Niche writing/niche blogging can be very lucrative if done well. My HubPages experience has greatly benefited from the niche blogging experience I’ve gained over the years, building blogs for myself and for clients. At the same time, being forced to write good content with no outside help from relationships and loyal followings, I’ve been able to see what works from a purely content-oriented perspective.
By taking some time to write outside of traditional blogs, I’ve been able to test some theories regarding creating content for the web. Writing the hubs has allowed me to focus on content over relationship, since the percentage of anonymous search engine visits for the hubs is much, much higher than it is here or on other blogs. HubPages (for the most part) don’t benefit from serious social media promotion (unless you make that a goal), opt-ins, or promise of dofollow links in return for comments. Your content stands alone, usually, unless you take the time to really develop relationships with other hubbers.
The lessons below apply to blogging as well. If you have just started out and haven’t been able to develop a close following on your blog yet, these tips will help you start writing content that appeals to people (and search engines) so that you can start getting more traffic.
HubPages.com Report Card - Click to Enlarge
1. The More Specific Your Keyword Is, The Better It Ranks
The single best performing hub I’ve created so far – which has the fewest number of words – is Kancamagus Highway Photography. It was also the very FIRST one I created. The lesson here is on specificity.
Kancamagus Highway is a hugely popular vacation destination in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, getting a million visitors every year. It is a specific area in the White Mountains National Forest, and people looking for it know it by name. It’s SO specific in terms of keywords, and the search competition was low enough to conquer.
Kancamagus Highway and Photography. Did I do this on purpose? Yes. Did it pay off? I’d say so. While BizChickBlogs.com and other blogs do better in terms of sheer numbers, the amount of time and effort I have put into marketing BCB is quadrupled what I’ve put into HubPages.
Almost all of the traffic this hub gets is from Google, and I’ve added more and more content to it as keywords pop up. I get the ideas from the keywords – a backwards SEO technique only learned over time. I could have chosen Pictures from My Vacation in the White Mountains as my title and keyword phrase, but it wouldn’t have had nearly the impact that the specific keywords have.
2. Seasonal Topics are Okay, but Trendy Topics are Better.
I wrote a seasonal hub on Father’s Day, which pretty much bombed. It was written too close to the actual day, and that day only comes once a year. The likelihood of that hub ever getting a lot of traffic is 0 to none.
On the other hand, Eat Pray Love has done well in the short time its been up (two weeks). The movie isn’t even out yet in theaters (it comes out this Thursday in the United States). I knew well in advance that I was going to write a hub page on it, and have done a fair amount of link building but not much else. It does very well in Google for several long-tail keyword phrases related to Eat Pray Love, including (my favorite) “eat pray love advance tickets.” Google is the 2nd best source of traffic for this hub, with HubPages.com being the first.
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Click to Enlarge
3. Helpful Content Reigns Supreme.
If you go back up and take a look at the top 10 hubs, all, with the exception of the photography hub, are primarily helpful in nature. You could say Eat Pray Love and the Kancamagus Highway hubs are also helpful, especially since both provide a fair amount of informative content, but you’ll notice among the top 10 hubs about getting into Google Places, buying soy candle supplies, and how to choose the best keywords for SEO.
4. Location, Location, Location.
It surprises me a little when service providers choose NOT to intentionally target their own geographic areas in their blogging and linking efforts. Geographic targeting is a slam dunk in terms of SEO strategy. People try to refine search results by including the names of cities, states, and regional areas all the time. If you are not doing this yet, try it.
You can see that Kancamagus Highway (very, very location specific), and the Tucson hubs are all in the top 10.
5. The More Competitive the Term, the Smarter You Have to Work.
Eat Pray Love’s rise to the top hasn’t been easy and I didn’t expect it to be easy. Almost all of the long tail keyword phrases you could possibly think of have search competition into the millions. I have been linking to it just as much as I’ve been linking to BizChickBlogs. It’s an incredibly competitive phrase, but I didn’t let that stop me!
It’s okay to go for something competitive (e.g., blogging in a crowded niche). It just means you have to be intelligent about it.
First, make sure that the content is really worth the attention it will end up getting from search engines. Then, make all of your linking efforts count. Rather than throwing a million ridiculous links at it that will never count, link wisely. Send several good links its way, and you will be fine.
6. Comments Aren’t Everything…
Getting comments on HubPages is a little bizarre. It’s not like a blog, where people are sort of expected to have something to say. Your content stands on its own and is consumed, just like a page out of an encyclopedia. The visitors tend to be nameless, faceless people just looking for what you have to offer. (Clarification: if you work to be part of the community on HubPages, you will do a lot better and have more fun. But this post is talking about content specifically.)
The lesson learned here is to not put too much weight in comments, because sometimes they speak very little about your content in terms of its quality. We cannot afford to assume that all of our readers are other bloggers who are interested in back links. Some are not. Some are just people who want the goods and then they leave. And that is totally fine, to me.
At the same time, though…
7. …Comments Are Everything.
Many great hubs DO have a lot of comments. Hubs that are written with hubbers in mind, that raise an interesting issue, or that are in some way exceptional, seem to bring in everyone’s two cents. Only one of my 24 hubs to date has a significant amount of comments (single moms saving money), and that’s because it won a HubNugget award and people were congratulating me.
Lesson: comments signify an existing relationship or perhaps the start of one. Leaving a comment takes time, so there has to be a return on that investment.
Don’t ignore your readers who leave comments, especially if you ever want them to come back.
8. People are Searching for Answers. So, Answer Away.
Whether you are creating content for blogs, HubPages, Squidoo Lenses, articles, or producing videos, podcasts, or any other content online, the reality is that people are looking for something, and that something is usually “answers.” They’re looking for answers to every question under the sun. If you’re going to start blogging and want to do it successfully, you’ve got to start answering some of those questions!
Don’t get hung up on trying to make your entire blog perfect.
Focus on optimizing a few key posts at a time.
If you don’t know what to write about, mull it over first. Post two to three good articles and then spend the next 2 to 3 weeks just reading blogs in your niche and commenting. Use this time period to research and discover what it is people are really looking for and are interested in. Keyword research will help as well.
Other Lessons?
What other cross-over can you see happening? Have you ever thought about expanding your circle of influence by writing outside of your blog?
About Tia Peterson
