Apparently My Blog Needs a Funnel

Sitting down with the guys, I tentatively asked what they thought of my blog.

This could have been an absolute disaster.

There is nothing quite like asking people you look up to in the industry for an honest opinion and then immediately wondering whether you actually want one.

Luckily, nobody told me it was shite.

Of course, it started with a round of well-placed insults. What do you expect from a bunch of SEOs, devs and marketing people sitting in a pub drinking?

The one thing that stood out to them was that the blog couldn’t be mistaken for anybody other than me. They understood the mix of technical work, research, opinions and the occasional article that started because something had pissed me off.

But I hadn’t asked them what they liked.

I wanted to know what they thought was missing.

That opened the door.

Rich was the first to chip in.

“I’m not sure where I’m going. It all feels like a bunch of really clever brain farts on a page. Where’s my journey?”

Pretty standard advice from a UI/UX guy.

Then Aaron:

“What’s the point of it, Brad? Where’s your conversion?”

Again, fairly predictable coming from a performance marketer.

Then there was Andy.

I’ve known him for nearly 20 years. He has always been my go-to guy—someone who has built several successful businesses and has since retired from the game. His response was considerably more direct.

“How are you making money?”

It was all exactly the sort of advice I would probably give somebody else.

Bugger.

I had made a rod for my own back

This was entirely my fault.

I asked a group of people who understand websites, content and marketing to tell me what was missing from a website full of content.

Of course they found a missing journey.

That is what we do.

We look at a page and ask what somebody is supposed to do next. We look at an archive and try to organise it. We see useful content sitting near a relevant service and immediately start drawing a line between the two.

If I found the same structure on a client’s website, I would start asking questions.

What is the site trying to achieve?

Who is arriving here?

What do they need next?

Where is the evidence?

What happens when somebody reaches the end of an article?

Why are we letting people read about a problem the business solves and then wander off without showing them the solution?

I know how this works.

A “Start here” section would give new readers a way into the blog. I could choose five or six articles, put them into a sensible order and save people from digging through the archive.

The research could be gathered into one area instead of being spread across several articles that are related but currently left to fend for themselves.

The Optimise connection is even easier.

I write about slow websites, broken forms, technical SEO, weak conversion paths and all the small problems that quietly cost businesses money.

Optimise exists to deal with those problems.

The bridge practically writes itself.

If this sounds familiar, I can look for the same problems on your website during a free 15-minute site check.

Lovely.

Relevant article. Relevant service. Helpful next step.

Add a tasteful button and the job’s a good’un.

Except I don’t want to do it.

Apparently everyone needs to be going somewhere

The same assumption sat underneath nearly everything we spoke about.

The blog should be taking people somewhere.

Someone arrives through Google, reads an article and then what?

Do they read another article?

Join a mailing list?

Download something?

Book a call?

Move one step closer to becoming a customer while we all pretend that isn’t exactly what the journey was designed to do?

There needs to be a next step.

We have become so used to treating websites as conversion systems that one without an obvious destination looks unfinished.

There is all this attention sitting around and nobody is doing anything with it.

What a waste.

But what if the person read the article they came to read?

What if it answered their question, helped them solve something or gave them a different way to look at a problem?

What if they then closed the tab and got on with their day?

I am not sure anything has failed there.

They came for the thing.

They got the thing.

Sometimes that is the whole bloody transaction.

I don’t want a “Start here”

Of all the recommendations, a “Start here” section is probably the hardest to argue against.

My blog is jammed with thinking, expertise (opinion) and research.

Giving people a clear starting point would make the whole thing easier to understand.

That is exactly what makes me twitchy.

A “Start here” page means deciding what somebody should understand first.

I would need to choose which brain farts matter, which ideas belong together and what order people should read them in.

Before long, the blog becomes a course.

Start with this article.

Then read these three.

Here are my five principles.

Here is the framework.

Here is a diagram with some arrows.

Give it another week and someone will suggest a downloadable guide in exchange for an email address.

We will have gone from “perhaps this needs a little structure” to “Brad Holmes Content Academy” before I’ve had time to wonder what the fuck happened, my personal blog had become some some sort of weird influencer pitch.

No thanks.

Most people arrive here because they searched for something, followed a link or became curious about a title.

They start wherever they happen to land.

That might be halfway through an idea I’ve been picking at for months. It might be an article I wrote before changing my mind. They might arrive because of a technical SEO study and somehow end up reading about people who begin emails with “I know you’re busy, but”.

That is fine.

They don’t need onboarding.

They can move backwards, sideways or straight back out again.

They can decide for themselves where the beginning is.

The thread the user wants to pull or even better doesn’t want to pull is the journey, if they have landed hopefully i’ve given them the answer or at least the seed they need to continue there own thinking

Optimise is over there

The advice about the conversion path and connecting the articles to Optimise bothered me more.

Not because the connection isn’t real.

It is staring me in the face.

The service has its own page. It explains what I do, who it is for, what it costs and how somebody can speak to me.

I am not hiding it under the stairs.

It is in the navigation.

If somebody wants to find it, they can.

What I have purposely avoided is bolting it onto the end of everything I write.

The moment I put a service message beneath an article, the article changes slightly.

Perhaps not for me. I know why I wrote it.

It changes for the reader.

They reach the end and discover there was somewhere I wanted them to go. The article becomes part of a journey. The useful information starts to look a little like the setup for the offer underneath it.

This may not bother most people.

It bothers me.

Sometimes I write because I’ve noticed something.

Sometimes the data has kicked the legs out from under something I believed.

Sometimes I’ve changed my mind and need to work out why.

Sometimes something at work has got under my skin and I need 1,500 words to figure out what is actually annoying me.

I don’t want every one of those thoughts to finish by asking for something.

The articles might show how I think. They might build trust. They might even cause somebody to contact me six months later.

Brilliant.

That still doesn’t mean they need to become little service-page delivery systems.

Everything useful ends up with another job

This shite happens all the time in marketing.

Something proves useful and we immediately ask it to work harder.

If articles build trust, they should generate enquiries.

If research gets attention, it should collect email addresses.

If people return to the site, we need a newsletter.

If several posts are related, they need a content hub, a journey and a prominent call to action pointing towards whatever we are currently trying to sell.

All of this is stuff i do every day for other businesses because the outcome they want is not the same as what i have here.

The initiative gets a head of steam behind it.

Before long, the blog stops being a place where somebody writes things and becomes a content marketing system with their face stuck at the top.

Then we add targets.

Then we add tracking.

Then somebody wants to know why an article about internal linking only generated two leads last quarter.

This is the bit that does my head in. it is not wrong thses are the correct things to do for the outcome but i think my outcome is different.

Something can build trust without being designed to capture it.

It can demonstrate expertise without turning that expertise into a pitch.

It can influence somebody’s decision without being dragged into the conversion path and given a monthly target.

Not everything that helps a business needs to become part of the sales process.

Sometimes a useful thing can just sit there being fucking useful.

Yes, I know what I write about

The obvious contradiction in all this.

I spend a lot of time telling businesses that their websites need to guide people, reduce doubt and help them make decisions.

I’ve written entire articles about brochure websites that give people information but no meaningful route through it.

Then I maintain a personal blog where someone can arrive, read something and disappear without so much as a gentle shove towards my calendar.

I can already hear the response.

Practice what you preach, Brad.

But these are not the same kind of website. This is not a pitch.

A business website has a commercial job.

If a company relies on its site for leads or sales, leaving people confused and hoping they eventually work everything out is not giving them freedom.

It is just doing a crap job.

A service page should explain the service. A product page should help somebody decide whether the product is right for them. Evidence should appear where evidence is needed. The next step should make sense.

This blog has a different job.

It is a record of what I was thinking at different points in time.

Some posts are useful guides. Some contain research. Some are personal. Some are complaints that got out of hand and needed headings.

My opinions change.

Older articles occasionally disagree with newer ones. There are things I would phrase differently now and conclusions I might pull apart if somebody else published them tomorrow.

That is part of it.

The archive shows the route, including the bits where I wandered down the wrong path or confidently talked bollocks.

It doesn’t present a polished version of events where I apparently knew the answer all along.

It is allowed to just be a blog

I also want my children to be able to read it one day.

Not because every article contains some important piece of their dad that needs preserving for future generations.

There is probably a fairly strict limit on how many articles about Core Web Vitals any child wants to read, regardless of who wrote them.

But the collection shows what I cared about.

It shows the work, the things that frustrated me, the ideas I kept returning to and the occasions when I realised I had been looking at something the wrong way.

That matters to me.

It is not measurable in Analytics.

It doesn’t need to be.

The blog may contribute to my reputation in good ways and bad. It may demonstrate experience. It may occasionally lead to paid work.

Those are consequences of the writing.

They are not conditions I place on whether the writing was worth doing.

Helping isn’t the same as steering

None of this means the site should be deliberately awkward.

Search helps. Categories help. Related articles make sense when the relationship is genuine. Research that belongs together should be connected, especially when somebody is looking for the data.

There is no prize for making people rummage around unnecessarily.

But there is a difference between helping somebody explore and deciding where they should end up.

One gives the reader options.

The other gives me an objective.

That distinction might amount to nothing more than a paragraph and a button, but it changes the relationship.

I want someone to follow another article because it interests them, not because I have built a sequence designed to slowly turn that interest into commercial intent.

I spend enough of my working life asking pages to justify their existence.

The blog can just hold the writing.

I don’t actively track keywords either

There is another part of this that will probably make the SEO people twitch.

i can hear them literally screaming “FFS Brad”

But I don’t actively track keywords for this site.

For clients, absolutely.

If organic search matters to a business, you need to understand what it is visible for, what has moved, where opportunities are appearing and whether the work is having any effect.

Otherwise, you are just making changes and hoping for the best.

I preach that constantly.

Then I come back to my own blog and completely ignore it.

I don’t have a list of target keywords with every article neatly assigned to one. I don’t watch positions move each morning or decide what to write next based on a gap in a spreadsheet.

That isn’t because I think keywords no longer matter.

They do. Keywords are my life’s work.

It is because the moment I actively track a keyword, the article gets another job.

Now it needs to rank.

If it reaches page two, I should improve it. If it drops three positions, I need to investigate. If another article starts competing with it, I have created cannibalisation. If the title isn’t pulling clicks, perhaps it needs rewriting.

Before long, something I wrote because I had an idea has become an underperforming asset.

Then the dashboard gets involved.

The article is no longer allowed to sit there as a record of what I thought. It needs updating, restructuring and generally poking with a stick until Google likes it more.

I know how quickly that changes the writing.

You stop following the thought and start following the opportunity.

You choose the title people search for rather than the one that made you want to write. You add sections because a competitor covered them. You answer questions nobody actually asked you because a tool said they had search volume.

Eventually, the article ranks perfectly and sounds bugger all like the person who wrote it.

That might be the right trade-off for a business website.

It is not the trade-off I want to make here.

Some articles rank.

Some don’t.

Some get read by thousands of people. Others sit quietly in the archive attracting about as much attention as a terms and conditions page.

That doesn’t make them failures.

They did the job I gave them, which was to let me work something out and put it somewhere I could return to later.

So yes, I tell clients to track keywords while refusing to actively track my own.

I build conversion journeys while leaving this blog without one.

I understand how both things work. That is precisely why I know what happens when you introduce them.

The blog stops being a place where I follow ideas and starts becoming another website I have to optimise.

I already have enough of those.

Sometimes I just want to write the bloody thing.