In a Fog

It feels like it’s been a while, huh? Every time I’ve gone to write one of these, something terrible happens and I’m either too sad, angry, or both to actually write about anything. May was my most productive month writing for sites like Bam Smack POW! and Dork Side of the Force, but I also tried taking a stab at doing some SEO-style posts for That’s Entertainment—which worked, but boy oh boy, was it exhausting!

Writing for SEO vs. Writing what you want

Now, writing for SEO and writing what you want aren’t mutually exclusive. You can put good SEO on pieces that you want to write about, but the results are only going to be good as what readers are actually searching for. I just watched the first season of The Boys and can write a 500-1000 word article (likely more) about it. However, that post won’t get nearly as many hits as a 250-300 word article about the runtime of this week’s Ms. Marvel or what time the episode will drop. Guess which one is harder to write?

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love writing some SEO content—I did a piece on Scarlet Witch vs. Doctor Strange that was SEO gold and I loved writing it. But I can only tweak runtime posts so much before I want to bash my head in (shout out to all my editors and site experts who have to write this kind of stuff daily—you’re made of a special breed).

But, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Writing content that you want that is also SEO gold. That’s what my SW v DS post was. It may be hard, but timing is everything. Have something to say about Thor? If it’s not breaking news, save it for the first two weeks of July 2022. Obviously, breaking news should in and of itself be SEO-ready—Chris Pratt adopted a real-life velociraptor? WRITE THAT RIGHT NOW!

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No Escape!

On a more personal note, after 2.5 years, I finally caught COVID. As I started writing this newsletter, I was in the early stages of it—which, for me, was a bad head cold. As I’m finishing this up, not only am I CDC-approved to venture out in the world, my symptoms have been gone for a few days now. I count myself very lucky, and filled with the power of a vaccine, that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It was just one more thing to deal with during a frustrating week, that I already hinted at being angry about above (so no need to get into it!).

While I’ve been writing, I’ve also been chugging along with some other projects:

• Starbird Media has our first web maintenance client!

• Continued progress on our own website!

  • This includes my personal site too!

• We’ve recorded about a month’s worth of our newest podcast, Walking with Writers!

That last bullet point means we are about a week away from debuting the new podcast. I’ll try and get the readers an early look at the show in the next few days, but our “Episode 0” should be up this week so we can get the feed approved by Apple. From there, the goal will be to get a rough edit of each episode up on Substack about a week before it’s released to the general public. Episode 1 should drop on 7/6 (so your rough edit won’t be a week early, but it’ll still be early) and every Walking with Writers will drop every Wednesday thereafter (though, I will say that I’m leaving room to adjust that schedule if it becomes too much).

I will likely be dropping two more VERY quick newsletters this week for anyone that may be interested in getting an early look at Walking with Writers. My first guest is Mike DeAngelo, the author & creator of the Tellest series. Until next time…

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