This guest post was initiated when Aaron Wall asked his readers whether he can write a guest post on his reader’s blog. So i immediately asked him if he wouldn’t mind to write SEO for non tech as at topics like Football, Music or even Pranks. Below is what he wrote for me. Hope this is useful for you too.
Every topic worth writing about has passionate people talking about it – after all, what attracted you to the topic? If you are in the tech field you can write a great post and get hundreds or thousands of links out of it. In some niche fields that might be near impossible. But it is worth remembering that you are only competing against other people writing about the same topics. So if you write a blog about a niche topic the measurement for success might not be 100 links, but 5 links, or maybe even only 1 good reference.
As far as SEO for blogs goes, I think the Blogger’s Guide to SEO (http://www.seobook.com/bloggers) is probably one of the better documents available on the topic. But lets say that your niche is so small that it seems like many of the ideas about communication and link building in that guide are irrelevant. The truth is, that no matter how small your topic is there are going to be other people who care about the topic too.
The key is figuring out where your passions align with their passions. Are you going to write a site about the NFL and break onto the market as the quick leader? Not likely. But if you created a site about the Chicago Bears, and wrote it religiously (like you were Mike Ditka’s son) then eventually people would notice it. The key there is that a team is something people are already passionate about… it is an established brand with fans. There are lots of right wing political blogs and lots of left wing political blogs…those party affiliates are brands. With music band names are brands, and so sites like GreenPlastic.com follow the latest Radiohead news, syndicate videos, and share lyrics and guitar tabs online, etc.
If you want to create your own brand the two options are to follow on someone else’s brand (which is easier), or to create something that people are passionate about and want to share. That passion can be creating great topical content built up over months and years, content that strokes the ego and identity of targets (award programs and interviews work great), or content ideas where your topic overlaps with other topics.
For example I created free SEO tools http://tools.seobook.com/ and made many of them open source. Not only does that content tie in with SEO, but it also ties in to people who like free and open source software. Don’t just think about your topic… think about how it relates to other topics and other people. Taking that one step further, if you are going to run a prank why not do one about viagra or credit cards http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/?
