Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
SEO for people who don't like SEO. I run an SEO agency. My wife Meredith is a family photographer. Our podcast explains how I got Meredith's website to the top of Google and answers questions from photographers about SEO and website marketing.
Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
Build a Blogging Habit That Feels Less Overwhelming
•A professional photographer and her SEO husband•Episode 212
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The Goal: Leave this episode with less stress about blogging.
It's hard to blog consistently when it feels like every post needs to be perfect. The obstacle is rarely the writing itself, since most of the overwhelm comes from expectations we place on ourselves. In this episode, I talk about:
The overwhelm that comes before writing
Why 'done' is more important than 'perfect'
What actually happens after you publish
Timestamps [0:00] Introduction [0:30] Why blogging consistently feels overwhelming [1:39] Tip one: take it one step at a time [2:43] Done is better than perfect [3:01] Tip two: what happens after you publish [3:42] Checking Search Console for impressions [4:49] Tip three: not every blog will succeed [5:13] What competitor research shows about successful blogs [6:25] Why 10% is the best case for a successful post [7:38] The three things to remember
All right, if you are struggling to blog consistently, I'm going to give you three tips that help me overcome the mental hurdles of blogging consistently. And hopefully something in here, or perhaps all of this, is going to help you do the same thing. Now, first, everybody who blogs is going to deal with this. Even the most successful bloggers, I would say, probably, especially the most successful bloggers, the people who blog the most often or make the most money from their website, they're going to deal with this probably even more than you or I are going to. So don't feel bad if you're dealing with this, because like I said, I'm dealing with it too. And that is a feeling of overwhelm. Just thinking about blogging. Before you even sit down and do anything, doing anything, you think, okay, well, my blog has to be, I got to think about it strategically. Okay, whatever I blog about has to be truly resourceful and helpful. And it has to be hopefully related to my service to help me, you know, somehow promote my service. Uh, are my blogs going to cannibalize themselves? Do I have to worry about keyword cannibalization? I know I've talked about that a lot.
So the first tip is one step at a time. Okay. I know I give a lot of advice about blogging. If you listen to the podcast, uh I've said a lot, I've I've been guilty of saying all those things that I just listed off. You got to do all these things. And if you're thinking about it in the sense that I have to do all these things with every blog I create, yeah, it's going to be totally overwhelming and you're going to end up not blogging. All right. You're just going to sit there and think, well, I'm not ready for that yet. Someday I will be, but it's not today. Now, the point I want to make here is that I don't say all these things, I don't give all these pieces of advice because you have to do all of them all the time. You don't. I give a lot of different pieces of advice because different things resonate with different people and they help different people at different times. So I give all these different pieces of pieces of advice sort of as entry points, as you know, specific points that might help you today or maybe next week, or they might help somebody else today or tomorrow or a year and a half from now. And this becomes important because you don't need a perfect blog. Okay. This is a case where you've heard the saying done is better than perfect. Yeah, having a blog that is not perfect is way, way, way better than trying to create that perfect blog. Okay, so that's point number one. Done is better than perfect.
Point number two is that what you think is going to happen after you publish a blog isn't going to happen. Okay, most people tend to think, well, if I publish a blog, it's going to be out there and everybody's going to see it and they're going to judge me. And it's not, again, back to point one, it's not going to be perfect, and I don't want to, I don't want to go through that. And I don't blame you. I don't want to go through that either. I wouldn't want to go through that. But I'll tell you what is going to happen immediately after you publish a blog. Nothing is going to happen. Nobody is going to see that blog. If you publish a blog today, nobody's going to see it tomorrow. Nobody's going to see it the day after. Most likely nobody's going to see it for weeks. And that is in the probably the best case scenario. You're going to have plenty of time to fix it. And what's going to happen is you publish a blog, yeah, go back in a few weeks and check Google Search Console and look to see if it has any impressions. Okay. An impression is not somebody reading it. It's not somebody judging you. An impression just tells you, has Google shown it at all in Google search results or in Google AI? Okay, that's an impression. And you're going to start to see impressions way before people actually click through and start visiting. So let's say you publish a blog and it's total crap, but it starts getting impressions. And you think, okay, well, nobody has seen it yet, but Google is starting to show it. Maybe I should fix it so it's not crap in case somebody visits it, then you can do that. You can fix the ones that start getting attention from Google, probably even before anybody sees it. So the fear that, you know, immediately you're going to press publish and people are going to start judging you, that's just not true. You will be able to fix the ones that start getting attention. And if they don't start getting attention, then who cares? And then
the third tip to remember is that not every blog is going to be successful. People also tend to think, well, I can never do all these things and all these checklists that Meredith's husband gives me. I can never implement them all. I'm never going to have a successful blog. So why bother trying? And I get that one too. But the truth is that most blogs are not going to be successful. Okay, that is true, and that's normal. That's normal. When I do, when I work as a consultant, one of the things I do a lot is for new clients, we go out and we research competitors. And that involves especially looking at their top-ranked competitors and then looking at those blogs of those competitors to see what they are doing or have done that has been successful that helped get them to the top of rankings. Okay, that's competitor research. It's very important when you're talking about SEO at a higher level. You want to understand roughly what it is, the type of thing it's going to take you to get to the top of Google. That's what competitor research does. So one of the things is I look at a lot of blogs. I look at a lot of, i.e., successful blogs. And you know what I find? Like literally always? I might look at a competitor's blog because they have, let's say they have a quote, successful blog, which means they have attracted a lot of links, which helped has helped their SEO. Now, they might have 200 individual blog posts, and inevitably all the links, which are what's going to make that successful, are pointing to maybe like one, two, or three of those blog posts. That means from a purely SEO viewpoint, only a few of those 200 blog posts are, quote, successful. All right. So that should give you an idea. And those are companies that hire professional content creators, professionals, who probably are better at creating blogs than you or I am. And even they, in the absolute, absolute best case scenario, 10% of their blogs would be successful. And even that would be extremely rare. So my point is, even if you, even if you held yourself up to like the highest standards and said, I want uh, well, Mary's husband said, best case scenario is 10% of blogs uh are successful. I'm gonna have 10% of blogs be successful. Okay, well, that means you can sit down and create nine blogs before you have to worry about one of them being successful. So, yes, you are correct. Not every one of your blogs is going to be successful, nor should it be. It's not going to be. I can guarantee you, if you write 10 blogs and all 10 of them are successful, they start appearing in Google all the time and people are visiting and they're getting links. Please write to me and tell me because that's amazing. All
right. So the things to remember, just take it one step at a time. You don't have to do everything at once. And what you think is going to happen and what you're afraid of happening, trust me, it's not going to happen. And if you are thinking, well, if I blog, it needs to be a great blog. No, it doesn't. What matters is that you just get started, get something out there. And again, best case scenario, nine blogs from now, you'll go to Google Search Console and you'll see that one of them, oh, is starting to get some attention. And then you can fix that one. All right, so don't stress about it. I'm not trying to give you more stress. I'm trying to create less stress for you. All right. So I hope that this one helps.
