Blogging – The SEO Dreams vs Reality

Some people blog for fun but others make it more seriously because they know that blogging when done correctly can generate a nice passive income.

Blogs normally get organic traffic from the search engines and to have their blogs listed on the first page the owners have to use the SEO technique so their blogs will appear on the first page of the search engines.

Now if you blog for living it is absolutely important to be consistently appear on the search engine’s first page, especially Google because it delivers most of the organic traffic. The other two important sites are Yahoo! and MSN / Bing.

To be listed on the first page of the search engines there are basically two ways people do. One is on-page SEO which is providing relevant contents and the other one is by off-page SEO where they try to get as many back links as possible to their blogs. Google can determine how important your blog is by looking at the backlinks.

To get your blogs reached the top position is not a sky-rocket science provided you know how to choose the right niche and keywords. However most bloggers made mistakes by depending on factors they can’t control. You can’t ask Google for example to put your blog on the first position forever. It is actually Google who controls our blogs ranking.

If you think that relying on the free traffic Google gives you is enough and secure you may need to take this note seriously: Google sometimes changes algorithm and a lot of internet marketing veterans suffered by these changes because out of the blues their sites were kicked out of the first page and found nowhere leading to no income. Sad but happened.

To prevent such disaster happen to your online income you have to build a list of your visitors’ email addresses while the search engines still deliver good quantity of free traffic to your blog. You can give something valuable for free in exchange for your visitors’ email addresses. Nobody will refuse to receive something useful. Once you have your list actually you are building your own market.

The good thing about having your own market is you don’t depend on the generosity of the search engines to drive traffic to your blog. Instead you can send promo emails to people in your list in a single click of your mouse.

While SEO takes a good part to drive traffic to your blogs, capturing the visitors is the best way to have a long term relationship and take benefit from it. It’s several times easier to profit from EXISTING customers than it is to go and find new ones.