Expertise, Authority, Trust. E-A-T is a commonly used term in the SEO world because it is a large part of their push to battle disinformation on the web.
But those three words are also central to what users care about when they decide whether to follow, listen to, and ultimately buy from you.
If you have a content regimen around written content that gets published to the web, then you should understand the lense through which Google and your users view you as it relates to E-A-T signals.
In reality, you probably either have an email first or blog post first approach.
If you know of someone who has both (who doesn’t have a team of 5+ people) I would love to know about it!
Generally though, you either write blog posts and as you write, think of the audiences that will see the post and then push it out to your email list as an afterthought, or vice versa.
The which-comes-first part doesn’t really matter, but the formats (emails vs posts) are so different that you have to think in terms of “I’m publishing this to the web” or “I’m writing this email for my email list.”
This is kind of a problem.
The formats are vastly different and therefore deserve different approaches to optimize for success. You wouldn’t write an article, have someone record reading it out loud and call it a podcast, but we do that when we publish our emails to the web all the time.
Sure, both are “working in public,” and help you cultivate your personal expertise around topics, but:
- If you are daily (or weekly) publishing to an email list, you are deepening a relationship with a group of people you interact with first and foremost, and eventually selling something to them.
- If you are writing blog posts, you are looking to grow visibility and add new subscribers around public content over time.
If you’re writing daily emails, they should be short-ish and to the point (one single point).
If you’re writing blog posts, they should be comprehensive enough to satisfy the intent behind a cluster of related keyword searches as a first step towards ranking for a concept.
Completely different.
If you can only focus on one, which is more important?
Or, can you do both without doubling your workload?
More questions I’m working through.