When the economy struggles, companies look to cut their expenses and scale back on new investments. If you provide freelance writing services, you might find the number of pieces you produce each month declining. This means less cash in your pocket. What can you do to earn more income? I stumbled into a service I never realized would help me weather the economic storm: Content optimization services. I found it relatively easy to do, and it ended up generating hundreds of dollars a month in revenue.
What is Content Optimization?
Content optimization is a strategy to improve the elements of an article with the goal to have it rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) to drive more traffic to a page with the hopes of generating revenue. To the untrained eye, an article contains a headline, text, and maybe an image.
However, there is so much more going on “under the hood.” Here are some of the important elements of an article that need to be scrutinized to determine if they can be optimized for greater results:
- Permalink: This is the web address for your article. It includes the domain name of your site, followed by a forward slash and then the slug. The permalink for this article is https://afterjournalism.com/content-optimization.
- H1 Tag: The main headline that appears on the page. The H1 for this page is “How I Make Money with Content Optimization.”
- Meta Description: This is the text that appears under your page title in the SERPs. If you do not write a meta description, Google will pull text from your article. (Sometimes, it will also rewrite your meta description.)
- Keywords: This is the phrase/term you are targeting. The article should be geared toward something people are searching for. The keyword for this piece is content optimization.
- Content: The words that make up the article.
- Images: These can be photos you took, stock photos, graphics or infographics.
- Word Count: There is no optimal word count. However, you want to write sufficiently about a topic to make sure you answer a reader’s questions. For example, in this article, I want to make sure I answer questions about what this kind of optimization is and why it is a good thing.
- Ordered/Unordered Lists: These add structure to your article and help to organize content.
- H2s/H3s: These are sub-headers that break your article into sections and subsections. These help to organize the flow of your article.
This article is about optimizing content and not blog writing, however, you can learn my secrets to blog writing.
How I “Stumbled” into Earning Good Money by Optimizing Content
I was fortunate when I started my company, Wooster Media Group LLC. I provided white label search engine optimization and writing services to other digital marketing agencies.
I conducted SEO audits of websites, wrote meta descriptions, wrote product descriptions, wrote articles for blogs, created content for static web pages, conducted keyword research, and helped develop content strategies.
One of the agencies I contracted with did some deep dives into content for a couple of successful blogs. I was tapped to figure out how to improve the existing content, create a plan for consolidating content, recommend which content should be discarded, and create outlines for new articles.
I continued to analyze content month-in and month-out for the digital marketing agency and developed a process for optimizing content. I never really knew how well the optimized content performed. I did the work for an agency, so I had no access to Google Search Console or Google Analytics data. All I knew was I getting work each month improving articles.
While a lot of my paid work focused on analyzing content and getting it to perform better in organic searches, I was not offering the service to anyone else.
When bloggers in a Facebook group learned I was optimizing content and doing keyword research, they reached out and asked me if I could help them. I was happy to do so.
So, I began offering optimization services to other bloggers and companies. It ended up providing a nice stream of revenue when my writing work declined. Stumbling into this was one of the best things to happen to my business.
How Does Content Optimization Differ from Search Engine Optimization?
I consider content optimization a subset of search engine optimization. The more you know about SEO, the easier it will be to optimize web and blog copy.
However, if you are a journalist, then you understand what it takes to write a good, coherent article that covers all the basics. This is the foundation for ranking, providing relevant, useful information that answers users’ questions and solves problems.
SEO focuses on trying to improve Google’s rank search results across a website, while content optimization is focused on a specific blog post/article. SEO seeks to increase organic search traffic to a site. SEO is a comprehensive strategy that takes time. With SEO, the hard way is the easy way. It takes effort.
How You Can Make Money by Optimizing Content in a Down Economy
How was this service able to generate income even in a down economy? Well, it’s quite simple really. With companies and bloggers looking to reduce expenses, they discovered it was more economical to improve existing content than to produce new articles.
Depending upon what a company or blog owner pays for someone to write new articles, you can optimize content for much less money.
In a down economy, you might want to target successful independent bloggers and pitch optimizing the articles on their websites so that the search engines will love them.
By Improving the Content, Client Gets Similar Results and Spends Less
Let’s say someone pays $500 for a 1,000-word blog post that will be used to attract a target audience that will buy some product or service. Well, the owner of the company or blog can achieve similar results by updating old content.
So, does this really work? Yes.
I worked with a blogger who asked me to optimize two pieces of content that were already ranking on Page 1 of the SERPs. One came in at No. 2 for its keyword, and the second was at No. 7 for its targeted phrase.
Normally, people will look to see what content they have ranked just outside the first page (positions 11 to 29), and try to improve them.
My goal with the optimization was to see how I could strengthen the pages. And, if I couldn’t get the pages to rank higher, I wanted to make sure they remained on the first page of the SERPs.
I optimized both articles and then got busy. I didn’t track the progress. However, when I went back about a month later to see how those pages were performing, both of them were at Position Zero. They appeared at the top of the SERPs as featured snippets.
My client’s pages were the very first ones users saw when they searched for the keywords we targeted.
The higher a page ranks, the greater the likelihood a user will click through to the page. The more someone clicks through to your page, the better the chance of you selling a product or service, resulting in more income.
Are You Interested in Making Money by Offering Content Optimization Services?
Are you a writer who’s seen a decline in the number of paid articles you write each month? Or, are you a freelancer with capacity in the pipeline and want to expand the number of services you offer to bring in some extra income? If so, content optimization can be a lucrative service to provide bloggers and companies.
I found a nice niche with improving content and earn a decent income. And, if you are ready to start making money doing the same, I outline my process in my Content Optimization Guide, available on Gumroad.