Make your blogging profitable with demand-driven content creation
Most blogs are full of content created on a whim. The blogger is really interested in a topic, so decides to hit the keyboard and blog about it. But if you're a business and blogging isn't just a hobby, your blog is a very powerful way to generate sales. Choose your topic and keywords carefully and your content can be profitable.
Say customers search on Google, land on your blog post, then buy your product to generate $300 of sales. If you'd spent $120 of your time on the post: voila! $180 profit. Pick keywords that are popular searches, attainable for you to rank for and convert into sales to make this a reality.
Does it work?
Demand Media and Associated Content (bought by Yahoo for $100m) profit by buying cheap content, getting it ranked, then selling ads next to it. With content as cheap as $20 per article, they've been criticised for their poor quality, high volume focus. But as the content exists merely to encourage clicking on ads, it serves its purpose. Chances are you've stumbled across one of their vague how-to videos on YouTube.
Does it work for small businesses?
Surely your little website with a couple of hundred visitors a month can't compete against these behemoths?
The beauty of SEO is that there are a massive number of niche searches. 
In fact, 20% of searches Google sees every day have never been searched for before. Just as your business has its niche, there are niche searches you can exploit too.
If you've had a website for a couple of months or more, take a look in your analytics for keywords from search engines. Ignore your brand name searches and see what's left. You'll have hundreds of searches that have been searched only once or twice. This is your personal gold mine for demand-driven content creation.
Your advantage over the big guys
Analytics reveals the keyword searches that search engines have decided you're relevant to. These form a great foundation for you to 1) expand a topic and 2) start related topics. Building on what you're already relevant for means you'll capture more clicks as your search engine positions rise, and you'll be listed for more related searches.
We'll go through a practical example of how to exploit your analytics for demand-driven content creation in the next part.
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Thanks for the photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/minnesota_social_marketing/4437146842/
