My best advice to you is to focus on two things: 1) Niche selection and 2) reverse engineering.
Regardless of what Google says and does in the coming months and years, if you do these two things right, you will continue to make passive income.
By passive income, I'm talking about writing a piece of content once but earning money from it long into the future.
This sure beats working a regular job or freelancing where you do a job once and you get paid once.
But if you want to get paid again, you have to do another job.
Do you see how this works?
You're essentially just trading your time for money.
With blogging, you build a passive income.
You work once but if your posts get traffic, those posts can make you money long into the future.
As long as people are clicking on ads or people are buying products through your links, you will make money.
This is why it's definitely worth doing.
You just have to have the right guidance, and here's what works for me.
First, you need to pick the right niche.
Niches are not created equal.
Gossip websites, celebrity websites, or music websites make way less money than certain types of insurance, credit, or finance websites.
This is especially true when it comes to legal topics or anything related to law services.
You need to find a niche that historically pays well.
It's easy to do this using Google's Keyword Planner tool when you sign up for an account with Google Ads.
Type in categories like insurance, and legal services, and you will see what I'm talking about.
Certain keywords will appear and Google will tell you how much people are paying per click.
Use that as your guidance, but don't stop there.
As you probably already can tell, these big niches are saturated.
People are looking to make that big money, so there's a lot of people publishing in those niches.
So how do you as a newbie get ahead?
Simple: niche down!
Let's say you start with insurance.
Look for specific types of insurance that offer services to a smaller population of people: people with money, people with businesses, and people who have a special need for certain types of insurance.
Chances are, the more specialized your sub-niche, the higher the per-click value of that niche would be.
Once you've niched down, the next step is to reverse-engineer your competition.
This is where it gets fun.
Type in the main keywords for your sub-niche into Google, and you will see websites that are already ranked for those keywords.
Get the domain names of those websites and run them through an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semresh, and then you will see what keywords they rank for and the difficulty of those keywords as well as the expected search volume of those keywords.
Once you have this information, you can then make a judgment call as to which keywords to target with your blog.
Ideally, you should look for keywords that are easier to rank but have decent search volume.
Once you have your target keywords, let's say you have 50, the next step is to load them one by one into Google and pay close attention to the results.
Ask yourself these questions.
Is this the best result possible for this keyword?
Put in another way, is there anything that the top search results are missing?
Do they deliver value?
What is the probable intent behind these keywords?
Why would people use these keywords instead of others?
What kind of information are they looking for?
Once you have a solid answer to these questions, you can come up with content that has a good chance of beating your competition.
This is your game plan.
Create a blog that targets a high-value niche and stock it with content that your competitors are not providing.
Maybe their stuff is too shallow.
Maybe it's out of date.
Maybe it's written by AI.
Maybe it's too robotic.
Maybe it's not very engaging.
Maybe it's hard to navigate.
Maybe it's confusing.
Whatever the case may be, your content must be obviously superior.
Let me repeat that.
It must be obviously superior.
What you want is when somebody clicks on your link and takes a look at your page, they immediately understand that what you're offering is much better than your competitors.
If you were able to pull this off, people are actually gonna read your stuff and possibly click through links.
The more of your pages they read, the more credible you become and the higher the likelihood you will make money off that visit.
Do you see how this works?
This is the best advice I can give to a newbie blogger because this actually leads to success.
At the end of the day, your content must be actionable.
Remember that word: actionable.
People must get the impression that they didn't waste their time and that they got exactly what they were looking for.
If enough people feel that way about your content, Google will reward you with even more traffic.
Pretty soon, you will start ranking for most pages.
Now of course you still have to do basic housekeeping stuff when it comes to your blog.
Make sure that your headings are formatted correctly.
Make sure that you follow all the basic on-page SEO tips and tricks that are widely available on the Internet.
All these small things do add up.
You have to make sure that you format your content correctly.
Let's face it.
Even if you offer an obvious piece of gold but if it's covered with shit, people aren't gonna bother with it because they're in a hurry.
They'd rather look for something that is shinier and more obvious.
Make their job easier for them.
Format it in such a way that it complies with Google's guidelines when it comes to SEO formatting, but at the same time focus on quality.
Put in another way, if your page features shit but it's wrapped in gold foil and it's formatted nicely, all the fancy tricks in the world are not going to take away from the fact that you're still offering shit.
It's good that you're offering gold, but you have to dress it up in a standard way so Google can find it, people can easily appreciate its value, and then take the action that eventually leads to you making more money.
