How to Create Evergreen Blog Posts for Your Podcast with Anita Dykstra
Podcasts aren’t a one-and-done enterprise, right? We aim to create content that will be helpful for our ideal clients for, hopefully, years to come. We want them to keep returning to our content and our websites as much as possible. One way to do that is posting your podcast episodes as blog posts on your website. You’ve already created amazing content for your show, now all you have to do is repurpose it into an evergreen blog post.
In today’s episode, I’m chatting with Anita Dykstra, a lead generation and evergreen content strategist. Anita shares the importance of having a blog post for your podcast episode, what makes a successful blog post for your podcast, and how you can optimize those blog posts with SEO. I really hope this episode inspires you to step up your podcast blog posting game!
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What’s in this episode…
[06:08] The importance of blog posts for podcasts
[09:40] What makes a successful blog post for your podcast
[14:59] What we can do to optimize our blog posts with SEO
[18:36] What to examine when your blog posts just aren’t bringing in traffic
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About anita:
Anita Dykstra is a world-renowned travel blogger who has written and been featured in publications such as Lonely Planet, The Huffington Post, Skyscanner and more! She's used her blog content to work with some of the biggest brands and tourism boards around the world.
Now she's using those same evergreen content strategies to bring automated traffic, leads and sales into her own coaching business.
Since 2019 Anita's been helping coaches, course creators and service providers skyrocket their reach and visibility, drive thousands of new eyeballs to their websites, automate lead generation and bring passive sales by creating optimized evergreen conten
Connect with anita:
FREE Download: 7 Step Checklist to Optimize Your Podcast Show Notes on Your Website
LINKS:
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Join the Strategic Podcast Academy!
The Transcript for Share, Strategize, & Shine:
ep 141: How to Create Evergreen Blog Posts for Your Podcast with Anita Dykstra
[00:00:34] Caroline Hi there and welcome to Share, Strategize and Shine. I'm your host, Caroline Hull, a podcast strategist and CEO of Wild Home Podcasting. I've built my entire career through podcasts by sharing my experience using strategic systems and shining a light on the power of podcasting. If you are looking to cultivate leads for your membership group, program or consulting services, I'm here to help you create a holistic and integrative podcast strategy that will let your business thrive. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to Share, Strategize and Shine. Today I am chatting with the amazing Anita. She is a world renowned travel blogger who has written and been featured in publications such as Lonely Planet, the Huffington Post, Skyscanner and more. She used her blog content to work with some of the biggest brands and tourism boards around the world. And now she's using the same evergreen content strategy is to bring automated traffic leads and sales into her own coaching business. How I came across Anita was I found one of her Instagram posts and she was talking about podcasts specifically, and you know how I am about content and blog posts and talking about how your podcasts are evergreen. And I just I immediately connected with everything she was talking about, and she specifically talks about creating blog posts for your podcast and how to leverage the your podcast to not only create these blog posts, but create an evergreen traffic driving machine to your website. And so if you are still not convinced that you should be posting your podcasts on your website as blog posts, then you're going to want to listen to this episode. And if you're already posting your podcasts as blog posts, she has some really great tips to optimize them and make them better so you can really start leveraging them to get more traffic and more eyes on yourself and your business. Let's dive in. Hi, Anita. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so excited to get to talk to you in person.
[00:02:47] Anita Hi. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's always good to connect with other people in the online space, so I'm happy to be here.
[00:02:55] Caroline Yeah, before we dive in, I would love it if you would just share who you are and what you do.
[00:03:00] Anita Yeah. So my name is Anita. I am a lead gen and evergreen content strategist, originally from New Zealand. So that's where the kind of strong accent comes in here. But I have been living overseas since I was 19 years old, so a good 11 years now. I actually started out as a travel blogger. I still have a travel blogging business, but in 2019 I opened my coaching business and I started to teach businesses about the value of blog marketing, SEO, Pinterest marketing as well. Because when I first entered the coaching industry and I entered this like kind of Instagram bubble, I saw so many business owners solely relying on social media to build their business. And I felt like I was just like this little person. Like, Hey, did you know that you can like, start a blog and you can bring in automated traffic and you don't have to show up on social media as much? And so it has been my mission to teach business owners how to become more visible on autopilot so you don't have to burn out on Instagram, so you don't have to show up 24/7 on Instagram, create content for the app. And the thing is, is that when you do create content for these social media platforms, it only lasts like a tiny, like maybe 3 hours or even like 24 hours and it's gone. And I knew the value of blog marketing and that is true evergreen content. And I wanted to bring that indication to the space and just teach business owners a different way of doing things.
[00:04:43] Caroline So yeah, and that's exactly what I connected with when I came across you on social media because, you know, that's something we talk about a lot when we're talking about podcasts, but you just don't hear a lot of people anymore talking about blogging. You're absolutely right. Like everybody puts so much of their focus into social media. I totally relate to what you're saying about the burnout because it is absolutely real trying to post every day on Instagram and Pinterest and all the places and feeling like, you know, you might not quite be hitting the mark, which I think is what a lot of podcasters feel because we like to communicate in longform content. And so trying to communicate in that short form, like make an impactful post or make an impactful reel can sometimes feel really daunting when we're so used to sitting down and recording 45 minute episodes. So I remember I was on I can't remember what I was searching for on Instagram, but I came across your Instagram profile and just connected right away with your messaging. But you actually do talk a little bit about podcasts and some of the missed opportunities with podcasting and blog. And so that's what we're going to talk today, because if you've been around Caroline at any point in time, if you've worked with me in any capacity, you know how much I stress putting your podcast episodes on your website as blog post. And so we're going to dig into that a little bit. So first, I just want you to talk a little bit about blog posts. And why they are important for podcasts specifically.
[00:06:16] Anita Yes. So especially for podcasters, I mean, I'm a podcaster myself and when I started teaching way back in 2019, I didn't specifically focus on like repurposing podcast episodes because I didn't see the value in it like myself. I was writing blog posts from scratch, and it wasn't until I became a podcaster myself, I was like, Hang on, I'm creating all of this incredible content. This too, can be really easily repurposed into a blog post, which I normally write from scratch. It's basically the same thing. We just have to like think of a different process. It's a different workflow, right? And so with podcasts, you already have the content, like you're already creating incredible content that like draws your ideal clients and or your ideal listeners. And and so you're creating all of this really incredible content. However what a blog can do is it can bring people back to your episodes again and again and again. Because a blog is evergreen content, it lives on forever. I have blog posts that I put out way back, and I think like 2016, most of my early blog posts, I definitely put those on draft because I like doing embarrassing. I do have some that are still published from 2016 and so bring me thousands of people to my website every single month. And imagine if you had if you just repurposed one podcast episode to a blog post and that was able to bring the same results month after month and you could just bring people to your podcast every single month to a specific episode. So it just really is a super valuable strategy that not a lot of podcasters are doing. However, it's not too much of a like a big task to do because you already have the content, and especially if you are putting that content on your website, you'll bring people to your website. You're saying to people, Hey, like listen to my podcast, but also I have products, I have services, I have social media, I have my email list, go sign up to this, go get that. And so you're bringing people like to your business on autopilot, which is fantastic. So that is one of the big reasons why I am just so pro repurposing a podcast. And so it's two blog posts. And another reason is it also helps your podcast's SEO, because you're bringing more awareness to your podcasts. So if you are consistently telling search engines like This is my podcast and you're creating a piece of content that is linking to that, that is going to help as well. So it's a it's a win win all around.
[00:09:04] Caroline Yeah, totally. And I love that you're using the word evergreen because we hear a lot about like evergreen products and evergreen funnels, but evergreen content, I mean, that's, that's what we all want, right? Like to not have to be creating content over and over again. And I do have a have a blog post from a very long time ago that does really well and is always shocking to me. And we actually recently went in and updated some of the links on it because it was still getting so much traffic, which is just so funny. So I love that example because it really does live on. So, you know, but evergreen.
[00:09:39] Anita Of that.
[00:09:40] Caroline So when we're talking about a blog post for your podcast, can you give us an idea of what makes a successful blog post for your podcast and maybe a few ideas of what it should look like?
[00:09:54] Anita Yeah, definitely. So one thing I think one misconception is that you can just basically post your transcription, and that's a blog post and we definitely don't want to do that because first of all, I don't know really anyone that wants to read just a page of a transcription and people want it nicely formatted, right? They want to end like clear sections. Like when I'm reading something on a website, I love to see some visuals, like for example, some pictures or headings or, you know, links and things like that. So when you're creating a blog post from a podcast, you want to make sure that you are formatting that. So you're formatting the transcription. You might want to adjust some of the wording and some of the places you can write. I can introduction, write a conclusion, and then you can just go through the transcription and edit it a little bit to make it like a little bit more flowy. Or you can get rid of, you know, we say um or ah or things like that. People don't need to write that, but you also want to make sure that you are breaking it up into sections, you know, so it's really easy for people to read. And if people want to skip like a certain part, maybe they're only interested in, you know, what you talked about at the end of the episode, give them that chance to kind of skim down to the end of your blog post and read what they really want to read. So the formatting piece is a huge part of it. We want to make it really nice because no one likes to just read a block of text on their phone or their laptop. Right? And then another thing you definitely want to do is optimize it 100%. I would say that with SEO you want to do some research around you just want to basically think what could your ideal listener or your ideal reader be typing into Google. Like just imagine that you're sitting at your desk and you are your ideal client right now and you are having a problem that is linked to what you teach or what you what service you provide and think about what words they could be plugging into Google and start to do some research around that. And that's basically like the starting stage of a SEO optimization. So that is something that you definitely want to think about when you are putting your podcast episodes to a blog. Because was SEO, you can drive traffic to that blog post and then to your episode on autopilot and you know, like that example that I was telling you about in 2016, that is how I drive consistent traffic. Like it's because it's in SEO optimize, it's on page one of Google. It's showing up in front of people every single day. So yeah, that is a piece of it.
[00:12:44] Caroline I love to that, you know, when as you're talking and I'm thinking about the process of doing this because I never want to give people like more work than they can handle. And I love this idea of just taking the transcript and literally formatting it into a blog post. So my team right now, we write a separate set of show notes for the feed, and then I have an amazing writer on my team and she writes a blog post, but that's basically what it is, is that she takes the chunks of the transcript and creates a heading and a couple paragraphs in it, heading in a couple of paragraphs. And so I love the idea that you can do that just with your transcript as well. And, and the thing about SEO and I want to dive into that just a smidge more. If you're doing SEO for your podcast, which you should be doing, you should also be like your, your titles should be keyword friendly, like thinking exactly what you said, thinking about what people are going to search in the apps and you want your title to be that way. And so if you're already in that mindset, like if you're already trying to optimize for the apps, it should be so easy to start optimizing for your blog as well because it's it's there's a lot of crossovers. And so it's not about creating extra work. It's literally taking what you've already done and formatting it. And so I just wanted to like kind of frame that for people because I think when they think about blog posts and SEO, it starts to get really overwhelming. But like everything I'm hearing you say is exactly like what I have taught in a podcast SEO Masterclass in my membership. It's the same concepts. And so if you're already kind of in that thinking through that and thinking through, okay, what keywords are people using to find my podcast episode, then you can apply that to your blog post as well.
[00:14:33] Caroline Are your podcast episodes set up to help you sell your membership group programs and consulting services? And I'm not talking about selling it in a sleazy way. I'm talking about creating episodes that are engaging. Create connection between you and your listeners and highlight your expertise to start creating episodes for sales get my free guide by heading to wildhomepodcasting.com/sales.
[00:14:59] Caroline But I would love to if you could just kind of give us an a very top level because I know there's a lot to echo, but so keywords is one thing, but is there anything else we need to be doing to SEO optimize these blog posts as well?
[00:15:15] Anita Yeah, definitely. So that was a really great point that you brought up because when people hear SEO, especially when it's linked to blog post, people freak out. They're like, Oh my God, I'm not tech savvy, like, I have no idea. That's like I it's just beyond me. And honestly, that's how I felt many years ago. I put off SEO because I didn't understand it. I thought it was kind of only for like tic bro people or right people who are good at like coding or some show. Like, I was like, oh, like I can't I can't do this. Yeah. And so when I learned about SEO and like the basics of it, I was like, Well, you just need to know what your person is typing into these search engines. So, you know, number one is to do that research, right? As to find out those exact phrases. And what you want to do is for each podcast, like blog post, you want to find one main keyword that is going to be the basic like the focus of that blog post. But another couple of things that you can do to really help you with SEO is actually use other keywords just throughout the text. That really helps because you can rank for more than one keyword. That's how you can really maximize your SEO as if you had one blog post and it's ranking for like one main keyword that could be bringing in a bulk of the traffic. But then there's like two or five or ten other keywords that a smaller but is also bringing in that traffic it starts to build and so another thing you can think about is like, what are some other ways that people could say that main keyword? Because there's lots of different ways that we can say one thing, right?
[00:17:03] Caroline Right.
[00:17:03] Anita So you want to add some kind of additional keywords. You only have to use them once. You don't have to, like, do anything too comprehensive. Another thing that really helps is SEO is simply by being helpful. And I know that's like very vague, but one of Google's biggest things is they want your content to be helpful to the user. And if it is being, they're more likely to show it in front of them. And so when you are repurposing your podcast episode, you want to be asking yourself, Can I make this even more valuable in any way? And that could be like including a couple of frequently asked questions that are related to that topic. Something that I do at the end of every blog post is I have like a little box where I have 2 to 3 frequently asked questions that I have found that relate to that blog post, and that is showing Google like, yeah, she's being really helpful. Like she cares about the users, she's trying to provide value. So that is like one of the biggest things that I tell my clients is like, make sure you're being helpful and adding in value and you can do that and lots of different ways. But the FAQ box thing is, is a really good way.
[00:18:18] Caroline That's such a good idea. I hadn't even thought about that. I love that. I'm going to have to try that out, which I guess brings me to my next question because I've been doing blog posts. We all of our clients. That's that's huge for us. We want to make sure that we're always bringing people back to our website and not just like out into the interwebs. But let's say you're a podcaster, you've been doing the blog posts, you're just not seeing the traffic that you want. Is does that mean that it's time to like, reevaluate the keywords you're using or what would you suggest be the thing that people look at when they're questioning that traffic?
[00:18:55] Anita Yeah, definitely. So number one, you definitely want to be looking into the keywords that you used for those particular blog posts, because it could have been that maybe you tried to go for a keyword that is a little bit too competitive for your website. Because Google does take into account like how long have you had your website, how much content do you have on this particular topic? And they take that into account when ranking blog posts. And so you want to ask yourself, Alright, does this keyword make sense in terms of like competitiveness? Or maybe I need to adjust the keyword slightly and try out something new. You don't want to be doing that straight away. Definitely want to be waiting like at least six months to see if it is bringing in any traffic whatsoever. If it's totally just did not doing anything, then that's when you can think like, alright, maybe I need to adjust some, some keywords or something like that. Again, asking yourself like, how can I make this even more valuable? How can I create more content that is around this particular topic so that Google sees me as an authority in this topic so they can be some of the things that you can start to think about and try out. But another huge thing which I don't see talked about often enough is updating your blog posts.
[00:20:21] Caroline Yes, please, let's dig into this. Oh my gosh. Yeah.
[00:20:24] Anita One of my favorite strategies, one of my favorite things to do. And in my own business, we actually put out the same amount of new blog posts as we do updating blog posts because yeah, thank you. Updating blog posts, but it's so important and it's because blog post is an evergreen piece of content, right? And so you want to show Google that this content is still up to date. It's still helpful for the reader, and just by updating a blog post, it can boost you into rankings like no other. I did this on. I can think of like one particular blog post I did this on. I was on like page two of Google. I wasn't seeing much traffic whatsoever and so. I went into the blog post, I adjusted some like headings. I didn't change the keyword or anything like that, just adjusted some of the hearings and editing. I think like one or two FAQs. And then I was having a look at what was on page one of Google for this topic and I asked myself, Alright, how can I adjust the title of my blog post? I just, from what I can see on page one, how can I adjust my title so that it's way more like just better than everyone else's? And I changed one word and then within a few days that article was on page one. One of the first results and bringing in hundreds of people. So it's like, Yeah. Updating blog posts, a must do.
[00:21:59] Caroline Oh my gosh. I feel like you're my kindred spirit or something because this is literally I've been telling people this for so long, like not even just with blog posts, but like with your podcast. Like it's totally okay to go back and update a title. It's totally okay to go back and improve the show notes and also blog posts. And this is something we've actually been you know, I mentioned that I have a blog post that was still getting so much traffic, and when we looked at it, it was information from like five years ago, links that were dead and things like that. And I think this is such an important point that you bring up because when we're talking about your podcast being a part of your funnel and something that you want to drive business, right, and to bring in leads, if you're not going back and updating links and things like that, you're going to create a lot of problems down the road when you do have all of a sudden a podcast episode that's gaining traction from a year or two ago. You know, I think I have a I have a podcast episode about I feel like it's about podcast editing or something that gets a lot of a lot of hits on our website. And even though that's not like the main thing we do anymore. So I can go back in and I can kind of adjust the links and adjust whatever ads I put in or whatever. What you said, like even adding FAQs that can direct people in different directions that I want them to go in. So I think that is such a valuable, valuable piece of information you shared. And I will support you on your mission to make sure more people talk about it.
[00:23:31] Anita It's such a simple thing to do as well. It's not like you have to totally redo the blog post or anything like that. It's just asking yourself like, is this content still up to date? Is it still valuable for the person who's coming across it? And like I said, like the links, you know, things change over the months and over the years. You might have like an old freebie or right. Maybe you change your Instagram handle, which is something that I did recently, and I was like, Oh, I have to go and change all the links now. But it is really helpful. And it is. Google sees that and they take that into account.
[00:24:02] Caroline So yeah, I had it was so fascinating because I think it was last week I realized that this old page that it's an opt in that I don't even really promote anymore. It's not even aligned with what we do. People were still going to it, and of course it wasn't working, like the actual link wasn't working because I had turned it off a long time ago, but I forgot to turn off the page and so people were still going to it, trying to sign up for my email newsletter and weren't getting anywhere. So I turned off the page and I fixed my four or four page. So it was actually helpful and I was like, Why haven't I done this before? Like I've got? And so I think this is like just a really good moment for everybody to go and look at the things on your website that might not be working or serving you and how can you update them, Because, you know, when we've got content that's living forever, that's evergreen. You know, I have, I'm on episode 138, right? So like I have episodes from years ago that are still live. Like, I need to make sure that whenever somebody is looking at that episode and they're clicking a link, they're going somewhere valuable. They're not just getting lost in the Internet. So it's just a really good, really good practice to go back and update those blog posts and find what's, you know, dead on arrival on your website.
[00:25:25] Anita Yeah, there's a really good website actually that I use. We do this every single month. Normally I like the start or the end of the month. We do like a like a website broken link check. So it's a website called I think it's literally Broken Link Chicago Broken Link chewy.com. It's a free website and you plug in your website address and it will tell you all of the broken links throughout your website. And we do this as a monthly task so that we have no broken links because that can be a negative thing with SEO as well. Like we don't want to have any broken pages or links or anything like that. So a little tip there. Definitely go check that out.
[00:26:05] Caroline Yeah, I'm afraid of the results, but it's probably something I really need to do. Oh, my gosh. This conversation has been everything for me. I have just enjoyed it so much because I feel like, you know, as a podcast strategist, these are things that I am teaching or telling people like, Hey, you should go and do these things. And so it's so nice to have an expert come on and and verify, but also give us some really great tips. So if people want to learn more, do you have any resources for them or something that they can dive into to figure this out?
[00:26:38] Anita Yeah, definitely. So you can head over to my website. It's called AnitaDykstra.com. On there, I actually have a really good freebie especially if you're a podcaster, because it's literally called Seven Steps to Optimize Your Podcast Show Notes, if it is something that you want to learn more about, then yeah, go and download that. That'll be really helpful for you. And of course I have lots of other resources and information on my website that will be really helpful for, you know, you taking your podcast episodes and turning them into these just like juicy, evergreen blog posts that live on forever and and bring in your ideal clients and customers for years to come. So yeah, I'm excited for everyone to start doing this or to start updating your blog posts as you've been doing this for a while. And yeah, it's really great to touch on this topic because I love chatting about SEO, I love chatting about blog posts like I can't shut up about it. Right.
[00:27:38] Caroline Well, thank you so much and I will definitely make sure all of those links are in the show notes and please go follow her on Instagram as well. We'll link that as well because you always posts really great things about marketing and content and everyone knows how I feel about content. So it was so great chatting with you. Thank you so much.
[00:27:56] Anita Thank you. Bye.
[00:27:59] Caroline There were so many amazing tips in that episode. I know that I am immediately going to be going and checking my links, but also looking back through some of my older blog posts. It's a process we've started with my website, but I definitely want to continue it and do more of that because she's absolutely right. You know, we spend so much time on creating this content. It's evergreen, it lives forever, so how can we make it work better for us? So I really hope you enjoyed this episode. All of her links are in the show notes. Be sure to go connect with her and I will be back soon with another episode. Thank you for listening to Share, Strategize and Shine. To give your own podcast some shine, download my Free Podcast Guide to Creating Episodes for Sales by heading to the link in the show notes, be sure to leave a review and connect with me on Instagram for more podcast strategy insights. Until next time.
