Writing For Me vs. Writing For Others, and the Basics of SEO

Strictly business over at his blog commented on my last post:

"well hopefully you get it man!! but you could also take those same articles that you would write for them and write them for your own blog and just do more marketing and networking for your blog, how about opening a few blogs along different lines of interest to expand your money net."

He has a valid point, but it's one that really is true to any other line of work. If you work on your own, and build up your own "business" (in a sense), you do stand to make more money, as you receive any and all profits. But, it's also much

more difficult to build up. Which brings up the important subject of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. When you start on your own, you have a very low page rank, no backlinks, and all sorts of other issues that frankly, make it difficult to build up your site. Search Engines control the web. Completely. In reality, if you want to start your own successful site, you need a good understanding of all of the SEO techniques, or you'll be buried so far in the results of searches you'll find it very difficult to get noticed, no matter how good your content is. There are entire books written about how to do this perfectly.

On the flip side, if you start with already established websites, you don't have to worry about this nearly as much. You still want to do keyword research, and in the case of Demand Media, you have to if you expect the article to get accepted, but you don't have to worry about page rank so much, as you already have a high page rank. Also, with Demand Media, you're seeing an upfront payment, so you don't really give a shit how much traffic the article receives (unless you use their revenue share option). It's a different business model, and one that provides more upfront benefits.

Now, here's the real trick. If you couple writing for Demand Studios with your own blog, or better yet, a website like Hubpages, then if you get articles rejected for Demand Studios (only allowed one rejection, get rejected again, tough luck), you can simply post your article up on Hubpages. Hubpages does take a cut out of your profits, but it's a modest one. And otherwise, your writing is wasted. This is legit passive income, and there are people making a sizable amount of money every month off the large amount of "hubs" they've written. Of course, for every one guy making money, there are 10 that aren't. But hey, that's life.

So, what do you guys think? Is this interesting at all? Would you want me to maybe explain SEO better? Let me know in the comments.