Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Most network marketers who start a blog make the same mistake I made. They go after the words they’d use to describe themselves. “Network marketing.” “Home business.” “MLM opportunity.” Then they wonder why six months of writing produced nothing but a handful of visits from their own upline.
Those words are the most competitive real estate on the internet, and half of the people searching them are your competitors. You aren’t going to win that fight, and you don’t need to. I’ve been in this industry part-time since 2002 — long enough to watch a lot of people burn a year on the wrong keywords and quit thinking blogging doesn’t work.
Long tail keywords are the way around it. A long tail keyword is a specific, multi-word phrase that fewer people search but that describes exactly what one person needs right now. Fewer searches, far less competition, and — this is the part people miss — a much clearer picture of what the searcher actually wants. Here’s the checklist.
In this guide
- 1. Start with a question you’ve actually been asked
- 2. Attach a situation to every keyword
- 3. Look at the results page before you write a word
- 4. Prefer keywords with a decision at the end
- 5. Don’t build your blog on your company’s name
- 6. One post, one question
- 7. Run a claims pass before you publish
- 8. Link your posts to each other on purpose
- 9. Don’t mass-produce
- 10. Measure in Search Console, not in feelings
- The part nobody tells you
1. Start with a question you’ve actually been asked
Not a keyword tool. A question. Something a prospect, a teammate, or a stranger in your DMs said to you in their own words.
“Can I do this if I don’t want to bug my friends?”
“How do I know if a comp plan is bad before I sign?”
“What do I say when someone asks if it’s a pyramid scheme?”
These are already long tail keywords. They’re phrased the way people search when they’re trying to solve something rather than browse something. Keep a running file. When the same question shows up three times, it’s a post.
2. Attach a situation to every keyword
Before you write, finish this sentence in one line: “Someone searching this is a person who ___ and is trying to decide ___.”
If you can’t finish it, the keyword is too vague and the post will be too. “MLM tips” fails this test. “How to explain network marketing to your spouse” passes it instantly — you can picture the person, the room, and the argument they’re bracing for.
This single step does more for rankings than any technical trick, because it forces the post to answer the actual question instead of circling it.
3. Look at the results page before you write a word
Search your phrase. Read the top ten results. You’re looking for three things:
- Format. Are they lists? Comparisons? Single-answer explainers? The results page tells you what searchers accepted last time.
- Gaps. What did every one of them skip? That gap is your angle.
- Who’s there. If the first page is all corporate sites and news outlets, back off. If it’s forums, thin affiliate pages, and Reddit threads, you have room.
Google publishes its own guidance on what it’s trying to reward, and it’s worth reading straight from the source rather than from a guru’s paraphrase: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.
4. Prefer keywords with a decision at the end
There’s a difference between someone searching to learn and someone searching to decide. “What is network marketing” is a browsing search. “Is [category] worth it for someone with a full-time job” is a deciding search.
Deciding searches convert. They’re also longer, more specific, and less contested. Bias your list toward them: comparisons, “worth it” questions, “before you join” questions, “how to know if” questions.
This is where a post like the complexity trap and the real customer earns its keep — it answers a question someone is actively weighing, not one they’re idly curious about.
5. Don’t build your blog on your company’s name
Two reasons, and both matter.
First, competition. Every distributor in your company is writing about the company. You’re fighting thousands of people for the same phrase, and the company’s own site outranks all of you.
Second, and more importantly: compliance. The FTC’s guidance for multi-level marketing companies is explicit that participants’ claims about income and product performance are the company’s responsibility too, and that unsubstantiated earnings claims are a violation regardless of who made them. Read it directly: FTC Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
If you’re writing about your opportunity, you’re one careless sentence from a claim you can’t substantiate. Writing about the problem instead of the company sidesteps the whole category of risk and gets you better traffic. If you want a sense of what to steer clear of entirely, I laid it out in MLM red flags.
6. One post, one question
A post that answers eight questions ranks for none of them. Long tail SEO works because the page and the query match tightly. The moment you pad a post with tangents to hit a word count, you dilute that match.
If you have eight questions, you have eight posts and the beginning of a cluster.
7. Run a claims pass before you publish
Every post, no exceptions. Check for:
- Income claims, implied or stated. “Replace your income” is a claim. So is a screenshot.
- Health or product claims you can’t substantiate.
- Testimonials presented as typical results.
- Disclosure of your material connection to anything you link. If you’re compensated, say so clearly and near the link — the FTC’s Endorsement Guides FAQ covers what “clear and conspicuous” actually means, and it’s stricter than most people assume.
This isn’t legal advice and I’m not a lawyer — but reading the primary sources yourself takes an afternoon and saves you from repeating whatever your upline told you was fine.
8. Link your posts to each other on purpose
Long tail posts are individually small. Together they’re a body of work. When post A answers a narrow question and naturally raises a second one, link to post B where you answered it.
Do this for the reader first — someone who finishes a post on prospecting language should be able to get to recruiting professionals in one click. The SEO benefit is real but secondary.
9. Don’t mass-produce
The temptation with long tail is volume: hundreds of near-identical posts, one per keyword variation. Google’s spam policies now name this directly as scaled content abuse — producing many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help people, whether they’re written by a human, a machine, or both (Google spam policies).
Ten posts that each answer a question completely will out-earn a hundred that each answer one thinly. That’s not a moral position, it’s just how the system is built now.
10. Measure in Search Console, not in feelings
Connect Google Search Console and check one report: the queries your pages are already getting impressions for. You’ll find phrases you never targeted, sitting on page two, that you could own with one focused post.
That report is the best keyword tool available to you, and it’s free. It’s also the only one reporting on your site rather than an industry average.
The part nobody tells you
This takes months. Long tail SEO compounds — the posts you publish now start earning three, six, nine months out — which means the failure mode isn’t picking wrong keywords. It’s quitting at month four because nothing moved at month three.
I stepped back from doing this business seriously years ago, for reasons I’ve written about here. What I kept was the part that never depended on a company: publish honest answers to real questions, consistently, and let them accumulate.
If you’re building that from scratch, start here — it’s the order I’d put things in.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Item one on this list, start with a question you have actually been asked, made me think of my own situation directly. At sixty-one, rebuilding after my pension underperformed, the question I hear most from people my own age is whether it is too late to begin such a thing at all. I do not see that question addressed anywhere in this checklist, though perhaps it belongs in a post of its own rather than a comment. I found the tenth point, about publishing consistently and letting it accumulate over months, the most honest thing in the piece, because it asks for patience I am not certain I have been granted in equal supply to a younger reader.
Arthur, working through the checklist against your question: item 2 asks you to finish the sentence “someone searching this is a person who ___ and is trying to decide ___,” and yours fits perfectly, a person over sixty rebuilding after a pension shortfall, trying to decide whether starting now is rational or just hopeful. Item 4 prefers keywords with a decision at the end, which yours clearly has. The gap I noticed reading your comment against the checklist: nothing in here tells you how to write the honest answer once you’ve found the keyword, only how to find it. That second post, the one that actually answers “is it too late,” still has to be written by someone willing to say no sometimes.
Tried the one-post-one-question rule properly last spring. Eleven short posts instead of one long guide, each answering something I’d actually been asked in my own DMs. Week three, two of them started showing up in Search Console for phrases I hadn’t targeted. Week nine, three had zero impressions and I killed them rather than padding them out. Nobody warns you that eleven separate results pages is slower to write than one long one, even though each piece is shorter.