What You Actually Mean When You Say You Hate Blogging
"It’s not that you hate blogging; it’s that you haven't found the blogging process that works for you."
You say "I hate blogging" and think that's the whole story. But boy, oh boy—it is not.
There are 3 things hiding behind that sentence & once you know which one it is for you, you’ve got a clear game plan on how to make blogging doable for you.
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
What "I hate blogging" actually means for business owners
How your North Star gives you 3 essential blog post topics
Where to steal blog ideas from when you're stuck
If you actually need to be a good writer (or even like writing) to blog well
Free tools that can make blogging easier for entrepreneurs
What’s likely missing when you feel like your blogs “aren’t working”
Successes like website traffic, digital product sales, and 7 minutes on a page that my clients are seeing
The AI mistake to avoid at all costs when blogging for SEO
There are SO many benefits to blogging—more visibility, more sales, more opportunities—and the sooner you find a workflow that works for you, the sooner you can get in on these goods yourself!
If you want my recommendation on the next best SEO step for your business, join The SEO Huddle.
($27 for one month—this is not another membership. Here, you get to ask me questions each week & get personalized guidance for your business & marketing goals.)
Mentioned Resources:
SEO Sprint (October 5th + December 7th)
The SEO Huddle ($27, 1-month » get answers & guidance for your SEO journey)
The Guide to Getting Found on Google (with Elli's full case study)
Wispr Flow (free voice-to-text tool)
Free Instagram and Blogging Workshops in Oct!
I’ve teamed up with my friend & business coach, Megan Yelaney, to bring you the ultimate supportive duo in content creation:
Meg’s guiding you through the 3 Instagram pinned posts you need to make sales for you
And I’m showing you how to turn those 3 topics into blog posts (and even podcast episodes!)
Meg: September 29, 30 + October 1 | Brittany: October 2 for the SEO bonus (limited-time replays avail)
Join through ^^this unique link & you’ll get a BONUS training with me on October 2nd on how to take those 3 pinned Instagram posts & turn them into blog posts for SEO 🎉
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
Hello and welcome to the Basic B podcast. I am your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Hersberg. Today I'm recording, talking into an actual microphone. It's hooked up. Yesterday I had a branding shoot with my friend Kate, and we were doing lots of like fake podcasting and fake group coaching calls. But today I was like, okay, we're hooked up, we're recording. This is grand. I love it. So we are here, we are doing the thing, but let me catch you up. So over the last couple of weeks, it's been interesting. And the topic that I have for you today is something that continues to come up in conversation.
Whether it's with gun for you clients or people in the SEO sprint or DMs or even just like regular conversations with like my boyfriend or friends, it is that there are things that are underneath the message that people say when they just say, I hate blogging. That's not all there is to it. And that's what I want to chat with you about today because there are three key things that I've noticed.
And when you can identify which of the these things is going on for you, if this applies to you, then you can much more easily go, okay, this is what I need to have going on. So with that, let's talk about what you actually mean when you say that you hate blogging. The first of them is that it's a very common problem, like many of us have on, you know, Instagram, where we don't know what to say, we don't know what to post about, we don't know the topic to talk about.
When it comes to SEO, we're like, I don't have the right keywords, I don't have the right whatever. And we obsess over the like the perfect posting schedule or having the perfect topic. And there's so much more to it. And at the same time, it can be so much more simple than what we make it. So the questions that you're constantly asked that can help you know what to talk about. Something I've recommended for the SEO sprint people.
Is that once you go through the sprint, you understand what your North Star is. It's the very first thing we do in that sprint is to figure out who do you help, how do you help them, and why you, how do you stand out in your industry? Once you identify those things, those could be individual blog posts. I was having a conversation this morning with Meg. She's gonna be on the podcast very, very soon. And she has this upcoming training and she's gonna be sharing how to figure out what you need to be posting for your three pinned posts on Instagram.
Brittany Herzberg (02:21.666) That you can take and turn into blog posts. I'm not going to give everything away because you have to listen to the episode to figure out what that is. But there are ways that we can make this much more simple than what we have been making it. The easiest thing for me as a manifesting generator is to find something to respond to. So if I'm ever like, I want to post, but I don't know what to post about because hi, I'm human. I'm a normal business owner and I have these same thoughts. I will either go to threads and see what people are posting, see what I've been tagged in, see what recent post I had that like took off.
And then I can always blog about it. And or like I mentioned a bit ago, I'll go to the questions that people are actually asking me. I have gone to the I don't know if you'd call this an extreme, but I have a folder on my laptop that just says questions. And I have started to screenshot questions as they come in, whether it's from, you know, a Dunview client that's onboarding or questions that I get in the sprint or DMs, emails. I mean, literally you name it, and there's questions everywhere.
So once you start looking for them, you can't help but to see them. But that's what I've done. So maybe that's an idea that could help you. But this is, I believe, what happened with Ellie. If you've grabbed the guide to getting found on Google, Ellie is the case study that you walk through and you see her entire SEO journey and how she went through the whole SEO and grow method, working on her website, working on content, working on her Instagram profiles and other social media profiles, then into tracking the metrics. But the point I want to make here is that.
When you get into that content section, you'll see her talk about how she hated blogging. That was literally a thing that she said on coaching calls that she messaged me. She's like, I hate blogging, I hate blogging. I'm like, okay, I hear you. I hear you. But what is it? What is it that's you're not really sure about? That you're like, what's what's the block here? And for her, what I think we talked about was that she didn't know what's post. So I was like, okay. And we had this conversation and we were able to pull out, I think it was like five or six topics just from that initial conversation on one of the coaching calls.
that may be your block. And once you start, I mean, you could even probably like pause right now in the podcast and come up with 10 ideas, five ideas, and just let yourself just brain dump, get some stuff out. If I were to ask you, what questions are you getting asked? What questions have you been asked recently? If I was to ask you what resources do you constantly share with people as they're onboarding with you or coming into your world, whether it's for a group coaching program or whether they're just purchasing a course or whether they're booking a photography
Brittany Herzberg (04:44.876) or massage session with you, there's those initial steps that they need to walk through. So what are those things? You can then create resources and those can become blog posts. So like there's a number of ideas that you have available to you. And it's often just about having the right question or teasing the right thing out of you to be able to go, that's a great blog post. And then the writing happens. So maybe you're like Ellie and you just don't know what to post about, pause the episode. Let yourself brain know. Let some things come to the surface. Another
possible thing that might actually be causing you to quote unquote hate blogging is that you don't like writing. A lot of people are like, I'm not a good writer. I don't like writing, whether that's like pen to paper, which by the way, none of us are blogging now. That is like literally not the medium that blogging is. But some people don't even like sitting there and typing stuff out on their laptop. They just don't like it. So okay, my brain immediately is like, must find a solution. What do you like doing? Do you like talking?
Do you like just like going for a walk and voice noting yourself? Do you like my friend and business coach and all the things? There's like 40 million titles for this woman. You'll hear on the podcast episode. But Meg loves whisper flow. She is someone who verbally processes. And she's talked about this a number of times. And this is something that I've mentioned to her that I've mentioned to other people in our mastermind of hey, you can go and use Whisperflow and just like be at your laptop and maybe you're looking at something or maybe you're whatever.
You hit a button on your computer, I think it's free. You just have to download it and then you can like whisper flow the thing. You can just talk it into existence. So many people are even doing that with like vibe coding. This is a whole other topic, but like there is a way for you to verbally get things out and for it to turn into writing. So you don't have to like writing. You don't even have to feel good at writing. And it's not even really about being good at writing. Copywriting, content writing, it's all just organization of words. So
Literally just get the thing out of you and then go from there. You can organize it, you can hyperlink, you can create headlines to organize the information that way. You can add some visuals. The possibilities are endless. I hate to be that person, but at the same time I don't. So there you go. But the point here is that you can talk stuff out. You don't have to sit and type something. I would also strongly encourage you not to completely outsource your blog post writing to something like Claude or ChatGPT.
Brittany Herzberg (07:07.862) It is not gonna do a good job. It's just not. You can prompt it to the best of your ability and you're still going to want at least one person to read through things to make sure it makes sense. Cause it won't make sense automatically right out the gate. You may get it to the point where it's like 90, 95%, which is beautiful. And then it's like helping you be more efficient, but I don't want you to completely outsource that just yet. So consider that. For some of my clients, like Dr. Cecily, this idea of talking things out ends up spinning off into a whole freaking podcast.
Which is beautiful. And I mean, I never thought I would be here talking to you on a podcast, but it turns out I like talking. And if you give me a subject, I will go la la la la and just like talk. So maybe you would surprise yourself. Maybe you have been saying that you don't feel good about writing, or you don't like your writing, or you don't think you're a good writer. Maybe try this. Try giving it a shot of just talking things out. Like I said, there's Whisperflow, you've got your voice notes app on your phone, whatever. There's like so much technology out here.
There is a tool that can help you do this, whether it's paid, free, whatever. So consider that. Consider talking it out instead of typing it out. Now the third thing may be that you're doing all the things right with your blogs. Maybe you have SEO in them. Maybe you already feel like you're creating these resources, but you're frustrated because you're like, I hate blogging because it's not working. Well, oftentimes I find that people have skipped website SEO.
So I see this, you know, when people join me for discovery calls or we're having conversations in the DMs or they email me. I'm seeing this far too often where people are like, I'm just gonna hop, skip, jump over into content and I'm just gonna do SEO there. Beautiful, lovely, and not the most efficient. So if you feel like your blogs, quote unquote, aren't working for you, could be that you don't have SEO on your website. Could be
That you haven't optimized your blogs to the fullest of their ability. So maybe you have an SEO strategy, maybe you have an SEO title, a meta description, your URL slug is looking good, but you don't have the heading structure how it needs to be. All of these things are very important and they're tiny little tweaks that make a really big difference. So those could all be things that you would want to think through. When you skip website SEO and jump straight into blog SEO, you're missing that foundational piece. The reason you want to
Brittany Herzberg (09:24.642) Do this in this order is do website SEO first because that will give you the foundation. You'll be able to find your neurostar, answer those three questions of who you help, how you help them, why you. That guides your keyword research. And then you know what keywords, what points, what topics to emphasize with some regularity. You know what to be saying. You know that. Let me give you an example. One of my clients, here we go. Jenna is a branding.
And website designer. She works specifically on Squarespace. So for her, I want her to be mentioning Squarespace in quite a lot of her blog post titles. I also want her to be mentioning the coaches and the therapists that she works with. Now it doesn't have to say Squarespace and therapists and coaches in all of her blog post titles, let alone all of her blogs. But we want to see that with some regularity because then the bots are like, okay, I get it. okay, I see. I understand. So you need to have
your website done first because it gives you that indication of the things that you do need to be a little bit repetitive about. And then you can make sure that there's like a really strong through line from your website SEO through into your blog post SEO. And if you have one, a podcast as well. It's really beautiful. Every step builds on each other. So website and then content. And then you can get into metrics tracking and you can start seeing things like what's happening with one of my clients. They do these really big home tours and
It's wild. I'm laughing because I'm just like, wait, what? How am I about to say this? Their home tours are having people spend an average of seven plus minutes on those website pages, on their blog posts. So there's very long copy, there's a big story, there's a lot of visuals, there's a lot of images, there's a lot of links that we weave into these things. You can go shop some of the product. Like it's really fun, but it's a really robust resource. And it's beautiful to see that people are coming to their website and hanging out for seven plus minutes. I it's just
I love it. Chef's kiss. So when you do the things in the order that they need to be done, stuff like that can actually happen. So if you're like, my gosh, maybe I don't actually hate blogging. Maybe it's that I have a problem with thinking that I'm a good writer and maybe I can try talking this out. no, maybe I did goof and I skipped website SEO and I really need to go back and do that. The place that you want to be going first is the SEO sprint. That is where you're going to be able to come in.
Brittany Herzberg (11:46.872) Join us. We're going to focus on website SEO. You're going to learn how to find your keywords, how to take those keywords and build an SEO strategy, and then how to actually make sure that it's plugged into your website properly. I walk you through all of that. I have one coming up in October and I have one coming up in December. Now, normally these are two-week SEO sprints, but the end of the year is a little nutty over here. So October is actually going to be a three-week SEO sprint. I'm going to be gone for a little bit in the middle.
So I'm extending it so it's three weeks. And then in December, I want to do a five-day sprint again because I know there's so many business owners who are like, my gosh, I have half to spend money, need to focus on my business for the first time this year. I want, you know, 2027 to be different. So I'm going to be doing those. The links will be below for that. Find me if you have any questions on that for sure. And speaking of questions, you can still join us in the SEO huddle. You can ask me questions in there. They could be related to blog SEO, website SEO, SEO, even for like social media, you name it.
That is what we're going to be talking about over there. And the idea is not that you're going come in and hang out in the SEO huddle for months and months and months. I want you to come in. I want you to get your questions answered. And I want you to get a move on. If I am being so blunt, that is what I want you to do. I don't want to be sitting here with the same, I don't know, wherever you're taking me today, if we're in the car, if we're on a walk. I don't want to be having the same conversation with you even a year from now. Definitely not two years, three years from now. Like I want you to take this information, get a move on.
So that you can get found while you're sleeping, while you're living a life, while you're just like doing normal people stuff. I want this to be your reality because it can be your reality. And you're already doing so much hard work, putting out content, having a website that's beautiful. I want people to see that. I want them to find you. I want them to know that someone like you exists and can help them. All right, I'm gonna get off my soapbox. Come find me with any questions. Remember that it may not be that you hate blogging. It may be that you just haven't
found the right way into blogging. And maybe that you have a little bit more work to do on your website. And maybe that you just haven't found the right medium of like getting content out there. Like for example, maybe it's the podcast stuff. So bookmark this one, come back, listen to me again, maybe even jot down some of the answers, brain dump like I said earlier, of like the questions that people are actually asking you. All right. And as always, remember that I'm cheering you on on your SEO journey.
