A Formula for Writing Blog Posts
The Need
If you have an affiliate marketing website that is looking to monetize itself through organic traffic, you will ne familiar with the need to write keyword-rich blog posts.
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You are aiming to rank high in the search engines for these keywords so that prospects searching the internet for these keywords will find your blog post and click on it. If your blog post is well written and sufficiently compelling, it will relate to their pain and lead naturally into the solution, which will be a product from a vendor that you are an affiliate for.
The Difficulty
Let's face it. Very few of us have the in-depth knowledge about our niche to write post after post just out of what's in our heads.
One answer is to choose a niche that reflects our personal life, so that each blog post is like a diary entry.
So as new things happen to us every day, we can write about them and make them funny, sad or just interesting to keep our visitors engaged.
This is the way for most internet influences. They write this way to create a following of like-minded people who follow the influencer's day to day life with the same fascination as they would follow a reality show on television. And just like a "reality" show, if the actuality of what's going on is somewhat scripted and actually far removed from reality, well, all's fair in love and entertainment, right?
The Solution for Most of Us
Most of us, however, will be relying on research.
Fortunately, the search engines have made that relatively easy.
Just Google or Bing your niche and your screen will immediately list tons of research done by others, a lot of it with slants we hadn't even considered.
And many of those will contain keywords which, when entered into a keyword research tool such as Jaaxy (available from Wealthy Affiliate), will be shown to have decent traffic and low competition.
It's a goldmine. But... how do we use this goldmine?
Avoid Plagiarism
The first rule is "Do not copy and paste".
If you're tempted, use the second rule. The second rule is also "Do not copy and paste".
Just remember that copyright lies in the actual words, not the concept.
So by all means use the ideas in an article, but use your own words to express them. I describe a method of achieving this in The Formula outlined below. If you're in doubt at any time, just apply the third rule: "Do not copy and paste". I find it much harder and more time-consuming to rewrite something that's copied and pasted than to just use the ideas as inspiration for my own words, as outlined in The Formula.
The Formula
Here's the formula I use. It works for me.
1. Create a new, empty blog post on your website and give it a sensible name that includes the keyword/search term that you're targeting. Give it the appropriate categories and tags. Find a suitable free image and use it as the featured image.
1. Pick one or two of the results from your search.
2. Write down 6 to 8 headings from these results, but change the wording and also the order in which they are presented.
3. Edit your new blog post and add the blog post name as an h1 and the 6 to 8 headings as h2's. Save it.
4. Find suitable free images (I use mainly Pixabay) corresponding to each heading and insert them under the headings, one to each. You now have the structure of your post established. Save it.
5. The really important bit: Open the page containing the article corresponding to your first heading and read it. Close the page. Go back to the article and write the paragraph in your own words, relying on memory. This will pretty much ensure that it's unique.
6. Repeat for each paragraph until they are all done. Then do a bit more rewriting by going back over it and sprinkling your keyword/search term through the post as covered by Wealthy Affiliate in one of the early lessons.
7. If you know how, flow the text around the images. It just looks better.
8. Finally, include some links. Your affiliate or landing page link if the post is promoting an affiliate product, along with a couple of internal links to other posts. Also revisit some existing posts and add a link back to this new one. This all helps with SEO.
Conclusion
So there you go. Not exactly e=mc squared, but something to help the loneliness of the long-distance poster.
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See also:
How to Start an Online Business for Free
