Josh Kennedy: to blog or not to blog, that is the question. Uh, bringing a little bit of my acting background into the title there. Um, so we are indeed setting the stage on the age old question of blogging's relevance. And this actually came up in our, um, community, which is why we're covering this, whether people should or should not blog.

Um, it was the done thing back in the day. James, do you want to talk a little bit of brief history on when and why blogging was the 

James Breese: go to? Yeah, it was what, my God, I literally remember how I had to create a blog from scratch for my masters, right, before WordPress, before all these fancy tools that are around here now, I had to create a blog from scratch, that was the done thing in 2003, right, so blogging wasn't even really around then.

How mental is that? So fast forward a couple of years, then WordPress came out and all these other things. So you could blog quite easily. So it became fashionable 2007, 2005, 2008 [00:01:00] onwards. I think it was to get everything out there. But yeah, it's been around a long time now and it was cool because it was online, it was the internet, it was kind of sexy, so everyone wanted to read and see what was going on.

Do you think it became 

Josh Kennedy: more fashionable after Facebook came out, maybe? Just a 

James Breese: random thought. Potentially, it's still being found by Google, I think there's a lot of people, people can access more links more readily and things are shared far more easier, I think. But yeah, I think in the glory years of the mid 2000s to early 2010s, I think when blogging was important to help you get traffic before YouTube and all these other videos, social media things came out and.

Which was now as everyone's looking onto video, uh, people have forgotten about blogging, but it's still a very important aspect of your business. However, that's kind of what we're going to share a few things about today is whether people should blog or not blog. Yeah, well, 

Josh Kennedy: exactly. It is an important part, but if you are a personal trainer and you are earning less than a certain amount, in our opinion, uh, [00:02:00] you should probably.

Not to be blogging because you've got other things to think about. James, you want to talk about that in terms of like where this sits on our revenue ladder? 

Yeah, 

James Breese: sure. So it came from Sasky. So calling Sasky Ford out in our ladder and she was, she was like talking about us and how, look, where do I want to, do blogs, I want to do YouTube.

And I was thinking it was great. However, we need to think about this. So in terms of what we think to see things in our black belt revenue ladder, we see this as a purple belt to brown belt. Type marketing piece. Why is that? Because it takes a lot of time and effort and technical capabilities to get your blogs found.

So what we call, we call Purplebelts earning less than 15, 000 a month, but more than 5, 000 a month. Okay. And the reason you need to have this in place, because you need to have a good website that's fast, that can load. You have all the technical abilities set up for it. So we can get your blog found when it is being written.

Now, this is not including your ability to write as a trainer. And whatever you do, don't [00:03:00] just use ChatGBT now to write your blogs for you. Because every man and his dog is doing that. And B, Google is torching your websites as a result. So you can't do that, right? It's really important you can't do that and get that done.

It's got to be authentic. It's got to be new content to be found. But I was like doing some searching beforehand. And if you can see, if you're watching us on YouTube, you can probably see this now. But one of the biggest reasons why I don't encourage people who are white belts or blue belts to start blogging is this.

90, if you look at this on the screen here, it's from Ahrefs by the way. Which is the number one authority on SEO and website content in the world. There's some fancy ass software here now. But from all their data, they found that 90. 63 percent of all pages in their index get zero traffic from Google. And of that, 5.

29 percent of them get less than 10 visits per month. Can I just emphasize this? Less than 10 visits [00:04:00] per month. When you write a blog, sometimes it takes you, if you're new to it, days to write. What is the point of doing a blog that gets read once, maybe if it's lucky, in a world of content that's... Uh, so readily available to be never found ever again, right?

That's a huge and frightening statistic. Think about your book. If you're a fitness professional, we've got a website, just go into the analytics. If you set it up, how many website visits does your website get to the blog? I'm guaranteed most of them are going to be in that 91 percent absolutely guaranteed because you're not writing.

For this, we'll go to in a second now, but there's, there's got to be user intent and you haven't got the technical capabilities of the SEO stuff to get it found in the first place. 

Josh Kennedy: Andrew, what's your experience? You sat there all silent in the background, I feel bad. What's your experience with blogging?

Andrew Wallis: Hey, I remember back in the day it was, as James said, I think it was around 2005, 05, 06 when I started blogging because I needed to, I had this [00:05:00] website. But I had no, uh, no one coming to it. So you've got to write blogs was the, the order of the day, the instructions I got from, from a mentor that I had back then.

And so I was spending, as James said, days, uh, writing content. And in those days, I wasn't that particularly good at writing. Um, it, it, it was, it was a terrible and horrible experience. I'm almost rocking in the seat thinking about it. But, um. I, I, I write and I would then get better, like any skill, the more, uh, you put into it, the, the better you get, but it, there is a significant amount of time and energy and, uh, expense put into writing it, which is why it's a great, uh, strategy to employ, but, uh, as we say, we, we think it's a purple, uh, belt, um, um, 

Josh Kennedy: um, Was it working feedback then, before things changed significantly?

Andrew Wallis: It did work. It did [00:06:00] help me get found, but I just find these numbers amazing. And it would be, to be honest, it is probably would be around those types of wasn't hundreds of people. It was. It was the tens to maybe hundreds of people finding me. But back then, that was great. But these days, there's there's better uses of our time.

And I think just in Quickly, James, um, as an example ourselves, you did an exercise looking at all the blog posts you've written over the years and you know, how many of them did you find were just weren't performing? Over 200. 

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All you cover is our [00:07:00] bulletproof hosting that comes 90 day money back guarantee. Ever wonder how many new clients you're losing by not being Google's number one? Don't wonder? Act. Now book your free strategy. call@strengthmatters.com slash website today. So we did a massive clean, so this is, it's the other thing in terms of websites and getting found in here, you've gotta do data sweep cleans to like completely clear and show Google that you'll wanna be only valuable content on your website.

So I looked at it back at July this year and I was like, oh my God. This many pages that don't reflect who we are. They're not being found. There's no user intent. So I just, just deleted them all. Now, I did a lot more to it than that. I just had to redirect traffic to it to make sure they were still pointing the right direction.

But I got rid of them for very good reason because it wasn't working. There was nothing here. And again, if you, on this graph, if you can see on YouTube here, like from the page, look at this. Less, just over 1. 0, 1. 04 percent of people get 100 to 1, 000 visits a month. Right? For their blog posts. That is [00:08:00] insane!

Right? That is absolutely insane. Now, when we're talking about this, this is not us blowing smoke up our own arses. Again, on YouTube, if you can log into the video and see this now, there's just three examples of our blogs, that if you type in certain keywords, we come into it. I never thought we'd be in the top 1%.

I never thought about it because it just hasn't occurred to me before. It's just stuff I knew technically that I had to do. And I just did it. It 

Josh Kennedy: shows the value of good SEO, right? 

James Breese: It does. Good SEO. And obviously we've been writing a lot over the years for the magazine, for stuff as well. But it's, it's the technical side of things that's the most important as opposed to the...

Good content is important, but it's doing the technical side of things. So, I'll give you an example. If you type in, is jogging bad for you on Google, look who comes up to, we're coming up top. Right? Same with like, another one, this is a big one for us. It's like aerobic threshold. We type in aerobic threshold.

Not only are we top, Google have done what they call their search engine results. Uh, side of things. We're looking at the graphs on the right hand side. We've got a whole bit of paragraph at the top, and that's our top blog, which looks good. And again, if you type in [00:09:00] strength, strength, standards to aim for, we're top as well.

That's, that's three of a lot of other blogs. We get most of our traffic organically to Strength Matters. I think that's really important to share this now. We get over... Well, a considerable amount of traffic through our blog posts that drive things and leads, which is why we don't have to advertise so much on Facebook, on TikTok and stuff like that.

We don't need to. We get organic traffic, which is where you should be aiming for as a trainer, is to nail this free content first and then pour gasoline on the fuel, on the fire afterwards, once you're doing paid traffic, once you've got it right. So, just something to bear in mind. It's really important we wanted to share with you guys today.

We're not just sharing this. To say you shouldn't blog and it's, there's better ways. Yes, you should blog at the right time, the right place when you're a purple belt or brown belt in our black belt revenue ladder system in the business 

Josh Kennedy: school. Yep. And everything is systematized on your website to get you ranking in Google.

What are some of the other, you've got a few other stats you want to share from Ahrefs, have you James? [00:10:00] Yeah, I just 

James Breese: want to share a couple of reasons. So again, I just want to back this up by data and say why people don't get found. And this is the number one reason the topic of the page has no long term traffic potential.

Yep. So a lot of people just go, I'm going to blog about this today. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but guess what? People don't care. People don't care. And like, they're not searching for it. So you're not getting found because people don't care. No, people are 

Josh Kennedy: searching for it. That's the important thing, right?

James Breese: If you're going to start a blog off, it's got to be that. People are searching for it. Then over time, you can write more stuff about what you want to write about. To draw people in because you've built this trust. A lot of great bloggers have done that over time it builds. But you've got to build something that people want to find to begin with.

So that's number one. Uh, topic is no page, long term traffic value again. And the ties in as well. The page is no, doesn't match search intent. What are people searching for? Like, in terms of jogging and running, is jogging bad for you? That is the number one thing that people type in when it comes to running, [00:11:00] right?

We've, we've done the analysis and we've looked at, that's what people are searching for. So we've built a blog all around it to draw people in. Because we're trying to answer questions that they have answers to. And that's what Google's about. It's about solving these problems and answering questions for them.

And the fourth reason, again I'll share on the screen. Is the page hasn't been indexed or isn't indexed. That is one of the biggest thing I'm seeing across all personal training websites and gym websites who don't rank in Google at all is Google doesn't even know they exist. 

Josh Kennedy: Simply. Explain this one simply for us.

It basically 

James Breese: means that Google doesn't know you exist. You're basically standing in the middle of a forest where no one's around. Right? That's the easy way to say it. And this is where it can be quite easy to do. You've just got to put a fancy bit of code on your website and link Google to your website together.

But guess what? Most trainers don't know about that. They think you can just build a website and away it goes. But also, most website design agencies [00:12:00] don't do this for you either. They assume you're going to do it. But that is the exercise. It will take you 10 minutes. But it's probably the most important thing to do is to connect it.

And 

Josh Kennedy: you might take you 10 minutes, James, but, uh, people 

James Breese: like me. No, but honestly, even, even, even for you, honestly, if you just go to Google search console and follow the instructions of Google search console, and then it'll do. That's 

Andrew Wallis: it is relatively straightforward. Josh, I was able to do it. And I've got an example actually of a, of a, of a client I had back in the day who was spending, they had, they were spending hours on content.

It was great content. It was relevant. Um, but we were scratching our heads. Why? Why wasn't it getting any traction? And they'd spent thousands a good Two three thousand pounds on on their website for on from this glossy, um, website design company and it looked it looked a fantastic site. But when we did this simple searches on the screen there, the site dot [00:13:00] and then their website name.

that Google wasn't indexing them, they weren't found. So, they'd spent hundreds of hours, literally hundreds of hours, um, on creating content, and, um, but it just wasn't being found. When it switched on, you know, it was night and day. So, that's why it's important to be aware of this, 

James Breese: for sure. For the technical geeks out there, just to say two things to be aware of.

Uh, the, the things you've got to think about is do you have a site map, right? Is do you have a site map that Google can crawl to know when pages are new that goes straight to that link? Where it crawls your whole website quickly as opposed to going through individual things. That's the first thing. And the second thing is we have something called a robot.

txt file, right? Where it tells Google which pages to search and index and which ones to not. A lot of people have that as default, do not search. Right? So, if you're thinking, oh my god, my website isn't on top of [00:14:00] Google from number one, or it can't be found. Those are the two things you look at. Do you have a site link map or site map link?

And do you have a robot top robot. txt file that allows you to be searched in the first place? So there you go. Well, 

Josh Kennedy: there you go. Fantastic. So to blog or not to blog, that is the question. James, I'm going to set you a 22nd challenge to sum up for me. 

James Breese: Go. Yes. Blog. If you're earning about 15, 000 a month, have a high quality website.

And you know, the technical expertise in terms of SEO, know anything else. There 

Josh Kennedy: we go. That's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you want to find out what's holding you back from growing your fitness business, go to strengthmatters. com forward slash quiz.