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SEO KILLED THE CREATIVE STAR

Do you remember that annoyingly catchy 80s song “Video Killed the Radiostar”? If you are over 20, there is a chance you do. I like that song. It is quite smart in the lyrics department. Video visualized everything and made things more fun but then looks gained much more importance over substance. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate video. It took marketing to another level. Songs came with their own comercials. Very cool. But like all good things, it came with a catch: if the singers/bands aren’t famous, there is a chance they won’t get much to say on how to shoot it. But then again, the popularity is nice. Oh, boy. How would most artists fill stadiums without the video? Exactly.

Where am I going with this? If you are writing online or in some sort of online marketing (aspect of a business), you know SEO, aka search engine optimization. And I believe SEO is the “video” of the writer. It helps you with your popularity- which is get higher rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo,…etc. Higher ranking is good news because as much as those engines are ready to come up with a million results on tens/hundreds of pages, people – that will be all of us- only tend to check out the first couple or two. Because we usually believe that the first pages are the most relevant and we don’t have time to go through them all. So we need to be on those first pages. That means we have to be relevant to people’s tendencies and needs. You have to know what people search for. OK. So far, so good. It is a wonderful marketing tool. A writer loves an audience and internet is an amazing market. It doesn’t matter whether you keep your own blog or you write on a special writing website like Triond. If you want to be read, you have to use and master at SEO. You wrote a book and you want a promotion? You need SEO so that more people reach you online and/or know about you. Whatever you write and whatever media you decide to use for expressing it; you just can’t stay away from this term. But are what you want and what other people want the same? There are most probably other writers out there who writes about your topic(s) of choice. Triond’s guide actually offers some good insight about the supply and demand balance you need to find. Basically, you can use any search engine to find the number of providers and there are free/paid tools to find how many people want to read/find about the particular subject keyword.

Well, this formula depresses me. It is insanely helpful but the problem is it kind of limits your imagination. Have you read tips on getting more viewership? Every established blogger/online writer will tell you to pay attention to SEO. But they will also tell you that it is easier to market content that is about what is already in demand. What if you are passionate about stuff that is not current and popular? This is a problem.

Let’s say you want to write about Kurt Cobain rather than Megan Fox? Now,  Kurt Cobain gets over 2000 in the demand department. Megan Fox? Over 49,000. Now, if we had the same internet technology in the 90s and you wanted to write about Cobain, you’d probably have the demand range over a million. So you face a trade off. Popularity or content from your heart? If you are lucky, you are a writer and you love writing about Fox. But if you are a movie buff who loves the 70s, you come with a disadvantage.

A couple of months ago, I had no idea what this little combination of s,e and o stood for. Now I can define it but I still have a long way to go when it comes to utilizing this concept.

Why does a blockbuster usually make more than an independent film? Because for blockbusters, there is a tested formula and an eager audience. Selling to your existing customers is easier than marketing a new and relatively “strange” product. It is a basic yet unfortunate principle. It will be fortunate once your name becomes a brand that sells itself. Sure, marketing never stops. It just becomes relatively easier. So right now, at the beginning of writing careers – whether we aspire to be professionals or not- we don’t have a market waiting for our “name”. We have to sell the content. So there are two ways to play according to the rules of seo. Write and optimize later. Or you can find an already popular subject and get your creative juices flowing around that. Do you feel like there should be a third option? Well, there is. You can choose different paths for different subjects. And maybe, SEO won’t kill your creativity. Maybe it will just give you more ideas.