This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Would you like to receive free traffic to your website? No, this isn't a promotion. This is the introduction to this episode. All you need to do is listen and apply this lesson. Welcome to Silence School.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. So yes, if you'd like to receive free traffic to your website, if you'd like to learn about SEO, and if you're struggling with knowing what to post about, I've got a strategy for you. Now, as a reminder, this is the biweekly classroom episode. The first half of 2020, we did them every week, every Monday. Second half of the year, we're doing them every other Monday so that I can feature more questions and contributions from our amazing listeners.
Now, on the newly updated classroom page, you can scroll back and take a look or a listen to anything you might have missed from the first part of the year, anything that seems particularly relevant to you. I always encourage you to use your time well. So if something seems basic, if you're like, nope, I already know that, then that's great. Just skip over it and keep going. So that page is sidehustleschool.com/classroom.
Now, I was gonna call this episode Simple and Effective SEO Tips. That's how I started. And I made a bit of a switch as I went along. If you start to learn anything about SEO, which by the way is search engine optimization, I should have said that earlier, SEO, search engine optimization, the art of getting your website's pages posts, other content ranked in search engines, especially Google, so that customers can find them. Okay, now if you start to learn anything about SEO, you'll find articles all about keyword research.
And this can be very helpful in understanding your ideal customer. What are they searching for? What specific words or language do they use? How do they phrase their searches? And your goal is to find something that a lot of people are searching for that doesn't have much competition.
That's a very classic yet still relevant SEO strategy. You're trying to find something that a lot of people are looking for, but not a lot of competitors are out there also targeting the same word or phrase. For example, if you wrote and sold a guide to solving the difficult New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and you found a bunch of people who were searching, how do I solve crossword puzzles? Maybe more specifically, how do I solve the New York Times Sunday crossword? And you didn't find a lot of results, like you found a lot of people searching for that term using a keyword planner tool, which I'll tell you about at the end of the episode.
So you find a bunch of people searching, but not a lot of results, that would be great. That would actually be ideal. And in that case, you might wanna create a page on your website entitled how to solve crossword puzzles. Maybe again, how to solve the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. In fact, maybe you might wanna name your whole website that because that is essentially what you are providing.
That is the solution you are providing to the problem of the difficult crossword. But let's go beyond merely knowing how to create a page or two based on what you learn. One of the things you'll notice is that people ask questions when they use search engines. So you start doing some research. You'll notice that people often ask questions and you probably do the same thing when you're searching.
You might ask Google, how do I solve the crossword puzzle? Or what is the weather going to be next week? Or whatever problem you're trying to solve. So guess what? If you're struggling to come up with topics to write about for your blog or your website, or otherwise used for content creation, for your YouTube videos or any other format or medium, then here's an answer.
You can create content based entirely around answering questions that people are asking. This helps you brainstorm. It's gonna give you a bunch of different ideas. It will also give you a task. It will show you, okay, here's what you write about or create next.
And it ensures that what you're working on isn't going to be completely irrelevant, right? Because you don't wanna start working on something that nobody's actually searching for. You want to find that thing people are looking for and come along with the perfect answer. Ultimately in the form of your product or service. But even if it's just an answer or information, then that has value.
So let me give you a real world example of somebody who built an entire business around this. And this example comes from the very first week of the program, the first week of 2017, to be precise, episode number eight, all about a guy named Tanner Callay. And Tanner and his wife received a gift certificate for a cruise to go on for their honeymoon. This was obviously a few years back because, you know, the cruise industry isn't doing so well right now. But remember, we're time traveling.
So he gets this gift certificate and he thinks, well, I don't know if I'll even enjoy a cruise. He's never been on one before and he had a lot of questions. So he actually searches around, doesn't find all the answers he's looking for, but ends up going on the cruise and having a good time. Now Tanner by profession is a copywriter. So when he gets back, he starts thinking, you know, I bet I'm not the only one who had those questions.
He was wondering about stuff, you know, about like the internet connection and can I watch Netflix on a cruise and a few different things. So he starts making a list of not just a few things, but a long list of questions. And he uses a keyword research tool to go and find other questions that people have about potential cruises. Then he creates a website that is a very simple blog. And the blog consisted entirely of answers to these questions.
So he would make a page, can I watch Netflix on a cruise? He would make a page, how can I get good wifi on a cruise? Whatever else people were asking, he'd make a page and then provide the answer. You might think, well, that's very nice of him, how generous. But of course there's a monetary aspect to it.
He monetized the site by adding advertising and links to affiliate programs. So the more traffic he received, the more money he would make. That's why he was incentivized to create more and more pages which provided better answers to people. You know, everybody wins essentially. Again, the entire project consists of answers to questions.
And it is still very possible to use this method to build out your first cytosol or to build out your next website. I would suggest maybe not focusing on the cruise industry at the moment, but otherwise it's a good idea. So let's take a quick break. And when we return, I'll tell you about a few free online tools you can use to make this process even easier. [Music]
All right, three tools that are gonna help you with this process should you choose to experiment or go down this road.
First one is Yoast, kind of a weird word, that's the name. Yoast, Y-O-A-S-T. It is a very popular WordPress plugin that has both a free and premium version. And notice I said WordPress. So this is if you are building a WordPress based website, if WordPress is the platform for your website, if you're using something different, then Yoast won't work.
But there's probably something else. And so if you're using a different platform, I would go on Google and search the name of your platform plus SEO plugin and see what comes back. So Yoast does stuff automatically, it performs free analysis for you along the way, will make your life a lot easier and also tell you how you're doing in terms of ranking. And like I said, there's probably some other services that do this well for different platforms. Second resource is wordtracker.com.
Just like Yoast, it is both a free and premium version, but you can do a lot with the free version. I always like tools that are freemium, but the free version is actually helpful and useful and wordtracker certainly fits the bill there. So with wordtracker, you can type in any potential search term, New York Times crossword puzzle, wifi on cruises, whatever else you're searching for. And it's going to show you a pretty big list of what other people are searching for, what the volume is, like how many people relatively are searching for that term, as well as what the competition is. Lots of good information.
If you really want to delve into it, then you can get a paid account and it gives you hundreds of results and you can see a lot of data. But like I said, just for a surface level understanding, you can learn a lot using the free service, wordtracker.com. And then lastly, the website Quora can be a great source for brainstorming. If you go to quora.com, Q-U-O-R-A.com, I'm going to link all this stuff up by the way in the notes, you can find all kinds of questions people are asking about all kinds of topics. So you want to search for your search term or for your topic, your industry, anything related to what you're trying to do.
And most likely, with just a couple more clicks, you're going to be able to drill into a whole lot of questions that people have. Now, you may want to actually consider not only taking ideas from Quora, but actually answering questions there. So answering some of those questions that you find. And of course, providing a link to your website at the bottom. We've talked about this in a couple of other episodes.
If you're trying to build a content based business, Quora can be a good resource for referring traffic over time. So three resources for you there that are either free or have free versions, Yoast, Word Tracker, and Quora. Your assignment for the week is to look up one word or phrase using a keyword tool. It can be Word Tracker. You can use the Google keyword tool.
You can use any other one and see what people are searching for. So look up one word or phrase using a keyword tool. And if you're not sure about that, you can go and say, what are some keyword research tools? And Google will answer that question for you with a lot of results. So when you do this, when you look up one word or phrase, does it give you any ideas?
What does it show you? When you look at the numbers in terms of how many people are searching compared to other terms, is it higher or lower than you expected? How popular is it? Just see what you can learn by doing some really simple research, typing in one word or phrase using a keyword tool. All right, I hope that is helpful.
Create content by answering questions. You can read notes for this in every classroom episode this year, once again, at sidehustleschool.com/classroom. This has been episode 1304, sidehustleschool.com/1304. Thank you so much, my friends. Keep being awesome.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sydustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
