In a world with so much content, SEO is king
I've been deep in a creation hole since the middle of August. I was accepted into Amazon's Merch on Demand program so I've been figuring out the ins and outs of this platform for selling designs.
It's also led me down a rabbit hole of researching and designing across multiple platforms that sell products or are focused on content (e.g. social media).
There are so many avenues to create content, monetize content or create products to sell in 2023. The way technology is enabling people to run their own business is pretty cool to see. Ease of access means more and more people are creating content and products.
Social media platforms are overflowing with people trying to hustle and get their content seen, and Amazon and even Etsy are currently overflowing with print-on-demand products.
No matter how you may feel about POD, I think it's pretty cool that there's a pretty easy way to create your own merch and sell it. POD has opened up an avenue for people to leverage their creative skills even further.
But opening up a shop, creating content or using a platform like Merch On Demand isn't enough for success. You've got to have a market for what you want to sell AND you have to know how to write a listing to target what people are searching for. The same goes for content whether it's on social media or your blog.
My number one takeaway from everything I've been watching, reading and researching is that SEO is king in a world drowning in content. Can you identify your market and write in a way that surfaces your content/product/whatever to your audience?
It's not just about Google ranking, but it's about keywords in your posts so people can find your content. I've heard people say Pinterest isn't a social media platform, it's a search engine. Instagram seems to be going this way too. Etsy, Amazon, eBay...they're marketplaces but leveraging keywords and phrases is a key to success. It's not the only key to success but it sure is damn important.
I'm now asking myself three questions when I'm creating.
Who is your audience?
What are they searching for?
What is micro-niche you're targeting?
The 3rd one is important because you can know, for example, you're targeting web developers and know they're searching for developer tooling. There's tons of content out on the web on the general topic. So you need to find out what kind of developer tooling they're searching for.
This is your niche within the topic. Optimize for that. Experiment. Iterate. Repeat.
Follow me on Mastodon, on Twitter or Instagram and yes I'm on Threads too. I run The Web We Want, a place for web developers and designers to submit the things they need from browsers and the web platform to make their jobs easier.
Author of Design for Developers.
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