How to Use Blog Capsule Content to Attract More Acupuncture Patients with Jana Osofsky - Episode 117 of the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast

What if marketing for more acupuncture patients didn’t require constant posting or starting from scratch every week, and could take up a lot less time for a lot more payoff?

In this episode, I’m joined by Jana Osofsky (also known as Jana O), marketing strategist for wellness practitioners and creator of the Blog First marketing ecosystem.

We talk about writing content that meets people where they are, avoiding jargon that turns patients away, and using blogs as the foundation for everything from emails to social posts.

Jana also explains how to use AI thoughtfully without losing your voice, why specificity matters more than niching down, and how to create marketing that feels spacious, aligned, and effective without burning out.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How to turn one blog into a full month of marketing content.
  • How to write in a way that attracts patients in a way that makes sense to them and you.
  • How to use AI as a support tool–not your marketing strategist–to amplify your voice, leverage SEO and increase your credibility.

Timestamps: 

  • 2:49 – Meet Jana
  • 6:31 – Jana’s business beginnings & entering her repurposing era
  • 11:24 – SEO, marketing, and your blog
  • 18:17 – How to write for your audience
  • 20:01 – Acupuncturist example: moving through buyer awareness
  • 25:47 – Do you really need to niche down?
  • 32:07 – Why topic selection goes first before creating content
  • 34:54 – How to use AI for your marketing content
  • 42:22 – Jana’s definition of success

Mentioned in this episode:

Connect with Jana:

🎙️ Listen to Episode #117: How Acupuncturists Can Use Blog-First Marketing to Attract More Patients Without Burning Out with Jana Osofsky

💙 This episode is sponsored by Jane, a clinic management software that’s here to make practice life a little easier.

Ready to get started? Use the code ACUSCHOOL1MO for 1 free month at jane.app.

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Transcript:

Michelle: Welcome to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Grasek, and I’m here to help you get visible in your community. Take marketing action with confidence, and get more patients in your practice and more money in your pocket every week. We both know you’re a talented, passionate acupuncturist and that acupuncture has the power to change lives.

So let’s dive right into this episode and talk about how you can reach more patients.

Hello there and welcome back. Today I’m talking with Jana Osofsky. Jana has been teaching marketing for nearly a decade. Working with practitioners, coaches, and other service-based business owners. And in this episode we talk about her blog first marketing ecosystem, a system she developed to answer a question that many of us have had.

How are we supposed to run a service-based business without also needing a second full-time job creating content? And we dig into how writing intentional strategic blog content can support SEO. Build trust with your audience and make your marketing feel more sustainable, especially if you’re short on time or feeling overwhelmed by constant content creation.

So I really think you’re going to like this conversation with Jana. Let’s dive in. Today’s episode is sponsored by Jane. A practice management software that keeps all the tools you need to run your practice in one place. Jane recently hosted a webinar called What’s New this Fall, highlighting their biggest feature releases yet, in case you missed it, let’s catch up with a few of the helpful things that practitioners can now do with Jane.

So for people who are already subscribed to Jane, you can try AI Scribe for free with five notes included per month. This is a really accessible way for practitioners to use AI Scribe and see how it fits into their note taking workflow. You can also now build a website in under a minute with Jane websites.

This AI powered feature automatically updates your site alongside your Jane account, making sure patients always have the most up-to-date information. It. Is amazing. And now you can provide easier access to care with Jane’s mobile app for patients. Now patients can access all of their Jane providers from one location making it easier to book and manage their appointments.

Jane’s new features and updates are designed to make the business of running a practice simpler. So if you’re ready to get started, visit Jane app and use the Code Accu School one MO for a one month Grace period on your new account. And of course, I will put the links and the code in the show notes to make it easy for you.

All right, let’s get into today’s episode with Jana. Hi Jana. How are you today?

Jana: Hi, Michelle. I’m great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Michelle: Absolutely. And thank you so much for being here. Before we get started, why don’t you take a moment to introduce yourself to the audience?

Jana: Sure. Yes, so I’m Jana o everyone.

My last name’s Osofsky. I go by Jana o ’cause it’s just easier to say. It has a nice ring to it. Mm-hmm. I’ve been teaching marketing going on nine years now, and I work primarily with practitioners, coaches, and service-based businesses. And I got started, like I said, around eight, nine years ago by kind of answering a question that I know a lot of.

People ask these days and answering that for my own business, which is like, can you be a business owner who serves clients and also like not have a second full-time job as a content creator? Mm-hmm. So these days I teach a program where we do a capsule blog and a blog first ecosystem and kind of answer that question that I originally answered for myself and now answer for my students and my clients all the time.

So I’m really excited to talk about that today. But I live in South Florida. I’m actually a Boston girl. By, well I grew up in Connecticut and I’m from, spent a lot of time in Boston, so I have like this very straightforward way of communicating. I hope that everyone listening super likes it. Sometimes people like it, sometimes it can be like, you know, she’s from New England, but I also, yeah, I live now in South Florida with my husband and our dog, tur and yeah, I run a little online business, do a lot of hanging out here in South Florida and traveling and.

Yeah, that’s a little bit about me, what I do and what I’m doing in my, my spare time too. So I’m excited for this conversation.

Michelle: Wonderful. I got unreasonably excited when you said, what did you say? Blog forward ecosystem

Jana: blog first.

Michelle: Blog first ecosystem. Yeah. You could say

Jana: blog forward though. That works too, actually.

I like that.

Michelle: I might write that down. Okay. I have to ask you, we talked about this before we hit record, but I, I guess I’m just a dorky person. I love to talk about the weather. So you’re in South Florida? Yeah. And you said the weather’s overcast today, but it would normally be like, what?

Jana: Yeah. Yeah. Normally around this time of the year, this is where we, things getting, start getting really good ’cause we’re recording this in early December, so all of our best months are ahead of us here in south Florida where we get our sunny, you know, high of, of 78, high of 81 kinds of days.

And today we have some rain, but I’m, I’m, I’m here for it ’cause it helps all the living things grow. So, but we’ll have, we’ll have a probably I think tomorrow we’re getting one of those sunny. High is 80 degree days, and I will rejoice in it.

Michelle: I just, I, I’m like some sort of junkie where I need to hear other people talk about nice weather when it’s not nice weather here.

I can’t even imagine. 80 degrees in the first week of December. It’s 27 degrees here today in Central New York. Yep. And we’ve got about six inches of snow. Yesterday. The weather was. Yucky. Every patient that came in the office described the roads as yucky. Mm-hmm. And I was like, well, I’m thanks for coming out.

Right. You made it

Jana: right. You’ve got serious customers there. They’re serious about their healing if they’re there in that kind of weather. So, but I relate, I lived in Boston for 16 years. Yeah. Lived through the big dig, traveling into, into downtown, you know, for years working in corporate. So I get it.

Michelle: Yeah.

And I,

Jana: I know what I’ve got here. Very grateful. Yes, I bet. I bet you

Michelle: truly enjoy it, maybe even more than the people who grew up there. Exactly. Exactly. To make you appreciate it on like a bone deep level.

Jana: Yeah. Yeah. It’s one of the, not everything about Florida’s great, but one of them is our weather for sure.

So come visit Michelle. Come visit us. Yes.

Michelle: Okay. I’m dying to talk about the blog first ecosystem and what that means.

Jana: Great. Well, I’ll, I’ll start by like. Telling you that when I first was in business for the first about five years of my online business, I was doing primarily done for you work. Mm-hmm. And the difference really with doing Done for You work, done for you work when you’re in online business is similar in some ways to the work that our practitioners and our coaches do in the sense, I mean, it’s very different too, but it’s, it’s similar in the sense that when you look at your calendar, most of your calendar, most of your working hours are blocked off to literally work with clients, right?

Mm-hmm. For me when I was doing done for you Pinterest marketing, done for you blog strategy, done for you blog writing, mostly for health and wellness coaches and practitioners. When I looked at my week ahead on Sunday night when I was, you know, having tea and looking at like planning the week, most of my hours were taken up by doing client work.

So I was either on client calls for strategy, so literally with clients or I was working on client deliverables and I felt like a lot of the online space and the marketing advice I was hearing. Was like assuming that I had hours and hours every week to do marketing and to like, yeah, right. And I’m like, wait a minute.

So I’m supposed to have two full-time jobs. I’m supposed to work with clients full-time, but also market myself full-time now. So, you know, I’m a marketing person. I studied marketing. I was working on retainer for a coach, a seven figure coach, and I was doing all of her content repurposing. So it had a little bit of a leg up and had a kind of a perspective to look at this problem that we all had and be like, okay, how can we solve this?

I solved it for myself first. What I did is I wrote what I now call a capsule blog, and I started writing blog posts, not random things, about like what I wanted to talk about this week, or even, it wasn’t even random marketing things or like musing, it was actually my brain. What I wanted to do, what I thought made sense was to sit down and write out the things that I knew that my audience needed to know.

To learn or to hear from me or to understand more deeply to be ready to buy my offer. So I was like very intentional about it. I thought about what those things were and I wrote blog posts about those things. And once I had enough of those blog posts, I then just started repurposing them instead of continuing to be, you know, blogging all the time, basically.

So I created about 18 blog posts during that time. Okay. And I was, they were pretty much focused around my. Pinterest offer ’cause that’s what I really needed to sell the most of. Not my retainer offer, but my Pinterest project offer. And then I set aside one day per month and it was a whole day and I made a big deal out of it.

’cause I love marketing, to be honest. I know not everyone who’s listening to this loves it. I hope they’re starting to love it if they’re listening to you, Michelle. But I

Michelle: hope so too. Yeah, I really hope so.

Jana: Yeah. But I, you know, I mean, it’s my thing, right? So I got so excited for that one day per month that I had where I had no client calls, you know, nothing.

All I needed to do was set up all my marketing for the following 30 days and get it all written and scheduled and everything. And I obviously wasn’t going to do all that from scratch. So I dipped into my blog post that I had already written about the things that I knew my audience needed to feel ready to buy.

And I just repurposed all of those messages into emails that I needed, social posts that I needed. If I knew I was going to be speaking in a summit, I grabbed something from there. And you know, if I needed a new presentation, it came from my blog. And so these days I actually teach that system. And so I call it the Blog First Marketing system.

And inside my program we build a capsule blog library. With between 12 and 20 posts about key things, the key things that your audience needs to feel ready to buy, and of course we figure out first in the program what those things are because you don’t automatically like be born into the world knowing what those things are.

It takes a little bit of doing, so I help people figure that out, obviously. Then we write the blog posts and then we move into the repurposing era where you just dip into your blog posts and you grab pieces of it. I call them gem poles. To use in all the places that you need content and that you need to be selling and showing up and you know, developing trust with your audience and showing your expertise in different ways.

So that’s really what a blog first marketing ecosystem looks like. And it starts with identifying what your audience needs to feel ready to buy, and then creating a capsule blog library that covers those key things.

Michelle: I love that you said you’re in your repurposing era. I would like to be in my repurposing era.

Yes. For always. So much easier.

Jana: Yeah. I mean, my students who now have moved into that era, they sometimes run into mindset issues where they’re like, is it really okay to repeat myself, you know, over and over again? Yeah. Or they’ll be like, is it really okay to like not be blogging every week for the rest of my damn life like a blogger would?

And I always say, you know, you’re not a blogger, you are a business owner with a blog. And those are very different things. Sure. Two totally different strategies and people need to wrap their heads around that to really understand how this works and to feel good about it. ’cause I want people to not only do this and get clients with it ’cause that’s what we do.

We leverage our blog posts to get clients, but also feel great about it.

Michelle: So it, this is, I think primarily an SEO strategy as well, right? It’s not just about building this capsule so that you can easily repurpose it over and over again, but also like. Building this capsule that’s speaking to your target audience that lives on your website, that Google starts to identify as being super relevant over time.

Jana: Yeah, and I actually, I, I take a very different approach to SEO than just about anyone who you’ll talk to when it comes to starting a blog or restarting a blog. So whether you have never had a blog before and you’re starting one, and your goal is to get clients using this blog, or whether you have had a blog in the past, but it hasn’t really been bringing clients for you.

My approach is actually what I call unforced, SEO, where instead of writing for keywords or thinking, okay, what’s going to attract people to my website from Google, we start by deciding again, what does my audience need to learn and hear and understand more deeply to be ready to buy my offer? And when we’re looking at the, I have these, this nine and two top content pillar concept that I teach inside my program.

And when we are, decide, we’re brainstorming all these different topics that could fit into the nine pillars, and then we’re narrowing them down using what I call a score and select method. One of the factors we’re using in that score and select method is relevant. So that’s exactly what you just said.

Like if you’re making sure that the topics you’re choosing are relevant, and when we say relevant, we mean like they’re things people actually care about and wanna learn about, which probably means they’re searching for them. Not always, but it could mean that. Then you’re naturally writing things for real people, and you’re writing in a way that real people are going to enjoy, and they’re going to find your blogs easy to read and structured in a way that’s makes them compelling and they’ll keep reading.

And all those things work really well for SEO. But I also firmly believe that if we sit down and try to write blog posts, quote for SEO, I know we’re, we’re doing audio here, not necessarily video, but for those of you who can’t see me, I’m doing big air quotes here, quote for SEO. That. A lot of times what happens is people start a blog, but they don’t end up continuing to write it because it feels heavy to write for keywords.

They don’t love their keywords. They may be writing about things that don’t actually match up with like what’s called search intent with keywords. Hmm. And so this is how I discovered how this works. Early on when I was writing, I never started my blog by saying, what are the keywords people are searching them for?

Instead, I asked myself, what do people need to feel ready to buy now? The blog posts that I wrote naturally over time did rank on Google. Not all of them, but some of them, because they were written based on real things that real humans wanna know about. But I wasn’t trying to write for keywords. So for people who have in-person practices, I really see it as like you’re writing this blog post to set yourself up, to show that you’re the expert, to show things that people need to understand, to be ready to buy, to hire you, to walk in and want to work with you.

You also wanna SEO optimize the other parts of your website for sure, and you could even have some of your blog posts be more written around keywords. But I don’t believe that that’s how you should start a blog. I believe that you should start a blog by simply writing what your people need to feel ready to buy and then grow your blog from there only because like I said, I see most people who start it that way.

They end up with a bunch of half written posts in their Google Drive that never get added to their website. So,

Michelle: Hmm. Do you recommend. If someone has started a blog, and originally they were just writing whatever they felt inspired to write, which I find is extremely common with mm-hmm. Wellness people. Do you recommend if you were to go through this ecosystem with them and find that their previous blog posts are not bringing the traffic that they want or maybe bringing some traffic that they don’t want, and I have a good example of that from my website.

Do you recommend deleting? Their current blog posts or you just keep them and you start writing. Yeah, the new content.

Jana: So like, I know enough about SEO to be dangerous, so to speak. Like I, I wrote, and

Michelle: sometimes

Jana: I feel the same way. I’m like, rah rah, right? Like I wrote my blog posts, I wrote blog posts for other people, some of them ranked on Google.

I ended up, after two years after I started my blog, I became really good friends with an SEO strategist and I ended up hiring her. Because I don’t barter, I only hire my friends. Nice. And she helped me identify what of my blog posts that I’d already written were ranking and how to bring those from page, like two or three up to page one.

And like I know enough about, you know, about SEO, but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t call myself an SEO expert. So I would always check with an SEO expert before you delete any blog posts, because sometimes Gotcha. You know, we wanna make sure, or at least look at your Google search console and see what’s going on with that post.

But strictly from a writing a blog. So that you have a blog first ecosystem and your blog will convert clients when they land on your blog. ’cause that’s what I teach. I would say, no, I don’t think you need to delete blog posts. I think you just need to kind of push them down the feed, if you will, with the things that your audience actually needs to feel ready to buy, not your musings.

So I don’t think it’s important to necessarily get rid of them. An SEO person might say yes because they have a different goal. For me, I just want there to be blog posts on your blog that are easy to find, that actually answer the actual questions and concerns that people have to get them ready to wanna hire you.

Michelle: So, and I’m imagining an important part of this process must be being able to identify where potential patients are in their like buyer journey. Like, I forget it’s, there’s five stages. Mm-hmm. I was just reading about this and it’s gone from my brain already. There’s like unaware. Yep. Something aware.

I’ll let you do it. It sounds like you know what they are.

Jana: Yeah. I, I studied it in marketing school, you know, we studied very nice, the, I’m trying to remember the gentleman’s name. He’s one of those old fathers of advertising. I actually wrote an email recently about this to my list, but the email that I wrote to my list about, it wasn’t like, oh, let me teach you the five stages of buyer journey, because I was like, you don’t wanna learn that you, you’re busy helping clients, you know, with gut health or you know, as an acupuncturist or whatnot.

Like, I don’t. Necessarily need you to learn the five stages of the buyer journey. Like I feel like I know them. I studied them, I baked them into my program. Yeah. You’ll find them in the nine pillars if you look hard. But I’m not going to try to teach you what they are, but Oh, what was his name? Oh my gosh. Oh, it’s just on the tip of my tongue.

He wrote, he wrote

Michelle: a very famous, that’s great book. Book about advertising. And now’s like Exactly. He’s like very like, hundred and $30 is the lowest You can find it on the internet. I was like, past. Yes. It’s

Jana: very like Mad Men vibes. Like he’s a, he’s one of those like old 1950s advertising dudes. Schwartz.

Eugene Schwartz, that’s his name. Okay.

Michelle: Yep.

Jana: And yeah. So the five stages are problem unaware and then they become aware of the problem. So it’s problem aware and then solution aware where they know that you have a solution, but they don’t know if it’s for them. And then, Hmm. Let’s see. As we move through them, basically they’re becoming more and more aware of and sold on the solution that you offer, right?

It’s like, what were those? I’m on the spot.

Michelle: No, that’s okay. Yeah, sorry. It was not meant to be a quiz.

Jana: So yeah, I think it’s important that you write content that meets people in all of those places because you wanna write content. That is what you know, the marketers will call the jargon is top of funnel.

More air quotes over here, but I don’t necessarily think you’d need to. Know them in order to write the right content. But having a system like the one that I have where we have certain types of content we write, and the fact that those ideas, those that, that human psychology, that sales psychology is like built into that.

So you wanna be writing about things like the problems that your audience knows that they have, not ones that you recognize that they have, but that they have no idea they have yet. And it’s not like, you know, we gotta, we gotta talk about like. Not necessarily root cause. I mean, you can talk about root cause in your content, but you really need to be catching them and hooking them in with the promise of helping them with something that they actually want help with.

That they are aware that is something that they’re experiencing, that they want help with. And then talking about, you know, busting up the beliefs that they have that are maybe keeping them from being able to say yes to the modality that you offer, things like that. And then as we kind of move closer to that decision point where they’re ready.

Thinking about, okay, what are the things that they have that are objections to it that you can help clear up for them? What are the basic questions they have about how this works? That’s something that a lot of times we forget to talk about because it’s so obvious to us, but they need the basic information to feel confident buying, right?

Mm-hmm. So just like basic questions, like what exactly happens in a session? You know, things like that. Mm-hmm. So there’s topics all along that spectrum of buyer awareness. But yeah, like I said, I don’t think that practitioners need to worry about that. The buyer awareness thing. I think they just need to.

Remember to write about the problems, the myths, the offer questions, things like that.

Michelle: Can we run through just one example maybe for acupuncturists? So it sounds like we’d be starting with a symptom. So the problem that people are aware that they have, it’s maybe like neck pain or digestive trouble. Yeah.

Okay. That’s a good one. And

Jana: then do you, Michelle, see people. Tend to, do you ever see people write content about things that are, problems that they don’t know that they have, but that like, your, your client wants to write about them, but they’re things that aren’t going to catch the audience member’s attention because they don’t know they have that problem?

Michelle: I think so. I guess you’ll have to tell me if, if this is what you’re referring to. Mm-hmm. I often see acupuncturists who will talk about the TCM diagnoses. Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s not that I don’t. Uh, I would never say like, I don’t want people to talk about Chinese medicine and, and the nuance and everything like that, but I think that leading with something that our potential patients don’t recognize whatsoever

Jana: mm-hmm.

Michelle: Creates more questions and confusion or just more scrolling. Right. So people will say, they’ll have a blog post about liver qi stagnation in the springtime. Right. And our, most of our patients have no idea what that is referring to. Right. The only part they recognize is the springtime. Right, right, right.

So I always try to tell people, hook them, this is the spring with the thing that they identify with, which is maybe, you know, like pick a symptom. And then when you have their interest, then maybe you have the opportunity, right. To give them a little bit of TCM jargon. But how do you expect to pull them in with vocabulary that they, it just, they doesn’t have a lot of meaning for them.

Jana: Right. I always say like, so help me out here with the liver qi. What would be a symptom that somebody might be experiencing because that’s going on?

Michelle: So a classic liver qi stagnation is, is like, irritability has this friction that you feel in your body and you’re like so irritable maybe before you get your period or something like that.

So it could be part of PMS, for example. Yeah, or it could just occur, you know, if, if you’re a human. You

Jana: have a busy day. Yep, yep. Yeah, so I always, I’ll use this as an example. You know, you can write a post about liver qi stagnation, but your ideal audience is going to completely ignore it because they’re busy looking to try to figure out how to be less irritable.

And meanwhile, like if they just paid attention to what you were writing about, this could be the thing that changes their life and changes that irritability and gives them a better relationship with their kids so they’re not yelling at their kids. And. Keeps them from getting divorced and like all these things.

Right? But they don’t know. And so I know a lot of the practitioners that I work with when they first come into my program, they’re so frustrated by that. They’re like, I know that this could help so many people, but no one is stopping to pay attention. And a lot of times that’s why. So I feel like we got it off a little tangent, but I think that that’s, that’s kind of where we’re going with it.

Right.

Michelle: Okay. So then what are some other examples? So we might start about. Writing a blog post about the symptom. And then you had said, busting down the, the myths or the mindsets that prevent people from making an appointment. So is that answering questions in blog posts? Like, is acupuncture painful or is it more like, here’s research that supports that it’s actually effective for this symptom?

Jana: Yep. Yeah, exactly. It could be. It could be. And everybody, like it depends. It, it might depend on. Whether you have a generalized practice or whether you tend to work with midlife people, maybe midlife women. Right. They’re going to have a different, different concerns than say, college students do or whatnot.

Right. I actually am saying that because when I was in college, my roommate went to a chiropractor in Boston where I went to college and all the clients there were college students.

Michelle: I bet. Yeah.

Jana: So, you know, if you have a practice like that and you love working with people at that age, then you’re going to probably be writing about slightly different things than, like I said, if you.

You know, you’re one of two practices in a town where you are more of a generalist, or you work with a lot of like midlife women who are experiencing perimenopause or whatnot. So anyway, sorry, tangent. Got on a tangent. What was your question? I’m sorry,

Michelle: what were you, I’m actually so tempted to take us on another tangent, but I won’t.

Oh, okay. I think we were talking about examples of blog posts that we might write about those barriers. Right, exactly.

Jana: So, totally. So you’re going to think to yourself, okay, with my people. What are, what’s keeping them from feeling ready, right? Is it that they’re worried that it’s going to be painful? Is it that it’s going to take too much time out of their day?

Is it that they’re not convinced that it even really works? That you know, their Aunt Sally told them that that’s, you know, because Aunt Sally

Michelle: acupuncture one time and nothing happened, even though her acupuncturist probably told her four times, you need to come eight times.

Jana: Right. So, yes, exactly. You’re, you’re exactly right.

You’re thinking about not, what do I wish people cared about?

Michelle: Mm,

Jana: and new, but what do people need to know from me to feel ready to buy?

Michelle: Taking a quick break to remind you of today’s sponsor, Jane. Jane is a practice management software that brings everything you need to run your practice into one place, scheduling, notes, billing, and more.

They’ve recently rolled out some great new features, including a free trial of ai scribe. With five notes per month, an AI powered website you can build in under a minute. Seriously, these websites are amazing and a mobile app for patients that makes booking and managing appointments even easier. If you’re ready to simplify how you run your practice, head to Jane app and use the Code ACU School, one Mo for a one month Grace period on your new account.

And of course, I’ll put the link and the code in the show notes for you. All right, let’s get back into Jana’s episode. Okay, so the tangent that I was dying to take us on earlier mm-hmm. Is, are you saying that we should niche down? Oh.

Jana: So whenever people give the advice to niche down a business coach, you know anyone who tells you you should really choose a niche.

Yeah. The only thing they’re saying is that you need to get more specific with your content. Yeah. That’s all they’re saying. Agree. They’re, they’re wanting you to niche down just simply so that you can write website copy that speaks to people. Mm-hmm. That’s specific enough so you can write blog posts that are specific enough so that you can, you know, do local presentations at the library that are specific enough to actually get people to attend them and be able to speak to things that people feel, make people feel like you understand what they’re dealing with.

Right. Actually, I teach a framework inside of HLC high leverage contents, my program called the Specificity Spectrum, where I teach people who are either not wanting to niche or afraid to write content that’s specifically for one group of people because they’re afraid it’ll either alienate or limit them from being able to work with others, how to write content that will resonate without getting yourself backed into a corner with a niche or whatnot.

And there are ways to do that, but it’s always just getting more specific. Hmm. So, yes, I mean, I think that if you feel comfortable choosing an niche, I think it’s a really good way to make everything in your marketing easier and work better. But I do also believe that there are ways to get around it. If you truly wanna be a generalist, it just takes a little bit of a different strategy.

So, yeah.

Michelle: Yeah. I, I, I really appreciate that angle because I think that. So I always use the example that I specialize in cosmetic acupuncture and the landing page of my website. I have an associate and she, she also does cosmetic acupuncture, but she focuses more on women’s health and she’s a doula and she’s a certified childbirth educator, so she tons of education in that area.

When you land on the website, it is clearly. Focused on women. There’s a lot of references to cosmetic acupuncture and aging naturally, beautifully, blah, blah, blah. Like all the keywords and women’s health. However, we still see plenty of men.

Jana: Mm-hmm.

Michelle: And of course, like many of them are referrals from women who came to see us.

Right. But the fact that we have a. Primarily women oriented landing page does not turn them away. It doesn’t make them say, I’m not going there. Right. And we also see lots of people for other things like pain management and digestion and urinary health and like all of these things. So I’m always trying to convince people to niche down.

I like the way that you put it where it’s less pressure. Right. Just get more specific with your content instead of saying you have to choose this niche and be married to it. I think it that less pressure angle is probably going to be helpful for people.

Jana: Yep.

Michelle: But it does, I think it makes our marketing much more effective for the cosmetic and the women’s health patients who are really great fit for us.

And then we are also happy to receive. All the other patients who come to us from different angles. Yeah. It’s not like we’re turning them away. I guess that’s my very long-winded point was it’s not like we’re sending people away and it’s not like we’re scaring them away either.

Jana: Right, right. And I would venture to guess, and this is kind of how I teach it too, that one of the reasons why you’re seeing patients who have other types of issues other than the ones that you’re specifically speaking to on your website.

And seeing patients who don’t necessarily fit into the demographic that your website obviously is most geared toward. Mm-hmm. I would venture to say that one of the reasons why those people still come to you is because even when they see your website, they’re able to understand because of the specificity that you’re using, that you do have expertise.

That you know how to identify problems and solve them, even if it’s not necessarily the exact same problem they have.

Michelle: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jana: Whereas when we try to speak to everyone, you know, and speak to no one, everyone says that.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jana: People read the website copy and they think, what does that even mean? I don’t get it.

And then they just move on, right? Yeah. So I call those the correlators. Those are people who see your content and they look at the problem that your content is, is addressing and going deep on, and they think, well, I don’t have exactly that problem, but if she’s able to. Approach that problem and she’s showing me in this blog post how she would approach it and what her frameworks are.

And I dunno if you use the word frameworks, but like different approaches that are different from other people. Mm-hmm. They still get drawn in and they still understand that you’re the real deal just because you got specific, even if the example you’re using is not exactly the thing that they’re dealing with and they think to themselves, oh, I’ll bet she’ll be able to help me with my thing too.

Michelle: Gotcha. Yeah. So I guess it’s more about. Coming across as a professional, right. This person is an expert in this, and perhaps that extends to other things as well.

Jana: Yeah, and I think it shows confidence too. Mm-hmm. It shows that you’re willing to go out on a little bit of a limb and say like, I know how to help people.

Yeah. I, I get real results for people.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jana: And that is something people are always scanning for, whether it’s consciously or subconsciously. They wanna see people who are confidently saying, I, I can help people.

Michelle: Right. And I guess that’s something else I wanted to point out is I don’t know that people who visit our websites are consciously thinking to themselves like, oh, this person sounds like an expert in women’s health and therefore I’m making this connection, right.

That they could probably also help me with X, Y, Z. But it’s, it’s like this internal processing that I think is happening Yep. Below the surface, and it’s right. Psychology, I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. So I can imagine it’s a little intimidating as the practitioner, the business owner, to try to write copy for that and think, I would think, well, shoot, where do I begin?

Jana: Yeah. Copy. Like on the website or content or both?

Michelle: Yeah. All yes.

Jana: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes. All of the above. Yeah.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jana: I mean, these things are challenging, worth doing, but challenging for sure. Yeah,

Michelle: and I feel like your program probably walks people through how to come across in that way so that it can be broadly interpreted, as you were saying.

Jana: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, inside high leverage content, we start by identifying those key things that your audience needs to feel ready to buy, and actually choosing the topics that align with your type of work, your ideal audience, if you have an ideal audience. That’s where that work comes in, where like, well, if I don’t have an ideal audience, I believe you do.

But if you’re more of a generalist, there’s still a methodology for choosing those topics. And then once we know what the topics are, we move into the writing phase. And actually people are often surprised by how much time we spend choosing topics because I personally believe that 90% of your, my content’s not converting woes come from choosing the wrong topic.

So we spend a lot of time, I always say we measure twice and cut once. And then moving into, we’re actually writing the content. And then there are certain ways, methods that I teach, we have like outlines that we follow for each of the nine types of content that we write that actually ensure that you are hitting on all of the key points that you need in the actual piece of content as well to make sure that it’s cohesive, interesting to read, you know, and hitting on those, those buying triggers as well.

I feel like I’ve, I’ve gotten away from your original question, but I think you were saying like. Figuring out what to say or how to structure them. That’s definitely part of, again, what we’re not born into the world knowing we have to learn. Right? But there are ways to learn that. And yes, structuring those pieces is important, especially because it’s long form content.

So one of the reasons why I love a blog first marketing ecosystem is because you’re writing 12 to 20 pieces of content. So let’s say you choose to do 12 or 14, you’re putting a little bit of time for sure into writing those 14 pieces. But then you’re not going to continue blogging. You’re not a blogger, you’re a business owner with a blog.

So you stop and you go back and you repurpose those messages because it’s actually repetition of those main messages that is going to get you clients not coming up with new things all the time to stay relevant like an influencer or a blogger. Right?

Michelle: Gotcha.

Jana: So we come up with those things and then we repeat them, but in order to make sure that we’re repeating the right content, you know, obviously you have to be super intentional about your topics and then the way you’re structuring it.

But with long form content, it’s so rich that you can always dip into it and grab different small pieces of it for micro content. And we wanna make sure that if we’re going to follow this kind of method, that we’ll never run out of ways to say the same thing from the blog post in new ways, the same ways, different formats, et cetera.

So we need long form content in order to do that. ’cause you can’t repurpose the same, you know, 200 word Instagram caption over and over again. Right? It gets stale. From a blog, you get a lot. The opposite side of that coin is that it is long form content, so you don’t want it to meander too much. Gotcha.

You do want it to be very cohesive and hit certain points as well, so it’s finding that balance that’s important. For sure.

Michelle: Gotcha. Actually, so I have two more questions for you before we sign off. Sure. So one is, how do you feel about using AI to help people write this content?

Jana: Yeah. I love ai. I use ai. I teach ai.

I think it’s really important that we are, so one of the reasons why we write long form content is because thought leadership these days is actually the edge that we need in a competitive market. And if you use AI to write your content end to end without actually having your thought leadership factored in that it’s not actually going to work for you anyway, regardless of any of the ethical concerns, which are also present.

So I teach a four step writing process, and we actually outline first without ai. Because that way you’re actually deciding what you wanna say in your brain. So you use the outlines that I have, but you fill in, if you will, the prompts on the outlines with your own thoughts, beliefs, ideas, approaches.

’cause we all have slightly, even if we practice a similar thing, we still have different, I don’t know if beliefs is the right word, but like different approaches I guess would be the right thing and different ways that we think work best and et cetera. We’re actually deciding what we wanna say, but in a very low pressure way first, and then giving it to AI for step two, which is taking all of our ideas.

Mm-hmm. From the outline and putting it into sentences and paragraphs, because that’s the part it’s really good at. We don’t wanna let it decide what we wanna say. ’cause then you’re not actually the thought leader, but you can decide what you’re going to say and then use it as a way to cut down the number of hours that it’s going to take.

Minutes, hours, whatever. Take your ideas and put them into a well written, easy to read format. So we use GPTs in my program where I’ve pre-programmed the backend of the GPT with my outline. So that fun. The GPT knows. Yeah, the GPT knows how you’re supposed to structure it and you’re telling it what to plug into the structure and that it puts it in words for you.

Very nice. And there’s still two parts of the writing process, so we’re still not taking the output and just using it. We still have to do the other two parts. Which is just flushing out and refining is what I call it. And even in those two parts, you’re still going to be adding in a little more of your thought leadership and making sure it sounds like you and that type of thing.

So I do believe AI is great for this, but I just, I, I caution anyone against thinking that you can actually just say, Hey, ai, write me a blog post about how acupuncture helps with digestion. No, that’s not what we’re, that’s not what we wanna do. We wanna tell it what we think and then ask it to put that into words that are going to make sense to the person.

So.

Michelle: Mm. Yeah, I, I love using AI to write content for my website. And recently I found that a lot of my marketing students are afraid that if they use AI and their blog or on the other pages of their website, that Google’s going to be able to identify it and they’ll get dinged for it. And we always have this conversation where it’s like, well, Google can usually identify AI generated content that’s really.

Basic and thin Correct. And is the same generic information that anybody could spit out, which is why when you are working with chat GPT, for example, it’s a, the way that I approach it is it’s a ton of back and forth, and as you said, it always starts with your ideas and then asking chat GPT to help you refine something or write something for you, and then you read it and you’re like, oh, okay.

That’s not quite what I meant. And then you. Tell the the GPT, then you’re like, okay, this is when I was word vomiting, that I was not clear, and here’s what I meant. So I think that. I, I guess my question for you is, what do you say to people who are afraid that they’re going to get dinged by Google for having GPT generated content on their website?

Jana: Yeah, it’s the same thing, and it’s what you said too. It’s like if you’re trying to get it to right content end to end for you without

Michelle: mm-hmm.

Jana: Basing that content on your own unique ideas and beliefs and stuff. And sometimes when people hear me say unique, they’re like, well, I don’t know if I have any really unique ideas.

It’s. It doesn’t have to be like mind blowing neatly, right? Yes. It doesn’t have to be a

Michelle: dissertation that no one else has thought of ever.

Jana: Exactly. Right. Right. Exactly. So just, you know, with a grain of salt there. But if you’re starting with your thoughts and ideas then, and you’re making sure that that is reflected in the output that the GPT is giving you, or the, OR chat, GPT or whatever.

Or Claude or whatever you’re using. Yeah. And you really don’t have to worry about that. So Google, I mean, again, I’m not an SEO person, but I know enough to be dangerous. So Google has this thing called EEAT, right? Which is expertise. What is it? Experience, authority, trustworthiness, right? Yep. And when you write, the way that I am teaching people to write that is, again, baked into it because you’re starting by outlining in a way where it’s like, okay, well what do you believe about this that’s going to help people with this problem.

What are three things you would recommend? What are examples of what has happened that you’ve seen happen when you recommended this and somebody tried that, for example? And that’s just one example, but it’s a really powerful one because if you word vomit as you said, which is a great way to say it, I always say brain dump.

But that works too. Not only what you believe, but also why you believe it and your firsthand experience with it and what you’ve seen from it and what you’ve talked to patients about with it and whatnot. You’re automatically do not have to worry about Google thinking that it’s AI generated slop that shouldn’t be ranked because.

Google actually really more than ever wants to see firsthand experiences. Yeah. So that’s just one example. But when you’re writing in a way that incorporates your own thought leadership, doing that, doing other things that also incorporate your own thought leadership, you’re not going to have to worry about that.

Michelle: Yeah.

Jana: So, but again, and if you are saying like, oh, I need you to write website copy, a homepage and about page, and a blog roll page for, you know, an acupuncture. A practitioner who works with midlife women go, go do it then. Yes, yes. You’ll have to worry then. Then you may end up with something that Google recognizes as completely derivative and will actually ding.

Michelle: I have a friend who calls his chat, GPT, Carl, I think. And he was telling everyone else has named their chatt PT, how have I not named mine?

Jana: I haven’t

Michelle: either. And he was telling me how he’s always yelling at Carl because Carl doesn’t give him the output that he wants. And I’m like, if you have to yell at Carl, you are not giving Carl enough information to begin with.

You are not telling Carl what you really need from it. Right. And I think that is actually a really common experience where if you, if you just say like, write my about page, it will make things up. Right. So you, I mean, you have to give it the information that you want it to work with and be specific.

Right. And so not only does that prevent it from just making stuff up that it thinks sounds good, then it will not get dinged by Google either. Right? Right.

Jana: Exactly. Exactly. And I know it’s kind of a tired analogy, but I’m going to say it anyway because I think it’s a cliche for a good reason. It’s like working with a person.

If you were to hire a copywriter and give them no direction and not fill out your onboarding form. Just tell them, oh, I need copy for a website, for a chiropractor’s office in, you know, this town and this person’s going to work with people of all ages. Mm-hmm. And you don’t get back something that you think is like what you wanted.

You know, it’s the same thing. Right, right. Then in order to get it, you’d have to give feedback, meaningful feedback so that that person could write what you actually do want.

Michelle: So, mm-hmm. Same, same thing. I like that analogy a lot. Yeah. All right. So my other question for you as we wrap up is, what is your definition of success?

Jana: Hmm.

Michelle: In business, right? Sure. Business, life, whatever you like.

Jana: Yeah. I think this goes back to my story in the beginning, which is that when I started my business, I was like, oh, wait a minute. You’re telling me I need to work with clients full-time to make a full-time living at this, but I also need to be a marketer full-time.

Like, what? No, it’s not going to work for me. And so I feel like when I look back on the trajectory, I’m really proud of myself. I was just leaving a message actually the other day for a business friend of mine saying like, oh my God, I did it. Like I made it, I got here. Mm-hmm. Where I have that balance, where I have the time to be, you know, creative and the time to really think deeply about what my audience and my clients need inside my program and help them, but also enough time to effectively market.

And so, ’cause I, I’ve, I’ve realized, I’ve found ways to not need hours and hours and hours. Right. So I would say that to me is success is being able to have a pretty spacious feeling schedule, but still be helping people in the way that you set out to, and still having like a pipeline of clients that you can rely on.

But also, like I said, not feeling like it’s constantly like you have to be just working 24 7 in two separate full-time jobs at the marketing job and the, you know, the delivery job in order to have it. Yeah. So I’d say that’s like, that’s, that’s success for me. And I feel pretty sure that like that’s, I, there’s always things we can improve upon, but I feel like I’ve, I made it, I did it.

So I feel successful in that way and I

Michelle: like to help. That’s wonderful. Help people. I love that word. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I love the, the concept of spaciousness. I think that’s so nice. I hope that’s my wish for every small business owner in 2026. Yep. We all feel spaciousness.

Jana: Yep, yep. I often use that term spacious marketing ’cause that’s what I feel like a blog first marketing system is.

It ends up being more spacious. ’cause you’re not trying to in reinvent the wheel in all different places and do all the things. You have one library of content to pull from for everything else that you need. So

Michelle: I love that. Well, where can everyone, where can we find you online? Yeah, where can we connect with you?

Contact you?

Jana: Yeah, so my website is jana o media.com, and so it’s Jana o, my first name and initial, and then media. I’m EDIA. I picked that name years ago, and it’s still by company name. And I have a free blog strategy training that anyone who wants to learn more about this blog first ecosystem and specifically about how my capsule.

Blog library concept works and how often we repurpose it and all that kind of stuff. It’s like very like a pretty nuts and bolts kind of training that’s totally free. So if you go to jana o media.com/free-blog-training, you’ll find it there and you can sign up and watch that for free if you want to.

And you’ll also, obviously at the end, it’s a webinar so you get an opportunity to learn about my program as well.

Michelle: Perfect. Oh, I love it. Well, thank you so much for being here today and sharing all of this with us. S

Jana: thank you for inviting me. This has been such a good conversation. I feel like I have a bunch of.

New ideas to think about and journal on from our conversation too. So I love doing this. Thank you.

Michelle: Oh, I love it. Thank you. Before we wrap up today, I want to invite you to something really special, the 2026 planning retreat for Wellness Professionals. It’s a cozy feel-good on-demand workshop designed to help you reflect on 2025.

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Outline your 90 day strategy and walk into 2026 with confidence and clarity. Early bird pricing is just $49, and you get instant access plus a beautiful digital workbook to guide you step by step. If you’re ready for a calmer, more intentional 2026, head to michelle grassic.com forward slash planning retreat to join me.

The link is in the show notes and as always, send me your questions at Michelle. At Michelle grassic.com, have a great week and I’ll talk to you again soon.