How to write a business blog which matters, with Rachel Extance

Welcome to Building Your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Rachel Extance. When people say, what's the best thing to create? I always say the thing that you find easiest, because otherwise it will be that Friday afternoon job that you detest and it just won't get done. You'll just fall down, down the list. Hi there and welcome back to Building Your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new, take one second, stop whatever it is you were about to do, because I know you just clicked play, and take a second to subscribe. That way you won't miss a thing and my numbers will grow. Numbers growing are my favourite thing, as well as obviously getting to spend time with wonderful people like you. Additionally, if you do enjoy this kind of thing, you will love the Personal Brand to Business Roadmap. 100— not 100, 50 pages. Where am I getting 100 from? Of everything you need to start, grow, or fix your expert business. 100% free as a gift from me. Just visit applyme.agency/roadmap. And that's my intro over, Rachel. I've read the script. We've done it. This week, I am delighted to be welcoming my friend Rachel Enskextensd to the show. Rachel is an award-winning blogger in a world that doesn't really reward bloggers that much anymore. And I'm going to be put right on that, I'm quite sure. One of the best thinkers on how to make complicated environments seem simple. Rachel, welcome to the show. Hi, Bob. Thanks for having me. So this is your second time on the show. We spoke years ago. I can't believe it's as long as it is. And really back then we were focusing on blog. Yeah. I rather flippantly talked about blogs as irrelevant. That was a little bit tongue in cheek. It's really not. If I look at the analytics on my website, it tells a very different story. Something like 70% of traffic comes in through the blog pages. I think it's the nature of what's happening on those blog pages that's perhaps evolving and how things are landing on those pages most certainly evolving and not actually in a good way a lot of the time. That's what we're going to talk about today among many other things. So if you're listening thinking, oh, it's going to be a blog post, I'm going to go do something else. It's not. This is probably going to be the most useful conversation you listen to. The whole year, if your business has kind of reached the point where things are getting complicated. Rachel, welcome. For the listener who's meeting you for the first time, who is Rachel Extens? I am a former journalist, used to work on local newspapers specialising in local government. So lots of attending extremely long meetings and going through complicated agendas, which most people would never look at. And then I went on to edit newspaper websites at a time when newspaper websites were quite new. And I was working with development teams to put those together. So, figuring out what sections you needed in a website and then what content you would use to populate them. So, this is when lifestyle sections were starting to come along. So, we were going beyond the old-fashioned idea of it's just news and sport. We were bringing other things as well. So then my day-to-day job was figuring out what's going at the top of the website, what's going on the sidebars, how are we leading people through content? And then I started my own business after I got made redundant, like so many people do, and went into copywriting. And over the years, what I've realised is that, A, people overlook so many of their stories. There are so many ways that you can be talking about who you are, what you do, why you do it, how people can get involved, how it's relevant to them. And that people often don't, they have a website that they kind of build and it all looks lovely and then they leave it alone. And that's where the blogging comes in. But also people aren't always thinking about, we often think, oh, well, I've built that and I've put a lot of effort into the homepage. Very often people aren't coming in through the homepage. They're coming in through all sorts of different routes and people have all sorts of questions and we've become, gradually we ask each other fewer and fewer questions and we're sitting and typing on our keyboard more and more and more questions. And that's where your website is such a useful thing because you want people to be asking those questions and you're coming up and you're helping them. Whether that is a blog post, whether that's a video, whether that's a podcast, because we all learn through different mediums. And that's another thing that I think people don't realise is, yes, we're going to be talking about blogging and yes, I am a writer, But all of the things I talk about apply equally to video or to podcasts and individual learners. You know, they're, they're, I believe people need to be thinking about these different sorts of ways of creating content so you can reach more people. So one of the things I noticed, and I think this kind of has to be the obvious place to begin, is it's never been easier to whip up a blog post. AI makes this outrageously easy for us. And if we would be doing the audience a disservice if we didn't acknowledge that that is the case. But something I find is that AI is an amplifier. If you have no imagination, AI is going to help you produce very anodyne informational content that's not going to really connect with anyone. If you are a very creative person with lots of ideas, it will let you execute on those very, very quickly. But what I experience almost universally is the kind of thing that could be considered an imagination gap. That, and we're gonna talk more broadly about strategic editorial structure of complicated information in a little while., but I'm putting myself in the shoes of the average business owner, leader, somebody who likes the idea of thought leadership, or perhaps evolved as a professional in an environment where that was something the PR company did or the marketing team did. Yeah. They've never had to really create themselves. And what comes up there is often, well, I don't know what to write about. 'Everybody else is already writing about that,' or 'I'm scared people might not like it.' What happens if people get angry with me? I have an opinion. I guess what I'd like to look at maybe first is the imagination gap, the blank sheet of paper. I don't know what to do. I don't know what makes me different, distinctive. I don't know what I care about. How do you walk people through beginning to develop a habit of that side of things? The easiest way to start, and you've raised a whole load of things there, which I'll get onto, but I'd say the easiest way to start is to think about what you have done this week or this month. What has your work looked like? Just write down, you can keep a diary if you want, but if not, just a quick think back. What's come up the last week or so? What conversations have I had? What questions have people asked me? What things have I got stuck on or have I had to really think about? Or what am I noticing in my industry? Just simple list. You don't need to be writing out paragraphs or anything like that. Just jotting down things like that. And those will all give you ways in. I talk about businesses as, often you kind of have this sort of jumble of white light. And I talk about having an editorial expansion prism, which is where you take your, your white light and you shine it through and it splits out into all of the different aspects of your business. So if you're thinking about what you've done over the last week or the last month, you have got who you are, what you do, and why. And anyone in business needs to have that very clear because that's where you start talking about things. If people don't understand who you are, what you do, why you do it, why it's for them, you're really going to struggle. So that's the first thing, your identity and purpose. Then you've got things like updates and activity, what people see as news. And very often people don't use their blog because they don't have any news. They think news needs to be "I've just hired somebody. I've got a new finance director," or "We've just won an award." And actually, news can be all sorts of things. It can just be your day-to-day thing, things that you're doing. It doesn't have to be something that seems exceptional. Most of us do not have exceptional days. You might have an exceptional thing that happens once or twice a year.. So if all you're doing is waiting for that, that's going to— you're going to struggle. Then you have things like knowledge and insights, and this is when we talk about thought leadership. So what is it that you know about? Nobody else is going to have done all the jobs that you have done, spoken to all the people that you've spoken to, read the books you've read, listened to the podcast you've listened to, watched the videos you've watched. All of these mean that you have got a unique perspective They might have done what you do in Kent. They haven't done what you do in Manchester. They might have started off in the same place as you, but then taken a totally different path. They won't have worked on that project that you did 3 months ago, which you really, really enjoyed and gave you lots of insights into things that you weren't aware of before. So these are all things that can feed into your thought leadership. Then you've got your work and project. So your day-to-day behind the scenes. And so many of us, my business is sitting at a computer. I sit and I type. It's not the most exciting thing for somebody to look at. I'm always quite jealous of people who'd have visual businesses or who are out and about all the time, because I'm like, oh, if only I had that life, it'd be so much easier to show up. But you have got things from behind the scenes that you could be sharing. Giving people insights into what you're doing. And that helps people understand how your business works. It helps people see, oh, actually, I hadn't realised that this company did this, or I hadn't realised that this work exists. And actually, I could do with some of that myself. And then you've got community and participation. So that's where you bring in other people. Who are your collaborators? Who are the people on your team? What's happening in your wider community? Are you taking a stall at the village fete or or sponsoring something, or is there content that you could bring in from people? Maybe people have used your product or your service and they've written you a review. So, all of these sorts of things come under community and participation. So, you've got a whole load of different things that you can be using to talk about. And when you start thinking about it like that, you start seeing that actually you've got quite a rich seam of information that you can be drawing on and things that you can be talking about. And it doesn't have to be long. People often think that, oh, a blog, that must be 2,000, 3,000 words. Doesn't have to be at all. You know, it can be a couple of hundred. All you need to be doing is putting something out that gives people the information that they need or entertains them or informs them, perhaps does all three. And it's absolutely fine if your blog is a series of photos with some words in between. It's absolutely fine if it's, I'm embedding this video and I'm putting show notes underneath. All of this counts. I think what I really like about the way you describe that, all of that, is it almost doesn't matter where the content goes. What matters is that you show up and you put it somewhere where it's an investment. And on your website, in the blog, is building a proper asset. Every time you invest in that blog, its footprint grows, its potential to attract audience grows. And I know myself having had essentially a, a blog post every single week for 5 years that compounds up like a high-interest bank account, but it doesn't have to just live there. So my blog posts are essentially my podcast interviews, but I know people who will take a blog post and read it as a solo podcast. They'll then use it in another way as a marketing email or just an email, a letter from the desk of, or it might also become a LinkedIn newsletter. So we create once and then we can derive value from it multiple times. But I emphasise for the listener, anywhere that you put that other than your blog, your playing the hamster wheel game. Put it on your blog, you're paying a— playing a very different game. Yes, absolutely. I always say to people, you create it once, you create it on your website, and then you repurpose it so that you've always— a, you're always bringing people to your online home, which is your website, because we all know, you know, platforms can disappear tomorrow, or they can change, or the algorithm can switch. Your website is your website. You own it, you control it, you decide what goes. But also, you don't need to be thinking, oh gosh, I've got to come up with an idea for the email, I've got to come up with an idea for the intranet, I've got to come up with an idea for LinkedIn, I've got to come up with an idea for Instagram, I need to come up with an idea for Instagram Stories because people tell me I have to do storeys as well as posts, and then there are Reels. You write your blog post or you create your video or your podcast, repurpose it into those other things. It's a lot easier. You don't need to be constantly reinventing for every platform. So something I encounter a lot is, okay, producing a blog post as a piece of information is fairly straightforward. That's doable for most people, but the average blog post— I'm talking about the average blog post— it doesn't do much to create a connection. And this is often my argument for a lot of people to maybe focus on a podcast and repurpose it into a blog. But that doesn't mean it isn't possible. What it does mean is you kind of need to invest of yourself. Yes. It's very easy to have AI write a blog post, but the problem with that is AI won't have an opinion. It won't have passion. It certainly won't know what your enthusiasm is. And a lot of the time people worry about what happens if people disagree? What happens if they don't like it? What happens if I'm wrong? I know you work with a lot of people who are very passionate. They're focused on movement building, change making, things like that. These are people who need to have opinions, and I think when you're at the beginning of that journey, it's very difficult. How do you move people through finding their voice, I think writers would call it? I think it is a sliding scale for everybody. People have different sort of those tolerances. But I would say if you don't put something out there, you will never know. And things can take off in ways you don't expect. Yes, that's absolutely true. But I think our fear of being judged— and this starts when we're really young— there's a brilliant book called Ask a More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. And we ask more questions when we are 4 years old than we will in the rest of our life because we're gradually trained out of doing it. And one of the ways we're trained out of doing it is you don't want to be the kid that puts the hand up and you don't want people to laugh at you when you say, "I don't know." You don't want people to laugh at you if you say something and the teacher disagrees with you. So we're almost trained not to do it. So it is a very— it can be a very difficult thing to do. I would say that you have every right to your opinion. You know, nobody can say you're not allowed to have your opinion. That's absolutely fine. As long as you're not doing active harm to somebody else, and I doubt that anybody listening to this would be doing active harm to anybody else. You can test what you've written, share it with a colleague, share it with a friend, share it with somebody you live with. Hey, what do you think about this? Does this make sense to you? Is there something in here that you would disagree with? You're going to fact-check. I know you're going to fact-check because people that listen to a show like this are absolutely going to do their due diligence. So, if you've written a stat, you're going to go and make sure that that stat is definitely true. So, you know that you've got things backed up. There are— truth is a really interesting thing. What's true to me might not be true to you. Where I say, you know, I can say it's incredibly hot today, and you might say, "No, it's not," because you're living somewhere else entirely. So, truth is something which is a matter of perspective in quite a lot of cases. And I think we can get very bogged down in people saying, "No, that's not the way it works." It might not be the way it works for them, but if it is genuinely the way it works for you, if you are genuinely having these conversations with people around you, if you are genuinely in situations where you found that something works or you spotted there's a gap in the market, Or you found that this thing that everybody talks about and says, "Oh, you know, everybody should do it like this," and you're sitting there saying, "But when I've tried that," and I have genuinely tried it, "and it doesn't work for me, but I've found A, B, and C instead," and I could give these different options. You know, that's absolutely fine. And, you know, we know that we all have different points of view. We know that there are all sorts of different ways of thinking in the world. We see it every day in the news. If people are— disagree with you, you have the option to have a chat with them and have a grown-up conversation. If they are going to be aggressive about it, then there is a block button. And I think too often we get dragged into debates that we wouldn't normally get dragged into. Because we feel like somebody's wrong on the internet. So many people are wrong on the internet, you'd be there all day. Uh, it's perfectly okay to say, it's okay, this is my genuine lived experience, this is my genuine opinion, this is my genuine well-researched piece of content, and I stand by it, and it's not doing anybody any harm, and people are welcome to disagree. We talk about Marmite businesses, we talk about saying things which attract the people that you want to work with and repel the people that you don't want to work with. I say things all the time, I talk about things that I know are absolutely going to put people off, and that's fine because the people that I work with are the people that like me, and I wouldn't know that if I didn't share my opinion. You're absolutely right. I think there is the phrase, your vibe attracts your tribe, but only if you're transmitting. Yes. That signal needs to have a degree of clarity to it, and if it's going to cut through, it needs to be distinctive. And I think a lot of people, when they transmit, they're transmitting on exactly the same frequency as all their competitors. So nobody really catches it. I think if I ask most people, what are you for? They've no problem telling me what they're for. But if I ask them, what are you against? They're very reticent to actually declare, well, I don't like this. And me, for example, I have begun very subtly talking about the marketing industrial complex because the entire marketing industry wants us to spend our money in places that are frankly profitable for them rather than effective for the business owner, especially my kind of business owner. And that's a strong position. The majority, I won't get invited to conferences because of that. That's fine. I'm fine with that because the people who will vibe with that. They're my people. And it's a distinctive signal that will cut through. But in expressing it, I have to be quite comfortable with the negative reaction. But most importantly, for me and for most people listening, the negative signal you will never see. You won't experience it. One of the things I talk about a lot is what I would call the rule of thirds. For me, this was the most liberating thing. When I understood it didn't matter who you— doesn't matter who you are, one-third of people will ignore you. One-third of people will actively dislike you, but one-third of people will love you. And I found that statistically to hold water for every single person. So if you're busy trying to fit in and look like somebody else, you're attracting people who are attracted to somebody you're pretending to be. So when you have them in front of you as a client and you don't get on and you don't like them, well, it's your fault. But when you do relax into, well, this is how I feel about things, this is my perspective, this is how I approach. Number one, you, like you said, you attract people who actually you enjoy being with, but also you can begin playing the numbers because you're not hedging anymore. You can show up with an abandon and an enthusiasm that allows you to scale your visibility and cut through. So it's very freeing. Yes. And also you don't have to— there's lots of people that will say, oh, you know, you have to come up with opinions which will absolutely polarise people. And I'm not overly keen on that, I have to say. There are lots of things where I take quite a balanced view. And I think there's a lot to be said for a balanced view. Continuing with your thing about, you know, there's things that profit people, one of the issues I see nowadays is that social media platforms in particular want you to stay on social media platforms. And a way of doing that is indeed, somebody's wrong on the internet. I disagree with this person. This person said something that I find absolutely abhorrent. I must tell this person that I find it abhorrent, and then I must tell all of my friends that I find it abhorrent as well, so that they can also come on and say the same thing.. And it means that we end up in these situations of people are either in Camp A or they're in Camp B. Lots of us are somewhere in the middle. And A, that creates a lot of space for you wherever you are in the middle. Yours, you know, that is completely valid and you will find the people who are also in the middle where you are. You can also, you don't have to express a political opinion. I think people very often get worried about expressing political opinion. I believe that lots of things are political. I believe that running a business is political. You are making decisions about your own life. That is a political thing to do. You are possibly employing people. You are hopefully earning money and hopefully having profits, and that is political. However, you don't have to, you know, be, you know, be broadcasting what your personal political views are. It can be as simple as you're wearing your favourite band t-shirt. Now I might be a fan of your favourite band, and that's great. I might never have heard of your favourite band, and it might bypass me completely. I might look at your favourite band and go, "I can't stand them. How can you possibly listen to that?" Now, that may or may not be something that I'm gonna decide is a deal breaker in working with you. It might be something that I gently rib you with. You will see this all the time with football teams. You know, people very happily will take the mick out of somebody for their football team, or they will say, 'Hooray, we're both fans of the same football team.' So these things can create alliances, or they can be things where people go, 'Yes, you're for me. No, you're not for me.' It doesn't have to be that you are putting out, you know, really strident opinions on things. If that's not who you are, what you want to do, you don't have to do that. And it's, it's completely up to you as well how much of your personal life you share. I think people often feel like, oh, what they're telling me is I must show, you know, with behind the scenes content, I must show all the things I do when I am not at work. No, you don't. You decide what's public, you decide what's private, you decide how much of your life other people get to have access to. If you don't want to show photos of yourself, you don't have to show photos of yourself. You certainly don't have to show photos of your family members, and in fact I'd advise not to do it. But, you know, there are, there were all sorts of things where you decide, and again, take a piece of paper, jot down, this is what I'm happy to do, this is what I'm absolutely not doing, and you decide where your boundaries are. So one of the reasons I often encourage people to go the podcast or YouTube route, because those are two other proper asset classics, if you like. Yeah, it's because it's superficially very easy to see how a personal brand can be established through those platforms. You can easily build that parasocial relationship because people are listening to you in the ears, they're forming their own sort of version of you psychologically inside that they have a relationship with. With YouTube, that's even more obvious. It's quite easy to do on a social media platform just with the odd snap here and there. But with a blog, the assumption would be that that's a lot harder. As somebody who writes words and educates on words for a living, I know that my assumptions are false. There will be ways to approach this. How do you help people inject the kind of personality that actually leaps off the page? Not necessarily one blog post, but over time, I really feel like I get to know you. A lot of blogs I read, that just doesn't happen. Again, it's being willing to share what's happening around you. What have you read? What have you listened to? What's going through your brain, your mind at the moment? What are the things you're grappling with? So often we are afraid to say, I don't know, or we're afraid not to show the polished, finished version. And actually, the magic is in that figuring out where you're going with something, testing ideas, being willing to say, what do you think about this? Or, I'm thinking of going down this route. A light example, I, uh, somebody that I follow on Instagram, I happened to spot a video where they were talking about redesigning their bathroom, and they said, I found these really gorgeous tiles, I absolutely love these tiles. And they got a whole load of comments saying, just so you're aware, those are going to get dry water spots on them. And they were like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. And they went away and they tested them. They set up, they bought lots of different tiles and then they sprinkled water on them and saw what happened over time, what happened at the finish. You wouldn't have that if you weren't willing to say, though they could have done, hey, I had my bathroom done and ta-da, look at this. But they didn't do that. They took people along with them. And A, it means that people feel that they are invested in it. They've had a hand in this. They're supporting you along the way. They're cheerleading. They're able to contribute and have their views heard heard. And also, when you get to the final thing, they know what it's about. They understand what you've been through. They understand why it is the way that it is, because you've shown them the different parts that you went through. Architecture is a brilliant way of doing this, you know, and you're thinking about, you know, what goes into building an extension or designing a garden, these sorts of things. You can say, you know, my thought process was this, and then I discovered there was this thing, or then we saw this thing over here and decided we wanted to include it. And, you know, you've, you've brought people along on the journey with you, creates great content that you can keep updated with. People are interested to see behind the scenes. They're interested to be on that journey with you, and they're going to be more invested when it comes to you saying, and this is the final thing. As you listen, I kind of had a vision of my own ecosystem, and I can see a world where you might do a YouTube video, you might do a podcast interview,, but you have reflections afterwards. And something like a blog can become the glue where people actually don't just experience the polished output, but the why and how you feel about it. One of the things with podcast interviews is my job is to help you communicate and my opinions, I kind of should almost keep them to myself. I don't, but a lot of the time when I ask a question, I kind of feel I already know the question, the answer, but the act is asking the question. But it doesn't end when we stop recording. We'll have chat afterwards. We have a relationship outside of this interview. I will have subsequent reflections months later that this can have a whole— and actually that's tremendously valuable. Great thing about a blog is it's a place where you can think. I write to think. It helps me think through things. I'll read a book, or I'll have a whole load of things that are in my head all at once, and I'll sit and I'll sort through them by writing about them. And people are interested to read about all sorts of things. We have all sorts of things where people say, oh, you know, people don't have long attention spans these days. They absolutely do. People still read books. People watch 3-hour films. People watch podcast interviews. They will watch reaction videos where people are watching something and giving their reactions in real time. It's all about if you are creating content that somebody else finds interesting, that is valid. It's also valid if you are writing something purely because you need to think through your response to something. Maybe something new is happening in your industry, maybe there has been Maybe you know that there's new legislation coming, or maybe somebody has come up with a different way of talking about something. We often think that because we've written it down, it's set in stone, and it's not at all. You can write something, A, unless you've got a gigantic audience, it's not going to be read by a million of people, and that's just reality. It's the same for any kind of content. Some people do have gigantic audiences, and that's fine, but most of us don't have gigantic audiences. It's highly unlikely that anybody's going to read it and, you know, be so cross with you that something disastrous is going to happen to you. We catastrophize a lot, and that's not going to happen. That opportunity to sort of think through your thinking and write about it, I think, is a really important thing. And I always say to people, you know, how would you feel if this was splashed across the front page of a newspaper? And if you felt that somebody would look at it and go, so what, then you're absolutely fine. If you feel that this was splashed across the front page of a newspaper and you'd be hiding in your house, then don't write that, don't publish that. You know, we've all got quite sensible things where we know, you know, that's the thing you say in public. That's the thing you don't say in public. I remember in something like 2005, I started a blog. Like, I'd written something like 2 posts, and I thought, and I had a business partner at the time, and I was basically writing about him because he was an idiot. And like, he found this blog post within 2 days, and I really shouldn't have written that. It's just an entertaining storey for the listener. More than anything else. Our relationship didn't last much longer than that, but it probably shouldn't have anyway. I will, I will sort of say, with things like that, do think about, is it your storey to tell? I think that's a really important thing for people, you know. If you're writing about somebody else, how would they feel about that? And just, you know, what are— what would somebody else think if they read this? That someone who really genuinely matters to you family member, close friend, people that really matter to you, is that something where you have a concern about that? Would it affect them? Basic right and wrong, really. And in my defence, I didn't name him. He was the only person who would ever known it was him. Yeah. And I, I know people who write about other people, they change, they change their gender or they change the, the sector that they work in. There were all sorts of ways of doing these things. The long and the short of it was I shouldn't have done it. So what I'd like to move on to is if you have a straightforward, simple business, I don't think anybody would identify as having a simple business, but if you're one person doing one thing for one kind of client, creating content and your ecosystem can be fairly straightforward. If your business is more complex, either as an entrepreneur or you have lots of different things going on, prioritising the storytelling and structuring and how people move through your storey is very complex. And it's an area that I'm starting to experience a little bit of friction in. It was only when we were speaking before the call, I realised actually this is what's vaguely stressing me at the moment. I have, for the listener, probably the podcast is the thing that you experience as The Bob Gentle Show. But my main business is I do consulting and advisory work around personal brands and leadership brands and the monetization of those. But I'm also involved in a family software business where we have, I'm looking at the list here with the tools. So we have productivity tools and LinkedIn tools. And in addition to that, there's Speaking, there's the media stuff. There's so many different things going on and the digital real estate, so multiple websites now, and you start to feel a little bit fractured. And if I'm feeling fractured, what that means is that my audience certainly doesn't have efficient routes to whatever's relevant for them. How do you help people organise this, these more complex ecosystems? So I think mapping it out the way that you have, what have I got where, what needs to be separate, what could be joined together. Is it that you could have a website which literally works a little bit like Linktree where you sort of say, you know, there are these different things, choose your doorway. But then when you have your, if you were to have an individual website, It's clear labelling on your menus. It is having search boxes. So many websites don't have search boxes. But it's a really simple, basic thing that you can add in for somebody to just type in something and find it. You, and internal linking as well. Creating hubs so that people can find out things and follow off different links. Watch a video, listen to a podcast, find the key things they need to know about this. It's all going to differ depending on, on your business, what you're doing, all of these, but there are lots of different things that you can do to try and keep it simple. And I would say make it as simple for yourself as you possibly can. How much time do you have to commit to doing this? What resources do you have? Who is going to be doing this work. It's no good saying what we're going to do is a weekly vlog if you do not have anybody who can A) put it together and B) edit it and then send it out, because all you're doing is setting yourself up for misery. It's just, you know, do not set yourself up for misery. This is with everything. When people say what's the best thing to create, I always say the thing that you find easiest. Because otherwise it will be that Friday afternoon job that you detest and it just won't get done. It will just fall down, down the, down the list. So creating a website where it's easy for people to see, as I say, starting with identity and purpose, who you are, what you do, how people can get involved, creating those doorways, making the pathways easy for people and making sure they don't get lost. And it's worth if things have got gradually bigger, it is worth taking the time, and it is taking time out, and I know that's not always easy for people, but taking the time out to go through and say, right, what have I got where? And am I still offering that lead magnet? Or am I still offering that service? Or, oh, hang on, we launched that, we ran that event. I'm sure that every listener has been in a situation where they have searched for an event and it's come up with the thing that they did in 2023. And you're like, but I don't need to know the timings for 2023, I need to know the timings for now. Or does this event still even exist? Is it running this year? So, you know, just going through and closing off things which don't exist anymore. But what is— have a look at it and literally just mapping out paths and thinking, this person comes along, what doorway do they need to go through? This person comes along, they've never experienced us before, where do I need to send them? This person comes along with this specific question, have I got a specific answer for them? I think as well, as you're speaking, I'm thinking on the one hand of a very large company that I worked with, there's something like a £2 billion company. And then there's my own little ecosystem and there's the same challenge in both that they're creating content in lots of different silos.. And these pieces of content would be tremendously valuable if they were more intelligently distributed across the various platforms, because a blog post about one little piece of farming machinery might be also really useful in this other website. They don't do farming machine, but similarly, if there's a productivity post on the Google Inbox management tool, that's probably equally valid on the CRM website and on my personal website and making sure that we're channelling content and building systems that facilitate leverage because if we don't, we won't. This is one of the things I think newspapers typically do incredibly well is they understand the investment they make in content and that investment needs to be surfaced as often and as relevant as possible. Because if they do that, the person who does that best wins the reader, I guess, and the advertiser. And it's simple to do with tagging and categories. And you can pull things in across different websites. If assuming you're all building them using the same, same system, you can say, you know, could you bring in this from this website? And yes, it might be that somebody goes across to your sister sites. But, you know, as long as it's all clear and people can find their way back again, that's absolutely fine. You don't have to be reinventing the wheel. You don't want to be in a situation where you've written this brilliant productivity article and then you're thinking, right, I don't want to have duplicate content, so I have to recreate this productivity article in 3 different ways. You know, you can pull it across to different places and make use of it in different ways. And Maybe you want to, you know, I have blog posts on my homepage as well as on my blog. I have a sidebar as well so people can find things. And then I have a second site and I pull things across from one site to the other so that people can see both things. And it also helps with search engines as well to understand that these things are interlinked. I think the editorial thinking as you described it there, and I think it's very easy to hear editorial thinking and not understand what that means because editor is a fairly generic word. It's anybody who helps make words better. But editorial thinking from the perspective of a newspaper or a media outlet is a very specific thing. It's about understanding the judgments about what's going to get visibility where and why. And As you're speaking, I'm thinking about the value of that to anybody who has a large amount of information. I'm thinking universities, governments, giant corporations. This is money in the bank if you get it right, and it's tremendously diminished opportunity if you don't. You can still be doing well, but if you get this right, your ability to connect and communicate appropriately and timely is a competitive advantage. Yes, absolutely. I think, I always say to people, think about your business or your organisation like a magazine. What are the different sections in your magazine? What are the things that people are going to be interested in, your audience? And that's going to vary from people to people, but if you think about what are the different sections that we have that make sense, is that news, research, and people, for example. And you're thinking about those different buckets, what goes into those different buckets. And you're also going back to your point about people end up in silos. It happens so frequently. Who needs to be aware of this work? And people don't necessarily know how their work connects to the work in a different department because they're not in a position where they're talking to each other. And you have that opportunity through an intranet or through a newsletter to be able to telling people about work, so you're not reinventing the wheel. Because you don't want these people over here to be doing a project, those people over there to be doing a project, and they meet months later and go, hang on a minute, we were both trying to solve the same problem, we just came at it from two different angles. So, again, this is where your communication can be really helpful for people understanding what's going on within an organisation, and this is where your work and projects comes in. So many people people, you know, when you have an intranet or you have an internal newsletter, that opportunity to be acting as a bridge between different departments, I think, is a really important one. I mean, that's one of the things that really stands out in your work, is this quaint, old-fashioned idea of a newsletter. In the right business, it's a catalyst like no other in terms of connecting and fostering Yeah, fair enough, parasocial relationships. But if I know what those people in the other organisation or the other department are doing, or the other location, I feel connected. I feel bound, binded again. What? Bound? Binded? Binded is not a word. Bound. Bound. And in a world where employee enlistment and connection is being more and more commoditized, that sense of connection and enlistment is at a premium. And, you know, being able to communicate like this, particularly I think in a paper newsletter, makes it very, very tangible. It helps you innovate as well, you know. If somebody over here has got a project that's enabling them to do something faster or easier or connect things, then you can say, oh, actually we could be using that too. So One of the things we were talking about before we started recording was this idea of almost serialisation. Things like Charles Dickens and Shakespeare, they would always release a play as a serial. We see them as finished articles, but that's never how they were created. And then a lot of good blogs are a little bit like this. And I was asking how you support people in finding their voice and you describing this kind of environment where you help cultivate that habit in people. You were talking about the coffee house, Rachel's Coffee House. Tell me about that because I think a lot of people might be interested. So the coffee house is based on the old-fashioned idea of a salon where people come together, discuss issues of the day, and then go away and write about them. And I feel that so often today we have algorithms which lead us down one path. We see one point of view because we click on something, we say, yeah, I like that, and then we click on the next thing, we say, yeah, I like that, and then it feeds us all things that are more of the same. So we don't see a plethora of voices, and we're not necessarily exposed to lots of different people's experiences. So I wanted to create a place where people could come along and share, but also where people had that opportunity to research things. So often people don't talk about saying— going back to a question you asked me right at the start of what if I'm wrong, or what if people disagree with this— it's a safe space where people can come along and share their views, listen to others, think about things, have that private reflection before they're willing to go public. And also that you want to be able to Just start small with something where you say, "I don't know about this," or "I'm not sure about this," or "I want to be able to talk about this thing, but I'm not quite sure how to do it." I feel that there's lots of things where people would talk about things, but they're so afraid of being wrong, or they're so afraid of putting something out there and somebody disagreeing with them. And it means that some people control the narrative all of the time, and other voices that we need to be hearing gradually get locked away. And with AI, there were— I've got a couple of issues with, with it. One is that it bypasses our thinking, going back to the fact that we don't ask questions. It's very easy to put a question into AI and it comes up with this instant answer. It doesn't necessarily give you nuance unless you've asked it to say What are the different ways of thinking about this? Please give me all the angles. Most of us say, how do I do such and such? And it gives you an instant answer. Or why is it this way? And it gives you an instant answer. And that's not gone anywhere near your brain. And I find for people that are writing blog posts where they say, I need a blog post that talks about this thing, and AI does that, and that's not, that's not had that opportunity for you to think Is that how I'd do it? What about this situation where somebody has got these things happening? So you lose that nuance, you lose that human touch. It also means we doubt ourselves, we don't trust ourselves. The computer's so quick and the computer knows everything because it's read— we're told it's read everything, it knows everything, therefore the computer must be right. You've got 20, 30, 40 years of experience. You absolutely know your stuff, but you're not sharing your experience because, oh, hang on a minute, that's not what, that's not what the AI came up with. And I think that's a really dangerous situation to be in. And also it means that there are viewpoints which aren't heard, there are real life experiences which don't get heard, there are things that you're not aware of like media ownership. Who owns the newspaper you're reading? Who owns the television that you are watching? It's increasingly something which I, I look at and go, hang on a minute, is this thing being written for me living in Britain, or is this thing being written for somebody who lives in America? And of course my needs are different, my, my lived experience is different, my viewpoints will be different. But because that media organisation wants to attract the most eyeballs it possibly can, it's written that for an audience that isn't me, but it's presenting it to me. And I'm reading things and thinking, hang on a minute, why doesn't this sound right? Or why isn't this interesting to me? And then of course I switch off. And I think that there are lots of people who have things to offer, who have things they want to say, who are in communities which are underserved. Who need to have the confidence, the ability to be able to express those things and put them out, because we all need to hear these different voices. Humans need diversity. Humans need different types of people, because when we all become homogenised, it all gets very dull very fast. I think that's one of the things that makes me quite excited about this kind of group, is that if you want to have opinions about things that are distinctive, then it does feel like quite a risky thing to do in the beginning. I remember that myself. And being around other people who are going through the same thing normalises it. And I can't understate that. I remember when I spent about 15 years working in search and rescue and To most people, the kind of things that I was perfectly comfortable with looked ridiculously scary and dangerous. And I look at how do we train people to do those things? That's partly a gradual process of desensitisation, but it's also partly a process of normalisation because you're around other people for whom these things are normal. So you just begin to think they're normal too. And on the AI point, I think We learn through friction and through challenge. AI does not support that. We can create content and broadcast it, but it won't be our opinion. It won't be what we think. It will just be content for the sake of content. There is almost certainly a place for finding efficiencies in the kind of process that you support, but it's not at the beginning. It's not about what am I going to, what do I care about? What do I want to think about? And that's actually the harder part. If anybody's listening and thinking, okay, I like this, but I still can't cope with a blank sheet of paper. I know there's things I want to state, but I just don't know where to begin. Any advice, anything they can take away and think, okay, here, now I know a direction of travel. Sit and Jot down. So if you know there are things you want to talk about, and it might be you want to talk about lots of different things, and that's fine. Sit down, jot them all down. Just literally, if, if mind maps work for you, mind map it. I am not a mind mapper. My brain does not do that. I am a list person. I just do bullet point lists. And then you can look at each thing on your bullet point list and you write some more bullet points about it. So I've written down this thing. Okay. So what are the things that I want to say about that? Bullet point list. And gradually you will see that either you've got one thing that comes from it, or you will see that you've got several things that you could write from it. And what I often see is people write 2, 3, 4 different things all in one. And then I sit there and say, that's a post over here. That's a post over there. That's a post over there. Hold that thought and do something else with it. But you, you have got no short— actually, the problem is not that people don't have any ideas. The problem is people have too many ideas, and then you get into decision overwhelm. So by doing this, you go through, you, you do your, your notes and you jot down your ideas. Then you look through it and say, what's the easiest one of these that I could just write right now? Or that I could talk about right now. Set a timer, give yourself 25 minutes, only 25 minutes. Go for it. Don't worry about whether it's grammatically correct. Don't worry about whether the introduction's any good. Just sit and just bash out whatever comes in your head. If it helps, another way to do this, hop on a Zoom call with somebody or have a conversation with a friend and record it on your phone, and then you've got to Transcript. And you will find that in a 5-minute conversation, you have got a lot of words that you can then go through and turn into something. One of the things I've grown to love is voice typing. I never thought that would happen, but as you were speaking, I was thinking I could waffle around a blog post from a bullet list very easily. Yeah. And then structure it nicely later. Yes, absolutely. You don't need to worry about the structure first. Get the ideas down. That's where the magic is. Structure it afterwards. I think I love what you brought there. This was my obviously too subtle setup because you have a thing on your website called 9 Ways to Tell Your Story. It's amazing. Everyone should get it. If people download that, what can they expect? They will get my guide on why it's absolutely okay to talk about yourself. I think we very often feel, particularly if you're British, I'm not allowed to I should not be boastful. Children are seen and not heard. All of these messages that we were given that are deeply, deeply unhelpful. So talking about how telling your storey is actually beneficial to other people, and it really is important to be able to tell your storey to other people so that you can create that connection. You are doing people a disservice if you're not telling them that you can help them. It's got ideas for where you can share your story. So once you've created this, what are you going to do with it? And then it has got, as it suggests, 9 different ways that you could be talking about yourself. And if you do all of those different things, it will give you a good start. And if people are thinking, hmm, I like the sound of the Coffee House, I know you're starting that towards the end of the summer, something like that. Is there anything they can do to jump on a waiting list or find out more about that? Yes, they can jump on a waiting list on my website, or they can sign up if they look at it and think, yep, that sounds good, that it is available now. And it starts in September and it runs through until July. So it's an academic year-long program. And if you're listening to this in 2028, I'm sure Rachel will still be doing it. I'll still be doing it. So we should head into part 2. I know we're an hour in, And I haven't even got to part 2. Anyway, sorry. So for the listeners, this is Rachel's 3 amplifiers, 3 things that you can go and do, read, eat, mindset, models, hacks, all bets are off. Anything is fair game. Rachel, what's amplifier number 1? We've already done one of them, but anyway, amplifier number 1 is don't assume that people know what you know. I think we are so close to our work, we are so close to our own knowledge that we discount it. And I have sat through countless presentations where people have started talking about this thing and I've gone, "Oh, I talk about this, I do this." And I've sat and watched people frantically scribble notes or take photos of slides on screens. Honestly, people don't know what you know. You know so much. And you, again, going back to how do I start talking about these things? Just start sharing your knowledge and people will thank you for it. They will be grateful for the fact that they understand something that they did not know about before. Second one is repeat yourself. It can be quite difficult to repeat yourself. You can feel like, I've already said this. If you're sharing things Only, you know, it depends where you are, but particularly if you're on social media, 1 to 2% of people will see what you share on social media. Nobody is going to be saying, didn't you say this 3 months ago? Because they probably didn't see it. And if they did see it, they've seen thousands, if not millions of people, pieces of content from since then. Remind them, remind them who you are, remind them what you do. Maybe they weren't looking for you 3 months ago, but now they're in a position where they are. Absolutely remind people about things and reintroduce yourself, because people come into your world all of the time, and they might have only just come across you, they might have come across you 3 years ago, they might have known one bit of your storey but another— but not another bit of your story. So, you know, don't be afraid to reintroduce yourself. The daft storey I always tell about this is that when Freddie Mercury died I was about 11, I think. I lived in a classical music household, so I knew nothing about Freddie Mercury. And somebody solemnly announced his death on the bus, and then Bohemian Rhapsody was being played, and I thought it was new. Bohemian Rhapsody was released in the 1970s. It's absolutely not new at all, but obviously the storey I built in my head was that it was new, and it must have been that he knew he was dying until he wrote the song. Obviously, absolutely not true. So do reintroduce yourself because people do not know about you. My third thing was going to be jot down conversations and activities you, you've taken part in. So I'm going to do it from one, which is I'm currently reading a book, it's very, very brief book, very easy to read, Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, which if you are looking for more information about this, these sorts of things, give yourself ideas, give yourself some encouragement to start talking about who you are, what you do, show your work by Austin Kleon. Austin Kleon is somebody I've been told I should have on the show again and again and again. He writes a brilliant newsletter. Again, if you're looking for newsletter inspiration, very good. Shows 10 things every week and it's always a joy. So the basics, like every time I try and tell people what I do, And I have to find new ways to do it. It's always like the basic, basic things people get super excited about. And you very quickly, as an expert in anything, lose sight of— it's actually just the most fundamental things that can be completely transformational. The repetition. Repetition is one of the foundations of learning, and if you want people to learn about what you do. Repetition is essential. And I think you'll agree that most people on social media always look for new things to talk about. That's not a great strategy. The people who grow the best businesses through content marketing repeat again and again and again the same things, and then there's some variation around it. But if you think you're being too repetitive. You're not being repetitive enough. It should be repetitive to the point where it makes you incredibly uncomfortable. Then you may be reaching the right place. I have had so much fun. This has been really just— I've got a lot to think about. I think I know what I'm doing when it comes to content marketing, but it's only when somebody who spent their entire career with words and pictures and communicating at scale that you realise what got you there won't get you there. And I think somebody once said, new level, new devil. You need to come back, reassess, and do things differently. So I've really enjoyed today. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on, and it's been a really interesting conversation. That does bring us sadly to the end of another episode. Thank you at home for spending some of your precious time me. If you did enjoy the show, then I would welcome you to leave a 5-star review wherever you listen to podcasts, especially Spotify. I would like to say thank you for that because like Spotify this week decided they love me. It's like everywhere. My numbers are through the roof this week. It's awesome. But don't stop, please don't do any negative reviews on Spotify because that'll ruin things. If you did enjoy the show, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap, 50 pages, not 100, of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. 100% free as a gift from me. Just visit amplifyme.agency/roadmap. Thank you at home for listening once again. And Rachel, thank you. You have been awesome. Thanks a lot.