Safe Hands blog takes a short break

Service interruption: please do not adjust your settings. There’s going to be a pause in the publication of these blog posts.

 This blog has been updated every week since June 2020 (apart from breaks for holidays). Before that, I’d been posting for years but not as consistently.

But there’s going to be a small pause now, in November 2024.

That’s because I’m making some changes in my content and marketing flow.

Up till now, with variations, my content flow has looked like this:

1.  Write and publish blog post.

2. Send the text of the blog post out as an email newsletter.

3. Use the blog post as the basis for social media posts the following week.

4. Repeat, once a week.

At some point, I refined the email newsletter (and therefore the blog posts) into two content streams. One called In Safe Hands contains more personal writing. The other, called The Content Guru, contains small business and content creation writing. I thought it might better serve different groups of readers, and having the structure set up that way made it easier to come up with topics to write about.

But things are going to change. Firstly, I’m not convinced that the two-strand approach works for readers. I also know that the audience for my email newsletter has not really grown, and I think that’s because it covers so much ground. And I’m focusing Safe Hands on a particular niche now, and the content topics and flow need to reflect that.

What I am thinking, for now:

One: Create a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn covering Generative AI, and how it impacts on content creation, with a side order of talking about writing, editing and production flow things (tentatively called A Sensible Woman’s Guide to AI and Content Creation).

Two: Continue an email newsletter, fortnightly or perhaps monthly, containing only the personal insights, simply because I like that kind of writing. It may be that I’ll need to accept that it won’t be a newsletter that grows or that does anything other than talk to a small group of people who like the way I write. The platform for that may change to Substack, because of the way it links writers and people into communities.

Or something else.

As you can see, this is very much still in the thinking phase. The end of October seems as good a time as any to pause the current content cadence to give myself time to decide what to do and then implement those changes. I’ve set myself a deadline of November 30 to get myself settled. And to resume publishing on December 5 (even if that means another short pause in January for the summer break).

That timing might seem a bit odd – but as previously explained, my business year now runs from September to September, as it should in the southern hemisphere. So I will keep plugging away even as everyone else is getting into the Ke Dezemba spirit of the South African summer break.

And please, any thoughts you may have, be in touch!

READ MORE

How not to hate marketing (part three) | Safe Hands

How to do small business planning… in spring! | Safe Hands

End of year greetings: Ke Dezemba boss! | Safe Hands

Main picture: Christopher Burns, Unsplash

How to reach me

Contact me if you would like to chat about how I can help with all your communication needs (writing, editing, coaching and training, social media).

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