Lesson 5 of 6
In Progress

How To Create Blog Content

What you need to know: the only way your blog grows is with targeted, well-written blog posts. Time to do the work!

Without traffic from Google, your blog can still survive, but it’s really hard. But when you figure out how to get search engine (organic) traffic to your blog, you’ll see it’s an absolute game-changer.

Almost every successful blog I come across gets a ton of search engine traffic. It might also get social media and email traffic, too, but it usually doesn’t get those without a strong organic traffic base.

Here’s how to get started.

First, realize that when you’re just starting out, your trust with Google and readers is low – pretty much zero. And when you don’t have trust yet, that means you need to start building it.

The best way to start is by writing blog posts that solve small, specific problems for people.

Why does this work? Well, websites have been around for decades now, and a lot of them have answered a lot of “big” problems and challenges for people.

Take the search “how to get a credit card,” for example. The sites ranking for this search include:

  • Discover
  • CreditKarma
  • Visa
  • NerdWallet
  • Mastercard
  • CreditCards.com

They pretty much have that problem solved, and they are considered extremely trustworthy sources in the credit card and financial world.

There’s really no way you’d be able to outrank those sites for that search without years and years of writing and building up your authority. Even then, there’s no guarantees you could do it.

So instead of going after big, massive problems that have already been solved by big websites, you go after small ones because they are less competitive and more open and accessible to new bloggers.

When I say a small problem, I mean one that is very specific, usually a “long” phrase with more words in the search, and one that doesn’t get as many searches in Google.

For example, instead of covering how to get a credit card, let’s take a search like “can you make a down payment with a credit card?” Now, that’s a very specific question and according to Ahrefs gets about 90 searches per month.

On the other hand, “how to get a credit card” gets about 8,600 searches per month.

The mistake many new bloggers make is thinking they have to go after “big” searches and ignore the small ones. But that’s the worst thing you can do.

Instead, you want to prove your value and build trust by tackling the small problems that Google and readers need answered.

Let’s go over that again because it’s the single most important thing to know about blogging.

You build trust over time by writing about small, specific problems in order to build trust with readers and Google.

Once you build that trust by answering “small” problems, you can move up to bigger ones over time.

Then things really get interesting.

Let’s say you start a DIY site, and blog about small, specific problems like “what to do with old broken bricks,” which gets about 90 searches per month but has little competition.

You cover stuff like that for a while, then one day you realize you have a lot of traffic, a lot of trust with Google, and your readers know you’ll provide useful content.

At that point, then you can start to write about bigger, more competitive topics because you’ve built a solid foundation of trust, expertise and authority in your niche.

Then you can write about something like “DIY Halloween props” which gets thousands of searches, especially around Halloween.

But if you were to try to cover DIY Halloween props right away, you’d likely have a hard time ranking and getting traffic because it’s a bigger, more competitive topic.

Because you waited and built up your authority first, you’re now in a better position to rank for it.