Following Your Golden Thread
Reinforcing your mission — your core message — over and over again can feel a little redundant from the author’s perspective. To serve a consistent, focused, unique, niche topic, to a carefully targeted audience, with a strict editorial schedule that features a small list of keywords and search phrases sounds like a creative straight-jacket.
How do you limit and narrow and focus your blogging while simultaneously stockpiling an ever-growing quantity of original, quality articles? Don’t these goals contradict one another?
The Lighworker’s Beam
I feel like keyword- and audience- targeting are like being on a path in a dark wood with a flashlight — point it in the right direction, the ground in front of you, and just a little ahead — and you CAN get where you’re going. Like a car with headlights, you can travel cross country in the dark, illuminating only a few feet in front of you at any given time. Even seeing an incredible distance up ahead is not the same thing as being there — going too quickly could be dangerous, too.
A lot of the other marketers I’ve read, listened to — even worked for — say to “stray” from your target less than 10%. I go for more of an 80/20 kind of thing with two overlapping areas of focus. I started out kind of all over the place, but six months in, I looked at the audience response in determining what the focus should be.
The audience/keywords are the flashlight.
For Shift Your Spirits, the audience wants more about spirit guides and manifesting techniques. These are two different topics, yet they are related — especially as I work with them and draw them together.
Note also that “manifesting” and “law of attraction” are recently popular terms — I’ve explored these concepts for a few decades under other names, in the context of Wicca as various forms of spellcrafting. I’m talking and writing about the same principles; but I’m following the audience’s lead on the vocabulary.
Here’s a trick for you to consider, which is actually liberating for a creative writer — how can you take ANY topic and relate it back to your chosen keywords?
At first it may feel too narrow, but you can find a common thread to run through every thing you write.
Think of it as a tapestry, and no matter what part of the “scene” you’re depicting, you know it’s going to have a gold thread running through it.
- maybe in one scene, that gold can be used in mass — the sun in a landscape
- maybe in another scene, it’s the trim on the hem of a gown
- in another, it’s a goldfish in a pond
- in another, the gold thread becomes a stream in the distance
Do you see the metaphor? I’m going to use some examples, but hear them only as a template — replace the examples with YOUR data.
Let’s say the golden vein, the common thread, the light is your audience:
- you hold the flashlight
- the focus defined by THEM
- you are walking them through a wood
The pool of light itself is consistent — it stays the same size — but as you walk it can illuminate anything on the path — grass, a rock, a lizard scurrying by, now the eyes of a rabbit, now some trampled dirt, now the trunk of a tree…
Find the Thread, Make the Tapestry
Here’s my own version of the template — my most common thread comes straight out of Google search terms — “communicating with spirit.” Now, this is interesting, because I discovered this in my audience, I didn’t tell them “this is what you will look for”.
“Communicating with Spirit”
Look at variations of how this search phrase can be used, in context:
- communicating with spirit
- communicating with spirits
- communicating with spirit guides
- people who communicate with spirits
- how to communicate with spirit guides and guardian angels
- communicating with spirit to manifest abundance
- communicating with spiritual beings
The list goes on and on…
The two most popular collections of articles on SYS are:
- communicating with spirit guides
- communicating with source in the context of manifesting
These topics are presented at the top of my home page. Makes sense to put them there, but what you may not realize is that I did not define these as most popular — my readers did. I have worked to write more and more articles that serve my readers’ requests.
BUT I also write a lot about “communicating with spirit” in the context of publishing and blogging… Aha — that’s a different conversation, that’s a divergent path in the woods. So — a different blog — Spiritual Blogging.
Let’s look at KL Masina’s Editorial Schedule as an example of how to apply this concept — I like the way you’ve broken the content into a template that mirrors Mind Body Spirit Relationships.
Consciousness applied to Relationships:
- relationships with others
- relationships with the physical — your body, your environment
- relationships with the material
(I may be fuzzy on my understanding of KL’s breakdown of topics — I’m doing a quick take… Again, use these as metaphors, but fill in the details according to what YOU’re doing, not what I’m saying to the last letter.)
You’ve established a “game” format with which to play, or a palette with which to paint. Think of these as colors, maybe.
“Conscious Relationships” could be applied as a filter — to produce or generate lists of potential article topics that all serve the blog’s unique mission:
- how being conscious improves your romantic relationships
- conscious relationships with money
- conscious relationships with food
- conscious relationships with your environment
So, let’s say an example like this is your “light” — your audience’s light, which you carry and point for them — the various “colors” or subject areas could be color gels, like lights on theater stages — today we slip in the red gel and look at your conscious relationship with your body image, now we slip in the blue gel and we look at how being conscious and living in the moment colors your dreams, now we slip in a gold gel and we look at your money and abundance issues in this light.
Do you see how you can shine the same light on different subjects? Do you see how you can even shine the same light with a different color on the same subject to produce a different feeling?
Play with this kind of metaphor in the context of the schedule and topics you’ve established.
To go back to SYS for a literal example that’s easiest for me — let’s say our audience has established a light to shine on “spirit guides” — and let’s say that is my super-tight, never-stray-from-it goal or niche focus…
I can write about spirit guides in the following contexts:
- defining different types of spirit guides
- the different situations where my spirit guides have helped me
- how do spirit guides give you signs
- what do spirit guides look like?
- how many spirit guides do you have?
- where are they?
- why are they here?
- how do they affect my work?
- how do they affect what I read or study?
- how are they a factor in my relationships?
Do you see how quickly I can produce a list of varying topics, with the same gold thread or light?
The objects on the ground are steadily passing under our feet, I’m following that common vein through and around each different idea…
Targeting is not as limiting as you think — the creative writing assignment, the game, the course, the challenge, the rules, the limits for you as a writer are to keep finding that thread in each scene, to keep following it and identifying it — it’s like a Where’s Waldo? kind of thing.
Think of car games that kids play while traveling — let’s say the rule is you must spot the letter K:
- K on a license tag
- K on a billboard
- K on a fastfood cup on the floorboard of the car
- K on a Tshirt on someone crossing the street
- K on the glass of a shop front window
See? Even if the focus of your blog was the letter K — ONE letter — not even a whole word or concept or keyword phrase — just one letter — you can still discover a variety of individual posts that approaches infinity.
Let’s say it was a photoblog and all you did was go out post after post, picture after picture, and spot a K… How long could you keep going and never run out a new picture to post?
Wow, you know that sounds like a really fun blog to me… Hmm… The letter S would be rocking too. So, do I keep adding letters to the K blog? NO — then it’s lost its thread. But what if I want to do K and S? Then I create another blog for S. I could even use the same format, the same light, the same path — switch out the color gel.
See that these “limits” are not limits — they are jump-off points — they actually define for you exactly where to go next. You hardly have to think as much. You don’t have to go out everyday and think “Hmm… How can I find a new Letter theme to photograph?”
I promise you, this is the ideal, I’m still refining and defining and searching for that perfect tight sweet spot. But I swear to God, I like the idea so much in five minutes I see the potential of going crazy over a web site devoted to the letter S.
I could do a kids version. I could do an adult themed book — “S is Sexy”. Then I record an album full of “S” song titles and lyrics, with singers and musicians whose names begin with S. Then I do a documentary about the History of the Letter S.
Then I’m on Oprah to talk about the S craze I’ve identified.
Did I invent the letter S?
No.
I just followed it.
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
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4 Responses to “Following Your Golden Thread”
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Love your work Slade - doing exactly this has helped me enormously.
I’m really getting a feel for why people come to my site and what they want. As an example - the words “suffer” and suffering” brought a number of people to my site in the last four months and they stayed on average for 22 minutes!!!
So this week I wrote an article delivering what I thought those people were looking at - ways to cope with and transcend suffering. That article was a huge hit.
So today, sitting down to write Friday’s article, I know it needs to reflect the energetic world. I take a peek at my google keyword states, I look at the topics I’ve listed in my editorial schedule, and I let that golden thread make itself known.
And in doing all this, I serve my readers… YEAH!
Thanks again Slade!
Very cool, K-L, thanks for reporting back about how you’re working the concept. And thanks again for inspiring this article.
I’ve always appreciated having a “target” in creative writing. It’s good to know which pool you’re jumping into when you leap off the edge of the diving board.
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