ep 062 Special Guest Host Rebecca Swanner

Theory of Content

Welcome back to Theory of Content! Joining Joshua Unseth this week is Rebecca Swanner. Rebecca is the owner of the blog, Let’s Eat Cake. Let’s Eat Cake is a lifestyle humor blog that dabbles in baking as well.

Joshua and Rebecca start the episode by hashing out details about their favorite video games and Rebecca’s past as a video game editor. The conversation turns into a discussion of Let’s Eat Cake’s content and how it came to be. Rebecca retells her story of how she initially got into blogging, but how her demographic shifted as her interests changed.

Next up, Rebecca explains the logistics of her blog. More specifically, how she gets comedians to draft posts for her. She explains the challenges of letting outsiders create content for the blog, since they may not fully understand the brand or it’s target audience. Joshua and her go over how to craft the perfect style guide for hired writers to maintain a uniform brand image across the entire site. More logistics Rebecca discusses deal with making comedic content translate to Google search bots. Being a humor blog, with lots of sarcastic posts, there were many times that Google could not decipher the true meaning of a Let’s Eat Cake blog post like a human could. Rebecca explains how she uses Dtelmu Demo to check if Google can understand the subject of a post before it goes live.

Finally, Joshua and Rebecca dive into Facebag to answer your guys’ questions. The first question they take is about optimizing monetization across two separate blog sites with different content types. Is it better to combine them? Or leave them separate? Joshua points out that there are more types of monetization than just adsense. Some blogs may be better equipped to garner affiliate links (especially if they have niche content), while others are more likely to profit greatly off ads. If two content types are not compatible with the same monetization strategy, it may not be the best to combine them. Next, they answer a slew of questions regarding when it is okay to delete old content. The conclusion they reach is to pay attention to the traffic they’re getting, if they’re still ranking, and yourself (if you really want the post gone, delete it to ease your mind). Lastly, they answer a question about taking a break from blogging (everyone congratulate Morgan!).

Thank you so much for tuning in this week to Theory of Content. Be on the lookout for an all new episode next Thursday. In the meantime, if you didn’t catch last week’s episode with Rizwan Asad go give it a listen!

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Hi Theory of Content! I love the podcast and have learned so much from it! I have a question regarding combing two sites due to the change in MV 2nd site. (I’m not complaining about the change, I totally understand it and how it will help my main blog! I LOVE MV and all the support I’ve gotten over the years!!)

I started a second site in January, for something different to do and also to give my teenage kids jobs! They research and write the articles for most of the posts on intheChristmasspirit.com.

My main goal was really just to get a little bit of ad money, enough for their payroll, and I thought I could get that site to 10K by Q4. But with a seasonal niche blog, I really don’t think I can get the sessions up to what I’ll need to apply to MV now.

My main site that I earn a full-time salary from is a crafting/DIY site, leapoffaithcrafting.com. My kids don’t craft and I don’t really want them writing posts for this site anyway;)

I have been working on SEO for my crafting site a lot over the past two years and now actually get 50% of my traffic from organic and 50% from Pinterest (used to be 20/80). Google has liked me over the last few updates so I’m a little scared to change anything.

The articles on the Christmas site we have are mostly factual based (history of everything Christmas) and some food and printable posts (only about 40 posts total). On my crafting site (400 posts), I do have a ton of Christmas craft and DIY posts that bring me a lot of traffic in Q4, but they are all tutorials (not factual based).

So question… Would it hurt my crafting SEO to move the Christmas posts over to my main blog and keep building that line of posts over there? Either copy and paste (and shut down the 2nd site) or redirect the posts? Or is it worth keeping the two different sites because of SEO?? Or fire my kids, lol!!??

I would love any advice from anyone here or as a mailbag question. I hope all this makes sense! Thank you for all you do!

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I have a few questions about different scenarios for deleting posts after hearing a lot of people recommend deleting useless/junk posts to clean up a site. Mine has been around since 2008, so quite a bit of clean up potential.

-duplicate recipe posts (somehow this happened years ago in a site redesign for a few recipes): should I delete one of the posts and redirect it to the other? How do I know which to delete, just choose the one that gets the least traffic?

-old giveaways: should I delete them? Any other action needed such as redirecting to category page? What is best here?

-I used to do a bit of freelance and would periodically do roundups of my work. These seem useless now and better in a press/about page. Should I delete them and consolidate the info on my existing pages that are better suited?

-complete and utter garbage posts? Wordless Wednesday, rambling, link ups: what do you do here?

-multiple recipe roundups in nearly or identical topics. I used to do this years ago before I knew about editing a post and republishing it. Should I do anything with this or leave as is other than optimizing by putting the info in Create lists?

Or is it not recommended to delete them at all and just no index or something else I’m unaware of?

Many thanks!

• Katie Kick

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Would it kill our blog to not post for 2 months?

We post 3x a week at least and have thousands of old posts published. I’m having our second baby mid-August and we will be moving when I am about 38 weeks pregnant.

Last maternity leave I pre-wrote and took guest posts for two months of content. Now, with our move being stretched out due to covid, we are scraping for content.

Would it kill our google juice to take a six week break and post nothing? We will drive traffic to old content via our newsletter and social media. I am thinking a true break will allow us to not put out crappy fluff content and come back strong october 1. But don’t want google to stop crawling my site? Thanks! Morgan from Charleston Crafted.com

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