As a writer for Factoidz for the last several weeks, I've had an opportunity to make a little money and look at which of my articles are receiving the most attention from readers. In the process I've learned a couple of things about what it takes to make an article a serious traffic generator. But here, I'd like to make a few notes on what went wrong with the other articles, pose some questions to my readers, and look into the future a bit.
Problems with article keywords
The first thing that comes to mind when I consider my articles that aren't getting hits is my state of mind when I wrote them. I usually write all night and I don't think this schedule is really as predictable as waking up every morning for the quality of my writing. I think the articles that aren't getting traffic are written fairly well, but by the time I was done with them I was exhausted. This didn't leave me much energy for the last step which is selecting all of my keywords. The process of choosing keywords is probably just like using the "Labels" box in blogger. You fill it with enough words that search engines can get a good idea of what your article relates to, but not too many that you get flagged. By not spending enough time choosing good keywords I was pretty much guaranteed that these articles wouldn't be looked at by very many people.
(Interesting side note: adding words like "Walmart, Martha Stewart, or CNN" just because a lot of people make searches on them may positively effect your ratings. Another term for this is "Black Hat" SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Black hat tactics try to drive traffic using unrelated but popular keywords to describe their page. When people search on these unrelated topic, they may happen to click on the article, adding another hit to the counter. White hat SEO involve honest and legitimate ways to attract people without misleading or violating a search engines Terms of Use.)
A question for my readers
One of my articles is about URL redirecting services, and it is here I have a question to pose to my readers. A URL redirecting or shortening service allows users to create short links of their own to other content on the internet instead of including long hundreds of characters long URLs. The google URL shortener is called Goog.le and another popular service is Bit.ly. So aside from the obvious keywords such as "URL shortener", what is the best keyword to use for something like Goog.le or Bit.ly? Do you leave the period out of the entry (i.e. Bitly instead of Bit.ly)? That isn't an option with Goog.le; without the period there is no way to tell the difference between the company and it's shortening service.
Onward and upward
Of the little money I have made so far, I see a huge percentage coming from articles that have titles offering advice on how to use some of the major players in social media. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn are becoming more important to nearly ever type of business every day; and writing helpful articles for people to better use these websites can be big bucks if you do it right. Utilities like URL shorteners are great, but you will have to wait for the nickels and dimes to start rolling in if you write about them before they reach their height of popularity.
Before I leave you, here is some food for thought. After watching two articles tank and another continue to generate a steady stream of hits, I can't stress enough the importance of choosing an appropriate title and keywords. My next step is to start using Google Analytics to gather more detailed information on my articles' traffic, and also choose subjects and topics that people will want to read. Many companies offering freelance gigs will help you out by giving you lists of hot keywords. Sticking to these lists and writing useful relevant content will almost guarantee you some exposure. But, as of the time this is written, I cannot locate this supposed list on Factoidz and they have not answered my repeated requests to help me locate this list. If I find it in the future, you can be assured I will share this secret cleverly hidden in yet another terribly designed website.
Happy keyword hunting, and good posting.
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