Last Updated on January 10, 2022 by James McAllister

By: James McAllister

15 Comments

If you’ve ever taken the time to analyze other blogs in your niche, I’m willing to bet you’ve come across some that are doing quite well, but absolutely suck.

Their content is sub-par at best, does not go into anything specific, and is barely written in English.

Posts are short and unhelpful, ads are everywhere, and you couldn’t imagine why anyone would bother to spend time on their site when there are so many better alternatives available.

Yet, despite the fact that the website is absolutely horrible, the website is outranking you and is attracting far more visitors than you could imagine receiving. How exactly are these low-quality blogs doing better than you? 

Content Is King, But It’s Only One Piece

For a moment, think of blogging as a game of Chess. Content is king. Without the king, you lose the game. Without content, your business will fail. However, you can not win the game of Chess with the king alone – there are plenty of other pieces you must use to beat your opponent. Content alone isn’t going to make you successful.

The game of business is similar. The goal of a business is to make the most amount of money possible. Content is only one part of it.

Here’s why. Content doesn’t make you money. People make you money. To attract people, you need a marketing plan to send people to the content. Within your content, your goal is to get people to take some action so they can at some point or another, send you money. When you accomplish this, you have the basis of a winning system in place.

Winning The Game Of Business

Each piece is absolutely vital for achieving the end goal of money. If you don’t market your content, you’ll never get people to come to it. If you don’t have good content, you can get people to your site, but they’ll never send you money. Money can be reinvested into paid traffic methods to scale up your marketing, increasing profit further.

So how does this tie into bad websites? Well, the content side of these websites may be weak, but they make up for it by having a strong system.

I recently read Robert Kiyosaki’s, “Rich Dad’s CASHFLOW QUADRANT,” and he brings up a good point about business. He asks the reader, “can you make a better burger than McDonald’s?” He says that most people can. He then goes on to ask why you aren’t making money off of your better burgers while McDonald’s is a multi-billion dollar corporation. The reason he says is that McDonald’s has the perfect system in place to deliver billions of burgers to consumers. The product is only part of the system.

The same idea applies to blogging and internet marketing. Your content on its own doesn’t make you money. Your content on its own is not your business. It is only part of the system. The system is your business.

Cheap fast food isn’t all that great, yet people still spend billions of dollars on it because the system works. This is the exact same reason why low-quality blogs do well – at least for now.

Low-Quality Sites Are Marketing Differently Than You

The majority of low-quality blogs are never going to succeed, but the ones that are already successful have a huge advantage over you.

Not only do they already have a regular audience sharing their posts (and growing their readership further without any effort on the blogger’s part) but they are also ranking well, allowing even more people to reach them. They have backlinks, so they rank high. They rank high, so they’ll get even more backlinks without asking for them. The rich get richer.

Websites that have a high Domain Authority have a huge advantage when it comes to ranking, and can put out shorter, lower quality articles than other people can and still rank well for them. I know that it’s very discouraging to pour your heart and soul into a 2000 word blog post only to see it outranked by a 400 crumby article that’s barely written in English. I get it.

Owners of these sites can outsource a bunch of these horrible articles and push out a ton of them extremely quickly, dominating Google for every thinkable search term. That’s fine. They’re untouchable for now, and that’s OK.

What you can do if search engine traffic is your goal, is to target low-competition keywords that your existing competition has already ignored. These usually won’t net you as much traffic as the bigger search terms, but it’s better to write an article that will get you a guaranteed 10 visitors a day, than to target a search term with 30,000 visitors a month, but absolutely no chance of ranking for.

I teach how to build lists of low-competition keywords inside of my blogging course.

You can also hire me to do it for you if you’d prefer.

You Must Seek Out Your Traffic Before It Comes To You

You do not have the advantage of ranking highly in Google for competitive queries, and therefore you must actively seek out your traffic. You must find where your target audience is, market to them, and bring them back to your site with you. Again, without the marketing, people will never see your content and they will never send you money. It’s impossible.

If you’re looking to build traffic to your website, I highly recommend signing up for my free, 7-day traffic building course. The course teaches you 7 different methods to bring free, long-term traffic to your site. Because your content is high-quality, you’re at a huge advantage when you do manage to bring these people to your site.

As someone that doesn’t write garbage, you have a real advantage when it comes to winning people over. Your blog is a “hidden gem.” People will land on your site, love how much better it is, and engage with your content far more often than the bad bloggers can ever dream off. As time goes on, you’ll win more and more of their readers. Their system is not sustainable, and they will inevitably collapse.

You are the gourmet restaurant of the blogging world. The low-quality, successful website is McDonald’s. When people realize they can get a way better burger for the same price, where do you think they’ll end up shopping at from now on?

Over time, quality always wins. It may take a while to get the ball rolling, but once it’s rolling you’ll be growing far faster than the McDonald’s bloggers could ever catch up with.

Remember The Goal Of The Game

At the end of the day, it’s not about how many people are visiting your website. It’s about how much money you’re making from the visitors that you have.

In my book, “The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business, Finance, and Life” I encourage people to build a profitable business back-end before focusing a ton of time and/or money on marketing efforts. You could have 10,000 people visiting your website a day, but if your visitors aren’t converting into buyers than they do not help you win the game.

The bad blogs may have a lot more visitors, but you’ve really got to wonder how many of those visitors are sending the blogger money. I guarantee you that it’s a lot lower than people who have great content and a good system in place.

Build a profitable system, and then bring traffic to your site.

Before long, you’ll beat your competitors and become the new authority in your niche. Don’t give up when you feel discouraged, keep putting out great content, and market consistently. Grow every month, and one day you’ll make it.

Quality content always wins in the end – but only if it’s part of a great system. Build the better system, and you’ll end up reaping the rewards.

 

About the author 

James McAllister

James is the owner of JamesMcAllisterOnline.com. He started his first blog at the age of 11, and has since gone on to start several successful businesses. In total, these businesses have sold hundreds of thousands of units and have touched millions of lives. Here on JamesMcAllisterOnline.com, he shares his knowledge that brought him to where he is today. If you want to connect with James, follow him on your favorite social networks!

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  1. Hi James,

    AHA! I love your take, because each time I read your blog I think, “yeah, that stuff has been through my mind 1,001 times” lol…..

    This one killed me for years. After networking, intelligently, I found that if you’ve a ton of friends, by being a friend, you can grow your presence even if low quality content. If you publish high quality content and have a supportive friend network, then look out! Good things will flow your way.

    All the best with your new eBook!!!!

    Ryan

      (Quote)
    Ryan Biddulph recently posted…Visit the Blogging from Paradise Library on AmazonMy Profile

    1. Hey Ryan!

      Yeah, a lot of people focus solely on the content but the truth is that it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Good content without a good system doesn’t help you much, and low quality content can attract visitors if the system is good (although it’s usually not sustainable.) Those with great content and a great marketing plan are the ones who will succeed in the end.

      Thanks Ryan!

        (Quote)
      James McAllister recently posted…How To Turn Your Blog Posts Into A Kindle eBookMy Profile

  2. Hello James,

    I like what you said “Quality content always wins in the end.”

    But its a long journey, not everyone has patience. At present scenario, setting up a new website and expecting to earn in a month is almost impossible. Getting some quick traffic from social media can be possible, but that would never convert. Build a profitable system would require both, experience and time.

      (Quote)
    Worli recently posted…How to Use Google DNS Server for Fast and Secure InternetMy Profile

    1. Hi Worli! Good to meet you.

      Yeah, that’s the only way you can really do it these days. Maybe 10 years ago you could throw up a quick site and make a good amount off of it but those days are definitely over. Those who aren’t willing to stick with it aren’t fit for this sort of business. Thankfully, that ensures only the hardest working and most persistant individuals will ever see success.

      Appreciate you stopping by and commenting!

        (Quote)
      James McAllister recently posted…How To Write Blog Posts Quickly And ProductivelyMy Profile

  3. Hi James,

    Many thanks for the great post. You exhibit a wisdom beyond your years, and that my friend comes from experience. It’s the value that true professionals like you share, that earns you the rewards you reap. Thank you.
    Cheers, Paul

      (Quote)
    Paul Manning recently posted…Dodging Hippos!My Profile

    1. Hey Nanda, good to see you again!

      Yeah, the system is the most important aspect of any business. Content and marketing are all parts of it, and you need all parts of it to succeed. If any part of the system is lacking, it will bring down all the other parts as well and your results will suffer. For example, your content could be great but if your marketing sucks, it won’t matter because nobody will end up reading your content anyway.

      Thanks Nanda!

        (Quote)
      James McAllister recently posted…How To Tackle Competitive Blogging NichesMy Profile

  4. This is wonderful. I’ve finally got what I have been looking for. Not having the right information is the main cause of failure. Thanks a million James. Remain blessed. No more thinking but action rather. I really like this.

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  5. James – Been meaning to get back over here for the past week, never seem to have enough time.

    I love the chess analogy. Agreed, content is king, but it is truly only one part of many. I keep saying, you can be the best writer in the world, and develop the greatest content for your blog, but if nobody can find the thing, how are they going to read it.

    I see these crappy blogs all the time (at least what I think are crappy). I just shake my head when I see some site ranking in the first or second position of the SERP’s, and there’s like 200 words of nothing. Really Google?

    Your advice is spot on as usual. Go find yourself that traffic. Once they get to your blog, now the balls in your court to win them over.

    Have a great week James.

    Craig

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    Craig recently posted…Don’t Panic But You Just Lost Your First Email SubscriberMy Profile

    1. Hey Craig! No worries, good to see you.

      It’s funny how one missing piece of the system can totally skew things. I know quite a few people that don’t get the attention they deserve (both bloggers and authors) and it’s solely because they refuse to learn how to market their stuff.

      I’d like to think that those who put out good stuff will eventually outrank those crappy blogs but Google isn’t human and will never be perfect. Of course they want to provide their users with the best content possible so I’m sure we’ll see more algorithm updates in the near future. How much they will change things is hard to say. I’m not one to rely much on SEO anyway so it doesn’t bother me either way.

      As bloggers and entrepreneurs we need to improve in the areas we can improve and not worry too much about things that are out of our control. We need to make the best out of our situation, whatever that may be. That is how we grow and become successful I think. We may not be able to control our rankings but as you said, we have the power to win people over once they are here on our websites.

      Good talking with you Craig!

        (Quote)
      James McAllister recently posted…How To Come Up With Blog Post Ideas – The Ultimate GuideMy Profile

  6. Hi James

    Haha, so often I’ve looked at other sites and thought “how on earth….?”

    But you’re right. I know I need to spend more time on my marketing system. Right now in my life I’m a bit bogged down, so I’m concentrating on adding content that will still be around when I take your traffic building course!

    Have a great week, Joy

      (Quote)
    Joy Healey recently posted…Helping Young Entrepreneurs Avoid Student Debt: Book ReviewMy Profile

    1. Hey Joy!

      Yeah, the amount of junk that’s doing well is incredible. At first I was discouraged and frustrated but you know, there’s not really anything we can do about those sites right? Better to focus on building our stuff up rather than worrying about something that’s beyond our control. That’s really all we can do.

      If there’s anything I can do to help you out let me know. You have a great week too Joy!

        (Quote)
      James McAllister recently posted…How To Tackle Competitive Blogging NichesMy Profile

  7. Hi James, even though I am just visiting your blog for the first time, all I can say is that you really have a great audience and you are wonderfully doing very fine here. I absolutely agree with you when you talk about having a system. when I was starting up as a newbies blogger, I never have time to network or build readers relationship I was busy creating good content but when I read a great post @ Aha blog and some couple of other blogs on my niche about networking and building a system as you rightly said, I quickly discover the need to have a great and working system which will help put your blogging effort into profitable venture. Thanks for the eye opener post, I will be hanging around here on your garden, I have equally subscribe for your traffic course, hoping to have a good time with your audience and with you too.

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