In episode #124 of the Joy Joya Jewelry Marketing Podcast, I share some of my favorite tips for generating new blog post content on a regular basis. Yes, that’s right I said “blog”, a word that makes people roll their eyes when I say it. But blogging still matters today, especially if you want to reach more of your target customers through Google search results.

If you want to rank on the first page of Google for a certain keyword related to your brand, then you’ll need to satisfy as many of Google’s ranking factors as possible. Some of those ranking factors includes:

• Content length
• Coverage of an in-depth topic
• Content recency, meaning Google favors recently published or updated content
• Multimedia
• Useful content
• Value and Unique Insights

Guess what? You can do better at all of those ranking factors by blogging, and you definitely won’t be able to achieve the quality of content with things like your product detail pages or other internal jewelry pages on your site. So I don’t really care if you think that people don’t read anymore. Google still “reads”, and Google will notice and reward you when you’re producing great content. View the transcript of this episode below.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 4:52
Okay, so let’s get to it blogging, you probably are like, Okay, I’m open to it Laryssa, I get what you’re saying it’s important for SEO, it can give me like an anchor for all my other content of focus for my email marketing campaigns. Something else to talk about on social media, another outlet for telling the story of my brand, all super positive things. I’m sure you’re open to the idea of it. But in terms of execution, it’s like wow, blogging takes a lot of creative energy. It takes writing skill, dedication to being to publishing on a consistent schedule, generating ideas. If you were to blog once or twice a month. That’s a lot of ideas that you need to keep generating. And for a blog to bring value to your brand, the content, the topics have to be interesting. They can’t be like your run of the mill, whatever, like let me introduce you to diamonds, because guess what, there are tons of resources about that already. So you want to really figure out how you can tell your story in a way that will set you apart. So I want to share some tips for generating those ideas on a regular basis. How can you get new topics for your blog that are really going to feel creative, and fresh. And these are tips that I actually use with clients tried and true. I even use them to help me with this podcast. You wonder how I come up with new content every week here, I’m going to tell you right now. So the first thing that I would really suggest is signing up for Google Alerts. So if you search for Google alerts on Google, it’s a service where as long as you’re signed into your Google account, you can add different keywords into Google Alerts set the frequency of how often you want to receive these Google Alerts. And then you’ll get a digest in your email when Google sees that there’s some kind of article or link that’s relevant to the keywords that you type. So for example, for me, I’m signed up for two Google alerts that really helped me with content. One is just jewelry, which is kind of generic and hidden, hit or miss. And the other one is jewelry marketing, which always yield some interesting things for me, especially like the articles from JCK that I mentioned today. So I’m not necessarily like diving through the internet every day, I’m able to get a digest in my email, when relevant articles hit Google so that I can just see what they are. So you’re probably like, well, how does this apply to me? How can I use Google Alerts? Well, if you have a specialized type of jewelry, or your jewelry is inspired by something like nature, or architecture, or whatever it

may be, you can actually put those search terms into Google and get a little bit creative with your blog content. Say that your jewelry caters to Female chefs because you make jewelry like little spoon charms or something like that, maybe you want to subscribe to a Google Alert for the restaurant industry or fine dining. And it also just helps you think outside of the box a little bit. And also keep your finger on the pulse of what your customers care about. So that occasionally you might find something that will spark an idea for you. I know this is super relevant for people that I have a client who does like very architectural style jewelry, so they kind of follow architecture and interior design news. And not all of its gonna be relevant. But every once in a while there will be something that can tie back to jewelry, or that maybe the customers will be interested in as well. And hey, if you’re a jewelry brand that’s inspired by architecture, you should probably be up to date on architecture news anyway, because your customers may ask you questions about these things about the inspiration, etc. So Google Alerts is a really great place to like keep your finger on the pulse of all these topics and keep abreast of what’s happening in the world. Another tool that I really like to use is Google Trends. So Google Trends is a way to see what people are searching for on Google in the world. And that’s useful to you as a blogger, because if people are searching for something and you’re producing content around it, then there is a likely chance that someone may find your content, if it’s well written, if it’s useful, if it provides value, you know that people are already looking for it, and that they’re interested in it. So use Google Trends to your advantage. So I’m the Google Trends dashboard, you can type any keyword, and then it will tell you how the search volume has changed and evolved over time. And it will also tell you other related searches that people are googling, which is the thing that can give you ideas for new topics, I find that Google Trends works the best when you are more specific. So I went on there just to play around yesterday. And I typed in jewelry, for example, which is very general. And I didn’t find it to be as useful as if I typed a specific type of jewelry or a specific product category. So the more specific you can get with it, the better results it will yield for you. I also really love to do an SEO competitive analysis. This is something that might be a little bit more difficult to DIY, especially if you don’t have a strong familiarity with SEO, this is something that you might want to specifically hire an SEO specialist to do for you. But if you’re serious about blogging, I think this is one of the best investments you can make. So in an SEO competitive analysis, you actually look at the content of your search competitors, search competitors are not necessarily the people you would consider like your direct competitors. But they are other jewelry brands that are already ranking on Google for the keywords that you want to rank for. So they may share customers, they may share products, but they don’t necessarily have to be like your real life competitors. Doing an SEO competitive analysis of those competitors, can help you see which of their website pages are actually ranking the best for these key words that you also want to rank for. And many times those things are blog posts, especially if they’re doing a great job with their content marketing strategy. And seeing that seeing what those blog posts are. I’m not saying copy them or rip off their ideas. But once you can see what is ranking well for them, you can kind of do your own spin or your own take on those blog posts. And you will probably get dozens of ideas just from looking at that. Sometimes it’s not blog posts that are ranking, it could be internal pages on your competitor site, or maybe like an FAQ page or something like that. But if you can see what those pages are, you’ll definitely get a better idea of what Google quote unquote likes and what will rank well for those keywords that you also want to rank for. You may also want to try researching Google autocomplete results. So you probably are already familiar with this and don’t even realize that

when you go to google.com on a desktop browser or on your smartphone, and you start typing anything, it’ll give you a list of I guess recommendations or try To like finish your phrase for you. And those are actually based on really popular searches. So if you’re looking for ideas for blog posts, you can start typing in idea that you have or a question that customers ask you a lot or a topic related to your jewelry. And notice what comes up, because those are things that people frequently are searching. And you can potentially use those as ideas and inspiration for new content. Because again, just like with the Google Trends, you know, people are already searching for those things. Perfect. If you can produce a really great value driven interesting blog post about it, there’s a higher chance that you will rank in Google for that search term. This is kind of obvious, but survey your customers. Or if you don’t survey them directly, just pay really close attention to what your customers are asking you on a regular basis. What questions do you often have to answer for what customers? What are some issues that often come up? What are the barriers to purchase that your customers commonly have? Like, when they’re about to make a purchase, but decide to abandon their cart? Do you know why that happens? Is it related to price is it because there’s a competitor that has something more attractive to them, you can use blog posts to kind of fill in the gaps of the customer journey. And that can help you rank in Google search results. Or even if you feature it prominently on your homepage or on other parts of your website, a customer may see that and maybe change his or her mind, because suddenly they have more information, you’re using that blog post as a way to provide additional value, build trust, kind of answer a question that maybe the customer doesn’t even know that he or she has yet really just kind of bring more confidence to the customer. So yes, it’s important to have just an FAQ page on your site. But think about even expanding on those FAQ’s like take each one of them, and make them into a fully written out blog post. That way, even on your FAQ page, instead of just dumping like paragraphs and paragraphs of content, you can do like a short answer of each frequently asked question, and then link to the blog post and have them go to a different page that’s way more fleshed out has a lot more content. Google really likes websites that have a lot of internal links that are relevant, it keeps the customer engaged and keep them longer on your site. Because you’re continuing to provide value, you’re continuing to give them a reason to look at other pages on your site. And hey, it’s an idea for a blog post. Also, this may be advanced for some listeners, but it’s one reason I encourage you to really familiarize yourself with your Google Analytics is use your Google Analytics as a place to figure out which kind of blog posts to write. This will be more useful to you once you start logging, and you can begin to gain data from your blog posts, which is why I encourage you to start blogging as soon as possible. When you go to your Google Analytics, and you look at which pages are people visiting on your site? How are people entering your site? If it’s through a blog post, that means that it’s ranking well in Google, that it’s popular that it’s answering some kind of questions someone has or providing more information, right, more of that. So look at the things that already are the most popular sources of traffic on your website, and do more of that thing. Use the data as a jumping off point. As you get further into your blogging journey, and you have more data, you can take some of those really popular blog posts according to Google Analytics, and maybe do like a part two or a follow up post or like a more expanded version. or you can even go back to some of the more popular posts, update them with new content, make them longer, update them with links to other parts of your site, and make them even more relevant and work for you better. So there’s so much you can do using the Google Analytics data. But the way to get the most out of it is just to get started. So you need to start somewhere.

Don’t shoot for perfection. This is going to be an ongoing evolution of a process. And the more you do it, the more data the more ideas that you’ll get back so it’ll it’ll pay you back in all the effort that you put into it. One thing that you’re really gonna want to do and people ask me all the time, how do you come up with ideas for your podcast? I mean, you just have to flex your idea muscle, I think a habit just like any other habit, if you know that you have a thing once a month, once a week, once every two weeks that you need to produce content for, and it’s non negotiable for you, like you’re putting it on the calendar and it needs to happen, you are going to start to force yourself to have to flex your idea muscle, you’re going to kind of turn on a little spout in your head, where you’re suddenly going to be open to receiving ideas. I’m sure currently, if you don’t have a blog, there are probably potential ideas around you all the time, especially if you’re interacting with customers on a regular basis, and you have your finger on the pulse of the industry. But because you haven’t like committed to this blogging exercise, you don’t register like oh, that’s an idea, you kind of just let it float by you and don’t even realize that it can be something. So you have to start to get in the mindset that everything can be a potential idea. And I would not censor yourself in any way. So even if something maybe seems silly or not fleshed out, I would, I would definitely have a place where you write down these ideas, whether it’s in a tool like Asana, or you have a notebook or you have some kind of Google Doc, anytime something looks like a hint of an idea or something you could potentially use, put it in a document. Because I can guarantee you, you’re gonna forget it. If it doesn’t go down on paper, I know that personally for a fact for a fact, then when you need to have content, you can always refer back to it. And maybe the next time you look at your idea list, you’ll be able to expand on one of those topics or have additional ideas. So you just have to get in the habit of opening your mind to all the ideas that are around you constantly. There’s no shortage of ideas in the world, you just have to believe that and be open to it. And think about getting more personal in your blog, a blog is a chance to tell a story. If your brand has a really personal element or storytelling element. Don’t be afraid to kind of share a little bit more about you are about your team or about your process. Not all of the blog posts have to be in that tone. But give your customers a chance to see a little bit behind the scenes that maybe you don’t show them on other channels. So those are all my ideas. I hope they were helpful to you saw my maybe a little more advanced, some are more accessible and beginner, but you have an idea of where you can go with it and all the possibilities and potential so that if you do need to bring someone on to help you at least you know how to guide them or what to look for.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Links mentioned at the beginning of this episode:

“How Storytelling Plays Into John Hardy’s New Bamboo Collection“

“Tiffany Giving Up Century-Old ‘New York Times’ Ad“

“JCK’s Resident Style Guru Identifies Key 2021 Jewelry Trends“