Under: Blog, Business, SEO/By: Will Veic

You can make money blogging about your life, but it can’t be at random. You need to match your experiences to questions/keywords people are typing into the search bar. Otherwise, search engines will not show your site to anyone.

Because your blogging has two separate issues you need to solve (especially when running a personal blog):

This article contains answers to both of these.

How To Get Web Traffic?

Truth be told, if your initial plan was to just ramble about your day and hope to make money, then I have to tell you that will never work.

You can write about your life, but it needs to be structured a little bit (if you want it to work).

Specifically, your day (or part of your day) will have a certain “theme”. And your job as a professional blogger is to match that theme to a specific keyword(s) that your potential readers are typing into their search bar.

This is (for the most part) the only way search engines are going to be able to list your content on search results pages. And if your content is not listed, you will not be found, and no one will find/read your blog.

Once you get the visitors, you’re half-way done.

Congratulations!

How To Monetize Your Visitors?

Let’s say you were camping in the woods one day and you wanted to write about that.

First you will take into consideration the keywords. You will not write the title: “random day at the woods”. Instead, write something that is searchable like: “how to set up a tent in the woods”. Or whatever else you were doing in the woods.

These are just rough examples and you’ll need to find these keywords (not just make them up)… but I’ll get back to this.

Sales Determine The Topic/Title

One of the most popular ways to monetize a blog is affiliate marketing. Basically you recommend (or just mention) products in your blog posts. You do this by putting links to them, and when people buy, you get a percentage of sales (i.e. you make money).

So if a tent company pays you $10 for every tent sold, and a flashlight company pays you $20, then your title and focus of the story will be on the flashlight.

For example, title will be something like: “how XYZ-Brand flashlight saved my life” and so on. And then you write how you flashed a bright light at a bear in the middle of the night and that scared him off and he ran away (if that actually happened).

Point is to extract some part of your experience and match it to your monetization strategy.

I know this may not be perfect but perfect, non-constrained writing will get you $0.

So you have to choose what you want.

How To Find The Keywords?

The most important thing you need to know about the keywords is:

The more other bloggers use them, the less likely you will be able to position (rank) your content on search results pages. But on the other side, the less readers use them, the less traffic your blog is going to get.

In an ideal scenario you would use the keywords that:

  • many people/readers search for
  • and there is no other blog using this keyword

Of course, you will very rarely encounter this situation. So your second best option is to find keywords that very few other people use.

So how do you find them?

There are 3 strategies you can use:

  • Guessing
  • Professional keyword tools
  • My secret method

Obvious Keywords (Guessing)

Whatever first comes to your mind is the same thing that others will come up with as well.

This means that these keywords are already used so many times that it’s almost impossible to rank for any of them.

So I would not recommend this method at all.

Professional Keyword Tools

Assuming these tools work perfectly – they still have a fatal flaw.

Let me explain…

There are bunch of people who are using these tools. And the only reason they use them is to find rare (easy) keywords.

But the real problem starts after these tools show them the keywords…

Loads of these tool users rush into these “easy” keywords. They start creating bunch of content around these keywords thinking they will all rank for them.

And in the process this increases the competition and these “easy” keywords stop being easy.

So by default, if you’re using the keyword tools, you immediately enter into a competition with all other keyword tool users.

And they all target these “easy” keywords”.

Secret Keywords

There are, however, some keywords that even the professional keyword tools cannot find. And remember, some of these tools cost up to $400 per month.

Yet, they cannot find them, and I have a solid proof of that.

For that reason, these keywords are really easy to rank for. And getting traffic for them is almost guaranteed.

Besides, if you’re reading this, it means you probably found this site on search results, so this keyword strategy definitely works for me. And I see no reason why it wouldn’t work for you as well.

If you want to learn more about how to find these keywords, then check out this SEO book.