The invoice says £300 to £500.
That's not what you paid.
The hidden bill
Add it up. The keyword research. The briefing call. The first draft that missed the point. The review round. The second review round. The sign-off. The upload.
Now add your own team's time chasing all of it.
The real cost of one basic 1,200-word blog post? Around £1,200.
Now multiply it
Most businesses don't buy one post. They buy a retainer. In the UK that's typically £1,500 to £5,000 a month. Up to £15,000 a quarter.
Then come the extras. Strategy calls. Reporting meetings. Reviews. Audits. The shiny new "AI search" add-on.
And what does it all buy you? A pile of text articles that look exactly like your competitors' text articles.
Here's the problem nobody mentions
Search has changed. When your customers ask a question now, an AI answer appears first. Then the videos. Then the images. Your blog post is somewhere underneath.
And the AI doesn't read everyone and share the love. It picks a handful of sources and recommends them.
Is your blog one of them?
What AI search actually wants
Not more text. The most-cited website in Google's AI answers is YouTube.
AI looks for the most credible voice on a topic. And nothing says credible like answering the same questions on video, in a podcast, in an article and in images, all made properly.
That's premium content. Not just some blogs and white papers left to wither.
One production. A quarter of content.
Here's what the same quarterly budget can do instead.
A few days of production gives you:
- Video FAQs answering the questions your buyers actually ask
- Podcast or interview episodes that show real expertise
- Cutdowns of everything, each short clip answering one question
- Articles and imagery giving every topic a home on your site
Every piece supports and elevates the others. In one published experiment, a broadcaster cut its long shows into short clips and its AI citations grew 3.4 times.
And it doesn't wither. Aftercare is built in: we refresh it, clean it up and find the next gap.
Same money. Very different result.
| Your blog retainer | Premium content |
|---|---|
| A pile of text articles | Video, podcast, articles and imagery |
| Sits below the AI answer | Built to be the AI answer |
| Extras billed on top | Aftercare built in |
| Start again next quarter | A library that keeps working |
Who's going to be famous for your topic?
Right now, AI search is deciding who the expert is in your market. Every month, someone else's name gets repeated a little more.
Our goal is to make that name yours, and to multiply how often AI search mentions you by three or four times. Nobody honest can guarantee what an AI says. But we can make the content it's looking for, with the craft we've brought to major brands and award-winning films.
We call it Famous For.
Email info@littleorchardmedia.com and we'll show you what AI search says about your market today, and what it would take to make it say your name.
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