Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

Hidden Opportunities can Offer Huge Payoffs

Hidden opportunities can be leveraged and create excellent secondary income. Sometimes they could even turn into a primary money maker (or invention). It happens to almost every business and even the best can fail to recognize an opportunity to develop a secondary income stream. The ability to leverage hidden opportunities is especially important in the world of blogging and Internet marketing. When you focus on the big picture too much you sometimes don’t pick up on an opportunity that could bring a significant amount of money. I recently learned that the hard way.

Don’t Make the Same Mistake I did

As you may notice I don’t really have much advertising on this blog. There is one ad for SMX West but other than that it is Ad Free. It’s not that I don’t want to earn a few bucks but I really wanted to develop the content, layout, and actually get a visitor or two before I worried about including ads. For the most part this is the right way to do it. In my case I made a fairly costly mistake though. I failed to consider some opportunities and missed out on the potential to earn a few bucks.

Chia Pets are HUGE Around Christmas

That was my big mistake. I wrote a blog post about the Chia Pet marketing strategy during the holidays. If you are not familiar with Chia Pets they are ugly clay animal looking things that you apply some kind of goo to, add some seeds, and water. They begin to grow into ugly plant that is intended to look like hair on the animal. They are a cheap gift that are only really marketed around the holidays when people are looking for cheap gifts en mass. So my blog post discussed how search marketers could learn from their marketing plan by taking advantage of seasonal and event related peaks for certain products and keywords. Of course if I would have paid a bit more attention to my advice I may not have missed out on the opportunity to make a few bucks off of people looking for chia pets.

Make Sure you Look at all of the Angles and Take Advantage of Every Opportunity

When I wrote the Chia Pet post I did not think beyond the search marketing aspects of what I wrote because the whole point of the post was to discuss just that. But when I looked at my analytics I noticed a lot of traffic coming from Chia Pet related queries. I did some digging and noticed that I was ranked pretty well for a number of Chia Pet related keywords. If I would have taken a step back and considered all of the opportunites I could have thrown a Chia Pet Ad, along with a couple of Ads for related products, to capture last minute holiday shoppers looking for cheap gifts. I don’t think it would have brought in a ton of cash but it could have helped me earn a few bucks.

Lesson Learned

In the end it was a good lesson. While my primary focus is still to discuss SEO & SEM topics I now know that there are opportunities outside of those fields to make a few dollars while doing that. This is a good lesson for anyone who is blogging for fun and would like to maybe try to make a few dollars at the same time. Don’t just consider your main topics. You should also think about how to leverage even the obscure aspects of your blog or site so you don’t miss out on a great opportunity. So next time you get done with your latest blog post or adding new content to your site try to look at things from a different perspective so you don’t miss out on a few dollars that could help you buy an extra round at the bar.

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