By Neil Patel

Blogging has changed over the years.

When I first started blogging, it wasn’t that competitive.

You write an article… on pretty much anything… and you get some social shares.

And then you would try to build links, but even if you weren’t great at link building you would still naturally generate more backlinks overtime.

Just take a look at one of my first blog posts that I wrote on August 31, 2005. Here are the first few paragraphs…

SEO Made Easy

The hardest thing for any site owner these days is getting the search engines to properly list their website. Making a site search engine friendly is the key to the success of search engine optimization. A site must be written in a language that the search engine will recognize such as HTML. In addition, the site must have defined keywords that are going to be used in classifying the site.

In all actuality, search engine optimization is nothing more than simple common sense. The whole goal of optimizing your site is so that search engines will find your site easily and catalog it within their systems for easy retrieval by consumers. Simple SEO is not hard and requires only basic knowledge of how algorithms work in relation to programming. The two important things to remember for those that are trying to learn the basics are how a search engine spider works and how it figures out what content is relevant to your keywords you have chosen.

I didn’t really provide anything actionable in the post. I even went on to discussing how search engine algorithms aren’t that complex.

But back then there weren’t many blogs. Now there are over a billion. That’s roughly 1 for every 7 people in this world.

Which is why it’s hard for you to generate backlinks, social shares or even get SEO traffic when you blog.

So, does that mean all hope is lost and that blogging is dealing?

Of course not. It just means you have to adjust your approach to blogging.

And that’s what I am going to share today. Here’s the new formula to blogging.

Not all content is equal

Before I dive into the formula you should follow, you should first have a better understanding of the type of content that does well.

And it’s not the same for all platforms.

Just look at the screenshot below from the NeilPatel.com blog. These are the top blog posts by traffic…

What do you notice?

The first post breaks down how to get Instagram followers.

The second tells you what the 4ps of marketing is.

The third post tells you how to check the traffic of a website.

The fourth breaks down how to make money from Instagram.

Do you see a trend yet?

Here’s another hint. Let’s look at the keywords that drive traffic to the 4ps post.

As you can see the keywords that drive traffic to that page are all basic and beginner terms.

But here is what’s interesting. I broke down all my beginner content versus advance content.

Beginner content on …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog

Author: Aaron