This article will give you some real world examples of long tail keywords on this blog over the last 3 years. I’ve really only thought about making money with blogs but never really made more than a couple hundred bucks. In this website, I want to give those who have some questions about long tail keyword research for their small business or personal blog a small insight to statistics that I think are great for beginners. (I’m not anything but a beginner) 

About This Blog:

Well like everyone else, I wanted to blog and make money! I was on my last $1,500 (after tax refund) and thought I would give it a try. I went to wordpress and signed up for a free blog and posted 10-15 articles over a few weeks. These articles had no real keyword research besides google adwords and what you’re typically used to seeing about finding a niche and starting with low competition “high” volume long tail keywords. 

I shortly realized that hosting on a free wordpress site wasn’t the way to go if I wanted to make some adsense revenue so I abandoned this blog and registered my own domain. I only even remembered I had this blog after google sent me an e-mail stating that I had an adsense check pending for a year and I needed to tell them where to send it. 

Well, these days I’m wanting to get back into blogging. The last 4 years for me was great. As a 20 something year old I went from a box packer to a partner in 2 multi-million dollar companies dealing with eBay, online sales in the mobile industry. While I’m still active day-to-day in one of the companies, I wanted to give blogging a try again as I thought my experiences over the past few years could really help others. 

Thank God 3-4 years ago I used the same password for everything and regained access to this blog!

I’m not even really sure where I’m going to begin this time around but with no real financial strain and my experience being around articles previously written I thought having 3 years worth of stats on my articles could help me get some idea of how long tail keywords worked.

I’ve done so much researching about trying to rank for top long tail keywords I was about to go crazy. Really, instead of researching I should have been writing. 

Anyways, BACK TO THE MAIN REASON FOR THIS POST. I’ve always had this burning curiosity on long tail keywords and what type of traffic and keyword search variations around long tail keywords could drive traffic. These days, the word seems to be targeting adgroups.

Without further ado, ….my list of incoming search terms and the hits they received. (I’ve made some general comments around them below the search terms). Please keep in mind that it looks like (but not certain) that these long tail keyword incoming search terms only go so far back (I think a few months). So the stats below would cover something over a period of a year or so?

A few points to remember 

• My blog had a total of 54 articles
• All of which were poorly written with some knowledge behind the content but masked in the rush to pump some items out in hopes of making some money.
• The articles were about eBay mainly (1/2), craigslist and cell phone related topics.
• It was written on free wordpress.com site.

So how does the traffic break down? (In my own 20 minute review)

1. First, I actually did write one “great” article about how terrible eBay franchise businesses were. I was a fool and took the article down and redirected it to my new blog only to abandon that one after I was employed and forgot to pay the hosting fee at godaddy. This one article ranked on the top page for keywords such as “eBay Franchise information” and “eBay consignment”. These were short tail ones back in the day. They probably generated about 1/4 of the overall traffic until the post lost rank on this blog and picked up on my other .com blog. 

• It didn’t take long with a crappy looking blog and terrible command of the english / typing language that some other bloggers and sites linked it up and the rest was history. It drove “a lot of traffic”. One blog post for a few short tail keywords and many surrounding long tail keywords drove about 25% of my traffic.

2. Many others came from the wordpress theme “tags” associated with my blog post. I defiantly would pay more attention to these tags and use of them this next time around.

3. While I didn’t rank many times for the keywords I was trying to (or research told me to go after) I did get a lot of traffic around keywords that google adwords showed no search volume for.

4. Some search terms I competed with the big boys. Top 10 search result for over a year for what was a growing trend around ebay consignment stores was a real surprise! This article I probably spent the least amount of time writing and think I did very little to no keyword research before hand. It just flowed naturally and I suppose readers and this the search engine picked up on it. 

So that I don’t get too chatty here, for anyone who’s just starting out on a blog, please remember a few simple things.

• Traffic takes a little bit of time to pickup. Sometimes weeks to months, or a year. 
• Using a free wordpress site to being with isnt a terrible idea. While you might be limited with ads and the likes, they will feed your articles down global tag categories which can get you some rank and free traffic right out of the gate. Later on you can upgrade or write other articles linked back and forth.
• Don’t spend too much time researching long tail keywords and regular keywords if it prevents you from writing something. In my case, I probably spent 80% trying to learn SEO and keyword research and my stats suggest I should of just kept writing and I would of generated more visits.
• A lot of the long tail keywords that came up in the incoming search results page would guide me more this time around on how MY SPECIFIC audience is searching for me and outlying search terms to get there. 
• Posting AUTHENTIC and helpful/useful comments on other peoples blogs is a great way to get some traffic to you site overtime. 
• There is no BS about writing good content. You can spam all you want, write crappy content and do it all for the money. That can even work! But if you have a niche, write about it, help others around the net in your niche and it should grow overtime.

My #1 thought: 

If i had it over again (and if this blogging for money helping others) this time around does take off, I would spend less time cranking out pitiful articles (even though they do bring traffic) and spend more time concentrating on fewer articles that really have something to offer the reader.

In my case, 1 article that took me 1 hour to write from start to finish consisted of 25% of my traffic hits and 35% of my google adsense earnings.

Being that this article is way too long, I thank you for getting to the bottom. If you did, leave a message or something. I promise I won’t take 3 years to respond this time. I’m going to make a few other articles highlighting the traffic statistics and how it grew and declined after a while also.