I'm doing a bit of an experiment in blogging.  (And I also wanted somewhere I could just write for pleasure, about me and mine.)

One of the things that marketers always want more of, is traffic.  The idea is, the more traffic you have, the more sales you'll do.  Hmm, yeah, okay, not always true, but a good general principle to adopt.  (What you actually need is well targetted traffic, but even so, any traffic is good.)

I've always said you can get traffic just by writing, and that you also don't need to go out and get loads of backlinks either.  The concept is, if you write about anything and everything, you'll start to get search engine traffic because some of what you write will end up on the first couple of pages of Google.  (The power of WordPress and the pings it sends to the highly spidered global update servers.)

So I took out a new domain a couple of weeks ago using "Frank Haywood" with a .me extension.  (Work it out, okay?)

I don't want to link to it just yet as I want to see how much search traffic it will get just by me doing nothing but writing about stuff that occurs to me, and that I want to write about there and then.  (It's good practice for writing other stuff.)

This is proof of concept that just using a self-hosted WordPress blog and then writing every couple of days or so will start to pull search traffic.  No backlinks, article marketing or ANY kind of marketing, just writing about stuff that happens to me or pops into my mind, with no thought for good taste or any of the marketing stuff.

As a result, I'll begin to see the kind of things that people are searching for, and I'll learn this almost randomly – it's based purely on what I decide to write on for pleasure.

There's absolutely no monetisation on the site whatsoever yet, and there are only links out to stuff that I find interesting, and NOT marketing related.

Okay?

So three weeks ago I took out the domain, and a week ago I got my first two visitors via Google search for a write up of a cheap camera I bought from Tesco on an impulse buy because of the price.  (It's a good camera too – I'm pleased with it.)  The camera itself is small enough to fit in my coat pocket, so it's great for taking with me wherever I go, and I can pretty much forget about it until I need it.  It took me about an hour to do the write up.

Since then I've had another 7 visitors to the site, all from Google search, and all for that camera.

Now while I didn't write about the camera to make money from the review of it, I did write about it for pleasure and lo and behold, I started to get traffic.  I could monetise it by sending people off to the Tesco site using my aff link, but I'm not going to bother as that's not what that site's about.

For now. 

But you tell me.  How hard is it to get traffic?

Isn't this proof enough that if you pick a product that looks like it could be popular, and do a little research and a write up about it, that you will inevitably get visitors?

Now here's the thing.  People agonise over how to get traffic and then more traffic.  It's the one thing I get asked about more often than anything else.

I've proven to myself again that it isn't that hard to get traffic, and yet people still seem to have a difficult time getting the right traffic to their sites to match their topic.  That's what I get told.

But maybe, and this is a message to everybody who's interested in earning a living online, you should be looking at it the other way round.  Maybe you should instead be looking at what people are searching for, making sure there isn't too much competition, and then supply them useful content based on their interest, and then use your affiliate links to monetise it.

See the subtle difference?

Many people choose a topic that's either too broad or too competitive.

The learning point here is if you want to make money from blogging, then choose a more tightly focussed topic and make sure there's some interest, but also not much in the way of competition.

You'll then find if you write about the subject and because you're filling an empty content gap, Google etc will be interested and take notice of your site.

Okay?

I'll continue to write for pleasure (and to blow off steam every now and then) on that site, and maybe sooner or later I'll come across some niche or another that gets a lot of interest, purely by accident.  Who knows what it might be, and when that might happen?

I won't lose any sleep over it because that's not what that site is for, but it's certainly an interesting experiment to do, don't you think?

-Frank Haywood