For those of you wondering about the headline, you MUST read Ian Lurie’s recent posting, “The Perfect Blog Post”.
If your goal is to
quit your day job
and make a living online off of ad revenue generated by your very popular blog then you should print off Lurie’s article and treat it as the gospel in your writing endeavors.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to be a professional writer, then you also should print off Lurie’s article and do your best to incorporate whatever you can into your writings to ensure your current survival. Then you can hope that one day, the search engines update their algorithms in order to favor useful, well written, content over that which was purposely written to contain a specific searched-for phrase in the title tag and then is linked to from wherever for whatever reason.
It is apparent that Ian is a “real” writer and, like me, has some issues with some of the things that make one “successful” on today’s Google driven (and thus blogger driven). And, while we both understand them, we don’t have to always like them. So, we play along thanks to a realistic world attitude that understands that success does not always beat a path to the door of the worthy.
I have tried to write this post about 100 times, but have never succeeded in plumping the depths of such “strategies” without sounding bitter. Satire is often the perfect tool for laying bare that which annoys. I will pocket that lesson for the future.
In a single post (under 200 words, I might ad) he has successfully managed to mock, maim, and criticize all of those pandering tactics that are used far and wide by various “online professionals” in the name of SEO to write popular high-traffic blog posts and other online articles. The net result being page after page of worse quality and lesser value, but highly searchable content that will drive your ad earnings up.
By the way, Mr. Lurie, I am sure that our demographic (real writers with souls) is much smaller than their demographic (who cares what it is if it drives traffic), but if you can find it in your hear to link back here using the link text “professional freelance writer”, that would be swell.
Oops, did I just link pander, too? (Yes, yes, give in to your eye rolling, for that is the true power of the dark side.)
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