#highly unrelatable content i know

[mylittleredgirl]

controversial opinion, but i love second-person pov in fic. in this case, i specifically don't mean x-reader; that seems like a different kind of story that scratches another itch.

i want you to be a fully-fledged character, familiar, recognizable. the thing i love about second-person is not that it inserts me into the story as a reader, but that it inserts the narrator as this omniscient, invisible, inescapable force.

in present or future tense -- you do this; you will do this -- the repeated you becomes a back beat of inevitability. the character is being moved from page to page by the voice of god, and we can see god's shadow on the wall. the you is so bound by the constraints of their own character, their own nature, that they could never have chosen another path. it creates an undertone of horror in any genre for me. the story is that there could be no story other than the one the narrator chooses to tell.

#highly unrelatable content i know #but it compels me because it's both so close in to a character's experience and notably separated from it #i remember reading choose-your-own-adventures as a kid and being like ok sure i'm at sleep-away camp and can go right or left in the woods #but who is offering me the choice? #on writing

[wisteriagoesvroom]

🏎️💨 THE FORMULA 1 TAG GAME! 🏎️💨:

stealing this from the timeline...

+ zero pressure tags (but i love reading these!) - @lecrep @souvenir116 @fueledbyremembering @thinkingaboutfilm11 @supercollide @fireopaal @callsign-shortstack @thatguywasvaping @linewire @buryawoman and whoever else wants to do it.

1. Who or what got you into F1?

charles edits on tiktok + drive to survive, lmao. i'm one of those bitches. sorry not sorry!

but! i will say! what greg james said about f1 resonated with me because i have never ever really cared about physics or engineering in any deep or substantial way. and now, i am avidly reading people like supermak's incredible posts talking about downforce or apexes or deltas and car configs, looking at the charts and the data, and i just think that is a really fun place to be.

f1blr and f1 fandom so far has been a nice confirmation that multiple things can be true - yes we want to make the vroom vroom boys kiss, but we also care deeply about the ethics of the sport, the growth, about driver + team stories, driver pipelines and equity and race excitement and engineering. i think it's really cool these things can coexist.

the sport never should be one thing to one group of people, you know? (wow that ended up longer than i thought.)

2. Who was the very first F1 driver you supported? Do you support them now? Have your opinions on them differed or stayed the same since then?

charles, and still charles lmao. unfortunately.

i am an oscar piastri enthusiast also. i think there's a bit of recency bias at work here but he's come swimming like a fledgling shark into the shallows with his deadpan personality and i'm just very intrigued by His Whole Thing.

i want good things for yuki! and lewis! my GOAT!! give the man his 8th :( (it probably isn't happening but lets' not manifest that.......)

TL;DR it's been a joy getting to "know" the grid (or at least as much of their public persona will tell us) and getting into the lore. *shaky hands* the LORE!

also nobody asked, but, schumacher was an omnipresent name when i was growing up - which might give away my age - but he always felt like an old school driver. in the sense of his mythos, his mystery, his dominance of the track. that era of f1 is over and the sport only moves on and evolves, but in the same way his presence felt a lot more removed and unrelatable to me, and far away. the speed of technology now and broadcasting and social content makes f1 feel more fun and accessible. it feels a lot nicer to find fandom spaces like f1blr where there are different audiences (female, queer, a variety of ages and backgrounds etc) yelling about the same things.

it's just a different time, not a value judgment. but i am enjoying it.

3. Who’s your current favourite F1 driver?

see above, but i'm 100% here for lestappen having a track battle next year only for oscar to pip them to the podium in one of the races lmao. i think it'd be amazing.

4. Is there a driver pairing or pairings you support? What made you attracted to that pairing in the first place?

*long sigh* once again lestappen baybee... the lore... the parallels... the sun-moonism.... the enemies-to-rivals-to-friends-and-gay-rival-soulmates-something

i like other pairings too like in my about me post - landoscar, galex, blabla. my dark horses are riccussell (george/daniel) and groto (george/toto).

something about that greyhound, very wound-up, very upper-middle-class, highly-strung, born-to-want-but-not-to-always-win english george:

5. Do your parents, siblings or relatives have a favourite team and/or favourite driver(s)?

i got my sister into f1 at around the same time but she's not indicated any preference on drivers yet tbh. she's a casual fan. must be nice being normal.

6. Do you have any favourite races? Are there any that stand out to you the most?

haven't seen enough of them to say, 'cus i only started following like two months ago as the season was winding down. i looooved Vegas '23 though and the legendary charles overtake. he's just so fucking smart and cunning when he's given the conditions and the car to be. watching Abu Dhabi '21 on replay was also a TRIP.

7. Do you have a favourite circuit? Can be from the past or from the current calendar.

i'm still learning them. but i'm mildly curious about the old tracks like nürburgring - it was from a totally different era of the sport and it'd be nice to rebalance the long tracks with the current spectacle of street races even though that doesn't seem to be where the sport's moving towards.

8. Have you ever been to an F1 race in real life? Feel free to tell us your experience going to one if you like.

i actually live in a place with a track... i had a free ticket for general access once many years ago but that was pre-f1 hyperfixation, and at that point i didn't understand the appeal at all. idk.

i feel like f1 is actually a better experience for me to watch on tv as a fan.... probably blasphemy i know.

9. Have you ever met an F1 driver in real life?

no and idk that i would because i've seen celebrities in person in the past and it's usually so quick and transactional because they're surrounded by hordes of handlers and/or they're usually running somewhere even if it's a fan-focused interaction.

THAT SAID! i would love to attend a talk by Lewis or just generally hear what he has to say, because what he's done is so beyond f1 at this point and he always shows up in terms of advocacy and speaking up, in recent years, where it really matters. he's a fascinating figure, sometimes contradictory, sometimes controversial, but i definitely would love to hear what he has to say.

10. Do you have a favourite F1 car? If so, what is it?

i am partial to that black and gold lotus from the 80s, ngl:

and this 7up car (jordan 191?) which with the fujifilm sponsorship is just peak 90s:

11. Do you have a favourite one win wonder?

does charles count as a one win wonder............ fight me in the comments

12. Do you have any favourite quotes from the F1 world? This can either be inspirational or hilarious.

"don't waste it" from seb vettel to charles on seb's last day

#tag game #this became an essay #but whatever #what is tumblr for if not being indulgent in longform

[yuri-ray]

No-Spoilers Review #1: Otherside Picnic (Urasekai Picnic)

Content Warnings: guns, general horror genre themes and visuals

Starting with a series I own in print, it's Otherside Picnic by Iori Miyazawa, a novel series with manga and anime adaptations. This series is half horror and half yuri romance, about two university students exploring and being harrowed by a world full of urban legend horrors.

Is it good? Yes! I recommend it very highly to anybody who can take a little horror.

After all... as the author said himself... "This too is yuri."

Before I start, yes, it's THAT Iori Miyazawa who popularized the concept of "yuri of absence" in a batshit crazy pair of interviews. I think a lot of people would read that and assume that his actual work, Otherside Picnic, is full of bait and subtext. It's not. It's a slow-burn, sure, but it's legitimately canon and it's really good, OK? This guy knows what he's doing.

Anyway...

Our two leads are two university students, Sorawo Kamikoshi (the brown-haired girl in the art) and Toriko Nishina (the blonde girl). All of Otherside Picnic is told from Sorawo's perspective. While urban exploring, Sorawo stumbles upon a portal to the Otherside, a dangerous realm of urban legends and internet horrors (imagine famous Japanese creepypastas). She meets Toriko and they explore the Otherside and how its horrors leak into the real world and their perceptions, pulling them in and becoming more dangerous over time.

What I love most about Otherside Picnic is how complicated Sorawo and Toriko are as people. Sorawo is both extremely relatable at times and also extremely unrelatable at others. She is not a self-insert protagonist in the slightest, and she's not even a good person. She doesn't care about others very much. Meanwhile, Toriko has some difficulties with social situations and is overall a pretty normal (in comparison) likeable person with realistic worries. The two of them become closer organically and, yes, they do kiss eventually. No one is an idiot and all of their conflicts make sense.

The horror is also good and well-executed. It's decently scary and the world of the Otherside is intriguing and unpredictable, but not in any bullshit way. The horror drives the plot just as much as the romance does, and the manga does an amazing job bringing the novel's descriptions to life with creative paneling and art.

A supporting character, Kozakura, is that classic maligned trope of an adult that looks very young because she's short. However, Kozakura genuinely acts like a normal independent adult, and is a very likeable character who is the voice of reason.

As a side note, Iori Miyazawa also happens to like guns. The leads carry them as defense against malicious Otherside entities and there's a scene where Sorawo expresses pretty abject disgust at a tank designed to kill civilians, so it's not pro-military or whatever. It doesn't go in-depth because neither Sorawo nor Toriko care for them.

Final thoughts:

THE ANIME IS REALLY BAD. It totally misses the point and all of the things that really makes this series stand out--the episodes got shuffled for no reason which caused plotholes and character progression issues galore, and it cuts out all of the scenes where Sorawo and Toriko actually talk properly to each other. Plus the budget is like, one corn chip.

THE MANGA IS REALLY GOOD. It takes a lot of care to really adapt everything from the novel, which means that although updates are slow, you get to see everything Sorawo feels and thinks.

This series is one of my top favorite yuris, which I recommend to basically anyone who likes romance and doesn't mind some spooky visuals (or anyone who likes horror and doesn't mind some girls navigating complex feelings). It has close to no explicit gore. I'm currently up to date on everything... I can write a lot more on this, but these are my spoiler-free thoughts. The title references Roadside Picnic (the inspiration for the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) which is an inspiration for the series, but as I've never read it, I can't say more than that.

#yuri review #otherside picnic #urasekai picnic #horror #romance #cw guns #high recommendation

[crimsondestroyerofgarlicbreadth]

Okay okay, hear me out:

Aroace superhero

The reason that a lot of superhero movies/content has romantic subplots is to make those deaths punch you in the gut harder. It creates motivation for the main character, or fuels them to live / or sacrifice themselves so that the other can live.

And that the supervillains are coded as aroace a lot because it makes them unlikable and unrelatable.

Well I want them to create a superhero movie with an aroace superhero who everyone thinks will be cold hearted and won't care about saving the world and everyone's cautious about if they'll turn into a supervillain. But then a threat comes along and this hero is fighting HARDER than the rest of them, like full out GOING FOR IT. And after the battle, they're like, but you had no one to fight for? And the aroace superhero just pulls out a photo of their family and friends and just say they had a village to fight for. That they might not have had a significant other to fight to come home to but that doesn't mean they had no one significant.

Like, throughout the movie, the superhero is alone but there's always hints that they have people to fight for. Like they take a phone call from their sister/brother and ask about the kids. They text their friends some memes that don't really mean anything but show that they have a connection. They stop by a cemetery with flowers for an unspecified reason. They take the original call to action phone call in a nursing home. After the battle their phone is BLOWING up. All small things that show they care about people. Specifically that they have people they're fighting FOR.

A scene where they're meant to be doing something important (scouting who knows) and they see something that they think one of their friends would love and put the whole team on a five min break to get it and then go to extra measures to keep it safe for the rest of the scene. And the others tease them about having a crush to which they EXPLICITLY say that they're aroace and that isn't the first time they've told them.

They wear a pin badge with the aroace flag, and have the aro and ace flags hanging around in their home and base. It's their phone screen background etc. It's not subtle. They're out and proud and know that they're aroace and won't take anyone's opinion stating otherwise.

Throughout the movie they show obvious signs that they're annoyed by what the other imply about not having anyone to fight for and they get pep talked more often than the other to 'ensure they'll stay on track', but they don't say anything about it until there's a heart to heart scene with who the audience is tricked into thinking is a love interest about how as an aroace, they're used to the comments and the best thing to do is usually to ignore them because it takes more energy to explain than it does to just mentally brush them off.

How they wish more people understood the complexities of being aroace instead of boiling it down to loneliness and how loneliness isn't being alone. They're happy being single, would love a QPR maybe, but happy being single either way and no one can understand why because they don't want to think that romantic love isn't the pinnacle of human experience.

That they don't fight for romantic love but for friendships and family and the people who have no one and are alone because those are the relationships that will last forever. Romantic love can be fleeting, can come and go quickly. But familial and platonic love lasts forever.

That they are out as aroace because they are not just fighting as a superhero but also so aroace people don't feel alone or broken like they did. They're trying to destigmatize being aroace, and they have to work harder than the other members of the team to be seen as 'good' or human. Bonus if they have mutant powers. Every mistake is highly scrutinised in case it wasn't a mistake and they've been corrupted because they're seen as heartless. That they've lost friends and family because they couldn't accept that they're aroace. They're fighting many battles that the others don't see that all stem from their aroace identity.

And in the end, after the final battle is over, they're accepted. The others bother to learn what aro and ace mean and stop confusing them and using it as a bad joke. They go see their family and friends and pets who were all worried sick throughout the final fight. Their 'risk level' lowered from likely to turn to the dark side to unlikely.

Being aroace is beautiful and challenging experience and I think we deserve a movie that reflect that.

#aroace #aromantic #asexual #superhero #movie idea #just watched the avengers if you could tell #and i had this idea for an aroace superhero movie centered on the aroaceness #and how that would affect the story #the power of friendship #isnt just for kids now #aroace people deserve representation

[pray4jensen]

Lol your tags about following Misha on social media as a non American.... Yeah. I unfollowed him in 2016 cause of Trump and refollowed on Nov 5th because. You know. But it's getting to the point where it's back to being no supernatural and way too much poltics from a country I don't care about :(

yeah i dont think i could ever follow him on social media. like don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely fantastic how he’s advocating for positive changes in his country, but as a canadian, when i see what’s the latest fucked up thing in america, it’s highly unrelatable and most times, straight up depressing.

canada is def affected by us politics tho, but usually it is more on the economic side vs the idealogical side. like anti-abortion views, nope, straight up nope, no one’s gonna agree with that here in vancouver. denying same-sex marriage? um it’s something like 86% of canadians that support it and it was legalized in canada decades ago. privatized healthcare in canada usually gets anger as a response—nobody wants that here. i see my doctor so much, get so many blood tests, and like i dont pay anything. why change!!

i think for us, it’s just easier getting his content filtered and viewable on tumblr tbh!

#boredombabbles #ask #anon #misha collins #i mean it is concerning as a canadian to see the republicans winning things over there #def after trump #some of that white only radicalism spread to canada as well #but i dont think canada is a place where it could thrive here #we’re too multicultural #esp in vancouver where more than 50% of the population is not white

[dankar-camoran]

what are some movies/tv shows/assorted media you find yourself constantly gravitating towards?

Time for a little unpacking of my interests!

Movies and shows are always Star Wars. Even when it's shitty garbage. Lately I've been a bit burnt out what with how much content has been and does continue to be released for it and the flaws become harder to ignore, but that just means I go back to the older stuff I've got nostalgia vision for. Really any time there's a Star Wars that does a Found Family well enough it hits me right in the part of me that would self-insert when I was younger.

Music-wise, my spouse has been a big fan of The Mountain Goats for years, and a couple years ago, I listened to a bunch of their albums so I could share it with them, and got pretty impressed with the fact that they've been doing music ever since. I learned most of his albums aren't really my jam, but the ones I like, I really really like. And, while I could very well be wrong, John Darnielle seems like he's not at the Unrelatable level of celebrity, and is just a pretty cool seeming guy.

The thing I am most obsessed with for the past three years or so is the Immortal Hulk run of comics written by Al Ewing. I was always a Hulk fan, but not really enough to get into the comics in a big way, but Immortal Hulk made me realize exactly what about the Hulk appealed to me and perfected it. It's also very easy to read without having to know a billion years worth of comics in order to put it into context, if anyone is interested. I highly recommend it without reservations.

Les Miserables is the musical that got me into musical theatre. I don't have much to say about it, because people who are into theatre probably already know more than I do, and if you're not into that, I'm not gonna be the one to convince you, but it's been a dream of mine to be a part of a production in any way (but preferably as Javert, or Grantiere, or the Bishop).

and 17776 and its sequel 20020 are fucking amazing, I adore them and recommend them so much it's fantastic and uplifting and so much fun.

#I hope this is in line with what you're asking #Im afraid I may have been answering this like it was a school assignment

[traincat]

I feel like I've read a ton, but I'm honestly still pretty new to comics rn. That being said... What is one more day? Ik we don't like it and it happened a while ago, but that's about it [,=

Time for Spider-Man History With Traincat: Highly Controversial Storylines! And that feeling is totally normal with comics with huge canons -- you can read a ton and still have some fairly big blindspots in your understanding of the total picture. That being said, this is kind of a big one, both in terms of Spider-Man history/canon and in terms of how Spider-Man fandom functions. I would say probably no other storyline has had quite as much impact on how the fandom views and interacts with the source material as One More Day/Brand New Day. It's been the Wild West out here ever since it happened. (Which was in 2007, so like, yes, fairly long ago, especially when you look at how Spider-Man canon has evolved since, but in the grand scheme of things, also kind of recent. One More Day is not old enough to rent a car.)

So when people talk about Spider-Man's One More Day, they're usually actually talking about two related arcs: One More Day and Brand New Day. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to be covering both. For the sake of transparency, I am going to admit that I think One More Day, as a self-contained story, is good, actually. This is controversial! I admit that! But I stand by my stupid opinions on this blog, for some reason. I think One More Day when you examine it on its own, by which I mean you ignore the decade and a half worth of canon that came after it, as a Spider-Man story and as a PeterMJ-centric story holds up under scrutiny and that people who don't like it don't like complicated love stories and might actually throw their own mothers under buses. No offense to the OMD haters. Little bit of offense to the OMD haters. Brand New Day, which is the continuation of One More Day, on the other hand -- largely bad. Very largely bad.

But let's backtrack. One More Day is a four issue crossover storyline that takes place directly after Civil War, during which Iron Man and Captain America got divorced and divvied up the superhero community and Spider-Man made some startlingly bad decisions and made a fugitive out of himself and his family in a manner that got Aunt May shot, and Spider-Man: Back in Black (Amazing Spider-Man #539–543) which examines Peter's actions immediately after Aunt May is shot and ends with him humiliating the Kingpin in front of an entire prison. One More Day consists of Amazing Spider-Man #544 -> Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #24 -> Sensational Spider-Man v2 #41 -> Amazing Spider-Man #545. In One More Day, Aunt May is dying, all of Peter's efforts to save her have thus far failed, and, consumed by guilt, he is rapidly running out of time. Approached by Mephisto, a literal demon from hell, Peter is offered a deal: Aunt May will live -- and Peter's identity, which was previously revealed to the world at large during Civil War, will once again be hidden from the memories of all but a select few -- if Peter trades him his marriage to Mary Jane. Peter and Mary Jane struggle with this, but eventually both agree to the deal. The clock strikes twelve, the deal is done, and Peter and Mary Jane's marriage fades into history.

(ASM #545) A reasonably simple premise for a story that caused so many problems -- most, I would argue, not actually the original story's fault. So obviously, this was an unpopular move -- Peter and Mary Jane had for a long time been a fan favorite Marvel couple, and in a fictional universe where most relationships are doomed as soon as they begin, the enduring Spider-Marriage was sacred ground. And then, with a snap of its fingers, it was gone: Peter wakes up in Aunt May's house, no longer married, with Mary Jane out of the picture. (She would not return to the book on any sort of consistent basis for over 50 issues.) In the wake of One More Day began Brand New Day, which is basically what it sounds like: a promised "brand new day" of "exciting" Spider-Man content and a publishing schedule where Amazing Spider-Man came out three times a month. (Which sounds good on paper but I think in practice caused more problems than it created good storylines.) Peter, newly single again, had new love interests! And also Harry Osborn was alive again for some reason! I generally like Harry's post-BND stories so that part's fine with me.

But overall? Brand New Day is a mess. It knows it wants to tread new and exciting ground with Peter -- tell new stories! ensnare new readers! make them fork out for a book three times a month. -- but it doesn't know what those stories should be. Readers who were invested in Peter and Mary Jane's relationship -- a major facet of Spider-Man comics for decades at that point -- felt rightfully betrayed that the marriage could be so easily traded in and that Mary Jane herself, perhaps the second most important figure in Spider-Man comics after Peter, could be tossed aside. From a personal point of view, I think Brand New Day fails in large part because it abandons what has always made Spider-Man such a compelling series, and that's the mix of Peter's personal life with his vigilante life. BND sees Peter with new friends, new jobs, new love interests, etc -- it is very much a brand new day! But it isn't a better day compared to the stories that came before it. I do like some post-BND stories, especially American Son (ASM #595-599) and Grim Hunt (ASM #634-637), but compared to pre-BND where I think the majority of canon is good, it's a very lacking body of work that is hurt by the way it divorced itself from the PeterMJ marriage as Spider-Man's central relationship.

"But Traincat, I thought you said you liked One More Day?" Yeaaaaah. I do. This is why I keep saying I like One More Day on its own merits, and not on the merits of the stories it opened the doors for. I like a good romantic tragedy in fiction, and the way Peter and Mary Jane's final scene in One More Day plays out is beautiful. I like the idea of Peter caught in this impossible situation, being asked to choose between two women he loves more than his own life. A really common criticism I see leveled against One More Day is that Peter should have chosen his relationship with Mary Jane over May's life, which is -- okay, I think it's weird that people keep insisting on this, not in the least because by asking Peter to sacrifice his aunt's life they're essentially demanding he commit a callous, out of character act in order to further his own interests. It's also weird because the thing is, Peter already chose Mary Jane over May -- that's what gets them into this situation. It's literally in the scene where May is shot:

(ASM #538) When the gun goes off, Peter's spider-sense kicks in, and he covers Mary Jane, leaving May in the path of the bullet. He does choose Mary Jane over May, regardless of whether he realized what he was doing. And that's why he can't make that choice a second time. His actions in One More Day do make sense for him as a character, whether or not any individual reader likes them, and Mary Jane's actions make sense, too -- after all, she's the one who ultimately tells Mephisto that they agree to the deal when Peter can't bring himself to voice it.

A lot of people also like to nitpick One More Day by going, well, why could (x) or (y) with life saving powers save Aunt May which is like -- yeah, I guess, but if we're going to ask that about this specific comic book near death setup, you kind of have to do it with every single one, and I'm not going to stake every single moment of comic book drama on whether or not that gold kid from the X-Men was busy at the time. Comics are soap operas in flimsy paper form: serialized longform storytelling that relies heavily on melodrama. Sometimes you have to go with things. Sometimes you sell your marriage to the devil. Stuff happens. That in and of itself doesn't make One More Day a bad story -- and while some people blame the Spider-Marriage's dissolution entirely on One More Day, I think that's a little shortsighted when you look at the history of Spider-Man since the turn of the century. It's clear -- and Marvel themselves have been perhaps a little too open about this -- that Marvel in the past few decades has had trouble with the direction they want to take Spider-Man. They WANTED Spider-Man to appeal to a distinctly youthful audience that they didn't think they were actually reaching -- understandable, considering that Marvel nearly went bankrupt around 2000 and was saved by Ultimate Spider-Man, an out of main continuity series which retold Spider-Man from the beginning and focused heavily on Peter as a teen -- but the problem was Spider-Man in the main continuity was at that point in canon a happily married man who was pushing the dreaded 30 whether or not they wanted to admit that. This is also why Marvel has continually pivoted away from Spider-Man having kids, because they feared that making him a dad would age him too much and make him unrelatable to their coveted audience of Teens. (This is also why almost every new Spider-Man property, especially the live action movies, perpetually stick him back into high school, despite that occupying a very small slice of 616 canon.) So around the year 2000, they started trying things in relation to the Spider-Marriage, which was viewed as a major problem -- after all, what's more adult than being married and liking your wife. First, they had Mary Jane presumed dead. Then, they had Mary Jane and Peter separate. Then, when Mary Jane and Peter had only recently gotten back together, One More Day struck. If One More Day specifically hadn't gone the way it had, it's pretty clear that the Spider-Marriage was going to go one way or another -- it's a little bit of a shame it happened when it did, because OMD is the end of J Michael Straczynski's run, and JMS wrote a really beautiful Peter and MJ relationship. But Marvel as a company and especially editor in chief at the time Joe Quesada viewed Peter and Mary Jane's relationship as a major problem in how they wanted to portray Spider-Man and thought that striking the relationship from the books would allow them more freedom in their portrayal of him as younger and more relatable to their Desired Audience of people who I guess really wanted to see Peter sleep with characters who weren't Mary Jane.

(ASM #546. Younger! Fresher! Less attached! Kissing random women in the club!)

The problem with One More Day has always been in the follow through -- from the content of Brand New Day to the pacing of events to the fact that Marvel withheld key information for such a long time that it allowed misinformation to thrive. After all, what does it MEAN to trade Peter and Mary Jane's marriage to the devil? It altered the events of canon in Peter and the majority of other characters' memories so that the marriage didn't exist, but it left people wondering -- did the relationship as they remembered it existed? How much of Spider-Man canon was altered? And the answers didn't come for over 100 issues of Amazing Spider-Man. One Moment In Time or OMIT (Amazing Spider-Man #638-641), which revealed that while Peter and Mary Jane never got married in the altered canon they did continue their long committed relationship up until just after Civil War, was published in 2010, so essentially readers were hung out to dry without answers for three years. That's a long time to string people along, but not as long as it took Marvel to confirm that the popular fan theory that Mary Jane retained her memories of the original timeline as part of her own deal with Mephisto was also true, which happened this year. I would say, at least from my perspective, a lot of the frustration doesn't come from the individual One More Day storyline so much as how Marvel has continually dragged out the aftermath, using the promise of a Spider-Marriage return to keep fans on the hook. Which is why One More Day continually comes up in discussion of current Spider-Man, because Spencer's run has relied very heavily on imagery from that period with a serious question of whether or not there actually was going to be payoff, something which is still up in the air.

This has been Spider-Man History With Traincat, brought to you by anonymice like you.

#traincat talks comics #long post #*replies

[a-toast-to-my-real-friends]

LOVER RANKINGS

Alright, y’all may or may not know, I’m a Taylor Swift fan. Chad Willard posted his Rankings and Reasons for her newest album, Lover, and it inspired me to do the same. So, for the two of you who care about my personal Taylor opinions: here they are.

I haven’t sat with Lover long enough yet to really figure out where I am with it. Speak Now is my peak Taylor Swift album. I love the honesty and vulnerability on all those songs. My emotions oftentimes seem overwhelming, irrational, and illogical, and I feel like a crazy person because I tell myself, “Johnathan, you shouldn’t feel this way, so and so hasn’t done anything wrong, if anybody knew you were THIS upset about THIS situation, they’d all laugh and tell you to relax and calm down and that you were acting crazy.” And oh buddy, if I weren’t acting crazy before, best believe I’d act crazy after.

Speak Now makes me feel like it’s OK to be overwhelmed by my feelings, and Taylor does such a great job of saying exactly how I feel.

So I say all that to say, I’ll probably compare every Taylor album to Speak Now. Does Lover make me feel the same way Speak Now does? Yes and no.

I like Lover a lot. To be fair, I have listened more to the first half than the last, only because by the time I get to  “Death By a Thousand Cuts” I want to go back and listen to “I Forgot that You Existed” again. I’m going to agree with what Chad said that Hannah said: “our enjoyment of her songs oftentimes stems from where our current relationship status is.” I’m so happy that Taylor is in such a healthy, great place emotionally, and that she’s so deeply in love – and the songs she’s made are SO GOOD; but I think I’m having a difficult time enjoying them the way I would if I were in a solid, committed, tried and true relationship. I listen to “I think he knows” and “Paper Rings” and “Lover” and instead of being all glowy and glittery I just feel – sad, I guess. Which maybe explains why I like Speak Now so much, because a lot of those are sad and Overwhelmingly Emotional.

Anyway, TO THE RANKINGS!

18: False God. I just think it’s sonically boring. It’s not fun to sing along to, and the lyrics don’t do enough for me to raise it any higher. I’m gonna give it a little bit longer, maybe it’ll eventually grow on me, but it’s dangerously close to becoming a skip.

17: Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince. I’m going to get dragged for this, but it’s got the same chord progression as “So it Goes” from REPUTATION, and tbh, that one is a skip for me too. Maybe I’m not deep enough or politically educated enough to see all the brilliance behind it, but I’ll give it points for the line “It’s you and me, that’s my whole world,” though.

16: It’s Nice To Have a Friend: Meh. This just seems like a list of unrelated things she’s done with Joe. Again, maybe I’m not deep enough to understand the brilliance, but what is she trying to say? And the song is so repetitive, it doesn’t keep my interest. All this snow, ya know?

15: The Man. It’s a fun song, good beats, fun to sing along to. But as a white male, the content is unrelatable to me. Which is the point, I suppose. The song isn’t meant for me. I appreciate it, for sure, and I think it’s important, but I just don’t feel the way she feels, so it’s just strange to sing along to it. I don’t wonder if I’d get there faster if I was a man, because I am a man.

14: Soon You’ll Get Better. OK, I LOVE this song, to be clear. It’s so sad, so relatable, so pretty to listen to. Hello Dixie Chicks, glad to have you back. I cried the first time I heard it, because I’ve followed along with her mom’s struggle with cancer, and I’ve two really close friends who have lost parents recently to sickness, and the thought of them feeling this way just breaks my heart. The only reason it’s so low on my list is because I like the other songs so much. Here’s where it starts to get difficult for me.

13: London Boy. This one is a lot of fun, it’s fun to sing along to, and I like the fast rappy bridge. Gotta work on getting those lyrics down. I also like the small details about the steps that we all take in relationships, specifically meeting all of his best mates and listening to his stories from uni.

12: ME!. Brendon Urie come through with those vocals. I think I’m a little biased towards this one, just because of the video, and the excitement that always surrounds a new Taylor era. It was the first thing we saw post REPUTATION era, snakes into butterflies, all the bright colors in the video, the peppy catchy chorus. I also strongly relate to “I know that I’m a handful baby…but I promise that nobody’s gonna love you like me.”

11: Daylight. Highly relatable content here. I always say Taylor knows exactly where I am and what I’m going through. Speak Now, I was living in New York, struggling in every aspect, and spent a lot of that era feeling pretty lonely and crazy, broken, losing friends and missing them but not knowing how to say any of that to them. Red was a carry-over. 1989 I had moved to Orlando, was living in the Wolf Den with a bunch of doods that I loved, everything felt neon and electric and exciting. Reputation I had been kicked out of my house and betrayed and felt very snake like, unforgiving, and hard-hearted. And February of this year, I moved into a house I had found, picked amazing people to move in with, and felt in control of my life again. And if you happen to follow Taylor culture, that’s the same month she posted the picture with the seven palm trees to her instagam, which kicked off the whole Lover era. I say all that to say, it was time for me to step into the daylight and let it all go. To be defined by the things that I love, not the things I hate, or haunt me in the middle of the night. I only want to see daylight and think of that that special person, you know?

10: Afterglow. Hello Speak Now. It’s all me, in my head. I’m the one that burned us down, but it’s not what I meant. I don’t want to do this to you, and I don’t want to lose this with you. It’s the perfect example, IMHO, of unconditional love. Here’s all my crazy. Here’s all my insecurities. They’re going to rear their ugly head, will you please love me even with those? Here’s what I need from you in those moments of temporary emotional insanity: Tell me that you're still mine, tell me that we'll be just fine, even when I lose my mind. Tell me that I'm all you want even when I break your heart. And when you do that, I’ll say “I’m sorry that I hurt you.” What a beautiful picture of loving and being loved in return.

9: You Need To Calm Down. I dunno how closely y’all follow my antics on Facebook, but when this video dropped, I casually posted it because I liked the message. As a believer in Christ, I feel the Christian community has done a HORRIFIC job of loving the LBGTQ community, and my simple post BLEW UP, proving my point. Sidebar, I also link the first listen of this song to being in Toy Story Land with Topher, Jessica, and Leslie, huddling around my phone under the giant Christmas lights for our second dive into New Taylor.

8: Paper Rings. Ok now it’s starting to get super hard narrowing it down. We’ve entered my True Jams™ section. The only reason this is at the bottom of my True Jams™ section is because I ain’t in love like this, so where I want to feel like glitter is exploding inside of me, I just feel like dried glue the glitter was meant to stick to. I love how deeply personal it is, I love the specificity, and the song is a BOP. Standout lyrics: “I’m with you even if it makes me blue,” and “I want your complications too, I want your dreary Mondays…”

7: I Think He Knows. A Bop. Fun. Sexy. Coy and flirtatious, while also owning her power. The rappy bits. I’ve never felt a longing for somebody’s body just by the way they hold a cold glass, but boy, does this song make me want to. What specifics, what detail. Also – “I want you, bless my soul.” HONESTLY. BLESS IT LORD.

6: The Archer. Giving me those Speak Now vibes. All my heroes die alone – I jumped from the train, I ride off alone. The LONGING. The wanting to be wanted. Knowing you’re good enough, knowing you have a lot to offer – but also knowing that it’s so much that maybe nobody can handle it all. I’ve got so much to offer, who could ever leave me? I’m too much to handle – god, who could put up with all of it?

5: Cornelia Street. My God can I relate to this. I’m ALWAYS looking for the ending, for someone I love to tell me they’re leaving because being with me is too much. I always prepare for the worst case scenario. And only recently have I started to believe that maybe the worst case won’t always happen? Maybe somebody will stay? But man, my natural impulse, my knee-jerk reaction, will always be to get as far away from any and all memories of the good times. I don’t want to be reminded of the beauty and joy and greatness because it will just keep reminding me that I don’t have it anymore, and there’s nothing I could do to get it back.

4: Death by a Thousand Cuts. Ahhh, yesss, Taylor. Speak to me of being left and of the heartbreak that brings. Also, make it a bop. I constantly find myself looking through the boarded up windows of past relationships, and I see the chandelier still flickering and see all the beautiful moments, though they may have lost the radiance they once had. Saying goodbye is the worst, endings are the worst, new beginnings mean something else ended stale. Also being given up like I was a bad drug – reminds me of a line from “Better Man”: “You pushed my love away like it was some kind of loaded gun.” Pure Taylor and I’m here for it.

3: I Forgot that You Existed. On repeat. Will dance and sing to this endlessly. Also always here for a good snarky twist of the kinfe.

2: Lover. Again, the longing. The vulnerability. Asking the questions that are scary to ask, that people would think you are insane for asking someone. Loving somebody so much that you put everything else aside, and all you want is to ask, “Can I go where you go?” Clingy. Needy. Co-dependent. As brave as it would be to ask a question like that, the fear of being seen as any of these things will keep most from doing it. Which probably hinders more than it helps, because if somebody loves us, truly loves us, we should be able to ask that without any fear of anyone or anything. But I’ll sing it and pretend.

1: Cruel Summer. SO. SINGABLE. I love the chorus. It gets stuck in my head. I love the lyrics. The frailty. A relationship that started as friends with benefits, her saying “it’s cool, no rules,” when secretly she’s falling in love and fears saying it, because she thinks it’d be the worst thing he’s ever heard. Yeah, OK, please stop reading my diary, girl. But the best part is, IMHO, he feels the same way about her, and also has feared speaking up, which is why he’s grinning like a devil, because he’s so happy because he feels the same way. 10/10 cant’ stop listening.

 And there you have it, folks. Time may change my rankings, relationships may change my rankings, but from where I sit, 10 days in, these are my thoughts. If you made it this far, I’d love to know what you think of the album, and your rankings!!! As if I’ll ever pass up a chance to talk about/listen to someone talking about Taylor Swift. Sound off!

#TAYLOR SWIFT #lover #swiftes #swifty #taylurking

[tyrannuspitch]

i know literally anything i say abt carry on is Highly Unrelatable Content but

anyone else constantly thinking abt how normal ppl's assumption, on interacting w the grimm-pitches, is that they are the literal mafia

#it's just... it's A Lot #carry on

[davidthetraveler]

fanfic ask meme: F, H, I, S, T, X, Y

F: Care to share a favorite hurt/comfort fic?

There’s a lot of hurt/comfort fics that I like to think back on/reread, especially in the Sanders Sides famderdom, and especially especially with all the fics released since DWIT that feature a sort of resolution to that cliffhanger ending.  Seriously, I’m going to need as many of those as I can get until Thomas & Co. finally give us the canon resolution.

But two that I can think of that I really like to go back to are Starved and Superfluous (parts one and two, but especially two) by @randomslasher.  Seriously, they are both great, and they fill me with joy and love, and maybe a little hope.

H: How would you describe your style?

A mess.

But seriously, any sort of coherent style that might be perceived in my writing is probably just a byproduct of whatever I’m trying to make the story sound like.  Different styles have different emotions attached to them, and I try to use the style that (to me) best reflects whatever feeling I’m trying to communicate to my readers.

I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?

guilty pleasure:  something, such as a movie, television program, or piece of music, that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.

Well, if we’re going by that definition, then just the fact that I continue to insist on writing about a character that is, in essence, a glorified self-insert would probably qualify.

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

Found family, hurt/comfort, and happy endings.  Seriously, when I get to the end of a long, possibly quite angsty story, and it ends happily with things looking bright and beautiful as a newly-minted found family finds love with each other, and everyone else is saying that they promised themselves they wouldn’t cry, I’m sitting there balling and saying, “I didn’t.”  I can’t help it, it’s just so beautiful.

T: Any fandom tropes you can’t stand?

There’s not a lot that I really don’t like (except for Explicit Adult Content, which I don’t think qualifies, but I’m just going to remind everyone I don’t write or read it, so there), but there are some things that I’m not fond of, such as certain ships (which in my mind are highly toxic and unlikely to be good) or character interpretations that don’t make sense to me (such as writing good characters as full stop unredeemable/unrelatable villains just for the sake of making them full stop unredeemable/unrelatable villains).

To be clear, if you have a ship you support that I don’t care for, I have nothing against you.  Just as I have nothing against those who subscribe to or like to write/read about character interpretations that I find... disagreeable.  You guys have every right to create and consume whatever type of content you want.  I just won’t be there with you for the ride.

X: A character you enjoy making suffer.

I don’t actually like making characters suffer.  My one exception is bad characters that deserve some comeuppance, and then I either like to give them the punishment they deserve for their crimes, or give them enough of a taste of their own medicine to make them rethink their life choices and maybe turn over a new leaf.  (I’m looking at you, Heather.)

Y: A character you want to protect.

Thomas and his good sides (please note, I did not say “Light Sides”, but good sides, which could theoretically include any of the “Dark Sides”, if there is a version of them that’s worth protecting in one of the myriad of alternate universes we’ve created).

I’ve actually written an entire story around this concept.  Let me know if you’d like to know more about it.

***********************

If you’d like, you can send me one (or more) of these Fanfic Asks.

#David's Answers

[emotionsandphenomena]

I know I make a lot of highly unrelatable content but here's a ringer for you: I am lying in bed and my face still feels really like, cold and cooled from this hm peel off mask I did and I just remembered briseis from the song of Achilles (and I guess the illiad) and ooo I bet she would've loved face masks so much. she was such a great addition to that weird good book. also my acid reflux is really acting up today. maybe it was the 6 salted caramel chocolates I ate on my way home from work. I just remembered I left my paycheck in my coat pocket. this has been an exercise in stream of consciousness writing

#y'all ever just write down everything that occurs to you as it happens #I know peel off masks aren't good for you but I'm fuckin obezsed w them and I got like 6 from hm the other day

[mynameisdreartblog]

Vacation Resorts 2

Leo: Tikal Futura. Alright, we’re at the spot now. <The news van stops abruptly along the dirt path leading up to the rustic chapel.> Now, a report from a local named [Clara] said that there’s one man still left inside this abandoned building on the outskirts of Chisec. [She] says that the man recounts experiences of supernatural phenomenon, particularly miraculous visions in ordinary objects and a divine narrative being revealed to him. «You know this guy’s just another looney preacher, right? They’d profess absolutely anything to believe what they already preconceived: It’s the whole damn point of their work.» Yeah, but I think we’re losing interest in the middle-aged demographic that eats up these kinds of stories. Fabricated or not, we need something that explores the paranormal and appeals to religious sensibilities. «True, and we aren’t a scientific magazine or anything; I’m just a scientist.» Yeah, yeah, I know you received a degree in biology from some fancy university in the West and you wanna bring enlightenment to the stupid masses here, but can it for now, alright? <Oro and [Viz] step out and approach the chapel: The only thing that accompanies them is the setting sun, gawking children past their curfew, and familiar barking.> [,] <A service-worker steps out of the building and shocks both of them because they thought there was only one.> Hey, who are you‽ <The service-worker remain silent, communicating only in hand-signals.> «They’re not speaking, Oro; they must be mute.» <The service-worker takes out a sheet of paper that has blank requirements, yet to be filled out. Confusingly, they took a pen out of their pocket and gestured it towards Oro.> D-do you want me to do something with this paper? Do you want me to sign it? <They nod.> «What the hell’s going on? Forget about this! <[Viz] takes the pen out of Oro’s hand and directs them back towards the chapel.> Focus on what we’re here for.» <The service-worker walks back the same path they went, folding the paper secretly.> […] You know, they were probably a service-worker and those were their documentation forms: Probably a student needing hours to pass. «What the hell are you talking about, [Oro]?» I don’t know, [Viz].

Taurus: The LaLiT Chandigarh. <We cut to a scene of a quiet night after the business day has finished. All that fills the air is the satisfaction of all the energy in the room releasing after what can only be described as genuine accomplishment.>  It’s done and dead: There’s nothing left to say of it but that it did its purpose and let it rest. «You’re always ready to end the day to just terminate it. I don’t get it; it frustrates me actually.» I do that all the time; have you not gotten used to it? I hang up before you can even begin the first syllable of ‘love you’ so it ends up being a dissonant L sound. There’s no need to say such things: The purpose of the conversation came and went, so why add on something we know already? «<Breathes in> I might just say how I feel…» Whenever you want to do that, let me know. As for now, the post mortem of the day begins! <Gresham turns on the old TV and adjusts the dials to the combination he isn’t secure in knowing works but still trusts it because of recent precedent. The contents remain typical until twelve minutes in where a particularly obnoxious yet catching commercial plays. The commercial depicts a woman in her mid-forties wearing a wrinkled suit, and she begins speaking in an almost tired voice.>  [,] «Imagine this: You’re a giant amongst the crowd of normally sized people.» <Gresham reflects to himself constant comments> I don’t have to; I’m already above 200cm tall. «Next, imagine that TVs haven’t been invented yet, and you’re through the paper to find what you’re looking for.» Huh, what is it exactly that I’m looking for? Also, they’re asking me to go pretty far back; TVs have been around here since, oh, the ’70s? «There you are, in your local library.» Highly unrelatable already, heh. «You pull a particular book from the shelf that piques your interest, and upon turning its pages, you find this particular line: ’My blood will drip onto the floor until the dead say, “Thank you, no more!”’» Ah, err, what? «Now, tell me, what does this quote mean to you? Next, whatever it is you thought of, it can help you lead to massive success!» That was a bit too… poetic for get-rich schemes. I’m gonna turn the TV off. <A blip is heard, and the TV shuts off: A look of desperation appears on the woman on TV appears terrifyingly desperate.>

Aquarius: Aulani. Only the worlds that matter will remain... <Aukai rips off the current page of her captain’s log and tosses it aside.> «You update it so rarely, and for the few times you do so, you tear out take out more pages than a frequent writer.» Well, I don’t like writing: The only time I do it is to label something momentarily important in a greater project. Understand that I only see it as a method of placing footnotes whenever I’d find them useful. «I do know that about you, and I can see the emphasized importance they have out here: It’s kinda difficult to get the right paints in the middle of the ocean. So economically, I can see why they’re important: You need to arrive back at port and gods know if your memory is still intact by then.» It’s difficult, but not impossible if you can muster a couple of targeted catches! A little bit of red from the blood, a little bit of yellow from the blubber, and a little bit of green from algae. It’d stink to high hell, but that’s appealing to some customers. «You’re talking about galleries, right? I hope you are.» Galleries? You know me better than that: I leave some in the storage forever or leave them in the environment for random people to stumble upon. Galleries are for aimless people. «A murderer hasn’t discovered them yet and hunted you down, right?» Uh, no? Last time that happened was… I don’t think it’s happened yet, actually. «Hah, seriously though, you seem to take a self-destructive attitude to your art as of lately.» I think about my involvement in that process a lot: Like, I feel that I have rather minimal involvement to the point where I don’t think about it at all — It’s subconscious. I don’t know if there’d be something catastrophic if I wasn’t there for the process, like a vegetative, bioterrorist attack occurs if I’m not there. I’ve done plenty unique so far, but it’s nothing other people have done also, so it’s only unique if you isolate me, but at that point, I don’t wanna be isolated. Recognize me for what’s there, you know? A niche doesn’t need to be consistent, nor do I need to be: Nothing of my philosophy entails that I know anything other than the stars in the sky or the conscience in my brain… «I’m sure there was a footnote in that spiel.» You’re probably right.

Pisces: Royal Horizon Baobab. We all know space is big, like, really big. If you want a perspective of how big it is, let me tell you about the biggest star, which is currently believed to be UY Scuti, which has an estimated volume of 21-billion times that of our Sun that would extend to the orbit of Saturn if it were placed into our solar system. While that’s terrifyingly huge, it’s rather miniscule in comparison to other objects which are even more impossibly massive. One such object is supermassive blackholes: They are millions, if not billions, of times the mass of our Sun. This is just a slice of the sheer scale of the universe now at our understanding, so that makes you reconsider exactly what your position is in the universe. [,] «Maghazi, you do this all the time: You arrive at our table, and then you blabber on and on about info that means nothing to our everyday lives despite how much awe you put into your speech. I mean, it’s impressive that you know all of these facts about space and time and whatever, but who the hell cares?» <Maghazi’s drink is about to spill over until he catches it at the last minute, giving him a brief amount of time to form a response in its excuse.> Well, they’re interesting to me, and the way I tell other people about them is by injecting them into conversations to see if I can bring about that moment in time where everyone is contemplative of their roles. <One of his company stares at him confusingly while the others idly continue to their own thing, implying that none of them heard Maghazi to begin with.> I’m referring to the moments where everyone contemplates what exactly it all means that they’re alive and talking among each other: While I think these moments are futile deep down, there’s a part of me that wants to see the value in them. «When has the largeness of something ever deprived value from it? If that were the case, you’d be the least valuable member of the wrestling team since you’re the stoutest of us all, but you and I hope that isn’t the case, right?» You seriously think there’s an intrinsic value to our lives that formulated entirely through chance? «A chance is what brought you here, hasn’t it? Look around you: Observe the poverty, despair, and societal misery around you. Why have you become so desensitized to this to focus on questions relating to the observations you’ll never live to see?» <The table is now emptied, leaving only Maghazi and The Other.> I remain unconvinced.

#Zodipunc #Zodiaccupuncture #Leo #Taurus #Aquarius #Pisces

[dillenwaeraa]

How to Start Getting Organic Traffic to Your Blog

Writing a blog that no one ever reads is the internet equivalent of throwing a party, where half the people who’ve marked themselves as attending on Facebook don’t turn up. 

That moment when you log into Google Analytics and see that your posts have had three visitors in the past month, and two of them were you, is exactly like watching the hummus you decided to make from scratch (that’s a thing) remain untouched by the four guests that come to your house; two of whom are already claiming they’ve got another birthday party to go to and are making for the door.

There are two questions here. The first is whether Facebook RSVPs can ever be an accurate way of knowing how many people are actually coming to your event (absolutely not). And the second: what’s stopping people turning up? 

Let’s now transfer this clunky metaphor to the marketing world and get to the point of this post: why is no one turning up to read the content on your blog?

We’ve all seen brand and company blogs that lean too far towards being salesy, unrelatable and self-serving. They answer the company’s needs (here’s why you should buy hummus!) rather than those of potential readers (how do I make hummus from scratch?) - and the amount of organic traffic they get suffers as a result.

Which is why getting people to arrive on your blog requires planning, research, and having a bit of a clear out. And a lot of this needs to happen before anything even goes live. 

So if you’re wondering how to get organic traffic to your blog, here are some steps to follow. Done right, it’ll increase visits over time, build your company’s reputation as an authority on topics within your niche, and help your site’s SEO as a result. 

(Disclaimer: I can’t guarantee it’ll also make people come to your party).

1. Audit your existing content

This is the necessary bit of cleaning before you invite people over.

Except in this scenario, you’re using a big spreadsheet to work out what needs to stay, and what needs to go. My colleague Ben has helpfully created a content audit template which makes life a lot easier, so take a look at that before you get started. But I’ll go through some basics below.

Hopefully, you’ll already have Google Analytics running on your blog, so head to 

Behaviour > Site content > All pages 

...and change the date range to at least the last year. This should bring up a list of all your blog posts, and the traffic they’ve received over that time. Export it. You’re going to use this list to find out what blog posts are already getting traffic, and which ones aren’t. 

You might also want to check other metrics on these posts, like whether they’ve got any backlinks - because that might also inform what content you want to keep. To do this, you could combine backlinks detected in Google Search Console with data from either Ahrefs or Majestic.  

Then, starting with the highest to lowest traffic, one by one, go through each of the posts in terms of content and note/look out for the following:

What posts are getting consistent traffic? 

Which posts have seasonal spikes in traffic? 

Which posts get no traffic at all? 

Are there any popular topics/themes/categories? 

Make a note to fix:

Outdated content 

Broken images

Strange formatting

Broken links

And ultimately against each one, mark whether to:

Keep it 

Keep it, but update/repurpose it

Delete it completely

Delete it + redirect to a more useful post

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a list of actions to go through to help your existing content work harder. 

2. Keyword research

Next, you need to find out which topics it makes sense for your brand to be writing about in the future. And within that, the specific terms people are actually actively searching for. 

Spoiler alert: it might not directly relate to whatever you sell. 

There are a number of tools you can use to do this (free and paid) - and we’ll go into those in a future post. But essentially, it’ll involve using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Keyword Planner to identify:

Relevant search terms within your niche

Their monthly search volumes

What your competitors are writing about 

Seasonal trends where traffic might spike

And once you’ve got a list of search terms to write content around, it’s time to start turning these into long tail ideas for evergreen blog posts. It’s these that, little by little, will build up traffic to your blog over time. 

3. Brainstorm topic ideas 

Your keyword research will leave you with a list of questions or informational non-branded terms and their search volumes, and an idea of when they peak. 

But the tricky bit is turning those terms into useful, relevant blog post ideas that fit neatly into a content calendar and align with your brand’s demographic. Remember, your aim here is to answer queries, become an authority on a particular topic, and provide relevant information. 

No one wants to come to a party and have the host do a hard sell. 

To rank in the SERPs, the posts will need to be detailed and well researched - so keep your business’ expertise in mind when you’re coming up with ideas. Don’t be afraid to go niche. 

Again, you might want to use some tools here to help you. Sites like Answer the Public can give you suggestions, or ‘People also ask’ on the Google SERPs. 

Let’s take an example: you’re a hotel brand, and your keyword research says that “things to do in London” is a good, high volume keyword to target. 

But it’s also a highly competitive term. So perhaps there’s a better way to narrow things down even more:

What other things dictate someone’s need for a hotel in London?

Time of year / seasonality

Specific interests, activities or events

Location: particular areas/boroughs

Your list of potential blog post ideas could a bit like this:

Things to do in London when it’s raining 

Baby-friendly museums in London

Where to take mum for her birthday in London

Do this until you’ve built out a big list of blog post ideas covering all the different topic areas you identified in your keyword research. Next step: plan it out. 

4. Plan out the content

Once you’ve got a huge list of blog post ideas and an idea of when their search volumes peak, use a content calendar to plan out what you’re publishing month by month. Here’s a useful guide to creating a content calendar which you can feed these organic traffic posts into.

When you’re planning out your content, consider:

Resource and time: to stand a chance of ranking, these posts will be comprehensive, well researched, and detailed (more on that next)

Posts will need to be written and published before the search volume peaks

Aim to publish at least 4 weeks beforehand, e.g. a post about Halloween outfit ideas would need to be published around mid September to catch the upward tick

5. Research the competition

Ok, let’s see what’s happening at that party. Not yours; no one’s at yours. The other, better one your guests are off to instead. You do some digging, and find out that party’s got a proper DJ and a decent sound system, while you’re putting your iPhone speaker in a wine glass. Where would you rather be?

Basically, before you start writing: know what you’re up against.

Take the blog post title you want to rank for (e.g. “things to do in London when it’s raining”), Google it, and see who and what is already ranking.

Format: are they numbered listicles (if so, how many ideas do they list?), long form pieces, or step-by-step guides? 

How recent is the article? 

Who currently has the featured snippet and what could increase your chances of getting the top spot? 

What’s the word count? How many items are they listing?

Remember: depending on your niche, your blog content competitors might not be your direct business competitors. 

So, Booking.com might be your competition when you’re selling hotels in London, but when you’re informing people about things to do in London, you could be up against established authorities like Time Out, travel magazines, or tourist boards. This gives you an idea of how detailed and well researched your post needs to be to compete.

Once you’ve got an idea of what your blog post needs to include, write a strong brief. 

5. Training for copywriters

Unless you’re working for one of the media outlets above, the chances are you don’t have a team of journalists working in-house.

And as I said, depending on your niche and industry, your competition might be lifestyle publications staffed by journalists.

The shift to writing more editorial-style content can be tricky if you’re working with in-house copywriters who are used to writing quite short, salesy product-focused copy. 

Depending on the competition, these evergreen, organic traffic driving posts are going to need to be more than 500 words of generic fluff. It’ll require research, sometimes resulting in upwards of 1,000 words, to be able to compete with whatever’s ranking on page 1. 

So if you don’t have the expertise in-house, consider where you might be able to get it. 

Who in your company can add expertise? 

Can you interview them and shape their answers into a post? 

Do you have the budget to source external freelance resource? 

Can you invest in basic SEO training for your copywriting team to help them along?

If you’re stuck, here’s a post on how to write high quality content to get you started.

7. Optimise, optimise, optimise

Before you publish, there’s a last bit of admin. Here are some things to check:

Whether you’re linking to other relevant blog posts (internally or externally)

If you’ve included a call to action at the end of the post

Whether your titles and meta descriptions are optimised for search (if you’re using Wordpress, a plugin like Yoast allows you to specify different titles and descriptions for search and social)

Avoid putting dates in the URL (i.e. best-things-to-do-London-winter-2019) so you can update the same post next year without it looking out of date

Images are consistently named, spaced and formatted, the file sizes are low 

8. And last but not least, keep it updated

Kind of like getting people to turn up to your party, having an organic content strategy requires planning and work along the way.

It’s not a short term plan. It can take a good few months for a blog post to start getting organic traffic, and you might find you need to revisit the posts every so often to keep them updated and relevant.

So once you’ve written a post, keep a calendar note for seasonal posts that can be updated each year / as appropriate instead of creating new ones. 

That’s just an overview of the steps you need to take, and we’ll be going into more details in future guides. 

If you’ve got any questions in the meantime, or are wondering why your blog isn’t getting the organic traffic you think it should, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help. 

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/start-getting-organic-traffic-to-your-blog/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[heavenwheel]

How to Start Getting Organic Traffic to Your Blog

Writing a blog that no one ever reads is the internet equivalent of throwing a party, where half the people who’ve marked themselves as attending on Facebook don’t turn up. 

That moment when you log into Google Analytics and see that your posts have had three visitors in the past month, and two of them were GoogleBot, is exactly like watching the hummus you decided to make from scratch (that’s a thing) remain untouched by the four guests that come to your house; two of whom are already claiming they’ve got another birthday party to go to and are making for the door.

There are two questions here. The first is whether Facebook RSVPs can ever be an accurate way of knowing how many people are actually coming to your event (absolutely not). And the second: what’s stopping people turning up? 

Let’s now transfer this clunky metaphor to the marketing world and get to the point of this post: why is no one turning up to read the content on your blog?

We’ve all seen brand and company blogs that lean too far towards being salesy, unrelatable and self-serving. They answer the company’s needs (here’s why you should buy hummus!) rather than those of potential readers (how do I make hummus from scratch?) - and the amount of organic traffic they get suffers as a result.

Which is why getting people to arrive on your blog requires planning, research, and having a bit of a clear out. And a lot of this needs to happen before anything even goes live. 

So if you’re wondering how to get organic traffic to your blog, here are some steps to follow. Done right, it’ll increase visits over time, build your company’s reputation as an authority on topics within your niche, and help your site’s SEO as a result. 

(Disclaimer: I can’t guarantee it’ll also make people come to your party).

1. Audit your existing content

This is the necessary bit of cleaning before you invite people over.

Except in this scenario, you’re using a big spreadsheet to work out what needs to stay, and what needs to go. My colleague Ben has helpfully created a content audit template which makes life a lot easier, so take a look at that before you get started. But I’ll go through some basics below.

Hopefully, you’ll already have Google Analytics running on your blog, so head to 

Behaviour > Site content > All pages 

...and change the date range to at least the last year. This should bring up a list of all your blog posts, and the traffic they’ve received over that time. Export it. You’re going to use this list to find out what blog posts are already getting traffic, and which ones aren’t. 

You might also want to check other metrics on these posts, like whether they’ve got any backlinks - because that might also inform what content you want to keep. To do this, you could combine backlinks detected in Google Search Console with data from either Ahrefs or Majestic.  

Then, starting with the highest to lowest traffic, one by one, go through each of the posts in terms of content and note/look out for the following:

What posts are getting consistent traffic? 

Which posts have seasonal spikes in traffic? 

Which posts get no traffic at all? 

Are there any popular topics/themes/categories? 

Make a note to fix:

Outdated content 

Broken images

Strange formatting

Broken links

And ultimately against each one, mark whether to:

Keep it 

Keep it, but update/repurpose it

Delete it completely

Delete it + redirect to a more useful post

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a list of actions to go through to help your existing content work harder. 

2. Keyword research

Next, you need to find out which topics it makes sense for your brand to be writing about in the future. And within that, the specific terms people are actually actively searching for. 

Spoiler alert: it might not directly relate to whatever you sell. 

There are a number of tools you can use to do this (free and paid) - and we’ll go into those in a future post. But essentially, it’ll involve using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Keyword Planner to identify:

Relevant search terms within your niche

Their monthly search volumes

What your competitors are writing about 

Seasonal trends where traffic might spike

And once you’ve got a list of search terms to write content around, it’s time to start turning these into long tail ideas for evergreen blog posts. It’s these that, little by little, will build up traffic to your blog over time. 

3. Brainstorm topic ideas 

Your keyword research will leave you with a list of questions or informational non-branded terms and their search volumes, and an idea of when they peak. 

But the tricky bit is turning those terms into useful, relevant blog post ideas that fit neatly into a content calendar and align with your brand’s demographic. Remember, your aim here is to answer queries, become an authority on a particular topic, and provide relevant information. 

No one wants to come to a party and have the host do a hard sell. 

To rank in the SERPs, the posts will need to be detailed and well researched - so keep your business’ expertise in mind when you’re coming up with ideas. Don’t be afraid to go niche. 

Again, you might want to use some tools here to help you. Sites like Answer the Public can give you suggestions, or ‘People also ask’ on the Google SERPs. 

Let’s take an example: you’re a hotel brand, and your keyword research says that “things to do in London” is a good, high volume keyword to target. 

But it’s also a highly competitive term. So perhaps there’s a better way to narrow things down even more:

What other things dictate someone’s need for a hotel in London?

Time of year / seasonality

Specific interests, activities or events

Location: particular areas/boroughs

Your list of potential blog post ideas could a bit like this:

Things to do in London when it’s raining 

Baby-friendly museums in London

Where to take mum for her birthday in London

Do this until you’ve built out a big list of blog post ideas covering all the different topic areas you identified in your keyword research. Next step: plan it out. 

4. Plan out the content

Once you’ve got a huge list of blog post ideas and an idea of when their search volumes peak, use a content calendar to plan out what you’re publishing month by month. Here’s a useful guide to creating a content calendar which you can feed these organic traffic posts into.

When you’re planning out your content, consider:

Resource and time: to stand a chance of ranking, these posts will be comprehensive, well researched, and detailed (more on that next)

Posts will need to be written and published before the search volume peaks

Aim to publish at least 4 weeks beforehand, e.g. a post about Halloween outfit ideas would need to be published around mid September to catch the upward tick

5. Research the competition

Ok, let’s see what’s happening at that party. Not yours; no one’s at yours. The other, better one your guests are off to instead. You do some digging, and find out that party’s got a proper DJ and a decent sound system, while you’re putting your iPhone speaker in a wine glass. Where would you rather be?

Basically, before you start writing: know what you’re up against.

Take the blog post title you want to rank for (e.g. “things to do in London when it’s raining”), Google it, and see who and what is already ranking.

Format: are they numbered listicles (if so, how many ideas do they list?), long form pieces, or step-by-step guides? 

How recent is the article? 

Who currently has the featured snippet and what could increase your chances of getting the top spot? 

What’s the word count? How many items are they listing?

Remember: depending on your niche, your blog content competitors might not be your direct business competitors. 

So, Booking.com might be your competition when you’re selling hotels in London, but when you’re informing people about things to do in London, you could be up against established authorities like Time Out, travel magazines, or tourist boards. This gives you an idea of how detailed and well researched your post needs to be to compete.

Once you’ve got an idea of what your blog post needs to include, write a strong brief. 

5. Training for copywriters

Unless you’re working for one of the media outlets above, the chances are you don’t have a team of journalists working in-house.

And as I said, depending on your niche and industry, your competition might be lifestyle publications staffed by journalists.

The shift to writing more editorial-style content can be tricky if you’re working with in-house copywriters who are used to writing quite short, salesy product-focused copy. 

Depending on the competition, these evergreen, organic traffic driving posts are going to need to be more than 500 words of generic fluff. It’ll require research, sometimes resulting in upwards of 1,000 words, to be able to compete with whatever’s ranking on page 1. 

So if you don’t have the expertise in-house, consider where you might be able to get it. 

Who in your company can add expertise? 

Can you interview them and shape their answers into a post? 

Do you have the budget to source external freelance resource? 

Can you invest in basic SEO training for your copywriting team to help them along?

If you’re stuck, here’s a post on how to write high quality content to get you started.

7. Optimise, optimise, optimise

Before you publish, there’s a last bit of admin. Here are some things to check:

Whether you’re linking to other relevant blog posts (internally or externally)

If you’ve included a call to action at the end of the post

Whether your titles and meta descriptions are optimised for search (if you’re using Wordpress, a plugin like Yoast allows you to specify different titles and descriptions for search and social)

Avoid putting dates in the URL (i.e. best-things-to-do-London-winter-2019) so you can update the same post next year without it looking out of date

Images are consistently named, spaced and formatted, the file sizes are low 

8. And last but not least, keep it updated

Kind of like getting people to turn up to your party, having an organic content strategy requires planning and work along the way.

It’s not a short term plan. It can take a good few months for a blog post to start getting organic traffic, and you might find you need to revisit the posts every so often to keep them updated and relevant.

So once you’ve written a post, keep a calendar note for seasonal posts that can be updated each year / as appropriate instead of creating new ones. 

That’s just an overview of the steps you need to take, and we’ll be going into more details in future guides. 

If you’ve got any questions in the meantime, or are wondering why your blog isn’t getting the organic traffic you think it should, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help. 

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/start-getting-organic-traffic-to-your-blog/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[donnafmae]

How to Start Getting Organic Traffic to Your Blog

Writing a blog that no one ever reads is the internet equivalent of throwing a party, where half the people who’ve marked themselves as attending on Facebook don’t turn up. 

That moment when you log into Google Analytics and see that your posts have had three visitors in the past month, and two of them were GoogleBot, is exactly like watching the hummus you decided to make from scratch (that’s a thing) remain untouched by the four guests that come to your house; two of whom are already claiming they’ve got another birthday party to go to and are making for the door.

There are two questions here. The first is whether Facebook RSVPs can ever be an accurate way of knowing how many people are actually coming to your event (absolutely not). And the second: what’s stopping people turning up? 

Let’s now transfer this clunky metaphor to the marketing world and get to the point of this post: why is no one turning up to read the content on your blog?

We’ve all seen brand and company blogs that lean too far towards being salesy, unrelatable and self-serving. They answer the company’s needs (here’s why you should buy hummus!) rather than those of potential readers (how do I make hummus from scratch?) - and the amount of organic traffic they get suffers as a result.

Which is why getting people to arrive on your blog requires planning, research, and having a bit of a clear out. And a lot of this needs to happen before anything even goes live. 

So if you’re wondering how to get organic traffic to your blog, here are some steps to follow. Done right, it’ll increase visits over time, build your company’s reputation as an authority on topics within your niche, and help your site’s SEO as a result. 

(Disclaimer: I can’t guarantee it’ll also make people come to your party).

1. Audit your existing content

This is the necessary bit of cleaning before you invite people over.

Except in this scenario, you’re using a big spreadsheet to work out what needs to stay, and what needs to go. My colleague Ben has helpfully created a content audit template which makes life a lot easier, so take a look at that before you get started. But I’ll go through some basics below.

Hopefully, you’ll already have Google Analytics running on your blog, so head to 

Behaviour > Site content > All pages 

...and change the date range to at least the last year. This should bring up a list of all your blog posts, and the traffic they’ve received over that time. Export it. You’re going to use this list to find out what blog posts are already getting traffic, and which ones aren’t. 

You might also want to check other metrics on these posts, like whether they’ve got any backlinks - because that might also inform what content you want to keep. To do this, you could combine backlinks detected in Google Search Console with data from either Ahrefs or Majestic.  

Then, starting with the highest to lowest traffic, one by one, go through each of the posts in terms of content and note/look out for the following:

What posts are getting consistent traffic? 

Which posts have seasonal spikes in traffic? 

Which posts get no traffic at all? 

Are there any popular topics/themes/categories? 

Make a note to fix:

Outdated content 

Broken images

Strange formatting

Broken links

And ultimately against each one, mark whether to:

Keep it 

Keep it, but update/repurpose it

Delete it completely

Delete it + redirect to a more useful post

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a list of actions to go through to help your existing content work harder. 

2. Keyword research

Next, you need to find out which topics it makes sense for your brand to be writing about in the future. And within that, the specific terms people are actually actively searching for. 

Spoiler alert: it might not directly relate to whatever you sell. 

There are a number of tools you can use to do this (free and paid) - and we’ll go into those in a future post. But essentially, it’ll involve using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Keyword Planner to identify:

Relevant search terms within your niche

Their monthly search volumes

What your competitors are writing about 

Seasonal trends where traffic might spike

And once you’ve got a list of search terms to write content around, it’s time to start turning these into long tail ideas for evergreen blog posts. It’s these that, little by little, will build up traffic to your blog over time. 

3. Brainstorm topic ideas 

Your keyword research will leave you with a list of questions or informational non-branded terms and their search volumes, and an idea of when they peak. 

But the tricky bit is turning those terms into useful, relevant blog post ideas that fit neatly into a content calendar and align with your brand’s demographic. Remember, your aim here is to answer queries, become an authority on a particular topic, and provide relevant information. 

No one wants to come to a party and have the host do a hard sell. 

To rank in the SERPs, the posts will need to be detailed and well researched - so keep your business’ expertise in mind when you’re coming up with ideas. Don’t be afraid to go niche. 

Again, you might want to use some tools here to help you. Sites like Answer the Public can give you suggestions, or ‘People also ask’ on the Google SERPs. 

Let’s take an example: you’re a hotel brand, and your keyword research says that “things to do in London” is a good, high volume keyword to target. 

But it’s also a highly competitive term. So perhaps there’s a better way to narrow things down even more:

What other things dictate someone’s need for a hotel in London?

Time of year / seasonality

Specific interests, activities or events

Location: particular areas/boroughs

Your list of potential blog post ideas could a bit like this:

Things to do in London when it’s raining 

Baby-friendly museums in London

Where to take mum for her birthday in London

Do this until you’ve built out a big list of blog post ideas covering all the different topic areas you identified in your keyword research. Next step: plan it out. 

4. Plan out the content

Once you’ve got a huge list of blog post ideas and an idea of when their search volumes peak, use a content calendar to plan out what you’re publishing month by month. Here’s a useful guide to creating a content calendar which you can feed these organic traffic posts into.

When you’re planning out your content, consider:

Resource and time: to stand a chance of ranking, these posts will be comprehensive, well researched, and detailed (more on that next)

Posts will need to be written and published before the search volume peaks

Aim to publish at least 4 weeks beforehand, e.g. a post about Halloween outfit ideas would need to be published around mid September to catch the upward tick

5. Research the competition

Ok, let’s see what’s happening at that party. Not yours; no one’s at yours. The other, better one your guests are off to instead. You do some digging, and find out that party’s got a proper DJ and a decent sound system, while you’re putting your iPhone speaker in a wine glass. Where would you rather be?

Basically, before you start writing: know what you’re up against.

Take the blog post title you want to rank for (e.g. “things to do in London when it’s raining”), Google it, and see who and what is already ranking.

Format: are they numbered listicles (if so, how many ideas do they list?), long form pieces, or step-by-step guides? 

How recent is the article? 

Who currently has the featured snippet and what could increase your chances of getting the top spot? 

What’s the word count? How many items are they listing?

Remember: depending on your niche, your blog content competitors might not be your direct business competitors. 

So, Booking.com might be your competition when you’re selling hotels in London, but when you’re informing people about things to do in London, you could be up against established authorities like Time Out, travel magazines, or tourist boards. This gives you an idea of how detailed and well researched your post needs to be to compete.

Once you’ve got an idea of what your blog post needs to include, write a strong brief. 

5. Training for copywriters

Unless you’re working for one of the media outlets above, the chances are you don’t have a team of journalists working in-house.

And as I said, depending on your niche and industry, your competition might be lifestyle publications staffed by journalists.

The shift to writing more editorial-style content can be tricky if you’re working with in-house copywriters who are used to writing quite short, salesy product-focused copy. 

Depending on the competition, these evergreen, organic traffic driving posts are going to need to be more than 500 words of generic fluff. It’ll require research, sometimes resulting in upwards of 1,000 words, to be able to compete with whatever’s ranking on page 1. 

So if you don’t have the expertise in-house, consider where you might be able to get it. 

Who in your company can add expertise? 

Can you interview them and shape their answers into a post? 

Do you have the budget to source external freelance resource? 

Can you invest in basic SEO training for your copywriting team to help them along?

If you’re stuck, here’s a post on how to write high quality content to get you started.

7. Optimise, optimise, optimise

Before you publish, there’s a last bit of admin. Here are some things to check:

Whether you’re linking to other relevant blog posts (internally or externally)

If you’ve included a call to action at the end of the post

Whether your titles and meta descriptions are optimised for search (if you’re using Wordpress, a plugin like Yoast allows you to specify different titles and descriptions for search and social)

Avoid putting dates in the URL (i.e. best-things-to-do-London-winter-2019) so you can update the same post next year without it looking out of date

Images are consistently named, spaced and formatted, the file sizes are low 

8. And last but not least, keep it updated

Kind of like getting people to turn up to your party, having an organic content strategy requires planning and work along the way.

It’s not a short term plan. It can take a good few months for a blog post to start getting organic traffic, and you might find you need to revisit the posts every so often to keep them updated and relevant.

So once you’ve written a post, keep a calendar note for seasonal posts that can be updated each year / as appropriate instead of creating new ones. 

That’s just an overview of the steps you need to take, and we’ll be going into more details in future guides. 

If you’ve got any questions in the meantime, or are wondering why your blog isn’t getting the organic traffic you think it should, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help. 

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/start-getting-organic-traffic-to-your-blog/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#Digital Marketing

[davidrsmithlove]

How to Start Getting Organic Traffic to Your Blog

Writing a blog that no one ever reads is the internet equivalent of throwing a party, where half the people who’ve marked themselves as attending on Facebook don’t turn up. 

That moment when you log into Google Analytics and see that your posts have had three visitors in the past month, and two of them were you, is exactly like watching the hummus you decided to make from scratch (that’s a thing) remain untouched by the four guests that come to your house; two of whom are already claiming they’ve got another birthday party to go to and are making for the door.

There are two questions here. The first is whether Facebook RSVPs can ever be an accurate way of knowing how many people are actually coming to your event (absolutely not). And the second: what’s stopping people turning up? 

Let’s now transfer this clunky metaphor to the marketing world and get to the point of this post: why is no one turning up to read the content on your blog?

We’ve all seen brand and company blogs that lean too far towards being salesy, unrelatable and self-serving. They answer the company’s needs (here’s why you should buy hummus!) rather than those of potential readers (how do I make hummus from scratch?) - and the amount of organic traffic they get suffers as a result.

Which is why getting people to arrive on your blog requires planning, research, and having a bit of a clear out. And a lot of this needs to happen before anything even goes live. 

So if you’re wondering how to get organic traffic to your blog, here are some steps to follow. Done right, it’ll increase visits over time, build your company’s reputation as an authority on topics within your niche, and help your site’s SEO as a result. 

(Disclaimer: I can’t guarantee it’ll also make people come to your party).

1. Audit your existing content

This is the necessary bit of cleaning before you invite people over.

Except in this scenario, you’re using a big spreadsheet to work out what needs to stay, and what needs to go. My colleague Ben has helpfully created a content audit template which makes life a lot easier, so take a look at that before you get started. But I’ll go through some basics below.

Hopefully, you’ll already have Google Analytics running on your blog, so head to 

Behaviour > Site content > All pages 

...and change the date range to at least the last year. This should bring up a list of all your blog posts, and the traffic they’ve received over that time. Export it. You’re going to use this list to find out what blog posts are already getting traffic, and which ones aren’t. 

You might also want to check other metrics on these posts, like whether they’ve got any backlinks - because that might also inform what content you want to keep. To do this, you could combine backlinks detected in Google Search Console with data from either Ahrefs or Majestic.  

Then, starting with the highest to lowest traffic, one by one, go through each of the posts in terms of content and note/look out for the following:

What posts are getting consistent traffic? 

Which posts have seasonal spikes in traffic? 

Which posts get no traffic at all? 

Are there any popular topics/themes/categories? 

Make a note to fix:

Outdated content 

Broken images

Strange formatting

Broken links

And ultimately against each one, mark whether to:

Keep it 

Keep it, but update/repurpose it

Delete it completely

Delete it + redirect to a more useful post

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a list of actions to go through to help your existing content work harder. 

2. Keyword research

Next, you need to find out which topics it makes sense for your brand to be writing about in the future. And within that, the specific terms people are actually actively searching for. 

Spoiler alert: it might not directly relate to whatever you sell. 

There are a number of tools you can use to do this (free and paid) - and we’ll go into those in a future post. But essentially, it’ll involve using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Keyword Planner to identify:

Relevant search terms within your niche

Their monthly search volumes

What your competitors are writing about 

Seasonal trends where traffic might spike

And once you’ve got a list of search terms to write content around, it’s time to start turning these into long tail ideas for evergreen blog posts. It’s these that, little by little, will build up traffic to your blog over time. 

3. Brainstorm topic ideas 

Your keyword research will leave you with a list of questions or informational non-branded terms and their search volumes, and an idea of when they peak. 

But the tricky bit is turning those terms into useful, relevant blog post ideas that fit neatly into a content calendar and align with your brand’s demographic. Remember, your aim here is to answer queries, become an authority on a particular topic, and provide relevant information. 

No one wants to come to a party and have the host do a hard sell. 

To rank in the SERPs, the posts will need to be detailed and well researched - so keep your business’ expertise in mind when you’re coming up with ideas. Don’t be afraid to go niche. 

Again, you might want to use some tools here to help you. Sites like Answer the Public can give you suggestions, or ‘People also ask’ on the Google SERPs. 

Let’s take an example: you’re a hotel brand, and your keyword research says that “things to do in London” is a good, high volume keyword to target. 

But it’s also a highly competitive term. So perhaps there’s a better way to narrow things down even more:

What other things dictate someone’s need for a hotel in London?

Time of year / seasonality

Specific interests, activities or events

Location: particular areas/boroughs

Your list of potential blog post ideas could a bit like this:

Things to do in London when it’s raining 

Baby-friendly museums in London

Where to take mum for her birthday in London

Do this until you’ve built out a big list of blog post ideas covering all the different topic areas you identified in your keyword research. Next step: plan it out. 

4. Plan out the content

Once you’ve got a huge list of blog post ideas and an idea of when their search volumes peak, use a content calendar to plan out what you’re publishing month by month. Here’s a useful guide to creating a content calendar which you can feed these organic traffic posts into.

When you’re planning out your content, consider:

Resource and time: to stand a chance of ranking, these posts will be comprehensive, well researched, and detailed (more on that next)

Posts will need to be written and published before the search volume peaks

Aim to publish at least 4 weeks beforehand, e.g. a post about Halloween outfit ideas would need to be published around mid September to catch the upward tick

5. Research the competition

Ok, let’s see what’s happening at that party. Not yours; no one’s at yours. The other, better one your guests are off to instead. You do some digging, and find out that party’s got a proper DJ and a decent sound system, while you’re putting your iPhone speaker in a wine glass. Where would you rather be?

Basically, before you start writing: know what you’re up against.

Take the blog post title you want to rank for (e.g. “things to do in London when it’s raining”), Google it, and see who and what is already ranking.

Format: are they numbered listicles (if so, how many ideas do they list?), long form pieces, or step-by-step guides? 

How recent is the article? 

Who currently has the featured snippet and what could increase your chances of getting the top spot? 

What’s the word count? How many items are they listing?

Remember: depending on your niche, your blog content competitors might not be your direct business competitors. 

So, Booking.com might be your competition when you’re selling hotels in London, but when you’re informing people about things to do in London, you could be up against established authorities like Time Out, travel magazines, or tourist boards. This gives you an idea of how detailed and well researched your post needs to be to compete.

Once you’ve got an idea of what your blog post needs to include, write a strong brief. 

5. Training for copywriters

Unless you’re working for one of the media outlets above, the chances are you don’t have a team of journalists working in-house.

And as I said, depending on your niche and industry, your competition might be lifestyle publications staffed by journalists.

The shift to writing more editorial-style content can be tricky if you’re working with in-house copywriters who are used to writing quite short, salesy product-focused copy. 

Depending on the competition, these evergreen, organic traffic driving posts are going to need to be more than 500 words of generic fluff. It’ll require research, sometimes resulting in upwards of 1,000 words, to be able to compete with whatever’s ranking on page 1. 

So if you don’t have the expertise in-house, consider where you might be able to get it. 

Who in your company can add expertise? 

Can you interview them and shape their answers into a post? 

Do you have the budget to source external freelance resource? 

Can you invest in basic SEO training for your copywriting team to help them along?

If you’re stuck, here’s a post on how to write high quality content to get you started.

7. Optimise, optimise, optimise

Before you publish, there’s a last bit of admin. Here are some things to check:

Whether you’re linking to other relevant blog posts (internally or externally)

If you’ve included a call to action at the end of the post

Whether your titles and meta descriptions are optimised for search (if you’re using Wordpress, a plugin like Yoast allows you to specify different titles and descriptions for search and social)

Avoid putting dates in the URL (i.e. best-things-to-do-London-winter-2019) so you can update the same post next year without it looking out of date

Images are consistently named, spaced and formatted, the file sizes are low 

8. And last but not least, keep it updated

Kind of like getting people to turn up to your party, having an organic content strategy requires planning and work along the way.

It’s not a short term plan. It can take a good few months for a blog post to start getting organic traffic, and you might find you need to revisit the posts every so often to keep them updated and relevant.

So once you’ve written a post, keep a calendar note for seasonal posts that can be updated each year / as appropriate instead of creating new ones. 

That’s just an overview of the steps you need to take, and we’ll be going into more details in future guides. 

If you’ve got any questions in the meantime, or are wondering why your blog isn’t getting the organic traffic you think it should, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.