Case in point, a man asks “what is club soda?” in a comment one of my cocktail shows. The response was one that I’ve seen before and will no doubt see again, “what is club soda????????? How did you log onto a computer and use finger muscles to type that question? … In another episode he uses cream for a white Russian let me know if you want to know what that is and I’ll explain…” Obviously the comment was left with a sarcastic tone but the point was made clear, someone doesn’t understand my international audience.

There are no stupid questions, only ignorant responders and I don’t mean this in a bad way. Some folks do not understand the idea of an international world where not everyone speaks English or the same English as we do in the United States. What is “Club Soda?” That’s actually a very good question but to answer it you first must do some investigation. Turns out the first commenter is from the United Kingdom while the responder was from the United States and these separate regions define carbonated products differently from one another.

Club Soda isn’t a global term, it’s not like “Coca Cola,” a product heavily marketed across many countries with a symbol, trademark and billion dollar namesake. The same can be said for the origin of Lemonade which may be entirely different from one country to another as may be the cocktail garnish we know here in the United States as a “Maraschino Cherry.”

We’re trying to create excellent video and audio content that streams the globe from time zone to time zone. However, we’re only human, we cannot understand every culture on earth and we cannot predict what people may or may not understand within our content. But, we can keep an open mind when the “stupid question” arises and rather than be condescending in our response, ask for the persons origin and a bit about their culture.

By opening a line of communication with your international audience it’s important to respect their efforts to speak your native tongue (no matter how bad) and understand that not all forms of English have the same meaning in all countries. After you’ve opened communications with your international audience you’re bound to not only answer their question in more detail but learn a bit about another culture in the process.

Creating content is a two-way road and while you may be teaching someone something, there is no limit to your own knowledge absorbed by those around you and abroad.

No matter how great your writing is, no matter how awesome your site looks, you may still have issues gaining traffic to your site because you’re on page 99 of google’s search results. Let’s face it, if you’re on page-3 of the google search results you might as well be on page 300. I’ve had plenty of pages arrive on page six and seven and I’ve had some clicks… but it’s never relevant. If they’ve not found a site to service their needs in the first five pages… you’re probably way off from what they are looking for, or a re-hash of something they already don’t care about.

Problem One: Effort

You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to receive page-1 or even page-2 results in google. It doesn’t happen over night, so be patient. In a highly competitive keyword space it also won’t happen on a single blog post.

Here are two scenarios, you are considering a site to write about “video games” because you know a lot about them, or “baby carriages” because you’ve recently had a kid and you feel you know enough about them to write articles involving baby transportation in the way of a carriage. Which one will be more profitable?

The average cost-per-click for a video game keyword ad is:

The average cost-per-click for a baby carriage ad is:

So, technically you’ll make more money on the keyword baby carriage as long as you realize the total searches are going to be much less (almost half says adwords traffic estimator). I don’t think it’s any surprise that more people are interested in search for video games than they are for baby carriages.

So, video games is the place to apply all our efforts, right? Maybe not. Do a quick search for video games and you’ll see something like this:

If you do a search for baby carriage you’ll see something like this:

You may discover, as I did, there are many less competitive pages for baby carriages, 323,000 compared to 799,000,000 for video games. Judging your competitive marketplace you’ll see it will be far easier to rank on page-1 on google for baby carriages and they’re going to give you better ad pricing (in general) using adsense.

What does this mean to you, the blogger? The market space is less competitive for baby carriages and thus you’ll have an easier time ranking on the first page of google’s organic search results. Less people are searching for baby carriages, however, you’re more likely to be the one getting clicks if you try hard enough because ranking for video games on any of the initial google page results is going to be a rough road. In the end, you’re effort will pay off much higher for something with less search results.

Problem Two: Luck

There is some luck involved with organic search. Some days people won’t do that many searches for your content, or, if it’s season dependent, some seasons may receive less organic search results. The next nature of luck… are the competitive sites trying to rank for your keywords any good at it?

To change your luck, you can do some deeper research and check the top ranked sites to see if they use the meta-keywords field or have content that’s really relevant to the search keywords. You can take what could be random luck and focus it into a well thought out plan and avoid having to rely on a lucky roll of the keyword.

Luck also plays into the niche field you’re getting into when writing content. You can start writing about a topic that’s rarely talked about on the Internet and then, one day, it becomes a huge hot button topic and you find yourself getting traffic you never though you’d get. Luck can be awesome at times.

Problem Three: Google Magic Sauce

How organic searching works is a mystery, a well-understood mystery, but it’s still a mystery none-the-less. SEO experts have found ways to “game the system” by making your content more relevant to google; crafting your text in a specific manner…using good keyword density but not overdoing it, is a good example of some basic SEO practices. You can take their advice and follow it like the SEO bible and google can change their sauce at any time and all your effort goes to the gutter.

Luckily for you, google tries to make subtle changes to their system and not revamp their organic search system from the ground up. Some subtle changes may indeed change how you rank in search results but those are the issues a Search Engine Optimizer deals with on a quarterly basis (usually google updates their ranks and such every three months, “big changes” will probably come at this time).

Problem Four: Relevance

Your content will have a specific relevance when it comes to how google views your site since an automated system is scanning your words, not a human. When writing content focus on what your site is about and less about other random stories. If you’re making a blog about baby carriages you probably want to shy away from talking too much about products outside the space or writing articles about other industries.

If you start changing your topics you may start arriving on page results not truly pertaining to your overall content. It will be hard to keep subscribers coming back if they think you’re about one thing but you’re really a site about something entirely different. And, adsense will start giving you ads that aren’t related to the keywords you originally did research on. You don’t want ad’s that are low pay CPC when your research ads that are high CPC.

Problem Five: Patience

Don’t expect to rank the day your site opens up. It may take a few weeks or a month before you see a single organic search arrive on your site. Using google analytics or 103bees to monitor your organic searches will allow you to see what’s going on in terms of search traffic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, patience is key to so many areas of a good blog or website.

Google likes sites that grow slowly, over time, they also give higher weight (or so people say) to sites that are well aged, so your competitors whom have been around for six years or more will usually show higher than you for the same keywords. That’s okay, people don’t always click on the first result in google, they’ll read the meta-description that google presents before clicking (usually) or at least the title of the result. They also may click on many of the first page results while doing research.

Keep at it for six months or so and see what you can do with your site. Watch the search results to see how people are finding your site and focus on what’s working. It’s important to realize this may not be what you want to work in all cases, but making money sometimes requires you to do things you may not want to do (in moderation anyway).

Problem Six: Niche Market

This is, by far, the most lectured topic in search engine optimization and web marketing in general. Selling a product someone else already has market dominance over is going to be frustrating and if you’re a low-budget shop (or have little time) try sticking to something that’s not so overdone…baby carriages for instance. If you’re not passionate about the topic you can look around for something else or do some research and learn the topic anyway, perhaps you’ll grow fond of it.

If you really want to do video games or something like that, pick a specific genre of video games (Role Playing Games, Racing Games) or a single video game fan site and dedicate your time to it. Just remember, if you grow bored of that video game you’re still going to have to maintain the site if you want to bring in ad revenue. As a blogger who writes about video games I’ll tell you up front: it’s a long frustrating road before you gain any type of search hits that net you revenue.

If you want to write about “news” on your topic make sure their is a lot of news going around because you don’t want it to dry up and go stale. News sites also require much more effort and consistently daily blogging (hourly is best) to keep people interested. News, on the Net, doesn’t last long so you’ll always be searching for the next hot story.

You can pay USD $5,000 in consulting fees to learn this, or take my word for it… targeting a niche market is going to be the difference between making some money and making nothing. Affiliating with a niche market is also a great idea if you don’t plan on selling products yourself and play to rely on ad-revenue to make a dime (more dimes with affiliating + ad’s than doing only one). Provide niche market content to help your readers make an intelligent decision about a product and continue to update it to keep those fans coming back for more.

Have Fun!

If you want to write daily content you must enjoy it or it will grow more like a “real job” that you hate to commute to each day. Enjoy yourself, have fun writing content and be smart about what you’re doing.

Good Luck!

The reason is wikipedia has a crap ton of great information, references and, in general, is written well. Content which is written well is easy to understand and better yet, to quote in other articles by other people. You don’t have to be the leading industry standard magazine, document, archive or personality to write something with passion which is easy to read.

Have you heard people say “the internet is a great resource for…” followed by almost any subject. If you need to know what the best car seat brand is, a review for a new popular car stereo, information about building a farm house, manuals for your lawn mower or other random request you’ll find it on the Internet. Is it all 100% accurate? Probably not, but it’s a good place to start your search.

A well crafted blog about a topic you understand or claim to understand goes a long way when someone needs to quote you in their own blog, magazine or elsewhere. I’ve had some of my content listed on the bottom of the Wall Street Journal simply because it was relevant to the topic the writer was speaking about and WSJ has a small “RELATED ARTICLES AND BLOGS” header near the bottom of the page which automatically picks up specific topics.

Although I’ve not had a server go down from WSJ back-links it was done without my knowing and cannot hurt my standing on the Internet. Was it magic? Nope, it was sphere.com who claims to connect blogs and news together… and it was working. My articles were considered ‘quality,’ in this case by some automatic crawler, but it was nothing but help for my blog since it brought me new traffic and a fresh set of eyes. A WSJ reader probably respects well crafted writing, hence their need to read WSJ and if they find my quality just as good perhaps they’ll subscribe to my own RSS and check my site out now and again.

Better content will give you better links-backs and a higher respect on the internet. As I’ve said before, make yourself important or fake it! You don’t have to be a doctor to write about men’s health and you don’t have to be a dietitian to have a great dieting blog. You just have to sound good, communicate your points well and utilize other resources (like wiki and other well-crafted sites) to build a foundation for your content. Once you have a foundation you can wrap the data in your own personality, your own style and your own flare.

But you have to start somewhere.

For instance, on everydaydrinkers.com I saw a few search hits coming in suggesting users were looking for seasonal beers and gift packs. This was an exciting point of realization for me because it meant I could use a few keywords like “holiday”, “gift”, and “christmas” in my posts about great holiday gift ideas.

Rather than simply blog about a beer type, a review or some history of a beer I decided to come up with a top-6 list of great beer gifts for the holidays. A day later google was presenting my blog in it’s results about gifts for the beer drinker, gifts for vodka drinkers, gifts for brandy drinkers and so on. At first I only blogged about gifts for beer drinkers but other recent blogs I had composed were about brandy, vodka and red wines.

Google isn’t smart enough to realize your front-page isn’t about gifts for red wine drinkers, it just knows you had a good time talking about gifts and had a lot of relevance to red wine. Upon seeing these search results it only made sense to write about Merlot being a great holiday gift or giving the gift of wine. Now, I’ll show up for those beer gifts and continue to show up for gifts about wines because I strengthened my grip on the keywords by actually targeting the ones I was getting traffic for anyway.

Is this a scam? Not at all. Every blog was well thought out and designed page of actual content searchers will find interesting. I’m not writing random words just to get hits because that just creates users that stay on your site for three seconds before clicking the magic back button. Like a good salesman I opted to give the user what they want, relevant content pertaining to what they’re searching for up-front.

I found a need for people searching for holiday gifts and did some research for them and blogged about it. Now, they don’t have to do the research themselves, they can work off the data I have already gathered. Their thanks to me? Perhaps they’ll find an ad on my site that’s pertains to their needs and click on it. Otherwise, oh well, it was a fun writeup non-the-less.

Life lesson, be dynamic and ready to write about topics people are looking for with creativity and an informed eye. Don’t try to scam the users, do their research for them and you’ll get a good hit of seasonal organic searches.

Just don’t expect them to continue querying google for these editorials in January. Perhaps they’ll find them again next holiday, be ready to start blogging about the next big season and ready yourself for another wave.

Assuming you’re going to use adsense over a firm like AdBrite then you’re in the market to bring content that shows high paying ads. Don’t go it alone, do some research on topics you think you could write a ‘journal’ about on a daily basis before you start your potential money making campaign. Don’t be that guy who has a great idea that nobody actually wants. Think ahead, plan smart and do a bit of research.

Think like a company trying to sell ads to a website and invest in opportunities. A company wishing to make their presence known may choose google adwords to start bidding on keywords to bring up their content on websites and search results. Although many companies may opt to only advertise on google search results plenty of high paying bidders are on the Net trying to get the word out about their business. You are here to carry their words.

First, pretend to be like those companies and research keywords to see what the average prices is for them. You can use adwords traffic estimator [or non-user-based external tool] to achieve this goal, in our example we’ll use a few keywords to get some relative idea about a market we can write about: kids. In our example we’ll use the keywords: “baby cloths”, “daycare”, “infant”, “safety” and “toys”.

We can see the terms have some good search volume to them and adwords online help says:

“Higher search volume keywords or keywords with higher advertiser competition don’t necessarily provide more qualified leads. They can also result in higher costs with a lower return on your investment.”

That means the marketing folks are going to need to spend more because their is a high competition for the words to be displayed on websites around the Internet. Although google won’t tell you the percentage of revenue you’ll make from the ad, it’s safe to assume if they get more you’ll get more. So, focusing on these keywords, along with those that complement them may be a good idea.

Now, an advertiser is going to want to know what their about to spend, on average, and the next column breaks this down. The total cost doesn’t always correlate to the total volume of searches but it will probably be close.

What you can look for here is a set of keywords with a sweet price. The “toys” keyword has a great volume and a pretty nice click price of 79 cents to $1.15 on average. The higher price they pay, the better price you’re going to make. A good rule of thumb, if what you want to write about has really low average CPC you’ll have to work very hard to make money on the site or provide thousands of users to your site to make money on sheer volume of low priced clicks.

The last fields define the estimated clicks per day and how much it will cost them to advertise with the keywords. Please note the keywords “baby cloths” don’t receive too many clicks on a daily basis and have a lower price while “toys” receive around 20,000 clicks a day.

Of course, you probably want to write about more than just “toys,” so you can try to find some other keywords with nice average pricing to broaden your scope. The moral of the story, do some research before you start writing because once you’ve got yourself invested in days and weeks of writing you want it to pay off in the end… that’s the goal, right?