Bryan McAnulty: Welcome to The Creator's Adventure, where we interview Creator's from around the world hearing their stories about growing a business. Today's guest reminds us that as entrepreneurs, we are captains of our own ship and get to create the way that we want. He's also going to teach us how to grow our audience organically.

Hey everyone. I'm Brian McNaulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's get into it.

Hey everyone. We're here today with Jessica Thiefels, the founder and c e O of Jessica Thiefels Consulting podcast, host of Mindset Reset Radio and Thrive through marketing, and four-time published author. She's been featured in top publications, including Forbes, an entrepreneur, and was named one of Yahoo's Top 10 Most top 10 marketing coaches to follow.

Her mission is to help female founded mental wellness brands amplify their message with intentional organic marketing. Jessica, welcome to the show.

Jessica Thiefels: Thank you so much for having me.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, so my first question is, What would you say is the biggest thing that you did or you are doing that's help you to achieve the freedom to do what you enjoy?

Jessica Thiefels: I, I think my answer is twofold. The first like part A is I decided what freedom looked like for me. So like what I wanted to be able to do. So I remember many years ago working with a coach and he said, how many hours a week do you wanna work? And I was like, well, I don't know. I guess like 30. 25 hours a week.

He's like, you wanna work 25 or 30 hours a week? I was like, well, I don't know. He's like, how many hours a week do you wanna work? And I'm like, I don't know, 10 to 15. He's like, okay, great. There you go. And so I got really clear really early on that I didn't wanna spend my life working as much as I love my work and what I do, I wanna have freedom and flexibility.

So, That was part one or, or A, and then B was getting really intentional about making that happen. So that was like, for example, looking at my offerings and saying, okay, this is how I make the most money while doing the least amount of work. Or this is the thing that I can make a lot of money from, but I can outsource pretty much all of it.

So it requires very little of my time. And then how can I do more of that and how can I continue to build my business around these things? And less of these really. Energy and time intensive things and then just continually moving toward that until I got to a point where, you know, now I work prob probably 10 to 15 hours a week.

I don't work on Fridays unless I want to, or like there's some sort of pressing thing going on. So it's a lot of intentionality. Yeah. Awesome.

Bryan McAnulty: I like that. I think that there's many who think about the idea, like, okay, I wanna, they've gone as far as to think, I wanna design my business to, to work around my, my dream lifestyle.

But then they don't think about the steps of making that happen. And it's Right. Unfortunately, stays a dream until they take that action. Mm-hmm. And so I think an important point to mention that about this is like, You decided, okay, I wanna work the, the 10 to 15 hours, and then realizing like, this is the constraint.

Now what can I do with that's going to allow me to create leverage or, or do whatever to accomplish what I want business-wise within those 10 to 15 hours? And I think that's really important because like everybody has their own set of constraints. Mm-hmm. Whether they want them or not. And so I think it's fine to embrace that, realize that, and then I think most people would be surprised of like what they can accomplish given those constraints and, and how those constraints are unique in some ways.

Like, I like to think of from my own business how the constraints we have are unique compared to like a larger business. Mm-hmm. And so like businesses that have more employees than us, more money than us, whatever it is. Yeah, like they have their own sets of constraints that are different than ours and so how can we use the ones that we have to our advantage against?

Something like that.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, totally. And something, one other thing I'll mention that I think is really important. We all have unique constraints and unique businesses. But one thing that I don't think is unique, that I think many of us experience is this idea that we're supposed to work a certain way and for a certain amount of time and mm.

I think the, the moment that I released that idea and that actually took traveling in 2019, my husband and I traveled the world. I. For nine months. Awesome. And so we did things very differently during that time and I stopped waking up to an alarm at 8:00 AM and I stopped working the typical timeframe.

And that sort of as simple of an idea as it is, it took that to open up my eyes to be like, wait a second. Why am I getting up at 7:00 AM if I don't have to? Or why am I getting up and jumping right into work? Like I can do whatever I want. This is my business. But I think, I think we go into being an entrepreneur or a creator to.

Live life the way we want and then we forget that we're in charge. We still let all of these old school rules and ways of living dictate what we're doing. And so rethinking that and really like challenging maybe some of those rules that you're living by that are not supporting you shifting into whatever that lifestyle is that you really wanna live.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, I really like that, that, that, that brings me to, I. Wanting to suggest that, that everyone in the audience find a way to, to challenge themselves on, on something like this. Mm-hmm. Because I think so many entrepreneurs, you really, really care about your business, right? You care about your business, you care about your customers.

And the idea of saying like, okay, well I'm gonna wake up later, is really hard because you say, well, there's a customer. They, they need me. I have to, I have to be able to respond to that email by 9:00 AM or, or whatever it is. But if you try and then, and let it happen and then respond at, I don't know, noon or something like most cases, I think people will find that there's nothing actually bad that happens.

There's no one, no one is less happy with you. Like none of your customers or clients are less happy with you and everything can really go the same way. But now all of a sudden you have this, this big release of less stress. Mm-hmm. More freedom. And all you're doing is, is changing the constraint of like, I have to be up by this time to like, I'm not gonna do anything until this time.

Mm-hmm. And, and often there's no negative impact on your business, but it's a massive positive impact on your own life.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah. Totally. Release that pressure that no one's put on you but yourself.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, exactly. All right. Great. So I, I like the start of this so far. Mm-hmm. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey, though, as it looks like you started as an associate, s e o copywriter, to now becoming the founder and CEO of your own consulting agency.

So can you give us a little bit of the story of your background?

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, sure. So I went to college to be a writer and my first job was after I'm born and raised in Burlington, Vermont. And my now husband and I moved to San Diego like a year and a half out of college with only what we could fit in our car.

No jobs, no friends, and an apartment we'd only seen in pictures. And When I af like two weeks after I got there, I got my first real job and that was this like assist like associate SEO copywriter, some like very, very low level copywriter job. And from there in that position, like a year later, pretty much everyone on my team got let go except for me.

And so all of these things that I wasn't doing before were suddenly put on my plate, like social media and supporting with other marketing efforts and. Then from there I just left and, and I had six jobs in seven years. So I was like very intentionally moving up the ladder to the next position in my career and picking up all of these marketing skills along the way.

And my final job was VP of communications for a blockchain cybersecurity company. And. I took the job, I was a contractor for them, like freelancing for them. And I, I took the job a against my gut. I knew I shouldn't go into a full, full-time position because I was essentially working for myself before that.

But I named a really high salary and I named this VP position and they were like, yeah, sure you can have it. And I was like, Okay, well I guess I'll do that. But within six months, within three months, I was super unhappy. Just was not the right fit for me. So I pulled back to part-time because I did not wanna do it, but I was too afraid to leave completely.

I was afraid of losing the money. And so I pulled back to part-time and three weeks later they let me go and because they knew I wasn't fully committed, like totally fair. But I very clearly saw that that was really the universe doing me a favor because I wouldn't do what I really wanted to do, which is leave completely.

And so I was in a position where I could find another full-time job that was safe and secure, or I could take some of these freelance clients that I'd been, that I'd had for the last couple years and take 40 hours a week and build a business. And I decided to do that. And that's where my business started and within the first six months, I was making more money than I was making in that VP position.

And I haven't looked back.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Yeah, I, I think there's definitely like important lessons there. And I've had similar experiences myself that my business started as a, a web design agency and I distinctly remember this one client that we had. That it was a huge job. It actually, it sounded great.

Everything we were going to build it was an inspiring project. It would really let us, I guess, like flex some of our creative capabilities, like not only in web design, but like illustration and, and other things that, that all sounded interesting to us. And there were some signs in early meetings that this client was going to be like absolutely horrible.

And things like. Them saying that like w the one meeting I remember, we get them the meeting, I tell them like, okay, so like, well, this is like when we're gonna have the, the first stage of the project ready. And then as I'm walking out the door, then he says something about, so we'll have it ready by, by this time or whatever, which is like a month before what I just said.

And I said, no, like I, I told you, I told you this time. He's like, you guys will get it done. That's why we hired you. I should have known, like right then like, turn around, don't walk out the door. Listen, like we're gonna stop right now. We're either just not gonna work with you or like, you have to understand like this is how it works.

But I didn't realize that at the time and I thought like, oh, this is this is an awesome project. It's a lot of money, right? Let's do it. Turned out to be definitely not worth it for us. And not a great experience, but I. So like that's is a little bit different than your example Definitely. But the same kind of thing of of chasing the money and the, the allure of like, oh, well what if we can have this big, big payday, big salary, big possibilities.

Mm-hmm. Over focusing on what you truly want. Yeah. And even if it takes longer or more effort, I would say it's definitely more worth it to focus on what you really, truly want.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, there was, I'll share with your listeners a question that was the game changer for me. So for like two months leading up to pulling back to part-time, I was hemming and hauling over whether or not to leave.

Like I, I also had a lot of potential stock. I had stock in the company that if I stayed long enough I would get money for it and it was, would've been a lot of money. So, And the salary was the most money I'd ever made in my life. And so really was the money that was keeping me sort of like you were just saying.

But I remember one day I left, I left the office early because I was just so unhappy and I cried all the way home and I was sitting on my front porch and I so vividly remember I asked myself, I don't know where this came from. I said, if I died tomorrow, would I be happy with how I spent the last six months?

And the response was immediate, no. And I, in that moment, I knew I needed to change something. Like I knew that I was not gonna waste another minute of my life doing something that I was so unhappy about. And I just really like leaned into the belief that if that money was meant to be mine, it would come to me.

This, this is not right. But if that's meant for me, it will come to me. And holding onto something so tightly when you're so unhappy, like is. It's not worth that amount of money, but that question, if I died tomorrow, would I be happy with how I spent the last six months was like, made everything really clear to me.

And there's actually a, I don't know it off the top of my head, but there's a Steve Jobs quote about how death brings clarity to almost any situation or experience you're having. And so it's morbid, but if you're in one of those situations and you just can't knock yourself out of it, it might be a good way to.

Bring some pretty quick clarity that you might not have otherwise seen.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, yeah. That's a, a great, great quote and a great question. This is really easy to think about the, the short term and, and make excuses mm-hmm. For suffering through something. Right. But yeah, even, even if you're not happy with exactly where you're at, I think you should be happy with what you're doing.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah. I like that. With your agency now you focus on helping clients who are in the mental health industry. Mm-hmm. So why did you choose to narrow your focus to this niche specifically?

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, another great question, and I've got another great story for you. I've got nothing but stories.

So this past summer, my husband and I run my agency together. He does UX strategy, web design and sales enablement. So very different than what I do. But we both had some big clients pullback shift, which is typical in an agency experience. And so we had this very large revenue gap, and it was one of those moments again, like when I got let go from that job where I was like, I could keep going in the same direction.

I'm going, taking whatever clients come to me and just doing the work. Or I could shift and make this more what I want it to be like. I constantly remind myself as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, I'm the captain of this ship. I get to steer it wherever I want it to go. And it was one of those steering moments and I sat with it.

Like I didn't come to this decision right away. I sat with it for a little while, let it sort of be there and. I've always been in the mental health and in the wellness space. I was a personal trainer for many years. Back in my early twenties, I run a podcast called Mindset Reset Radio. I am a projector for any of you that know human design, so I am just like naturally a teacher and a guide.

And so I've always brought this element of mindset, wellness, and personal development into what I did, and it hit me. It dawned on me that maybe I. I've always been trying to bring the two things together, mindset and marketing, and I thought maybe I don't need to bring those two things together. I need to use my marketing to help the companies doing this work to help them amplify their reach.

So my, my impact can be tenfold because I'm helping these organizations that have a way greater impact and a way greater reach than I do. And it just clicked in for me right then and there. And I realized that that's what I wanted to do. And all of a sudden also this work that I've been doing for 12 plus years and running my business around for five years, I'd never had like a really strong why.

Like this is just always what I've done. I'm a writer. It made sense to translate that into marketing and content marketing. And all of a sudden it was like I have this really powerful why around what I'm doing and why it matters to me and my mission, and. It was one of one of those clicking moments where everything just came together and I was like, yep, this is perfect.

And I hadn't redone, my husband does my website design and we hadn't updated it for a long time. And the second I realized it, I was like, This is why I haven't done it, because I needed to know that this is where I was gonna go and that changed everything. So my whole website got updated, facelift, new messaging, new focus, and it's been amazing.

It's I know a lot of people are scared to niche down because you think you're leaving people out and you'll get less work. But for me it's actually been incredible. Like I get lots of leads through my website, but they were always kind of, I dunno, random. And now it's all businesses that I wanna work with because that's who my messaging speaks to.

So that's why I did it. And it's, it's, I wish I had done it sooner, but I don't think I was ready to until now, so,

Bryan McAnulty: yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. That's great. So I want to kind of see how we can relate this to Creator's listening and help them out. Mm-hmm. So you focus mainly on organic marketing rather than like paid advertising.

And I think that a lot of Creator's and business owners, they get started, they wanna see results right away. And so the idea of like paid advertising is sometimes seen as like, oh, this is the more attractive option. Mm-hmm. So can you explain a little bit of like the risks of investing in ads for like the beginners upfront?

Maybe a little bit about why you prefer to focus on organic marketing.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, so a couple things. The first is to think about marketing like a faucet and paid marketing turns that faucet on, but the second you stop putting money into it, the faucet turns off. So that means your leads dry out, your traffic dries out all results.

End completely. Organic marketing turns the faucet on and it keeps it on, and over time, it makes that stream of water stronger and more effective. So even if you slow down, even if you stop. Organic marketing grows and builds value over time. So you can do the two things together. And I have nothing against paid advertising.

I think it's a hugely valuable marketing tool, but I always recommend to my clients that you start with organic and you build that foundation that's going to support you as you then turn the faucet up a little higher with paid ads and then turn it down a little lower when you take the money out. But as you do that, even when you tr take the money out, The water's still running because you've got a solid foundation of organic.

That's the easiest way I used to explain to my clients, and it can be difficult to pay for that upfront, but like a lot of things in life, you have to make investments upfront to see the long-term results. And that's the reality with organic marketing. Just you have to invest upfront, but you will see those results 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the line.

So, It is, you know, short-term struggle for long-term gain.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Got it. So for those who are like really new to this, they're saying like, okay, I'm, I'm just getting started to, to build a website and, alright, sounds, sounds good. I'm gonna try the organic marketing. So like focusing on blogging and your seo, how long would you say it takes to bring in.

That like initial result and I guess what should you expect as like an initial result?

Jessica Thiefels: I mean, if you're starting from absolute scratch, I'd say you will likely start seeing organic traffic go up within three months. That is if you are creating content, you're properly optimizing your website content, which is me, which means you're choosing it based on.

High quality keywords. Quick lesson, a great keyword has keyword is what people search into Google or any search engine, but Google is the primary one. So that keyword should have high search volume and low competition, which means lots of people are looking for it, but not a lot of people are ranking for it.

Or the ranking, the people that are, are not so competitive that you can't also get into the top 10 or the top three on Google. So if the content you're creating is based on those keywords, it's optimized with variety of other optimization factors that you wanna take into consideration, like linking, formatting the usage of the keyword, meta description, all these things.

If you're doing that and you're doing that at least twice a month, preferably four times a month. You will start seeing results within three months. You may not be seeing leads, but you'll be seeing organic traffic increase, which is the first sign that this is working. And then the way to drive leads is to make sure you're building your content for your specific audience.

It needs to be hyper relevant to them. It needs to be high quality, and you need to, if possible, reference your product or your service offerings within your content. Like if you could put a little in content like your own native ad into the piece, or get a contact form in there and naturally highlight your expertise throughout the content.

So you're basically, I. In addition to optimizing it for seo, you're also optimizing it for a conversion. So you're, you're asking for them to fill out a form or make a purchase, whatever that conversion point is for you. It's, it's, I'll be honest, it's a lot of work to, to do the research, to know what you're doing, to then create the content and to be consistent with it.

I think the biggest issue is entrepreneurs. Creator's when they're just by themselves. It's, it's a straight up resource issue. You just don't have the time to create that content. So even two a month is a valuable place to start. And I would be thinking about your marketing strategy as a whole, as a stock portfolio.

The more diverse, the better. So that doesn't mean spread yourself so thin that you're on a thousand platforms, but it means s e o is only one piece. Just like social media is only one piece. Podcasts are another piece in-person. Events are another piece. Guest posting or contributing to other outlets is another piece.

So thinking about your strategy as a whole, and then what can you do to make that all run with the resources that you have and or do you need to have someone help you with getting it done?

Bryan McAnulty: Great. Yeah, that's great. I think if it helps anyone listening or watching, I can say that it does in fact work to mm-hmm.

Go and, and do that content marketing and do those blog posts and. When it may not feel like much of anything is happening for a period of a few months, maybe even more than that. Yeah. What is hopefully reassuring is that, let's say a year goes by now, if you're consistent with it, you'll start seeing some of those things you wrote about a while ago.

Now suddenly they start getting traffic that they weren't getting before. Mm-hmm. And the growth from there can really start to seem exponential, but definitely I. It feels like a challenge to invest that time upfront when, number one, you don't know for certain that anything's happening because you don't see it.

Mm-hmm. And number two, when as you said, like as a, as a creator or early entrepreneur, your resources feel spread so thin that yeah, you're not sure if you have time or if you should really invest in that one other thing. I could give a a point or two of how. There's an example of how important it is and, and how much even larger businesses value it mm-hmm.

Is I had the opportunity around the middle of last year to talk with one of the founders of Click Up, and I asked him for, for myself, like, how can, how can I better, like, grow my business? Because I knew that they had grown to 20 million a year in revenue before taking any funding at all. So it's like, well, that, that sounds great.

How, how can I do that? This is what I'm doing now. Like what do I have to be doing more of? And Chris, his response was blogging. Mm-hmm. And he said what they were doing as a team is they had everybody on the team had to write a blog post and like every day they were writing blog posts and that's what got them eventually all that traffic to then bring in all that revenue.

And so, It, it may seem like it doesn't have an effect in the beginning, but Quick Up, for example, thought it was so important that they had every single person on the team writing something, even though they're not writers, just to get something started so it could get going faster.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, I love that example.

And so many companies rely on organic to grow their business, get people to their website and think about content too. It's not just you're creating a blog post for seo. So I teach content with my clients that I work one-on-one with, with Done For You services, or even with coaching, I teach an integrated content strategy.

And so you wanna think of it as an upside down triangle. And the very top of the triangle is like your remote, your most robust content. So this is likely if you're creating blog content, blog content, but then from that, Trickles down to all of the other places where you're active. So from that blog content, you pull out, let's say the content for your four email newsletters for the month.

And from that blog content you also pull out more than half of your social media content and you also pull out two podcast episode topics. So the idea, the reminder being. That you, once you create that content, you just repurpose the hell out of it throughout the month. Like that's just your base for everything else you do.

So it's not like you're just creating it for SEO purposes. You're getting that value, but then you're getting content for everything else that you do throughout the month on all of your other platforms. Plus it's building brand value. Brand authority. It's helping you share your unique expertise. So it's doing so much for you than just being a blog post on your website.

And I also wanna encourage everyone to think about this beyond the idea of blogs. Like I've, so I can't tell you how many people I'm on sales calls with, and they're like, so I feel like I've heard that blogs are like, so yes. You know, like so early two thousands and I'm like, When I'm talking about a blog, I'm talking about a really thorough, high value piece of content, not a, not a 500 word blog, like a Tumblr blog or something.

Mm-hmm. So we're thinking about this as a really education forward, value based 1100, 1200 word article that answers a question that your ideal customer has. So you are showing them right away, look at what we can do for you. So shifting that mindset a little bit around what it is that you're actually doing and how it can support your brand as a whole.

Bryan McAnulty: Got it. So my next question then is, is kind of two questions, and I guess you pick which one you think is, is more helpful to give a, a better example for people listening. So either if you could give us a few important rules for blogging. An seo. Mm-hmm. To be able to work effectively or. If maybe you can go over some organic marketing strategies that you've seen that were like particularly effective for your clients?

Mm-hmm.

Jessica Thiefels: I think, I think that the, the two, the two pieces sort of work together and I think the number one piece that I'll share is consistency. No matter what your organic strategy is, organic requires consistency. It's not a start and stop. It's not a write three blog posts and hope that you're gonna see results or share on Instagram one day a week, and don't do anything else and hope that something's gonna come through.

You've gotta be consistent and intentional no matter what you're doing with organic. Paid is, in some ways, a little bit of a cheat. It's an expensive cheat, but you can just put money in and you just get your results. And that's why it's a really valuable tool sometimes, but organic requires you're getting those long-term results if you put in the intentionality and if you're very, if you're consistent with what you're doing.

So like if you're not gonna see those results in a year, if you do a few things this month and not, and don't do it again. So no matter what strategy you're using or what result you wanna get, consistency is the name of the game.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Yeah, that's great. So, And I'd also add to about the paid advertising part.

Yes, it can seem attractive because like you can just turn the faucet on, as you said. Mm-hmm. But the challenge that sometimes people don't talk about as much or don't think about is you can also turn the faucet on, on, on something that it just doesn't work Right on on bad content. Mm-hmm. And so there is a very long period of time you can go through with trying to spend money on ads.

Where you can't get any of the ads to work. Once you have the ad that works, you can turn it on. Everything's great. But in, in going through the process of finding the ad that works mm-hmm. You can easily spend just as much time as you could have building that organic content. Yeah. And I would even say, That what you can do and what I think is really powerful is making the organic content and using that to inform you mm-hmm what the ad should be later on.

Because then you can see like, wow, this piece that I didn't actually expect at first became really popular, so maybe I should make an ad that's talking about the same kind of topic as this piece of content.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, absolutely. Every part of your strategy can inform the other, and that can be vice versa too.

Then maybe you do run ads and you have a few that are successful. Then that can also inform the organic content. So it all feeds each other. Like I, I approach marketing. Anyone should approach marketing from an extremely data driven way of thinking. Like we can have our assumptions and we can have our instincts and our intuition, but.

The data will never lie to you. And so always coming back to that to determine what the right strategy is or what your clients want, or what your audience wants to make sure that what you're doing is actually effective. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty: Okay. So with that said, What do you think is the, the best metrics to measure then with the organic marketing?

Like what, what would you say somebody should pay attention to? Is it just page views? Is it search impressions? Is it, is there one thing that like stands out?

Jessica Thiefels: I wouldn't say there's one thing because you wanna look at a couple, but I would say the top metrics are organic traffic for your site as a whole.

Because if you're creating this content that we've been talking about, you sh you should see a lift site-wide. So like this, Organic blog content is going to support your sales pages, is going to support your homepage and all this other, all the other pieces of your website. So organic traffic time on site is also an interesting metric because it tells you if people are actually stopping seeing what you're doing and maybe even looking around like bopping around to multiple pages.

Which also, which means pages per session is also an interesting metric. But then if we're looking at social or email, we really wanna be looking at like clicks back to your website. So ultimately, we're in all of these other places that are considered organic marketing, like social, to get people to your website.

So they'll convert. So we wanna see, okay, are they coming to my profile? So profile views is another important metric. So they're seeing my content coming to my profile, and then clicking my website link because they're so intrigued by what I'm doing that they wanna see more. So organic traffic pages per session time on site profile views, let's say for like Instagram or, I don't do TikTok, to be honest with you.

So I don't know what sort of metrics are on TikTok, but something similar. And then traffic to your website from social would be probably my top five.

Bryan McAnulty: All right. Great. And then let's say okay, I'm starting out. I wanna make all this content. What tools would you recommend that I use, or should I not even worry about that?

Jessica Thiefels: If you're creating content for your website? My preferred SEO tool is SEMrush. SEMrush, I don't know how to say it. It's really expensive though. Mm-hmm. One thing I will tell you, all the SEO tools that are worth having are costly hres. A H R E F S is the one that I used before this, and I used that for many years.

That's also really expensive, like at least a hundred dollars a month. I think s Eem Rush, I pay like 200 plus a month. Granted, I use it for myself and my clients, so it's worth it. But you, you need a good tool like that. And the value of it is you can do everything within that tool. So like with s DM, rush, for example, I can track not only myself, but all my clients and I can see organic keywords.

What am I ranking for? How much traffic am I getting from those keywords, which pages are doing well? They also give insights in terms of which pages you can update, which keyword gaps you have. You can track competitors. There's so much, it's your all in one SEO tool. Like, and not just SEMrush, that's the one I use, but like hres and there's a couple other out there that do the same thing.

So I would say invest in the right tool and then invest in someone to support you because you're likely not gonna be able to do it all on your own. But what you could do is, You run the strategy, you be the captain of the ship, you do the keyword research and figure out the content, and then find a writer on Upwork, someone who knows your industry so that they can speak the language and someone that charges within what you think is reasonable for your budget and have them do the writing, and then you do the editing and the publishing.

So that keeps you consistent, holds you accountable because you've assigned the work out and you're paying for it. You can also manage to get it done without like hiring a full on agency or stressing yourself out to the point that it doesn't get done because you don't have enough time to do all of the pieces.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Yeah. I really like that. Yeah, I would say even before all of that if, if spending a hundred or $200 a month on a SEO tool seems intimidating and you're really just starting out, I would say just start writing things and making the content. And use like Google Search console to, to analyze the search and everything.

Then once you, you've built some kind of consistency with it, then go in there and get the SEO tools like you're talking about. Cause then you also have hopefully something going on that you can look at with the data. But of course, like there is like, there's value in getting it right away, like the competitor research, that kind of thing that you were talking about.

And then I like that idea too, of hiring somebody. To help you not only stay consistent, but grow it going forward.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah, totally. I mean, and I would argue, I would argue not to do it unless you're optimizing, because it's not gonna do much for you if you don't have an audience. So e, even a tool like Neil Patel has a tool called Uber Suggest.

I don't feel like the results are like 100% accurate, but it could at least give you some direction and that tool is free. So I don't know. I'm trying to think. Unless you do paid ads, I don't think you have. I. You don't have access to Google's keyword search, or you do, but it's really broad, like 1000 to 20,000 searches.

So it's not as helpful. But I would say having some semblance of keyword research going into it. Cuz if you're gonna put all the time into that content, I'd hate to see it. Just sit there and not do anything for you. I'd like to see you really do it right. From, from the outset. And so even if that's only one blog post a month, if that's all you can, you know, manage, I'd at least like to, yeah, that's true.

Done, done right from the beginning, but that's, I'm like, this is what I do every day. So this is what I tell my clients. I understand that we don't all live in that world where that's

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, no, that, that's a great point because like I've made the exact mistake that you're talking about here. In the past, which is that you write something and you think, okay, I made this great article, spent a lot of time on it.

But the way you wrote it, the title, the, the way you're talking about the subject, which might be interesting to other people, is not the way that people are searching for it. Right? And so no one finds it because of that. And so doing that little bit of research upfront lets, you know like, oh, well this is the way that everybody words it when they're searching for it.

Mm-hmm. Or when they're asking a question about it, or, and, and like, it's, there's a chance that that topic is still good. But it's just, you have to word it slightly different than maybe you had initially in your head and make sure you actually have the chance of getting something out of it.

Jessica Thiefels: Right, exactly.

Making sure it's not so competitive that there's just no chance of you ever ranking for it. You wanna hit that sweet spot of high surge and low competition.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. All right. Great. All right. Well, one of the things we'd like to do on the show is have each of our guests ask a question to the audience. So if you could think of anything to ask the audience, something that you're curious about, something you want everybody just to think about for themselves, what would that be?

Jessica Thiefels: I'm gonna ask the audience to ask themselves, what are you prioritizing right now? And is that actually moving you forward? Yeah, because I think so often we get stuck in doing all of these different things because we think we should be doing them, or we get stuck in these routines because we think it's the way we're supposed to do something, but it's not actually getting us closer to where we wanna go, whether that's growing our business or creating more freedom or reaching a revenue goal.

So it's all, every choice we make gets us closer to or further from where we wanna go. So what are you choosing every day, and is that actually moving you toward where you'd like to get to?

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. That's a great question. I think like that's one that not only somebody starting out can think about, but mm-hmm.

Like everyone should continuously think about no matter where you're at in your business, because it's easy to work on something that you think you wanna work on, and in your head you're thinking, oh, this is gonna help. But if you really stop to think about, well, what, what's the impact of this versus that?

Mm-hmm. You can probably even realize for yourself that maybe it's not the best thing to do to really move the needle forward. Yeah. And. Another way to look at it is like everybody else out there, in most cases, like as we said in the, the very start, that like everybody has different constraints and, and things that they have to deal with.

But in most cases, like everybody's generally the same. Like we're all humans. Mm-hmm. And so the difference of like one person getting there faster than you, like maybe it's part-time, part luck, part hours that they put into it. A big part of it is working on the right thing at the right time. Yeah. And so if you can work on the right thing at the right time, then you can move, move forward a lot faster.

Jessica Thiefels: Yeah. I love that point. So true.

Bryan McAnulty: All right, well Jessica, it is so good to talk with you. Before we get going, where else can people find you online?

Jessica Thiefels: You can find me. I'm pretty much always on Instagram where I share all things mental wellness and my son Weston, who's 17 months old, don't follow if you don't wanna see baby videos and pictures cuz it's constant.

And then my website, jessicathiefels.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, but I don't really share much there and on Twitter, but I'm also not super active there anymore. So and then my two podcasts, mindset Reset Radio is. Really personal development for female entrepreneurs and thrive through marketing is all about organic content marketing.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. All right. Thanks Jessica.

Jessica Thiefels: Thank you.

Bryan McAnulty: If you enjoyed this interview and want the chance to ask questions to our guests live, tune in on Tuesdays when new episodes premiere on the Heights Platform Facebook page. To learn more about the show and get notified when new episodes release, check out The Creator's Adventure dot com.

Until then, keep learning and I'll see you in the next episode.