The 'Secret Sauce' to SEO

Build and they will come. That's what many people who are unfamiliar with blogging and digital marketing believe. They think that just creating a site and putting up content will bring 1000s to their doorstep. In most cases, it's unlikely that they'll even get 10 visitors per month.

I'm working on a few sites with the hope that they'll be able to generate passive income some day. One of my old sites took off and I was able to coast on it till I got lazy. Didn't renew the domain in time but that's a story for another day.

There's tons of courses, books, digital products trying to teach people SEO but I thought I'd share what I've found to be the 'secret sauce'.

Here they are in no particular order:

• Write at least 50 articles first and then try to add 1 or 2 per week after that
• Target long tail keywords
• Unless you can generate 10x better content, stay away from competitive niches like tech or cooking recipes.
• Get as many quality backlinks as you can. Forums are a good place to start
• Once you appear on the search engines, try to boost your CTR and Bounce rate

That's about it, really. Easier said than done, though. If you can find a blogging group where you can help each other along the way, you'll find the journey much easier. It can get lonely and there isn't exactly a perfect correlation between effort and results although they are correlated.