How to Turn an Email into a Blog Post w/ Breanna Owen
Get the exact steps you need to take to repurpose your emails (strategically) as SEO-ified blog posts!
I’ll get right to it—yes, it is possible to repurpose emails as blog posts! But there’s definitely some strategy you want to consider before copy+pasting that text from your email service provider (ESP) to your website. My friend & email strategist extraordinaire, Breanna Owen, joins me for this jam packed Q+A episode!
Breanna’s asking me the Q’s so you learn the exact steps to take to wisely identify, optimize, & share your email-turned-blog post. We took our Voxer conversation & brought it to the podcast. You’re gonna want to grab a notebook!
Topics covered in this episode:
If it’s a good idea to repurpose emails as blogs
How long blog posts should be
How to choose which emails to turn into blogs
How to SEO-ify these emails-turned-blog posts
Mistakes to avoid making in this process
Examples of emails repurposed as blogs
How to share blogs in your email marketing
Other email strategy tips from Breanna
Meet: Breanna
A left handed, Enneagram 3, (pure) Generator who believes peanut butter M&Ms are the best M&Ms and purpose-driven brands connecting with customers are most likely to leave a mark on the world. When not watering my 82 houseplants or feeding my four children I’m likely rearranging furniture in our new home. I’m obsessed with working smarter – not harder and using email lists that create fans for life!
Links & Mentioned Resources:
Repurpose an Email (Blog)
Keyword research tutorial (YT)
Submit Blog to GSC for Indexing (YT)
DFY Blog Copywriting / Optimizing
How to Blog w/ SEO (email course)
Related Episodes:
Laura Belgray (Organic Marketing)
Submit Blog to GSC
Seo Title + Meta Description
Connect w/ Breanna:
Connect w/ Brittany:
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Welcome to the basic be podcast, a show for the wannabe SEO savvy service providers among this for the coaches and consultants who dream of becoming known for their storytelling skills. Not to mention the solopreneurs who straight up need to master all things social proof to increase sales. After a little reluctantly, fully committing to this online rather business, I quickly realized I needed to get people to come to me, I needed to tell them I was here and how I could support them. I dove headfirst into social proof, which led me to SEO, which led me to storytelling. And now it gives me great joy to share what I've learned with other business owners so they skip the hard stuff and ease straight into sales. This podcast gives you expert insights, actionable takeaways, and casual combos with some of the online world's best and brightest experts and strategists. I think that's enough of an intro. So here we go.
Hello, and welcome back to the basic B podcast. I've got my friend Breanna, oh, and with me, and she's actually joining me later in the season to talk about storytelling in your emails. But we had a really cool idea that we did not want to like not share with you immediately. So I'll let her share a little bit more about the idea that it has to do with blogs and emails. I'll leave it there. But it works out really beautifully because Breanna is an email copywriter and strategist. And of course I do things with blogs, so I'm stoked about it. But one thing I think Breanna does particularly well is she gets you to think about your email sequences differently. And most notably as a way to support your client experience and really hold someone's hand throughout the entire process. So Breanna, hello, my friend.
Breanna Owen 1:45
Hey, thanks for letting me hijack your podcast and kind of flip the script on you. Of course, I will have episodes like yes, it is my turn to ask you the question my friend do with me what you will write, you talk all the time about SEO and case studies and blog posts and how they all go together. And it's very Mani Gen of you. And I love it so much. But I did I had a thought recently, because we Voxer all the time you and I notice.
I wanted to take this conversation out of Voxer and actually make it available because I think there will be some awesome gems. And I selfishly want to be able to go back and listen to it. So like you said, I write a ton of emails, I would be a new blogger, if anything, I am not an established blogger by any means. But recently, I had an email that I wrote, and I'm not gonna lie. I mean, it was pretty awesome. And I was like, This is really good. So good. I actually don't want it to stay contained to my email list. I actually want this information to be accessible to people outside of my email list.
And because we talk so much your voices in my head, and I immediately said to myself, SEO blog post, and my burning voice. And so that's the question I want to bring to you today. And to be honest, if I'm having this question, my guess is you have a lot of listeners out there who have this question. And to your point earlier, one of the things that I do really well is identify the pieces of information that your ideal client is wondering, wanting to know, so that you can get in front of it and serve them really, really well throughout the journey experience with them. And so I was like Brittany, you need to share this with your people, too. Those are some questions I have for you today.
Brittany Herzberg 3:37
Yeah, I'm excited. And this is something I've been having conversations behind the scenes, like you mentioned with you. So with friends with peers, and then clients as well, this is something that comes up quite a bit. And it came up big time in the last round of the email course how to Blog with SEO. So I'm really excited. All right. Well,
Breanna Owen 3:56
my first question for you is, what are your thoughts on repurposing emails into a blog post? Is that something you recommend or not?
Brittany Herzberg 3:56
I highly recommend it. And in fact, I have one example where I did this exact thing. And it was, like I said, around the last time that I ran the email course, and I did it because I wanted to show what it could look like. So I had one email, it made a lot of sense to turn it into a blog post. And I did it and shared it with people. And I either got the response of I've been thinking of doing the same thing, or I didn't know you could do that, or it's so cool to see this being done. So yeah,
I think it's a great strategy, especially to be smart with the content that you're creating. And you and I had this part of the conversation where it's like instead of just sending out that email once or only letting that story those tips, the strategies within the email that's going to a select few people. Why not go ahead and use it on your website as well as a way to mark it and get other new people in the door. So yeah, highly recommend it!
Breanna Owen 4:56
Okay, good. Make the rest of this conversation very awkward. I'm super awkward. So thank you for framing this idea. As somebody who started with the email, and is interested in moving it over into a blog post, what are some things that I would need to consider or to keep in mind when repurposing that content into a blog?
Brittany Herzberg 5:18
First thing I would recommend is a lot of people are concerned with word count, make sure that whatever you're publishing as a blog post is at least 500 words long. That sounds intimidating if you don't write words, like you, and I do all day every day. But it's really not that long. So just give yourself like a little bit of an outline, start writing, and then you can gauge it from there, you can do the whole word count checker on Google Docs really easily. So that is one kind of thing to I would encourage people to think through as a, I guess, like a funnel of should I do this? Or should I not do this would be is there one big central point to all of this?
I know, for me, some of my emails, ping pong in different directions. So if I had an email where there was a key point in that email, but it also went off in various directions, sometimes I would want to edit those pieces out. So that it just focuses on that one big point, because that is what enables you to really think through strategically with the keyword research and make that blog post into something that's going to be findable, that's going to go out and do some organic marketing on your behalf on the internet streets. Other things to consider are, as you're looking through this email, are there natural breaks, where you can insert headlines, I know you and I talked through an example recently, and there were some really smart places where there already were pieces of copy that you could easily tweak and make headlines.
But also, I think we added in a couple of pieces where there weren't natural headline breaks. So those are some things I would recommend to thinking through. Other things would be in your email. Sometimes we have buttons, sometimes we have hyperlinks, you can do the same thing in a blog post. But I would encourage you to at least have one button that's eye catching that attention grabbing, and that is going to draw that person into like here, do this thing next.
Breanna Owen 7:07
Okay, that's all good information. If I were to ask, like the process of turning an email into a blog post, is that different than the things I need to consider? What would be the process of taking this email and turning it into a blog post? Yeah,
Brittany Herzberg 7:22
there's a little bit of overlap. So there's going to be some of that same stuff of like considering the point, turning things into headlines, but for the sake of walking someone through it, and us through it, so you could go back and listen to this. I'll just lay it up.
Breanna Owen 7:34
Thank you.
Brittany Herzberg 7:35
So you've selected the email, we'll start there. And if you haven't already done this, I would pull all of the copy into a Google Doc, it's the easiest thing to do. Please, do that make your life simple. From there, identify what that big point is? Are you talking about how a politician can use email marketing? Are you talking about how to turn an email into a blog post? Are you talking about how to do simple keyword research, whatever that thing is, write it down at the top of the page, then you can go in and do keyword research, I'll make sure that I link my six minute tutorial, it's like super simple, but do keyword research, identify your target or your focus keyword, and then maybe three to five supportive synonymous types of keywords.
And from that space, you're going to be able to go into your email, copy, identify or create your h1 headline. So there's only one h1 for any page, and there needs to be one on every page. And then you're going to use some strategic like bookmarks, like we talked about, what are your H twos, your H twos support your big point of your h one, your H threes support your big point of your H twos. So that's kind of the hierarchy that we're aiming for.
And then after that point, are you going to add in any images, you would want to think through like the image titles that are keyword rich, for that blog post, and then you can go and populate it onto your website, you'll want to make sure that you have an SEO title and meta description, and a smart keyword rich URL slug as well. And then once you actually have that blog post published course, you want to submit it to Google Search Console. Okay, so if those two things don't sound familiar, the SEO Titles and Meta descriptions and then submitting it to Google Search Console, I have two other short solo episodes that I'll make sure to link as well for that, because those pieces are very critical to make sure that your blog post actually does go out and do that marketing for you and gets found and posted in the right people.
Breanna Owen 9:35
Okay, perfect. Yes, thank you. I think those are the last two pieces that I would also be needed. So I might ask him a question for myself or if nothing so as you know, like in my case, because again, we talked about this i and that is exactly the email as an email copywriter, especially as one who focuses on the nurture sequences of emails and businesses. I know that that is a phrase that people either think is incredibly boring, or don't know, WTF I'm talking about. And so I'm trying to share really tangible examples of here's what an email nurture sequence can look like in this industry.
And inspired by a real life event, I was like, here's how politicians could use email strategy to win the vote in an upcoming election. Like I wrote a lot, it was close to 2100 words, which is a bit longer than I typically send in an email. And that is what was part of the reason why I was like, Oh, I think this would be better as a long form piece of content. So let's like flip the table a little bit, if I'm starting with my blog post, and then I'm like, hey, I want to take this blog post and share it as an email. What do you recommend, for the inverse of blog post to email? How would you recommend sharing the blog as an email?
Brittany Herzberg 11:01
then this was another thing that we talked through, like you said, because you were like, there's a lot of words here, and I want to do this. One thing I've done really well, and I shared a couple of examples with you, is I've seen people have these really long blogs, and they do share it with their email list. And I've seen it done a couple of different ways. You could either pull out in some bullet points, some high level things that you're going to talk through in the blog post, and then give them a button. Hey, if you want to read the whole thing, go here.
Option two, which is what I've seen done super well. And I really love is just copying and pasting in like a first chunk of that blog post, and then including a button, go here to read the remainder because it gets people, especially you and I know when emails are written well, especially if there's some kind of story that hooks you in, and then you're like engaged in your reading down the page, you want to know the rest of it. And if we can get them to click a button in your email, that's going to be a really nice engagement statistic there. And then if we can get them over to your website, that's going to also help boost traffic and make that blog post more visible in search results. So it's like a win win, win win.
Breanna Owen 12:06
Yeah, I think I did a hybrid, I'm trying to think back to this week, when I send it out.
Brittany Herzberg 12:13
I know that life.
Breanna Owen 12:14
I think I did a hybrid where, because I know as a consumer, when I'm on somebody's list, and they're sharing a blog post with me through their email. And the first part of it, is the blog. And then I click over, I feel bored, if I'm reading the exact same thing all over again, at the beginning. And at the same time, you've sent me an email, and now I have to click something to go read the rest of it, that also annoys me. And so I did a little bit of both.
I think if I remember correctly, I did that first section of my content, which was really setting it out what I was about to do, but I didn't do all of it. It was like almost like every other paragraph type of a thing. And then I was like, and then the rest of the blog post talks about these four things. When they did, it wasn't going to be like, Oh my gosh, I just read all of this word for word. Hopefully there would be a little bit more like interest in surprise. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I haven't looked at the data. That's another
Brittany Herzberg 13:14
thing too, is I like letting the email data breathe for a little while because if I think of my own behavior, I don't check all of my emails immediately, once they're sent in. Sometimes I'm like, oh, I want to spend some time reading this email. And I'm going to need like 10 or 15 minutes. So I'm going to pause that and leave that in my inbox until this weekend, and then go consume it in full. So just a side note on that. But it's an interesting point, because I don't feel the same way.
Especially with the examples that I sent you I like getting engaged in now that I know the person I know that this is her style of sending the emails, and I know that it's gonna give me a teaser, and then I go over to the blog. So she's done a good job of training me at this point. And I don't mind clicking over, I don't mind finding my spot in the blog post. And I actually find it helpful that she includes it just copy paste that first section, because then I know where to go to find where I was. But it's very cool to think of it from a different perspective.
Breanna Owen 14:08
Yeah, well, same. Like that was also a helpful perspective for me. So I love it. Look at us. Yeah, that's not one of the things we think about when we think about our ideal client, because sometimes it changes based off of the day and all of that. And so training your people to know and appreciate and consume a certain way is part of our jobs, when we put this content together and whatever way we do so. Exactly. Yeah, I love it.
Okay, I have one last question for you. You do a lot with SEO, you are the SEO queen. And my zone of genius is very much email marketing. But for as long as I've known you and what we've done, I've always loved what you did, but I was always like, I mean SEO and email don't really go together. You'll be happy to know, through being around you for so long, I have changed my mind. So before we get into my realisation, I would love to know like, from your perspective, because you also send emails all the damn time. How do SEO and emails come together? How do they work together? What does that look like? Other than Brittany and Breanna, Voxer and each other all the time?
Brittany Herzberg 15:26
Which I'm not mad about. I love that. This is a cool question, because I have some thoughts. And I don't know that they immediately sprang to everyone's mind. Because we do think of like SEOs for your website. Emails are for like, behind the scenes, you know, client relationship, nurturing and stuff like that. SEO seems behind the scenes, but also internet related. And email feels more like behind the scenes behind the curtain. Not everyone can touch it, see, whatever. Yeah.
But and the two things that came to mind when you asked that question are that my clients when they come in, and it could be a student going through the email course, it could be someone working with me for like a done for you, Seo packet, whatever the case may be, I always get them to think about three questions. Who do you want to help? How do you want to help them? And what do you want to be known for or as? Those three questions, those three answers are going to help you really narrow down your focus of again, who you're talking to how you're helping them what you are sending your messaging out about and what you're going to be top of mind for.
So for me, it's SEO copywriting, and it's case study copywriting, which is amazing, because I've worked really hard to make those things be synonymous with like Brittany, oh, yeah, she does that. So it helps you be that top of mind person for those topics. And then people can easily find you refer you or find you and work with you. That's gonna work in your email, too. I can count.
Well, I actually can't count because it's happened so many times. How often I thought of a topic, and then I've been like, oh, Natalia does that Breanna does that actually does that array does that. And then I can go to my email and just type their names, or I can type the topic if I can't think of their names, I could say like email marketing, and something like that would very likely come up with your name, podcast, production would come up with Lee as name things like that. So it helps me to find those people, those emails, those pieces of contact information, or the strategies and the tips that people were sharing. It helps me do that I can actually search my email.
Breanna Owen 17:20
Yeah. Okay, you're using your inbox as a search engine.
Brittany Herzberg 17:24
Exactly. So I kind of wove those two things together. But to recap, SEO helps you get focused on what you want to talk about, and what you want to be top of mind for and what you want to be considered an expert in or on. And then email, like you just said, email turns into your own personal search engine.
Breanna Owen 17:41
Okay, well, I love that. And mostly, I love it because I had different ideas. Yes. And so you put the two of ours together. And we have five ways, SEO and email are actually really, really powerful together, but tell me yours. So Well, the first thing I thought of is, if you're trying to grow your email list, you have to get people on your email list to have an email list. And the best way to get people on your email list is by utilizing SEO, if you can utilize SEO, on the front end with your website, with your content with a very consistent message, then it is going to draw people into your email list. S
o I would say that's the first one that I'd like before, during and after. And then during I don't know about you, but I have signed up by their freebie or their downloadable or their quiz or whatever. And now I'm on their email list. And I don't really remember who they are, or what they do, or what made me want to sign up for their email list and way. And I hadn't even thought about the fact that well, you actually could use your own inbox as your own personal search engine. But those keywords like your brain is still processing that information too.
And so if you can utilize those keywords in your emails is also going to help people like put you together. Oh, yeah, that's right. Bringing does all of this stuff with SEO and Case Study copywriting. Okay. Yes, that's right. And matches those together. Oh, Breanna is always talking about email copywriting or mental health and entrepreneurs like, Yes, that's right. That's what she talks about. So our brains are also cataloging the f is that person, and why am I getting their email? So yeah, and then the last one I thought of was, again, if you turn that email into a blog post, if you already incorporate the SEO keywords into your email, you don't have to do as much work to make those blog posts optimize for the back end, when it lives out on the internet streets, bringing people to you.
Brittany Herzberg 19:48
That's really smart.
Breanna Owen 19:49
I hadn't thought about any of those options. This is why we have to be together for past me, thinking, email and SEO. We're like friends and acquaintances But not like me.
Brittany Herzberg 20:04
It turns out they are. Yeah, I love it. This was really fun. I think this is gonna be really helpful not only for you to be able to go back and listen to this, but also for anyone else who's thinking of turning an email into a blog or vice versa, wanting to know how to get their blogs and share it in an effective way with their email list. Also, anyone listening didn't know this, Laura Belgray was on the podcast this week, who is like, I mean, Breanna and Laura are like besties I love Laura. She's amazing. So her podcast episode, we were talking all about how she smartly incorporated SEO, social proof and storytelling into her shrimp mugger basically like a web page blog post type of situation. So this is just another kind of aspect of that we took it and we kind of like worked it in reverse, but anywho make sure you go listen to that, because there's other nuggets that you're gonna hear in there. And I just wanted to make sure to shout that out.
Breanna Owen 20:57
I love that. You did though, because longtime fan of Laura's met her in person recently. One of the memories I will flip through on my deathbed 100%. Like she has turned some of her best emails into a blog post. That's what I was thinking. That was the inspiration where I was like, Wait, this could be possible. No way it was because I have seen Laura Belgray do it. Yeah. And she doesn't do it for all of them. She couldn't. She sends an amazing amount of emails. But she does do it for some of them. And I was like I could do that. I don't have to turn all of my emails into a blog post from Florida that I can do it. So I love that you brought Laura up because I was like, effing Laura Belgray. Yes, I can.
Brittany Herzberg 21:40
That's funny. Yeah. So now you have to go listen to her episode. You're welcome. I know that there's gonna be people who are listening, who are like, Oh my gosh, we're gonna be friends with Breanna to so we're gonna do that.
Breanna Owen 21:50
I'm on Instagram at a when you're mark. It's Oh, Wen. My last name is Owen. So it's a play on words. Oh, w e n, your mark. The other words are grandma. My website URL is the same: owenyourmark.com. So you can come say hi on Instagram, or threads. I've been hanging out with threads recently and loving it. It's real fun. And check out more about me on my website, too.
Brittany Herzberg 22:18
I love it. Yay. Thank you for all that. Yeah. And of course, I'll have all the links everywhere plastered over the internet. So you will not miss Breanna. Don't worry about it. I think thanks for being up for this idea and for taking the mic and taking control of the episode. And thanks for letting me of course. Like I said, it's really fun. Alright, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.
That was really something wasn't it? What that really sink in and guide you toward being the answer to even more Google questions. Thanks so much for joining me this episode. You are the reason this show exists and that it keeps growing. You know, thanks to all those follows and reviews. If you know someone who could benefit from what we've shared, send it to them. We don't do shy around here. If you thought of clarifying or follow up questions while listening. You know what to do. Say hi on Instagram, check the show notes for all the things that were mentioned. And I'll talk to you soon Fred