Keywords. Search intent. Metadata. Headings. Internal links. Optimisation. Content briefs.
For most of my career, I’ve written to a brief. A client. A publication. A brand. A keyword. A deadline. I spend a lot of my working life thinking: is this the right search term? Could this heading be better? Is the page answering the question clearly enough? Should we move this paragraph? Can we make it more useful to Google, more useful to readers, more likely to be clicked?
And I love it. I’ve been doing it for more than a decade, and I’m very lucky that something I enjoy has also become my job. But somewhere along the way, I started missing writing that didn’t need to achieve anything.
I started Her Cup of Tea 16 years ago, when having a blog was a normal thing to do. I wrote about travel, food, places I’d visited and whatever else I happened to be interested in. But there was an ulterior motive, too: I wanted to become a travel writer.
I could put the blog on my resume and say, look, I’m a travel writer. It gave me somewhere to publish my work when I didn’t yet have many other places to put it. And it bloody worked. By the time I started at Tourism and Events Queensland as a Content Specialist in 2020, that little blog was one of the things that helped me stand out. It showed that I wasn’t just saying I could write about travel. I’d actually been doing it. So Her Cup of Tea helped me get where I wanted to go. Then writing became my career. And my career became very good at giving my writing somewhere to go.
But when writing is your job, you start thinking about whether something is worth your time. Will someone pay for it? Will anyone publish it? Will people actually read it? Will it drive traffic? Will it lead to more work? And when life is busy, those questions make sense. Time is finite. If I’m going to spend a day writing something, it can be hard to justify spending those hours on something that isn’t going anywhere.
So, for a while, I stopped writing just for me. Her Cup of Tea had been sitting here for years, quietly gathering dust. Until recently, when I wrote something about the suburb I live in. It was a piece I enjoyed writing. I know the place well, I had plenty to say about it, and when I finished I thought: This is good. But no publication picked it up. There was no commission waiting at the end of it. It wasn’t going to turn into a paid article.
And my immediate, well-trained response was essentially: Okay, move on. But why? Why does something have to be commissioned or published or paid for before it’s worth keeping? I have a website. I could just put it here. Groundbreaking.
Maybe not everything I write needs to make money or further my career. It doesn’t have to rank or have a keyword attached to it, and it doesn’t need to be optimised for anything at all. I can write something because I find it interesting, because I enjoyed being somewhere, because I have a thought I want to get out of my head. Or it can just be something I want to write.
So, I’m bringing Her Cup of Tea back. Not as a business idea. Not with a content calendar or because I’ve identified an untapped search opportunity. Just as somewhere to write.
There will probably be travel. There will definitely be Brisbane. There might be books, food, motherhood, family life, things I’m currently obsessed with and whatever else takes my fancy. Some of it might be useful. Some of it might not.
Anyway, I’m back. Let’s see what happens.
