A reader asked me a cracking question:
"Olly, why do you publish your email newsletters on your blog?
They don't look optimised for SEO at all, so what's the strategy?"
Astute observation.
There are four reasons I put (some of) my newsletters on my blog, and none of them are about gaming the Google algorithm.
Reason #1: Ability to Share
When I send an email, it lives and dies in your inbox.
But when I publish that same content on my blog, it suddenly has legs.
You can share it on social media.
You can Whatsapp it to a friend. (“Hey dude, you’ll like this!”)
By giving my content a public home, I'm allowing it to spread and be discovered by new people.
Reason #2: Instant Credibility
Imagine this: Someone hears about this "Olly Richards" character from a friend.
They decide to do their due diligence and check out my website.
But when they get there... crickets.
Bearing in mind that this person knows nothing about me at this point, it’s not exactly helpful to have nothing on my website, is it?
By having a blog packed with my stuff, I’m able to set out my stall and give people the opportunity to check out what I do.
At the very least, they might scan the blog and take in the topics that I talk about.
At most, they might devour the content.
It's a library of my "thought leadership" (ick!), and that can only help my cause.
Reason #3: The very-long-tail SEO game
I mentioned earlier that publishing newsletters isn’t about SEO.
But it is about pin-point discoverability.
For the right person searching for the right thing, they’ll find my blog posts even if they aren’t SEO-optimised.
Consider someone searching for "what margin to aim for in my online business?" or "how to build content teams in an online education business" for example.
These topics are so niche, you’re unlikely to find anything specific written about this on the web…
But you know what you will find?
My eminently punchable face, grinning at you through the screen.
By writing about super-niche topics that I know my ideal reader is interested in, I'm making myself discoverable to the people who matter most to my business.
I really don’t see any point trying to SEO-optimise these posts, because there’s so little competition.
Reason #4: AI
The search engines of the future are AI — ChatGPT et al.
It’s already happening.
And people aren’t even “searching”, they’re asking questions.
For example, on Google, you might type: “best margins for online education business”.
But on ChatGPT, you’ll have a conversation:
“I run an online education business but I’m not keeping much profit at the end of the year.
I’m wondering what margins are standard for this type of business?”
Now, whereas Google would search for keywords like “online business margin”, LLMs have already digested and ‘understood’ all the available information on the web, and use that to continue the conversation with you.
And that info comes from your blog.
Ethical? Hardly.
Useful? Sure.
The direction of travel seems to be that LLMs (Perplexity, Gemini, for example) provide references for the information they’re getting.
And this means the user has the ability to click through and find your website.
But — and here’s the clincher — your information has to be out there in the wild for the LLM to actually find and crawl.
Therefore, much like the old blogging days, it works to your advantage to be publishing stuff out there, because AI will gradually build a picture of who you are, and start referencing you.
Or just plain ripping you off.
It’s hard to say.
But you’ve got to have a seat at the table to stand a chance of winning.
(Here's my answer to the margin question, btw.)
Summary
So there are the four non-SEO reasons I publish my newsletters on my blog:
- To make them shareable and discoverable
- To build credibility and authority
- To attract the right people over time
- Training AI on my content
Last thing to say is this…
On this newsletter, I’m playing an authority game.
I’m not playing a high-traffic game.
Not so in my other business StoryLearning, though.
Over there, SEO optimisation is important, because we’re in a highly-competitive zero-sum game with other language businesses trying to capture search traffic.
And then, on the website, capturing the lead is vitally important.
But for the Olly Richards brand, the game is all about laser-targeting the right people, because my ACV is astronomical.
And so other elements take on more importance:
- Word of mouth
- First impressions
- Quality of content
- Positioning and authority
For example, around 25% of people who work with me 1-to-1 say they first heard about me from a friend.
Think about that for a moment.
Given this, do I need to make any effort to capture their email on the homepage?
Not really.
It’s much more about designing an experience that faithfully shows who I am and what I’m about.
That’s ultimately why the blog is there.
And why I’m in the middle of doing some very, very deep branding work, the results of which you’ll see being rolled out later this year.
Anyway, that’s it for now.
Namaste,
Olly