Blogging isn’t Dead—You’ve Been Doing it Wrong

“A blog that gets you found online gets you PAID.”

I have a MAJOR announcement: Blogging isn’t dead! You’ve just been doing it wrong.

Not only is blogging NOT dead, it can actually make you money—IF you do it correctly.

A blog full of only “how to” articles is a really bad blogging strategy… 

Because blogs can be—should be—SO much more.

Your blogs are part of your SEO strategy. They should be getting you found AND booked, making money.

So… here are 5 things you need to do to achieve that.

→ Get the full show notes here!

——

Write a review for The Basic B podcast & share a screenshot with me at hello@brittanyherzberg.com for a chance to win a Mini SEO Audit! 📝

———
Find B: Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn

SEO & Grow 🌱
Private SEO Podcast 🎙️

SEO Dashboard (20% off w/ code BRITT20)
Keysearch (20% off w/ code KSDISC)
Buzzsprout ($20 off)

(*some affiliate links included—I earn a lil money when you click. But I only recommend people, products, & programs I ❤️!)

Podcast brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.

———

Transcript

Brittany Herzberg:

Hello and welcome back to the Basic B Podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Herzberg, and I have a major announcement… Blogging isn't dead! You've just been doing it wrong. Not only is blogging not dead, it can actually make you money if you do it correctly. This episode was very much inspired by the threads conversation I mentioned in the substack episode. This person commented that she thought all blogs are supposed to be how to articles. Nope, that's actually a really bad blogging strategy because blogs can be should be so much more. 

Your blogs are part of your SEO strategy. They should be getting you found and booked and making you money. Blogs should be establishing your authority, demonstrating your expertise, sharing your origin story, your thoughts and opinions, your unique process, your flipping client success stories. Blogs are not a place to be avoiding those topics. They're the perfect place to share all of them. Blogs should be pointing people to your resources and offers, entering people into your funnel, helping them get to know you, like you, trust you, so that they get a sense of who you are, what it's like to work with you, and what's possible because they have worked with you. A blog that does all those things gets you seen and and a blog that gets you seen, gets you paid. So here are five things you need to do to achieve that, and I talk about all of them in the blogging workshop and in SEO and Grow, which of course you will have links for those in the show notes. Okay, Here we go. 

1. Lean into the keywords you've built your website SEO strategy on. Remember, you should start with building SEO strategies for your main website pages, home services, landing pages, et cetera, and then jump into things like blogging. This is case in point for why you want to do that. Once you have that core SEO strategy in place for the main web pages, blogs that are created featuring some of those very same keywords basically pour gas on the fire. They support your SEO strategy. Let's say you have Lead Generation strategist as one of your target keywords for one of your main website pages. Guess what? A blog post titled something like when to hire a lead Generation Strategist or 5 Ways to Work with a Lead Generation strategist to grow your business would be perfect. It features that main keyword and answers questions people are searching for about that topic. As a starting point, I usually suggest people map out three to five future blog posts following this process. You could always pause me right now and do that. All right, welcome back. 

2. make sure your blogs reference one another. Internal linking is really important when it comes to SEO best practices. They're key indicators the robots are looking for so they know you know what you're talking about. They also need them so they understand how to navigate your site. This also helps keep you focused on creating content. People are searching for content that is related to your work and content that features your expertise. And there are two main ways you can do this. 

One is that you could just be mindful of your other blog posts as you're writing or optimizing your current blog. This takes a little more time, thought, energy, intention. But for someone like me who's really familiar with the blog posts I currently have on my site, it's easy for me to think, ooh, I can link from this episode about getting started with SEO to this one, where I go deep on best practices for meta descriptions. But at some point, that will very likely not be my best strategy. Whether that's because I bring on help to create and publish blogs, or because there are just so many blog posts. When I get to that point, this next strategy will be much better. 

You could use a cheat code to find blogs to link to. Now, I say cheat code, but it's just a nifty thing called a search operator. Search operators are special commands you can type into a Google search bar to help you find things faster. After you've published your blog post, you can use this search operator I'm going to tell you about to help you find those internal linking opportunities. I'm going to share it right now verbally, but if you're a visual person, go to the blog post for this podcast episode. The link is going to be below. I'll have all of this stuff typed out for you. So you're going to follow these steps. Go to Google and type in the word site, colon, whatever your actual domain is. And then in quotes, you're going to put the keyword that you want that blog post to show up for. So an example I would type in could be site brittanyherzberg.com and in quotes, meta description. The visual might be a little bit better for you. So if you're like lost right now, go to the blog post. Once you hit enter, you're going to see pages on your site that include that keyword. You're going to go to those pages on the back end of your site and link those words to your new blog. So following that example, I would hyperlink the phrase meta description on the existing post to the new blog post. Ideally you would do this for two to three existing pages to the new blog post. Again, go to the blog post that I wrote about this episode so you can see that visually mapped out because it is a really big deal to have internal links and to use them well and to do them properly and and it can really help these blog posts get picked up even quicker. So go check that out. 

3. Create blogs with the call to action in mind. Have a launch coming up. Have a really big speaking gig on the horizon. Writing a book and publishing it soon. Whatever that thing is, guess what? If you blog about it in advance, you can very easily drive people to the thing. You pique interest and then send them to the thing. That's how blog posts work best. They bring people into your world by answering a question that they are actually asking and they offer a logical next step. That next step could be anything from another blog post to a freebie opt in to a program sales page, to a form they can fill out to book a consultation call with you. It can be whatever you want it to be, but it just needs to make sense. That way it's an easy yes for the reader potential client bonus. It also feels way easier for you to add in a CTA when you've already thought about it and identified what it is. When business owners don't do this, that is when things feel forced or salesy. 

Take 15 minutes or so. You could even once again pause this episode right here and make a giant list of all the things you could send people to. Offers, classes, workshops, physical products, services, freebies, podcast episodes. You get the idea. That way you have an easily accessible grab bag of calls to action as you're creating your blog posts. One final note about this. You can have more than one cta, but just make sure that your main CTA for that blog post is a button. A very clear, easy to find, easy to understand button. Most people need that in your face, click me kind of button to know where to go next. It's not that they don't want to take a next step, but they just can't always find it. So we have to make it obvious for them. 

4. Get opinionated and share those opinions look, it's scary to share your industry related opinions, your thoughts, your observations to call things out. But if you don't, who will? If you don't, who's even going to know that you think that way? Or who you don't really enjoy working with? And that's just sad. You deserve to have clients who are thrilled to work with you. People who run to you seeking your advice. People who people who trust you to do your job and guide them down the best, most success filled path. And to get those people, you have to be willing to take a leap of faith and share your thoughts, opinions and observations. We no longer want someone we just meet on the Internet streets who seems fine, but we don't really know that well. Nope. Buyers are vetting everything much more thoroughly and your blogs are giving them key pieces of info which makes them the perfect place to include these thoughts and opinions. 

The biggest benefit to being this brave, this courageous, is that those really aligned ideal clients will be directed straight to you. I was really nervous to start sharing more of my woo, but you know what? That's exactly what's led some of my favorite humans to me. I was also nervous to declare that there is a best order of operations for SEO. But the data shows what the data shows and I'm doing you a disservice if I don't talk about it. You know, you can start slow. Just start noticing what you see online that you have a difference of opinion with. What do you repeat a lot to your clients? What do you share with them that you get really fired up or passionate about? Start creating a list of those things and over the next one to two weeks you'll definitely start to see a pattern emerge. 

5. Add in stories and social proof like how I'm about to tell you about a bookkeeper named Elli and how she claimed she wasn't a blogger when I first met her. In fact, she laughed at me when I told her that after we created SEO strategies for her main website pages that we were getting into creating optimized blog posts. She started this year with zero blogs. She's now up to eight. Not only that, she's making sales directly from these blog posts and we're only three months in. She went through SEO and Grow last year and is now in the maintain membership and is living breathing proof of how my three phase approach of SEO works. So of course I'm going to shout her out in this podcast episode in blog posts, and I'm even building an entire resource around her story. But you wouldn't know about her success if I didn't tell you about it. 

As business owners, so many of us get in our heads about oh, I can't celebrate too hard. I don't want to toot my own horn. I don't want people thinking boo Boo. Do you want to run a charity or a business? Do you actually want to help people do the thing or not. That's what I thought. So toot toot. I wish I could tell you that creating content doesn't matter, that you don't need to do it. The fact of the matter is that you do. But you certainly do not need to create content that will disappear after 24 to 48 hours. If you're going to need to create content, create the kind of content that works for you for months and years to come. The kind of content that boosts your visibility and helps you make money. Money that you get to make by working with really aligned clients and clients who you love and who sing your praises. 

There you go. Five things to do to create blog posts that'll get you found, booked and paid as a recap Create blogs using keywords you've built your strategy on. Add internal links from one blog to another blog post. Create blogs with the end the call to action in mind. Talk about your industry related opinions and share client wins and social proof. 

My SEO approach has been proven time and time and time again for lots of different businesses and industries. Wedding professionals, photographers, podcast producers, massage therapists, coaches, course creators. It goes like this. Get your website SEO strategy in place. Answer the big three questions and at least start with the meta descriptions and SEO titles for each page. Then create three to five blog posts that speak directly to and even include some of those main keywords. Lastly, be sure to include a very clear and intentional CTA that gives people a next step aim to publish at least one new blog each month that is at least 500 words. So many people get discouraged when they think they have to write 5,000 word masterpieces. You don't. So stop letting that keep you stuck in a shame spiral. Shoot for 500 words and watch. I can almost guarantee you'll end up writing far more than that. But the point is that you're blogging and that your blog posts are answering legit questions your people are asking and you answering those questions helps them find you so you can help them. 

See how beautiful this all is for additional support depending on where you are in the three phase process. Phase one being understanding SEO. Phase two being implementing SEO. Phase three being maintaining SEO. You'll either want to check out the blogging workshop or SEO and Grow. If you have a solid website SEO strategy in place, you can get the blogging workshop. If you don't have a solid website strategy in place or you're not sure if you do, SEO and Grow is going to be your first step. If you have any questions, come find me and ask. You know I love them. And as always, remember, I'm cheering you on on your SEO journey!