139: How to Use Content You Own to Grow Without Social Media

In this episode, Jules White shares why creating content you own is the most powerful thing you can do to grow your business without social media - and why it's been her fundamental belief since the very first episodes of this podcast.

Jules gets honest about her own content journey: why she stopped turning podcast episodes into blog posts, what she noticed when she looked at her Google Search Console data, and how she's approaching content creation differently now - with strategy and purpose rather than just volume.

Key Takeaways:

Own your content first: Your website and podcast are assets that compound over time. Social media content stops working the moment you stop posting - owned content doesn't.

Creating content isn't enough on its own: Without a clear strategy, you can spend years producing content that brings no real business results. The pages that actually make you money are often the ones that get neglected.

Commodity versus non-commodity content: If AI can create the same content you're producing, it won't deliver real value. Your lived experience, client stories, and genuine expertise are what set your content apart.

Why blogging might not be your first step: Before creating new content, make sure your core pages - homepage, services pages, and booking pages - are actually doing their job.

Podcast as a trust-building asset: Jules shares how she's reached 15,000 downloads without social media or paid ads, and why podcast listeners often arrive already feeling like they know you.

Using AI to turn podcast episodes into blogs: How Jules uses AI to repurpose episodes into blog posts that stay in her voice - without creating content just for the sake of it.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 002: Why you don't need to keep feeding the algorithm
• Episode 012: Why creating content for your own domain should come first
• Episode 131: Why blogging might be a waste of your time and what to do instead
• Episode 135: What Google actually says about AI search and what you can stop worrying about
• Join The Website Growth Club to get strategic about your website content

Transcript

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Introduction & AI Training Event

Jules White: Hi, it's Jules here. Welcome back to the Website Success Show.

I want to talk today about an inspiration I got from an event I was at last week. So I went to a training day on AI and, and AI for businesses, really, and it was good.

I definitely learned a lot, definitely had some things that I will need to revisit. I'm gonna record some future podcast episodes based on some of the things I learned and some of the, some of the ideas it sparked in me.

What I really realised was that being among, amongst other business owners, hearing ideas and hearing what other people are doing helps to really generate some ideas in me. Sometimes when I sit at my desk and try and come up with thoughts and ideas and try and almost think my way through problems, I get stuck.

Whereas actually being out there, having conversations with real business owners, I have definitely found has been the best way for me to move forward in my business and is, I think it's a really good example of why taking action is better than trying to overthink things. And I think we could apply that to our websites.

We could apply that to SEO, we could apply that to getting offers out there and all those, all sorts of things that we could do in our businesses. But yeah, it was a really interesting event and as I say, I will come back to it.

I will revisit this in future episodes on some of the things that we were talking about and some of the things we learned. We were doing some vibe coding of websites, and I'm still getting my thoughts together on that, really, on whether I think it's, well, I, I don't think right now it's the right thing to, to do, to be building websites fully with vibe coding, but that's not what I'm talking about today.

So look out for a future episode around that. So I'm, I talked a couple of weeks ago when I, when I was talking about networking.

Back in episode 137, I was talking about the ways that our brain tries to make us worry about what other people think. And I talked about the fact that I went, walked into a big networking event earlier this year and dropped my water bottle on in the middle of the floor with the lid off.

And you would not believe this, but

The Water Bottle Story

Jules White: I actually did it again on Friday. So it was a different water bottle.

But I walked in, filled it up with water, didn't put the lid on properly, picked it up by the strap, and it literally, water went everywhere. And this was twice the size of the, the other water bottle, smaller room, smaller group of people.

But oh my goodness, my clumsiness, um, it's just legendary really. So I thought I would tell you about that.

Again, something that nobody would ever know. Nobody there would know that I had done that before another event.

Nobody else would give it a second thought, really? But oh my goodness, I was so embarrassed.

What a clutz. But anyway, it was still a good day and it really tied in with the idea that I already had for this episode

Which is

Growing Your Business Without Social Media

Jules White: how I use my content that I own to grow my business without social media. This is one of the fundamental things that I believe in my business, that we should create content that we own first, and the content that we own is through our websites, our podcasts, if we have them, and our email list.

We wanna make sure that we are actually first and foremost when we are creating content, thinking about whether it's something that exists on our own website or in our own podcast. Really, and I think this is something I have been talking about, basically for the whole length of the podcast, I had a little look back and even in episode two I talked about why you don't need to keep feeding the algorithm.

In episode nine, I talked about why a content strategy is your first step to website success. And in episode 12 about owning your own content and why we need to create content for your own domain, first and foremost, before we create content to just feed algorithms, really.

So it is a fundamental thing that I believe, I, I believe it in my business. I teach that to clients in the website Growth Club.

And when I'm working with clients one-to-one, it's something that I fundamentally believe is true. And I, speak to so many people who still aren't doing this, and it's one of the things that I want to help more business owners to do, to realise that they are just becoming content creators for other platforms.

If it's not something that is helping to reinforce the message online about you and your business. And that's why having the, the correct words on your website is fundamental to helping Google and AI bots to understand what you do and that your business exists as this entity.

And everything else online, all points back to your website, which you own, and no algorithm can take that away from you. But the thing we have to be aware of is that creating and owning our own content isn't enough.

So another fundamental thing I believe in my business is that we shouldn't create content for the sake of it. Each piece of content that we create has a purpose, and it's supporting the other content that we've already created, and it's linked together and it's actually doing something for our business.

I talk to so many business owners who are either blogging or creating social media content and just doing it for the sake of it really. They'll often say, oh, just to keep a presence, or just to keep things ticking over, or just for the sake of it.

It does seem to be that. They're not looking at the strategy behind it and not looking at what it's actually doing for their business as well.

And meanwhile, the pages that can actually bring money into their business, their sales pages, their treatment pages, their, product pages, their, services pages. The ones that are actually about what they sell and can directly bring clients into their business are neglected or they're not linked.

So you, they may be creating lots and lots of blogs, but then their blogs aren't bringing any money into their business. I have one particular client that I've been working with and advising them, and they have blogs that are bringing traffic into their business.

They're actually, the blogs are getting traffic and people are clicking through and they're reading these blogs, but because there's nothing on them that then either links them to other articles so that people can then binge through their content and, and keep learning more about them. This is a product site and they're even just something basic as you're interested in this thing because they're reading this blog.

How you can then weave naturally through that content, the things that they sell as well. So that's one of the most common things that I see is content that's being created that's either existing on its own.

And it's not got anything linking to it or from it. It's, it is not really got a proper purpose in the business.

And this is more important than ever actually, because we are now at a point where if AI can create content that's very similar to the content that you've created on your website, so if you're a, if you're using AI to create content and they're not humanising it, not bringing in your real lived human experience into that content, then you know, why would the bots want to show your content when they can just create that content anyway themselves? And I talked about this back in episode 135 of what Google actually says about AI search and what bits you can stop worrying about.

I talked about commodity versus non-commodity content. And if you're, you're hearing these terms,

Commodity vs. Non-Commodity Content

Jules White: commodity content is something that is just kind of general content that could be created by anybody who knows how to use AI. It could be content that could be generated automatically from AI already.

Whereas non-commodity content, you could call it proprietary content. You could call it expertise content.

You could call it unique content that only you as that unique human or group of humans in your business, the content that only you could create. So your real lived experience, your real unique thoughts on things, your experience of working with clients and customers, your stats from how you've worked with people.

The things that we add to our website that increase the trust helps to make your content something that will actually deliver real value, both to the people who end up reading it, but also to the bots that are crawling through your website and trying to deliver authority content to the person that's doing the searching. So that was quite a lot to say.

This is all about creating content that has a specific purpose that isn't just being churned out for the sake of it and isn't just contributing to the noise. I think we're all in a situation now where there is so much noise online and we do have a choice.

We have a choice whether we just contribute more and more and more and more noise, or we do less and we do it better, and we make sure that everything we are creating in our business is supporting one of our offers, or is bringing new clients or even new leads into our business. Even if people don't directly go on to buy from you, they're joining our email list.

They're learning more, they're listening to our podcast episodes, they're reading through our blogs on our website, and they're becoming closer to our world. They're becoming closer to being a client or a customer because otherwise we are just wasting time.

Almost our time is precious. And one of the big things I've learned from my mentors from going through, I've talked about this a few times of going through the, the NatWest Accelerator programme and the mentors there have been fantastic.

And one of the big things I've learned is that we can't do everything. You know, there is a certain amount of time and a certain amount of energy that we have as business owners, whether or not you have a team or you have people helping you with your business.

As the CEO of our business, we need to be involved in the strategy. Even if it was a massive company like Coca-Cola or somebody like that, the head of Coca-Cola still has an idea of what's going on with the marketing and whether things are working and has expertise and leads, the things that are going on.

Obviously, they have teams but they would still be involved they would still understand what things they're trying to achieve and they would still be involved in the strategy. So.

I think that the temptation is there to try and outsource this as well, especially if you can, if you've got a little bit of budget for somebody to help you with marketing, then you can end up thinking that you can outsource the whole thing and just get somebody to do it all for you. But if you are not involved in the strategy part, then that's how you end up just creating content that's very general and is not doing something strategic for your business.

Regardless of whether we're talking about creating blogs here, or whether we are talking about improving the content on core pages of your website. And

Should You Be Blogging?

Jules White: I talked about this back in episode 131 of why blogging might be a waste of time and what to do instead because there are many businesses out there who don't necessarily need to create blogs. And I think the temptation is there.

When people start thinking about SEO and start thinking about getting more traffic from Google, you might get told that you need to write a blog. And for some businesses that is absolutely true, but it's rarely the first thing that you need to do because there's always extra ways that you can increase the authority of your core website pages.

In the website Growth Club, this is what we focus on first, and it's always been my fundamental belief that this is important. So before you start thinking about creating and, and I'm gonna say it, churning out more content, make sure that your core pages are really strong on letting Google and people who arrive on those pages know what you do, how you're gonna make people's lives better, what they need to do to get it, and why they should choose you over other options that are out there.

So over your competitors, over different ways of solving the problems that they're trying to solve. And by focusing on those pages first, we then have a real core understanding of what we're trying to achieve with our website, what we're actually trying to show up for, what we want to be the authority in.

And then you can start thinking about whether you need to create blogs around that or whether you just need to expand those pages. Maybe case studies.

For local service providers in particular, before you start writing general blogs. You can create case studies around how you've helped people.

You can create thought leadership posts, so things where you are actually giving your opinions from all of the years of working with clients and what you've found and dispelling some of the myths and all of those kind of things, rather than creating just general blogs that anybody could create with an AI tool, this is the time to start thinking really strategically about what you're actually trying to achieve with your content in your business. Now, I was releasing blogs regularly.

I, when I first started my business pre AI, I was writing some blogs, and those blogs do still exist on my website, and they do still get some traffic. But when I first came into blogging, I didn't really go into those with, with real strategy.

But blogging and writing and looking at a blank page, I suppose really is the thing that I always find is quite hard. This is why I like looking at, at an existing website and telling you what's wrong with it, rather than looking at a blank page and designing a website from scratch.

That was the, the big switch I had when I actually went full time in my business. I thought I was gonna be building websites, and I really quickly realised that actually that's not what I love to do and it's not what my zone of genius is.

I like to look at something and tell you what to tweak rather than looking at a blank page. And it is the same with creating content for my own business.

So I like to gather my ideas for my podcast episodes and I do have a long list of like brain dump ideas for future episodes, but quite often I do end up with episodes like this where actually I knew I was gonna be recording this episode around creating my own content and how that's helped me to grow my business without social media. But the event that I went to on Friday sparked some different directions and like hone in a little bit more on the, not just creating content for the sake of it.

So with, with my podcast episodes, I'll have a few notes that I'll gather, as I say before an episode. But I am, I much prefer to record an episode of me talking than sitting down to, write a blog.

So I was blogging, I was turning some of my podcast episodes into blogs, and I was doing that regularly up until, I guess it probably was around the end, around the autumn last year. So when my dad passed away for some reason that I, I just, I had to release something in my business.

And actually the turning the episodes into blogs was one of the things that I, I just let go. And I'm okay with that.

I think, you know, I, I was still releasing podcast episodes every week pretty much, and I was still enjoying doing those. And I think that's the thing is I was enjoying doing those, but not necessarily enjoying turning them into blog posts, uploading them into FEA, create, which, which I don't actually use the blog builder that's built in there.

So making things harder for myself, I suppose, really with wanting it to look good, wanting, to do its job, and wanting it to actually bring traffic into my website. But what I have noticed, I, I've actually started, started turning my episodes into blogs again now.

Some of them, not all of them, and I think that's a big thing for me is it's just, I'm not just doing every single episode. I want to create cornerstone pieces of content.

So pieces where it's actually bringing a few episodes together, or if it's a really key episode, then expanding that into a blog is much more of the direction I'm going with this. And what I noticed when I was looking at this, and when I was thinking about this episode in particular,

My Own Content Journey & SEO Results

Jules White: I was looking at my Google Search Console, my Google Analytics, and I noticed that there is a drop-off in traffic.

Now that might coincide with a, a Google algorithm update that happened in September, and I hadn't thought about this until just now actually, but there was a, this Google algorithm update that then they changed the way that they reported impressions. So you might notice that in your own Google Search Console, if you look back to last September, you might see that there was a strong drop-off in the number of impressions that you're getting.

And it is just basically that Google changed the way that they report it. So it didn't mean that your impression impressions suddenly dropped off, but it's just that Google was, I think it was to do with the bots that they were reporting the traffic on.

So pretty much between last September and I guess about March time, I hadn't really done anything with my website. I'd maybe, maybe done a couple of tweaks here and there, but I hadn't added any new pages.

I hadn't really updated any of my sales pages or my services pages or my homepage or anything. So I hadn't really added anything.

I hadn't told Google that this website is still fresh, still up to date between that time really. And then I started working on my offers and updating some of my sales pages, starting to add some more blogs back in again, I definitely then could see that my traffic started increasing again.

Now, the great thing is that the work that I'd done before, I didn't suddenly get a drop-off in traffic. And this is what I love about SEO is that the, specific strategic work that we do around SEO, where we are actually trying to show up for the things that matter in our business, rather than just creating content for the sake of it, that can keep paying dividends for years to come.

Unlike social media or paid ads where when you stop doing those things, the traffic just stops. For SEO and for organic traffic, that can still keep bringing those clients into your business.

And that's, that's the fundamental thing that I love about it really, is yes, it's quite front-heavy, so you have work to do upfront to get this all set up. But once you've done that, it can keep people coming into your business for years to come.

But it can only do that if you've been strategic about what you are actually creating. So if you are creating content without a strategy or creating content that's not pointing quite in the right direction.

So those very informational blog posts and just churning out content that, that could be created by AI, then you are not really steering the ship in the right direction. That's when, unfortunately, you could have been blogging for years, but you haven't fundamentally set up your core pages to tell Google what your business is about, what you sell, how you can help people.

So the blog traffic isn't doing anything for your business really. Now

The Podcast as a Trust-Building Asset

Jules White: with my podcast, I definitely consider that one of my own success stories in my business. So I have been releasing pretty much weekly episodes for a couple of years now, and I'm just about to hit 15,000 downloads without ever promoting it on social media or paying for ads.

And those early episodes are still getting plays. So that content that I've created there is still bringing people through to my website.

And it's building my authority around what I do, and it is sending the right people into my website. And the great thing about the podcast is when people do actually come through and book a discovery call, if they've been listening to the podcast for a while, they say things like, oh, I feel like I know you, Jules, because I've been listening to you for the last two weeks.

So it definitely helps, it builds visibility and it's definitely a trust-building asset. And I love it for that reason.

And, and as I say, it works with my brain. Me sitting and recording an episode, even if sometimes they're a bit rambly, I record an episode, it's very much me.

And I can then take that and I can use AI to help me to turn that into a really good blog post that's got my unique thoughts, my unique opinions, my unique experiences that only I as a unique human being can have. And no AI can, can, um, replicate that.

Although I think this is definitely something we need to be aware of is being able to back up the facts and the opinions and the thoughts that we are putting on our website is gonna become more important. 'Cause AI is going to start now trying to create content that looks like it is trustworthy content.

A bit like all the, the websites that we now see where people are using AI to write a website and AI will generate some testimonials and things on a website and those testimonials aren't real, they're made up. And we will see more and more of, and more of that actually.

So that's why it's really important if you are using anything like that, if you're using things that are building trust on your website, like for example, if you are using a little snippet from a Google Business Profile testimonial that you've had, then linking to your actual Google Business Profile helps to show that actually this does, does exist. The bots can crawl through and then they can actually see that review on your Google Business Profile.

And also people can do that as well, so people can actually do their own due diligence. I think we'll all become more and more cynical about the, the, the claims that we see on websites.

I think we all already are there. We, we've been definitely over-marketed to over the last few years in particular.

And I think people are looking for more of those genuine trust signals and AI tools are also looking for those, those trust signals. They're looking for different places online who are also saying that you're an expert in what you do and that it's not just your word on this really.

So all this to say

Your Website as a Business Asset

Jules White: your own website is an asset for your business. And that's why it should be one of the fundamental things that you work on.

So, create content that exists on your website or on your podcast if you own, if you own a podcast, then that can be another way that you can create that content. I would still say make sure that your website is supporting that.

So even with my podcast and my website, even if I don't actually put a specific episode page on my website for each individual episode, my main podcast archive page on my website has an embed in there where it, where people can play the latest episode, as well as playing older episodes as well. So every episode that I release of my podcast, people can get to that through my website.

So my website is the hub of my business, and everything that I'm doing online is always pointing back to my own website. I'm not pointing to my social media.

I don't send people to my social media even more so now that I'm not, not actually really using social media anymore. But I, I had never really done that.

I've always tried to send people to my website and they can go there. They can find links to my social media there still.

But my website is that, that hub where all of the other things that I do online come together and it's content that I own.

Wrap-Up & Call to Action

Jules White: So I hope this episode has been helpful. I hope it's given you some permission to not just keep churning out content for the sake of it, and to actually focus on content that you own first and foremost.

So if you're talking about a subject, that you've talked about it on your own website, you've got something on there that actually shows you know about this subject and that you are an authority and that you should be trusted talking about this particular subject. And that the content you create all has a purpose and all links together and all helps to support your business, not just now, but also in the future with whatever happens in the world of search your own content compounds in a way that social media never, ever will.

And if you'd like some help with this, then come and join The Website Growth Club. We focus firstly on your core pages and getting those set up for your website first.

Making sure that those pages that help you make sales are really well optimised, that your message is clear and that you understand what to put onto your website pages in order to actually get them bringing you traffic and converting. And from that point on, then we start moving into creating additional content that can help to support that.

But all of it is done in a very structured and strategic way, so you're not just becoming a content creator and you can actually enjoy the time that you have in your business without that constant pressure to keep churning out content over and over. So remember, social media is optional, but creating authority content that you own shouldn't be so.

Thanks for listening. I'll see you soon.

Bye.