On the way back to knowing myself, I realised I hadn’t laughed. Not a deep belly laugh from the depth of my stomach, for a long time. I ventured to London last week for myself, for work and for space to exist outside of Motherhood. Never able to completely disconnect; whether reminded by the container of milk from pumped breasts, or people’s enquiries about the kids and my own self-incited mention of them and how I’d missed them (even though all I’d wanted for the past year was this trip). The same contradiction of the love/hate afflictions of Motherhood could be applied to working for yourself. It feels so good when it’s going well, but it hurts so much when it isn’t. Days where it feels overwhelming and insurmountable. Days where we don’t know if we’re doing it well, doing it right or giving away too much of ourselves.
The reality is, that not knowing is normally from a place of dishonesty with ourselves. I experienced those moments because I was stalling, because I wasn’t ready to act out of authenticity. Rather, I was trying to be what I thought people wanted – not what felt right for me. Evolution, levelling up, elevating, growing; isn’t always nice, but it’s necessary if we are interested in being better humans. It will cause us to question what we know, what we thought we knew and what we thought we wanted. One of the ways I’ve been able to elevate through these experiences is accepting that some parts will hurt and acknowledging the pain and where it’s located. Probing ourselves to really understand our readiness to say what the root of the pain stems from; fear of failure, fear of shame, fear of weakness, fear of abandonment, fear of being alone- is big work.
My understanding of the self-care thing, is that I see many people advocate for it; surface level. But silence ensues when we’re faced with the bits that don’t feel nice. So we check out. I’m definitely guilty of doing it too. There were things about myself that I had to admit whilst reflecting on last week:
– My priorities have changed since becoming a Mum of two and spending time with them is more important than I’d cared to admit.
– I thought I would lose “myself” and be judged by outsiders for admitting that, but the reality is: I’m surrounded by people that love and encourage me. They see the power in taking breaks, stepping back and listening to our bodies. They’re my people, so other people’s judgement doesn’t really matter.
– I have the capacity to help many people, which I do, but that doesn’t mean it should come at a cost to my own wellbeing.
– I don’t have to do one thing, but I do need to concentrate and do my best on the projects I choose to work on. That is at the core of me. I like doing things well.
– It’s okay to feel scared but to still say yes. It doesn’t mean you’re going to fail.
How do I choose what to write about for blog content?
How can I use it on other social platforms?
How do I make sure my blog content is optimised for SEO?
What is legacy content?
SEO is not a new term, but “legacy content” has popped up like a dizzying Gen-Z pop word, that is swirling around in online business groups, in the morning huddles of companies, behind the doors of businesses across the globe and in the latest Tik Tok insights of marketing moguls everywhere!
Legacy content is the cornerstone content that continues to be helpful and relevant to your ideal audience. It’s useful if it also ties in nicely with your USP and product or service offers, because it helps to establish you as the person or business to seek out and go to for information on said key topic or area. Even after you’ve written blog posts on those key areas of your expertise, it continues to drive traffic to your website when people search for terms that link to your blog topic. You can update it over time, but you can also recycle the long-form blog post and break it down to use as micro posts on social media or vlogs on platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
As Google gears up to introduce Google Analytics 4 or (GA4 for short!) and “sunset” the standard Universal Google Analytics as we know it, we’re faced with an opportunity to really home in on what we’re good at and showcase the hell out of it! The discoverability of thorough and well-composed articles will be crucial in the next couple of months to gain traction with Google’s algorithm. Particularly whilst Google works on simultaneously bringing together Google search integrations with AI technologies in the coming months. Now is the time to write that ever-faithful SEO legacy content you’ve been putting off, since forever.
Why should I create legacy content?
If you’ve been putting off writing key, legacy content for your business now is the time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Taking the time to create legacy content over the next month before the full rollout of Google Analytics 4 on the 1st of July could have your business seeing returns for years to come from people finding your products and services online. Google responds well to expertise and trustworthiness (amongst two other points in the E-E-A-T acronym, Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness). The Quality Raters Guidelines help Google assessors from across the globe, determine the usefulness of search results; particularly if “people searching find relevant and reliable as intended”. Does your content provide a benefit or help solve a problem for people that come across it? This is no time to play small, trust me I know. I have put a lot of work into continuing to play the supporting act in my own business, but the truth is – it’s time to put those doubts to bed and write about what I know, so you and I can grow.
How do I choose what to write about for blog content?
Your knowledge and industry expertise are invaluable to creating those cornerstone blog posts and cementing your position as a leader in your field. Don’t sleep on SEO, and if you’re not sure there is a usefulness to AI in niching down on content topics and taking your crown as an industry leader.
Keep reading to find out how to pick your legacy content topics and set out a realistic plan to write those pieces in the next few months.
Nobody in their right mind wants more things to do as we head into summer, I mean, if you do get a sniff of some kind of break and time out from your business – we’re guna take it, am I right? So, trust your intuition and instinct and start with a topic that is something you could muscle through a 20-minute presentation with next-to-no preparation. These are the topics that you feel comfortable striking up a conversation about at a dinner party or networking event. The thing is, it can feel incredibly overwhelming and leave you feeling underqualified if you spend too long trying to be clever about what you’re going to talk about in your blog posts, when the reality is, most people have landed on your site because they are less than an expert or native – they are beginners or happy to have something laid out for them that saves them time and make their life easier – which is exactly why they’re coming to you!
Allow AI to lighten the load.
Despite ongoing debate in the marketing industry- AI technology such as Chat GPT is here to stay and for anyone that is smart enough, using it just enough to make our day-to-day tasks more efficient is the same as hiring a VA in my eyes. Using AI-type platforms to help brainstorm keywords, and metatags and to expand on our initial ideas to streamline each article can really help you focus on the finer details of getting down on paper (or G- doc if you’re so inclined, as I am. It clears space in my mind to just write and allows me the chance to put my personality into whatever I’m writing about.
Why not use AI and try this simple prompt?
“Help me choose 5 relevant blog topics to discuss as an industry expert in *[your industry] * for *[audience type] *”
Once you have three to 5 ideas, spend a few minutes bullet-pointing the headings that could bring each piece together and move forward with two to three that you can dedicate an hour a week to over the next few weeks. We don’t want it to feel so scary that we become paralysed into doing nothing at all.
How can I use it on other social platforms?
Holistic content calendars or streamlined content is basically a way to maximise your time and efforts by using one piece of long-form blog content across all your vertical channels of communication to connect with your ideal audience. One of the biggest burdens of businesses is generating new ideas. Working on your business is time-consuming and even if you have the budget to have something that looks like a “marketing team”, that team can sometimes miss huge opportunities to marry up the content you produce by having people work across different aspects and platforms. Social media should really be working for you, not against your efforts – heck, why are you doubling, or sometimes tripling the work by trying to think of completely different topics to show up and talk about on the gram, TikTok and in that underwhelming newsletter update?
When you are the whole marketing team, there is even more reason to look at your business and the content plan as one harmonious orchestra of recycled music; meaning put your efforts into one grand composition that can pay dividends for years to come in all the places you show up.
I’ve written this piece for my blog, but you can be damn sure I’ll give a teaser on Instagram, a little intro to the topic on TikTok and remind mailing list subscribers to get their ducks in a row and do the damn same. All from this one article.
Quality, not quantity counts here.
You may have 100s of ideas swirling around that preoccupied brain of yours, but the reality here is that even if you could write one hundred credible blog posts – why would you want to put yourself through it? Your time is valuable and there really isn’t much of it left in the week after making sales and finding new customers, so set a timer and dive into those questions you’re asked time and again by your customers or use apps such as Answer the Public, Google Search Console or even start typing in Google Search for a quick way to see frequently asked questions appear in the automated search response as you type a question. Pick 10 and try to group them into 2 or three key areas you can relate to your offer and what you sell.
For example, the results I found were questions such as “How do I know what to focus on in my business?”, “how do I write great content for SEO?”. From that, I’ve selected two key areas I want to focus on: small business ownership and SEO.
I can confidently say I can write about small business ownership as I am one myself and a huge part of my work as a copywriter is delving into research for my clients to understand what clients are saying about their business. I can equally write about SEO as I write blog content every month for clients that pay me to craft great and insightful articles about different aspects of their industry.
Blog content doesn’t have to be perfect.
We can deliberate allll summer long about grammar and spelling and if we’ve struck the right balance with our brand voice. This content is legacy content for a reason- we can go back to refine it and tweak it as we see fit. Sometimes you just have to press publish! If you’re wanting some support with grammar, free online spell-checking platforms such as Grammarly and Writer can help.
How do I optimise my blog content for SEO?
This is a pretty simple overview, you can find a more detailed resource here, but there are some standard parts to remember to complete in order to optimise your on-page SEO, whatever your write for your audience:
Keywords – aiming for keywords that are relevant to your audience and what they may be searching for that includes those words is vital, aim to use those words throughout your article. Using your own analytics data can be really helpful here, if you know there are things that your audience wants to know it can be a great place to start to share your knowledge.
Keywords(s) in Heading – Including one of those keywords in the search title helps Google distinguish what your blog post is about and how relevant it is to people searching the topic you are writing about as well.
Meta description– Easy information for browsers to determine what your page is about and it allows searchers to quickly decide if your article could help them find a solution to their search.
Internal links – Not only do internal links provide visibility to your offers and other areas of expertise, but clickable internal links also help a reader to navigate your website and support Google in adding your website’s pages to its indices.
External links – Adds value to the article for the reader, providing them with further relevant information around the topic areas you talk about without duplication.
Reutilise your content
Whatever platform you’re using to show up and show out – maximise the work you put into those legacy blog posts by using snippets wherever you currently have a presence and sharing that knowledge EVERYWHERE.
