Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of the Creator Toolbox. This is the show all about the nuts and bolts behind your creator business. I'm Colin Gray from thepodcasthost.com, joined by Jacob, as always. How are you getting on, Jacob? Fairly good. Really good. Glad to be back. Good to hear. I've been off gallivanting again. I've not been recording. Missed a week. Did you fill the gap? Did you fill the gap in the air? You had an idea?
I did have an idea. I didn't get to it, though. Other things but questions. All right, mutual blame then. I'm not taking all the blame for that. Yeah, that's fair. Cool. Right. We've got a few things on the list today, actually, so let's just jump into it. But we're going to be covering just to give it a wee teaser. We've got a few things like I want to talk about how to research a new content brand altogether.
A bunch of the tools that I've been using to figure out where to start with it, from keyword research to question research, audience research, all that kind of stuff. You've been looking into a lot of writing tools, haven't you? Like getting into a bit more writing these days, too. So a lot of tools around that kind of stuff. And maybe a wee discussion around that as well. And actually a couple
of details around writing, too. Isn't it like around how you write, whether you're splurging out your first draft or whether you're putting some detail into in the first place? So. Totally. That sound okay? That sounded like the list sounds good. Sounds like a lot of what I've been working on. So. Cool. Good, good. All right, let's jump into one of yours first because I think you've got a few smaller ones where I've just got really one big one to talk about.
Do you want to jump into. Well, let me ask you a question first. Sure. Do you have a favorite writing tool? That's a good question. So I had this question in my head again this week because, I mean, the theme around this week is writing because we have been planning to start a new content brand for a little while, writing a different kind of blog, haven't we? And both of us have kind of finally kicked off this week. So I was thinking about this, too.
Where have I written? Like, in the olden days, I would just write straight into WordPress, to be honest. That was always the blog we used to use. So straight into WordPress, you'd format it as you go which is fine, at least. It's like there's no copy and paste issues. I used to sometimes write in Google Docs and word like five, six years ago and then copy it over, but you'd often get these formatting
issues brought in, so that's not great either. I think there's a few things you want to talk about related to that here, to be fair. So in the end, I often ended up just writing straight in. Now, do you know what I wrote in this week was notion, actually, I do like Google Docs. It copies over reasonably well. I like the fact you can collaborate, you can put comments and people come in and edit it and actually you can see the edits at the same time.
So you can have somebody give you feedback in your work and you can see where the changes are. That kind of stuff. I think that's important, but I don't like the way that Google Docs is kind of, it's just not that organized in a lot of ways. It could be probably if we worked on it more effectively, but I find notion a bit more intuitive in terms of organizing and the database form and all that kind of stuff for being able to have a list of all
the documents you're working on, the status, that kind of thing. So I set up a space and notion, as you found a couple of days ago, just with a few fields like status, like progress, that kind of thing. And that's what I was using. So yeah, that's where I'm at with it. What about yourself? Yeah, I mean, I like notion, but I, it can be a little bit clunky sometimes. In particular,
it just gets on my nerve. Do you know when you make a new line and you go to create a new paragraph, but it becomes part of kind of like the last paragraph because it's all sort of elements, right? It's all paragraphs and headings and all the other wonderful things that notion has built into it. Yeah, sure. Sometimes for some reason I'll go to like highlight something. I want to make a headline and it
will kind of select quite a big block of text. Now I think this is user error and I think this is just a habit of mine and I think it's because I type big long messages on slack. So I have a habit of holding down shift when I press enter just because I've accidentally sent messages so many times when I wasn't done. Yeah. So it kind of is probably user error, but just in general. And again, I have the same problem in
Google Docs. Google Docs like you say, brilliant for collaboration. So if it's like you're writing a big manuscript, a big guide, pick something that's got multiple people working on it, hard to beat it. I think notion is kind of similar, but it's still kind of our towards Google Docs for some reason. Yeah, but yeah, just that the fact that I'm kind of coming out of my flow to do formatting was really bothering
me. And I know like in notion in particular, you can use the slash commands and stuff like that, so you can kind of inline poop with it without taking a hand off of the keyboard. You can like slash heading and then write it in. But I just, I don't know, never felt natural to me and I never felt the need to justify either. I just wasn't happy and I was like, I'm going to find something else I really enjoy. I find that really funny because you're very techie, you're a
coder, you play around with all licorice stuff. I'm sure you use keyboard shortcuts a lot, I presume, is that right? Fair to say. But you're exactly the same as Matthew in that sense. Matthew won't mind me saying this, I got frustrated with Matthew many times because he just kept being a bit useless at notion and complaining about it and I was like, just bloody learn the controls and then you'll be fine. And actually I love it. Like I really like
being able to just hit that. I use keyboard all the time with notion. Like I just, I can really easily go in there, scroll around, pick a sentence, change it into a header, change it into a toggle. Like halfway through a sentence you can just hit the forward slash turn and you only have to type tu g and it'll do. Turn it into a toggle and just hit enter. And I know all these come out, it's just so quick and easy and it's just like, I don't know, it's so intriguing.
I've actually, since getting to know that in notion over the last few years I've discovered so many other tools just use the same format, like WordPress does it now, so you can forward slash in WordPress and get the right blocks. And I don't know. So it surprises me that you don't like that. That's funny. I don't know what it is either. I don't know, because like I mean it makes sense. Do you know what I think it is? I think, I don't know. My brain puts
things into boxes. I love notion as a reading thing as a place to sort of read the documents that we're creating, if you know what I mean. It's a really good organization tool, but it feels, see, for just writing where all I need is headlines, bold, italics, and bullet points, that's pretty much it. Yeah, it feels just too much. So I had started using a tool called obsidian, and I've
mentioned that before, and it's really powerful. Again, the use case for obsidian for me is that it's kind of like a local on your computer notion. So if I'm on a plane, if I'm on train, I don't need to connect notion servers, get all my stuff. I can just build my own sort of nicely organized system of files and hook things together and link them. Yeah. Pause you one sec. Behind the scenes here, we might not even edit this out. Your microphone. I think
you're using your headset microphone. Is that right? Just plugged into your ears. Is that not deliberate? Oh, dear, oh, dear. It's rubbing against your jumper. So, anyone listening? If we keep this in, I think we should keep this in. Jacob's using a headset mic, which actually sounds fine when it's not rubbing against your top. But that is the big downfall of when
I say a headset mic. I mean just a pair of earphones, like the plug into your phone, and they've got a little microphone just below your ear. The trouble with this, some of them sound fine, just about passable. But the trouble is that they rub against your jumper whenever you move your head or anything like that. And that's exactly what yours is doing, right? Yeah. Yeah. So either we pause and you change your mic to your proper one, or we keep going with that, but you're gonna have to
hold it. What do you fancy? Well, I mean, does it sound all right? Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Something to do is just hold it out from your jumper a little bit and you'll be fine. If you want to just swap that, even better. Well, let's swap. Let's swap. Let's pause. Go for. And you can hear the difference. Yeah. Okay, we're back on a different mic phone now. Back. You're using your. Your rode vid mic, video mic go to, aren't you? Right, that's the one.
That's the one. That's what it should have been. New laptop didn't have a set as default. So next time. So where was I? We were talking about obsidian. Yeah. So it's kind of like your own little personal notion. It's on your laptop, you don't need to get to the Internet. You can link files together. So that's brilliant. That's cool. But it's still got that similar kind of thing as notion where it's just a little bit overbearing and like, I'm so splitting
hairs here. And it was just a moment of fun in the evening where I started kind of researching different tools I could use. And I stumbled across this tool called Highland two, and I actually found it in a way that I never find new tools, which was just to go to the Mac app store and search for writing. Yep. Yeah. And so this is, this tool is actually
for screenplays. I started off. It's meant to be used for writing proper, kind of like manuscripts and screenplays, and it's a real sort of like writer's tool. So it has none of the bells and whistles, really, that you would expect to find. And that was kind of exactly what I was looking for. But it uses Markdown, which is sort of inline. Non coders code. Yeah, kind of. And, you know, at first, this is the thing that I actually didn't really like about obsidian in
the beginning. It's also markdown based, and I didn't find it that intuitive. So anyway, I ended up using markdown for loads of different things, so it kind of just became muscle memory. So now that I've kind of got markdown as muscle memory, using Hyland two is. It's just the best writing app I've ever tried. It really is. And the whole reason is that it's just writing, you know? So I go into full screen. All that's on the screen is just the words. Just the words. It doesn't even
format the headlines. Right. So with markdown, it's like, for example, for a heading, one, it's hashtag because I'm of that generation. And then your heading. So normally, like in notion or in Google Docs, you might. I don't think it works at Google Docs, but it works in notion. You would see the styled headline. It doesn't. It actually just kind of changes the color of it. And I puts the sort of hashtag next to it, and that's it. And for heading two, it's hashtag,
hashtag, and then that. And it's just, it's all flat, it's all simple. It's all just totally, totally, totally focused. And it's wonderful. It's really wonderful. It's got a few really nice little productivity things built in as well, which I appreciate. And it's completely free. Two things that I've been using are it's got, like, a built in timer, like, a little pomdoro timer, and it's just a tiny little icon up the top
hand corner. And it's just for doing, like, a writing sprint, which is nice. Again, like, it's. It's something that I have used before. I think we've talked about it on the pod before, about the idea of using a Pomodoro timer for doing these kind of, like, 25, 30 minutes sprints and then taking a break and then coming back to it. But, like, again, that's just another app switch,
or it's looking at your phone and seeing another notification or whatever. So it's just a little icon, one of two tiny little icons up in the top right hand corner. Click that, you start timer, and then you just write. And the other thing is a bit strange. I wasn't sure if I liked it at first, but I think I actually do. It's like a typewriter
mode. Okay. What that does is it keeps the paragraph that you're writing at the moment in the center of the screen, and as you write, it pushes everything up. Scrolls. Yeah, it's kind of scrolls. And it just keeps what you're writing right now right in the center, which is great for focus. Actually, I found a. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it looks cool. Yeah. I'm looking
at a screenshot of it just now. So you've got better. You can make it so it's got about the structure on the left a. But you can make it full screen as well, I guess, with just the writing. Yeah, yeah. There's a few tools like this I used to use years back. I used to use one called Scrivener. You ever heard of Scrivener? No. It was a similar one. It's designed for proper authors.
Like, it's designed to be able to write an entire book. Include your notes in there as well, but structure chapters really nicely built to have, like, what they called shards and things like that, which linked to. So you could link to the name of a character. You could have the notes about that character pull up when you just click on it, that kind of stuff. But it had this kind of distraction free mode as well, and it had that kind of something around. The screenshot I'm looking at just now
in front of me is typewriter type font. So, like, the really basic old school font. And there's something about, like, just feeling like you're doing some. You're just doing some good writing work. When you're writing away and something like that. You're not writing an email. You're not writing like a, you know, like a message of slack or something like that. This is real writing because it's an old fashioned font.
Yeah. And silly mindset. Things like that are not to be underestimated, actually, when it comes to things like this. So for sure, simple, distraction free. And like, the reason that I'm using that for everything, like almost everything that I'm writing at the moment is starting in there. Yep. Is that it? Just like I say, it saves directly to your laptop. It just saves on a markdown file. So I can open that file in any other
text editor and I can just copy and paste that. So for example, I can paste that end file right into notion. And it's just exactly as you'd expect it to look. There's no weird kind of glitches that happen. It's just exactly as it should be. So that's kind of why I'm enjoying markdown, really. Is that. It's just portable is the word. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, totally. That's really cool. Yeah. And I seem to remember Scrivener was only Mac only as well.
And it was paid. It's a paid app as well. So this is a nice little alternative. Don't even know if scrivener is still around, to be fair. But if it is, okay, that's great. Yeah. I might even check that, actually. I'd love a little place to just do some nice focused writing in it. And so you're writing in here, then you can still copy into Google Doc or notion or whatever to do. Then do the feedback and the comments and things like that. Totally. Yeah. Perfect. All right.
Another behind the curtain thing here. We could edit this out, but we might not. Your mic is susceptible to a bit of table rumble. So whenever you're hitting the table, it's bringing it up. So that's the trouble again with the rode video mic. It'll be on a stand, it'll be attached to the phone. So it's bringing the vibration straight up through the legs of that stand into the mic. So just be careful about where your hands are. That's all tip for everyone out
there. Okay, cool. Right. What we jump into next, then this mark, your Markdown.com here is. That's pretty closely related. Is that, or have you already covered that, do you think? No. So it's URL. Teach people about it. Yeah. To markdown.com. so it's not teaching about markdown. No, it's URL to markdown.com. it's very, very simple. All you do is you paste in a link and presco and it will convert that webpage into Markdown.
That's it. That is all it does. But if in my kind of world of organizing things at this moment in time, everything's marked down. So to be able to just grab an article and paste that right into everywhere else that I'm doing my writing and kind of reading as well now because I've gone back and reading my own stuff, it's brilliant. It's brilliant. Um,
it's really good as well. For if you are using Claude, for example, that doesn't have, or another AI tool that doesn't have access to the Internet and you want to talk about a web page, if you just drag your mouse down and try and copy the webpage, and it's going to be the same problem. No matter where you try and paste it into, you're going to end up with all the kind of HTML tags and it's going to try and paste in images and stuff
like that and it's just, it's going to be a real mess. You're going to end up with all sorts of stuff. But this removes a lot of that gunk and it does a really good job of actually just keeping the content of the page. So, for example, I've used that for some of our own articles. So I've pasted in articles from the podcast host.com in there, and that's been the basis for me creating style guides and stuff like that. So it's always a bit of a pain copying and paste and then you have to paste
it in somewhere and then tidy it up and. Yeah, this is, it probably does save me at least an hour a week. Yeah, that's real. Yeah, it's just a highlight. It is really. There's a few things that just about anybody that works with a computer should really, really learn. But particularly creators, because you're doing so much writing and so much content, so much of that kind of stuff. Markdown is one of them, isn't it? Like, I use it all the
time. Even just simple things like bold, being able to bold a word or italica word, all you do is do the underscore around the word and it automatically converts it. In. Most apps these days, like even my email, I think the email app I use just now converts it for me. So it's like, just saves you then stopping highlighting the word, going to italic when you really want to emphasize something, stuff like that. It's just, just makes it so simple. It works in almost, it works in so many
places as well that people don't realize it does. They're already kind of using markdown, but not, but not at the same time. So like, slack, I believe, uses it. Yeah, discord uses it. Twitter, I believe, uses it as well. People don't know this, but you can actually have proper kind of formatting in Twitter posts. It does look weird sometimes, but yeah, yeah, totally worthwhile,
definitely. And the other one's keyboard shortcuts, it continually surprises me how many people I end up working with and they don't even know, like what can control Z means. Like how many times do you undo in the day? Learn the control Z, if you don't know already. But there's so many others. I actually, I made a big effort last week to learn the tal, the, what do they call it again? Jogging.
Is that what it is in premiere? So when you're video editing and premiere, premiere has like the most keyboard shortcuts of any app I've ever seen in my life. And one of the main ones is how to basically scroll through your timeline nice and quickly. And you can, you can, I think they call it jogging. I could be totally
off on that. People all shout at me for this. But you can kind of slowly speed up through so you can start playing, but you can speed it up a bit and speed it up a bit more and then slow it down a bit as you get to a part. You want to edit that kind of stuff. So that's a nice way to scroll through. But then you also have a few shortcuts to jump from cut to cut to cut to cut. So you can check every cut is fine as well. So you do a shortcut to jump to the cut and then a shortcut
to jump back 2 seconds and then press play. And so it's just a really simple, easy way to go through your whole thing and just review and stuff like that. So it's just saves so much time. But yeah, keyboard shortcuts all the way. Right? Can we jump into new content then? Let's do it. So again, a little bit of context. Like we've been looking to expand out into a new content niche. We've always wrote about podcasting in the past. We still do.
We always will. We write about the business of podcast. We write about related things like YouTube in relation to podcasting. But we wanted to start a new brand which was much more around creator business. Is that fair to say? Jacob yeah. So running a creator business, and that involves so much more. It's more
around. It includes YouTube, social podcasting, it includes all sorts of different things, but even more about the kind of the monetization, the business behind it, how a business can use this to grow themselves, or how you can start a content channel and then turn it into a business. That's what we've done, that's what we continue to do, and it's what so many people are interested in. And it's kind of just an area we're both really interested in.
So when you start a brand new thing, I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed at the start, I'll be honest. It's like with the podcast host, we've been doing it for 14 years. We've got a thousand posts. We just passed that 1000 posts mark. That's massive. And it feels overwhelming to think about starting something new like that. I made a big effort to break it down into like, where do we start? How would someone start? Because again, this is actually
a part of what we're doing, isn't it, Jacob? Like trying to figure out how to start again. Yeah. Yeah. It's a totally different thing, though, isn't it? Yeah, it's kind of easy. Like there's unlimited things and a never ending list of things we want to do in the podcast host, but picking where to start is way more difficult than any of that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's something that I'm sure
many out there listening will experience it, too. Like, you're an expert in a particular area, and then you want to start creating content around that area. Sometimes it's the. Sometimes they call it the curse of knowledge. Like, you know so much that you either forget what the problems are in the early days, or you underestimate how painful some problems are. So you think, I'm not going to write about that.
It's way too simple, it's way too basic. But actually it's one of the biggest problems that brand new people experience. So. So that's what I was going through the last couple of weeks, was actually taking the general plan we had for the content and trying to figure out, right, where do we actually start? We want to create some content. We've been doing this podcast, which is great. This is part of it. But how do we start writing blog posts around this?
So, yeah, that's basically it. So I was going to nip through a wee bit of that structure. Does that sound all right? Yeah, let's do it. Sounds good to me. So where I mean, when it comes down to it, the very start of it tends to just be what you would generally term SEO keyword research. And you've got your topic. You start with the topic. So we were looking at creator business or creator economy or how to create, and this actually kind of caused me a bit of trouble in the first
place. Like, where did you get to in this as well, Jacob? Like the fact that I don't think many people actually search creator business. In fact, we discovered this. Not many people search creator business. Not many people search creator. It's actually more of the specifics as well. Was that your experience in looking at all this? Yeah, definitely. They're looking for the sort of how to do things, particular things, but not how to do this. For my creative business,
they're looking at the elements. I think it's because it's a term that people use to describe creators more often than creators use to describe themselves, especially in the early days. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just say, I want to start a podcast or I want to start a YouTube channel, or I want to do a bit of Instagram, and it doesn't make you a creator necessarily, but you say you type into Google still, how do I make money on Instagram? So, yeah, and I did come,
I did kind of clarify we. But my thinking around planning in general, like, one thing we've struggled with on the podcast host as a content platform over the last ten years is that I would argue one of the most important parts of the whole process in starting a podcast, and this applies to any kind of content, I would say is your strategy is the plan. But that just sounds so boring. And there's no real specific keyword around that either. People don't generally go out there and search,
how do I make a plan for my podcast? How do I create a strategy around my podcast? You do get, the closest you get is generally like, how to think up a podcast topic. And that's part of it. But actually, it's not even like a tiny part of it. It's like it's the smallest part of it, the topic, because actually
you then have to take the topic. You have to find out what the problems are within that, what the actual audience is that's searching for that topic, what the problems they have that are most painful, that you can then answer what your answers are, how you're uniquely solving those problems, so many
different parts to it. And that's your strategy. All those things make up, but generally the most, often the most painful parts of a problem or a topic are more ephemeral because they're harder to put your finger on. And I kind of started to think this through a little bit. So it's definitely, I've not solved it by any means, but I think that kind of applies to a lot of different content platforms, and it definitely applies to this one,
too. But so to get to the more specifics, the thing I did start doing was I often go to Google trends first because actually it's a really good, kind of top level one. Start typing in things like YouTube, podcasting, social media, start to compare those platforms. That's what I looked at. Then I start to try and hone in on the language. Sparktoro, I think is a really good one for this as well. Like, have you used Sparktoro much? Yeah, yeah, I talked about it a couple
of episodes ago, I think. Yeah. By the way, cool. I forgot entirely now. Yeah. The thing I love about that is it's a way of really discovering how people talk about topics. Because if you find one blog or one podcast or one website about a topic, you pop that into Sparktoro and then Sparktoro spits out all, let's say a website. So I want to talk about, let's say I want to talk about like how to do cold showers or something like that. One of the trending topics right
now. Like what's the sort of the scope on cold showers? So I type that in and it pops up that a few different websites cover this. So I put that website into the site and then it will show me all of the podcasts that people listen to if they've searched this site, cold showers, all of the YouTube channels that they watch, all of the blogs that they read, all of the social media channels
that they follow. So then you spend an hour, 2 hours just looking at all these different things and really looking through all the questions on these site, all the blog posts, all the topics, all the insights, and start to collect all of these things that you didn't really think about. All these questions, all these words, all this language that you didn't think about too much. You'll know some, of course it's your topic, but you'll be surprised at how many things pop up related to
this topic that you maybe didn't even think about. It's maybe just another way that people say that problem or ask that problem. So I think I find that really useful as one part of that. Then often I try to jump into the keywords, well, actually, no, I'm going to go to a few channels first, actually. So I'll often go to some of the more general sources. Like, you're a Reddit guy, aren't you? You use a Lot of Reddit.
There's nowhere better, I think, actually, to find the questions that are currently trending than Reddit. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, kind of. Kind of. Okay, give me the qualification. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's like Quora is the kind of older school version of it. You type in your topic into Quora and it pops up all the top questions on that topic. So I type in podcasting and it'll give me a whole bunch of questions people asked. Well,
I think, yeah, go ahead. For something like that, where there's a set kind of, because it does depend on what it is that you're researching. But for example, for podcasting, there is a Reddit.com r podcasting. There's a podcasting subreddit. And on there you can actually just order all of the posts from the last year by number of votes. So you can see what are the questions and topics that are getting the most discussion on here.
And that I think could be really useful. But it depends on what it is that you search. And if there's a good subreddit for it, then yes, it would be a great tool to use. Perfect. Yeah. I found even just typing in a topic as well will bring up, it'll bring up the subreddits, but they show the conversation, most relevant conversations, too. And that can show you if something's been heavily upvoted, it shows you topics that are really resonating with people, and that's what you're looking
for at this stage. It's whether you're looking through a YouTube channel, like I said, that you found that resonated with this type of person you're looking through. You find a video that got ten times the views of everything else on this one person's channel, you're like, well, that obviously resonates with people. That's one of the questions that's really top of mind with people
right now. And that's the same with Reddit, Quora and the like. You're looking for anything that just has a disproportionate amount of engagement with it. And you could do the same. Actually, one thing I used to like to do, I'm not sure. I think it still works. Well, maybe not as well as it used to, but on Twitter, stroke x, you type in a special
question. So you type in something like podcasting and then, and capital letters and then a question mark, because Twitter has good advanced search functionality where it uses those booleans. So if you have the. And that means it shows any question that had a question mark in ithemenous that also included the word podcasting. And so it surfaces all of the questions that
are around that topic. So if you have a good idea at this point of a lot of the keywords that really resonate with people, then you can start to dig into the questions that really pop up that way, too. That's great. I've never heard that before. I didn't know you could use billions. Yeah, absolutely. It's actually bonus points. And it's a great marketing tool later as well.
It's one of those that doesn't scale because you can only do it for so long, but you just start responding to ten of them a day, and suddenly you grow your profile, you show some of your resources out there. It works quite nicely.
All right, so all of those, like I said, this is all designed to give you an insight into, you know, you've got your main topic, you'll know the broad topic you want to talk about, but it really hopes to surface all of these specifics, all of these niches, all of these little elements in and around this topic that are really resonating with people.
And again, that language as well that maybe you didn't know, maybe you don't know that that's what they call, like a group of people call something in your niche. It happens all the time. Just these surprises pop up. And from there, I tend to jump into the actual keyword tools. So you've got a bunch of these around. The one we use most, or I use most these days, is ahrefs.
We have used SEM rush in the past as well. What are you on these days, Jacob, when you're looking at keyword research, I do prefer ahrefs. Yeah. Yeah. I historically used Semrush mostly, but it's just. It's big. It's big. It's easy enough to just get to the keyword magic tool, right. And then just ignore the 150,000 other options. But it's still. I used ahrefs the other day there, actually, because I saw that you were using it and I just remembered. Yeah, this is much nicer. I just.
So much cleaner in and out quicker. Yeah, that's it exactly. Semrush had just become a monster. It's just absolutely. Yeah, it's enormous. I love the fact as well that in the Ahrefs keyword tool, it has. So it's got you type in your keyword at the top and it brings up the overview. And then if you go to keyword ideas, you have a few different elements here. You've got matching terms, which is the traditional. So I type in like how to start a podcast. And then it lists down the list.
It'll have like how to start a podcast at the top. It'll give you the volume, the keyword difficulty, the trends, and then it'll say how to start a podcast on Spotify. How to start podcasts for free. How to start a podcast on YouTube. So it's all of the terms that match it exactly. And so that's a really useful way to get niches and specifics and long tail keywords really usefully.
But then equally, you can click straight over to related terms and then it gives you stuff that's actually much more alongside. So if I click that in right now alongside how to start a podcast, then suddenly you've got Apple podcast pops up or how to make a podcast. There's an alternative. So that's an example of, I would say, how to start a podcast. I wouldn't have even thought of how to make a podcast as an alternative, but that actually has some
really good volume in there. So without using tools like this, you don't realize how other people ask the same question. That's one of the things you're looking for, really. But yeah, related terms, really useful. And then I also love the fact that they've got in here in matching terms. They've got questions. So you've got matching terms, top left, all terms or questions, and you click questions and suddenly it surfaces, all of these questions related to that search term,
and it's so useful. So now I've got, how much does it cost to start a podcast? How to start a podcast on Spotify? How do you start a podcast with a script, how to start a successful podcast? And that wouldn't show up in the matching terms because it's not an exact match. It doesn't have how to start a podcast in it. It's broken up by the
successful. So I love the fact, just as you were saying there, Jacob, it's just so quick to go through and find all of these different elements, all these different, you know, variations of the keywords that are there. And it's so easy just to add it to a list and then export your listen. Yeah. And then you're gone. Yeah, totally. So what I come out with here, I mean, once you've done that once I've looked through all of that, what I'm looking for really and what we discussed earlier this
week. Jacob, and you can take different approaches to this, but at this stage I was looking for something which was in that kind of low to medium volume in the thousands. So 1000 to 5000 volume if it can get up to 10,000, even better, but with a lowish keyword difficulty. So something that it shows up with only having a keyword difficulty of something like 25 to 50 in that range. Lore is better, obviously, but you're unlikely to find something that has up to 5000 search volume that
has less than 25 keyword difficulty, for example. But if you do then excellent. That's a good rediscovery there. So we've got a list of topics now sketched out, maybe 15 or 20 of them that are all in that kind of range, five to ten k and a few little kind of aspirational ones that are maybe ten to 20k in terms of volume. But yeah, they're kind of maybe a later stage but
that's what I was looking for. And that research, spending about probably 2 hours on that I think last week just sitting down and doing that and having that really solid information around I can range of terms. The difficulty in the volume, that was what really got me over that hump of really just getting down and starting right. Because I could see there was people out there demanding it. I could see the difficulty wasn't too hard. We could get some search volume around this within
a few months if we do it well. And yeah, that worked. So yeah, that got me over and started the first post. Yeah, go for it. So what do you think, what would you say to the idea of someone that's starting a brand new site from scratch has
no links, no referring domains. What do you think about the idea of actually looking for terms specifically which have that super, super low difficulty rather than coming across and having a nice day when you do find one of those, it's got 1000 2000 search volume and really low difficulty. Do you think that's a good way to start a brand new site with no history whatsoever and just focus on those super low difficulty keywords?
Yeah, I think it's got to be a two pronged approach. I think you got to have two things in here and I've got this in our plan as well. To be fair, I didn't mention that, but I also have alongside these ones, the, the pillar posts essentially. So these are, I mentioned that those higher difficulty, aspirational ones. But you have in here in podcasting, for example, how to start a podcast is probably one of the most. It's high keyword difficulty,
77 in hrefs, 36k searches. So a lot of volume, but reasonably high difficulty, one of the kind of core starting ones. So that is a pillar post for us. So really you want to get that one out in the early days as well, but it's unlikely you're going to rank for that anytime soon. So that's what I mean by a two pronged approach. You want to plan in having two, three, four of these pillar posts, your most important pillar posts, you want to knock them out in the first few
months as well, alongside. But they're going to be big jobs. That is the problem. So that's why you don't want to only concentrate on them, I would argue. I would say that's why we're not concentrating only on them, because I want to also be knocking out some easier, simpler, shorter posts which are likely to get some traffic quicker as well. So that's the two sides to those pillar posts. Yeah, that's it, yeah, absolutely, yes. Yeah. Because then they kind of work together to work to,
to start to bring some traffic into. They start to bolster each other. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're totally right, though. Yeah. If you've got absolutely no
authority, no audience know anything, you're starting from absolute scratch. There's no reason not to go quite long tail in the early days because like a really quite long tail article that only has maybe even like five to ten keyword difficulty, but only three 4500 volume, maybe that is something you could rank in the top three within a few months if you do a really good job around it. And that can be great. Traffic going from zero to 300 is brilliant.
So, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I would pick out a range potentially if you're in that situation, just starting from absolute scratch. Good advice. Cool. All right. Anything else in that? I think, I mean, the only thing to point out there is that hrefs is not cheap, cheap by any means. So, yeah, if you're starting out from scratch, Semrush, I think it's like 150 a month for the minimum one. Hrefs is about 100. But you can do a lot with keyword,
Google Keyword Explorer as well. Just the standard Google keyword Explorer. Like it's the. I don't even know, they change the name all the time. Like Google Adsense words, Google Ads account. And you have to now put in your billing details, I believe, but then they won't charge you. So that's just for your, just for
your ad account. If you were to run ads and then somewhere in the top right hand corner there's a little icon that you can click and then you find your keyword research or whatever they've called it now. But yeah, there's, it's a bit of a, it used to just be easy if you had a Google account you could just get into it. But there's a little bit of a rigmarole now and I think a lot of people do
get put off by the, by the billing thing. I've seen that come off a few times, but you really won't get billed and it is free and you do get, you get difficulty in there. It's called competition and it's more to do with advertisers competition, but it still gives you a bit of a. It gives you a steer. Yeah, yeah. I found them pretty correlated to be fair.
Like the kind of organic difficulty versus the paid difficulty because people are so on top of it these days that you know, if it's worth fighting for, it's worth fighting for both organically and paid clicks lay so they tend to go up in concert. So yeah, it's called Dem Keyword planner now. So if you search keyword planner, Google Keyword planner, that will pop up and that'll give you a free version. Yeah. So that'll be a good way to do
it. Do you know the final one as well? I'll just mention too, do not underestimate in this whole process, good old fashioned social engineering as well. Talking to humans. Totally talking to actual humans, believe it or not. I mean again, this kind of depends on having a place to speak to them. It's an advantage if you have an audience already, you have an email list or whatever that you can reach out and ask a question, run a survey, whatever it is. Say something like what are you struggling
most with just right now? And that'll surface so many questions, surface so much of the language that your audience are really using just now. And that's what you want to put into your titles, that's what you want to put into your keywords, that's what you want to build your, your articles around really to solve those problems. But if you don't have that audience, get out there, join online communities and start talking to people, start contributing, start looking up
the questions, all that kind of stuff. Go to events, go to live events and have conversations with people really doing this social media too. Just get on there. As difficult as it is sometimes these days, like, have good conversations on social and get the questions people are asking. So, yeah, that's a way to do it, too. All right, I'll do that for now. I think. I'd love to hear some feedback on that. Actually, other people are working on that, so we'll come to some feedback at the
end. But I'd love to heed. We've got a survey for everyone this time around, so, yeah, if you do want to give us some feedback, then we've got a little request at the end of the show for you to do that. That'd be great. Last talking point here, Jacob, that you've got Jon to talk about the drafting, the way that you actually write. I think that's quite interesting, actually. Yeah, go for it.
Tell me a little bit about your approach, because I am, in real terms, a bit of a baby when it comes to writing long form content. I'm a big proponent of the brain dump with no edit up front. So it is really tempting to start writing. And then I'm writing my intro and I'm like, oh, no, I could make that better. Back and edit a little bit. And then I write a bit more, and then I go back and edit the first bit a bit again based on the second bit. And some people do that and it works for
them, but it doesn't work for me. I get so bogged down and I don't get anywhere. And I get exhausted quick because the editing process is actually quite different, I feel, in terms of the type of energy required, the type of mindset required. And so there's a bit of context switching between creating, writing, and reviewing and critiquing, I believe. Certainly I've found that over the years with me. So what I try to do to my best ability, and I don't manage it every single time.
I'll still self edit sometimes, but I try my best to just go and brain dump a whole thing at once and just get it out there on the page. And that initial one is the outline of the article. It's all the ideas I have. It's all the what I want to say. And it's probably written in a really shitty way. It'll be that shitty first draft that people talk about, but it's
out there. And that you feel. You feel a real sense of achievement having done that, and then you can stop and come back and do the edit later. So, yeah, that's. That's the way I try to do it. When you say out there, do you mean you're publishing this? No, no, no, no. The shitty. No, no one is going to see your brain. No one is going to see it. I'll maybe then send it to an editor like yourself or Matthew or somebody, or I'll just self it. I'll just go back and edit it myself at another point.
I'll give it a wee bit of time. I'll go back and then I'll review and edit again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That really resonates with me. So I've tried writing top to bottom, like the whole thing. Sure. Yeah. And it might have some bullet points of like an outline kind of general structure. Doesn't work
because it's exactly what you're describing. I'll write the intro and then I will edit the intro about five times and then look at the clock and realize I spent 2 hours writing the intro and I've already forgotten what the point was. That was what made. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. It doesn't work at all. So. Yeah, the brain dump, for real, what I want to experiment with, I've talked about this on the, on the podcast before, but I've got into a bit of a habit of doing audio journals.
Yeah. I'm actually wondering about. Could I do a similar thing but for the brain dump, for that initial brain dump. Yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah. But I wonder if actually there is value in the physical, the physical action or writing your own outline rather than transcribing it and then turning it into an outline. It's a really good point, actually. I hadn't thought what I also do, which I hadn't mentioned there, but is the precursor to that, is I'll write a bullet point outline first because
that's what you're really talking about there, around that. You've got this shape in your head of what you want to say. Yeah. And if you try and write it top to bottom, it's going to take you an hour because you're. Because that even that shitty first draft is still all the words. So it's going to take you a while to put it out in paper, even with that brain dump. And really.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. You want to be able to start to structure the ideas, the points, the concepts, what order they come in. I want to cover this, this, this and this and, and you're right, it's quite, it always feels quite ephemeral in your head around this point, doesn't it? Because it's like you can lose things and, and if you spend too long writing someone, you absolutely, totally. I do that all the time. I'll forget that
next point I had initially. Frustrating. So, yeah, there's always a bullet point outline. Brain dump first. Yeah. And then that turns into the. The kind of larger. The bad first draft. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you've actually kind of got a bit of structure in place, and you've got maybe, like, different sections with some. It goes into maybe some detail. Like, are you actually writing in any way for the reader, or are you still, at this point, writing for yourself, if that makes sense. No,
definitely for the reader at that point. Yeah. So I'm writing an article. I mean, I say it's a bad first draft, but sometimes it won't need that much editing. So it's like it's writing properly. It's not just. It's not going so fast that you're bad at that point. I think that's what the outline's for. That's what the bullet point outlines for, is to get the. The real brain dump out there.
And then the writing part is, I'm not going back and editing, but I'm still writing, like, my best writing voice or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, at that point. Indeed. Yeah. Okay, cool. That makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know, another thing that I do sometimes there as well, actually just occurred to me, is that I'll often, if I get stuck on a section or a point or I'm just not feeling it, like, I do prescribe a lot to the Steven Pressfield.
Like, amateurs procrastinate and talk about writer's block and wail and cry about writing, and professionals just turn up and get it done. I prescribe a bit to that. Like, if you want to be a writer, you just have to do it. Like, there's no excuses, really. But on the other hand, there's definitely. It's definitely not quite as simple as just, like, doing some sums or whatever,
you know, being creative and actually writing something. It's definitely. There's something a bit more complicated, a bit more complex to it than just doing that. And so other things I do sometimes is I'll. If I do kind of get stuck in a part, or I feel like I'm really procrastinating on a section, I'll just jump to another.
There's no reason to do it all in the right order. So I'll have my outline, and I'll pick out a part of the outline that really speaks to me at that very moment in time, and I'll just write that, and then that'll be you in the flow a bit more, and suddenly the other parts become a bit easier. So I find that quite useful. That is a big benefit of having that outline to start with, where you can skip ahead and you can write whatever part it is and, you know, you're confident that
it has a place in the full finished product. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, definitely. Because actually, even still, when I make my outline, I'm then trying to go top to bottom, and I haven't really tried skipping ahead like that. Yeah. Because there's definitely, there's parts that you're like, you feel you've got something really unique to see or you've got, you know, there's just something that you're a little bit more excited about than everything else. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And, I mean, I totally hear what you're saying on really, you just need to turn up and you need to write, but I guess you also need to engineer yourself into making that happen. And it's finding out, like, for me, it was. I'm really enjoying writing in the moment just with this really simple editor, like I talked about earlier in the episode. That helps me. That helps me turn up and get some writing done, but, yeah, it's. Yeah. Hacking yourself, figuring out what,
how to trick yourself into getting that out. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Good stuff. All right. I think that was, that covered quite a lot there, actually. I think you happy to tie it up there? Oh, yeah, yeah. Good one. Great stuff. Okay, thanks. If you're out there listening, I hope you got something out of this. Covered quite a few things there. Like I said, I'd love to get some feedback. We'd love to get some feedback, and we've put
together a little survey. So I thought, Jacob, what do you feel about, how do you feel about giving something back for anyone that fills out the survey? Reward people? Well, my idea, my initial idea, maybe we can brainstorm this on the podcast here. My initial idea was actually just to bring on spills questions. So do
you think that's enough if we say we put the survey there? If you go along and answer two or three questions for us, give us some feedback on this show so that we can hopefully make it better for you out there listening, pop in a question of your own for us to answer, and then we'll spend a bit of time talking through it and hopefully help you out too that way with that. Jacob, I think that sounds like a good plan. We'll tell you. Yeah, we'll show you how we're doing it,
how you're reading it. We might also come back and say, no idea, sorry. We can ask some friends, ask some friends. But it's okay. So if you're up for that, that'd be great. So go over to thepodcasthost.com creator and we'll put the survey right on there. So that's thepodcasthost.com creator and you'll find that right there. And you'll get just two or three questions.
So it won't take you long to put together. Give us some thoughts, and hopefully we can use that to put together a better show for you in the future, cover better topics. We'll do a better format, all that kind of stuff. We'll refine it for you and make it better. And like I said, we'll put a we question in at the end. What is your question for us? And we'll hopefully help you out on that, give you some answers, hopefully give you some advice, too. All right. Thank you again for listening
again. Go over to thepodcasthost.com creator to help us out. We'll talk to you on a future episode, talk to you then.