for you to progress with time
- Repetition is common in all jobs you do. You have to learn how to avoid that or use it in your favour.
- You need to keep innovating and explore new ideas to interact with readers.
- Learn from your mistakes
- Nurture these qualities – patience, perseverance, thoughtfulness, imaginative power.
- Don’t just blame your clients as they use to give you same set of keywords every time. It is your job and you are paid for that. Rather cursing on keywords you need to think like an intelligent. spend time in finding ways to survive. Don’t just give up.
- Every hurdle you face and then overcome will add to your resume. So count tough times as your learning period, and then rejoice as you have done something really great.
- Feel proud of what you are doing and how great you are doing. Writing is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Following these guidelines/sugestions will help you survive and succeed in this blogging/ SEO writing industry. Try them today and measure your status. Know what you have already and what you need more. You sure will come out with flying colours.
If you have enjoyed this post and feel contributing to me and my readers, please leave your comments here.
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Brianne Walter
3 comments
Well, I don’t deny that the suggestions you have shared with us are useful. But I doubt whether they will at all work if someone needs to write the same thing over years. These tips will be more useful for a fresher. People who are working in this industry for 1 or 2 years can also try following these tips. But what about people who are writing on the same keyword for last 4 or 5 years. If somebody needs to write 2/3 article per day on a same keyword and that too for 3 to 4 years i don’t think it is possible for that person to imagine things from a new line every time he or she writes. Monotony will be the obvious result. I don’t want to sound like a pessimist but somehow I feel that imagination and innovative power also has a limit especially if the topics are something like law, insurance or petrol supply. I would appreciate your effort for giving these tips. But I would like to find some more fruitful tips in your next post. What I like about your writing is that you do a lot of research and give the topic a detail thought before writing. I am sure it won’t be difficult for you to come up with some more effective tips on this topic. Keep up the good work.
Research for good and interesting topic is totally different than keyword research. You must provide new facts which complies blog topic and are related with your clients requirements. Really great tips here, I wasn’t find anything similar to this post. Useful and unique, that’s what you must offer when you work for client, am I right?