Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich… and you overthink SEO!
You have a great idea for a moneymaking website: You’re going to write a fandom blog for your favorite media, be it movies, TV shows, music, video games, books, comics, manga, anime, whatever. And then you’re going to post affiliate links from your site to Amazon, etc., so that fans will read about this stuff and hopefully buy some of it with a commission for you.
What a “passive-income” prospect! All we need is some content marketing, and the rest takes care of itself. People Google for this stuff all the time, so you know it’s a popular topic space.
What fandom do we pick to write about first?
Star Wars is popular, we can cash in on that fandom! Let’s see how competitive writing about Star Wars is:
Great googly moogly, there’s 884 million hits! That’s pretty competitive. You’re launching a new blog, right now you’re Joe Nobody to the World Wide Web. To succeed, you need to come out on top of 884 million other websites or no one will ever find you.
Let’s try to narrow our focus. How about if we blog about Baby Yoda?
Sufferin’ succotash, 30.7 million hits! He just came out in the recent Disney+ series, he hasn’t been out for a year. Not even that long, The Mandalorian first aired in November 2019, four months ago this writing. In four months time, 30 million websites jumped on the bandwagon.
This is going to be tougher than we thought. Let’s find an aspect of Star Wars fandom that’s really obscure. How about, um, Hammerhead? I myself remember him well, because he was the first Kenner action figure I owned. This is what happens when you ask for Star Wars action figures for Christmas and the store was sold out of every other character. Later I’ll try to get a support group together for “Generation X kids who got screwed out of first generation merch.” Anyway, we have to use some Google query syntax magic so Google knows we’re not asking about the shark:
Christmas on a cracker, you’ve got to be kidding me! That’s 942K hits for a character shown for like one minute in the background of the Mos Eisley cantina scene! Are you ready for this?
Yes, this nine second clip is Hammerhead’s big scene. So we find out from Wookieepedia that his species is actually “Ithorian” and his name is actually “Momaw Nadon.” Let’s verify this with a more descriptive search:
Out of all Star Wars websites, 81 thousand of them call Hammerhead by his real name. We’re doing better here, it’s less competitive, but still even if we create an entire website dedicated to JUST Momaw Nadon, we would still have to claw our way past 81K other web pages to make it to the front page of Google’s search results.
All this for a character who doesn’t speak. A character whose sole contribution to the story is to turn his head slightly when Greedo gets toasted. As God is my witness, I could have sworn up to a minute ago that I was the only one to remember this guy. Did all of you get Hammerhead for Christmas in 1978 too?
Well, how many people have talked about just the action figure?
Finally, a manageable number! 67 hits is nothing, any decent site can rank over 67 overnight. I’ll probably pop to page one for it just talking about it here, for the new grand total of 68 web pages that mention the Momaw Nadon action figure. I forget what happened to mine, I think I traded him or maybe he got left in a sandbox somewhere after my collection was built up a bit. And before you ask, yes, “Hammerhead” was originally how he was sold:
Hammerhead, if you’re out there, I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate you more.
It’s hard to rank for popular media topics
This was an exercise to show how tough it is. As a card-carrying geek and freelance writer, writing about any kind of media is my favorite thing to do in the world. It is my cheapest work. The tough grindy writing pays the rent, while on the side I always try to have a couple hobby-horse gigs to write for. It’s how I blow off steam so I don’t go blind writing about contract management software for procurement departments on my B2B writing gig.
But there’s a reason that it’s a low-paying proposition: It doesn’t make money very fast. Everybody loves to write about their favorite manga series, or the Pink Floyd album that changed their lives, or their top ten vampire movies. Sites like IMDB and IGN have thrived for decades on free crowd-sourced content, because people will write movie reviews and game walkthroughs for free.
Really, who doesn’t love to share their opinion on the Internet? When you’re reviewing any kind of media, that’s the old Lebowski “just your opinion, man.” You think you’ll be the only person who remembers Space 1999, and then you find 2.23 million hits for it and it has its own Wiki. You have the hots for Barbara Bain and want to write fan fiction about her? Well, 85 other people have thought of that as of this writing.
Tips For SEO Ranking In Media Topics
It can still be done. You have to be prepared for a long grind on a site you run for a hobby for at least a year. But eventually, you can start to stand out for long-tail keywords, even within very big ticket fandoms like yes, Star Wars too.
- Have a HUGE site – Volume wins the day over keywords in fandom content marketing.
- Talk about a topic a LOT – One blog post won’t do anything; five posts about that topic will begin to show results as Google ranks your authority higher.
- Try to anticipate questions people query – Random raving about Hearthstone does nothing. A focused strategy guide for climbing the ladder with a Warlock Zoo deck is gold.
- Obscure niche topics within broader topics is better – See the Momaw Nadon example.
- Clickbait! – Don’t forget SMO (Social Media Optimization). One viral post spread all over Facebook is worth a year of SEO grunt labor. Write for people, not machines.
- The harder it is to research online, the more you should write about it – This is why I often turn to those archaic dead-tree research tools commonly called “books.”
All this for a profit model that has a low barrier to entry, but also pays coffee money. Yes, it’s fun, but until your media empire reaches Star Destroyer status, it’s going to be an ugly grind. Do it for the reasons you should be doing it: a fun hobby that can turn a few dimes profit on the side.
BONUS BUCK: Ran across this clever rascal with a post on what Star Wars teaches you about SEO. Great, even talking about Star Wars in an SEO context is a claimed niche!
