Should You Start a Blog in 2026… Or Is It Too Late?
Wondering if blogging is dead in 2026? Discover why starting a blog now might be your smartest move yet — or your biggest mistake. Find out here.
Special Guest Ryan Robinson Joint Founder of RightBlogger
This Week’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:22.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 1018. We’ve got a returning guest, a returning friend of the show. We’ve got Ryan Robertson, joint founder of WriteBlocker, um, and a well-known, um, digital marketing expert who does a lot of other things. He’s been on the show a couple of times. Been really looking forward to this discussion. So Ryan, can you give us a really quick intro, and then we can go into the main part of the show after our First Break? So just give the tribe a quick intro, Ryan.
[00:01:03.150] – Ryan Robinson
Yes. So I’ve been a blogger for 15 years now, and I know we’re going to be talking about some really good stuff: is this even still a viable business model today? So I’ve been a blogger for 15 years. I’m still blogging, but I’m doing a lot of things very differently than I was when I first started. But yeah, I started WriteBlogger with one of my best friends, Andy, and we make tools for content creators who want to put their blog on autopilot. And focus on other aspects of the business.
[00:01:34.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. And I’ve got my co-host and friend Kurt. Kurt, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:41.570] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más. We do a lot of great work with the team over at WP-Tonic, and Ryan’s been taking my money for the last couple of years on WriteBlogger. So it’s kind of cool to bring this here.
[00:01:56.390] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. We, like I said, what Ryan said, we’re going to be talking about, you know, what is blogging in the middle of 2026? Does it still have any relevance? How should you do it the right way? We’re going to be talking about how Ryan, what’s his views. He’s a power user of WordPress, but he’s outside of the kind of WordPress developer bubble, developer bubble, and just get his views where he thinks WordPress is and a host of other stuff. Should be a fantastic show. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a message from our new sponsors. Hopefully, um, we’ve got a couple new sponsors. They’ll either be in this show or next week’s show. That’s great news. But we will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:02:42.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:03:16.360] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Want to point out we’ve got some great deals from the sponsors, uh, of the show. Plus we’ve got a curated list of the best WordPress plugins, services for the pro, for the freelancer, for the small agency owner. Um, to get all these goodies, all you have to do is go over to wp-tonic.com/deals, wp-tonic.com/deals. You’ll find all the goodies there, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. Um, so let’s go straight into it, Ryan. So, you know, to say things have changed over the last 2 to 3 years would be the understatement of the world. Um, with AI, um, the AI Kings. Um, so where do you see blogging in the middle of 2026? What do you think some key, um, things that people really need to understand in this changed and very changing environment.
[00:04:21.030] – Ryan Robinson
I feel like one of the biggest things we’ve seen, and I’ve seen this across my entire portfolio of sites, like I’ve been blogging for a long time, so I have 10 sites that get about, you know, used to get a million readers a month, let’s say, across the entire portfolio. What I’ve seen is that traffic has gone down pretty much across the board for every single property, no matter the niche, no matter the topic. But the really big takeaway is that blogging itself is no longer a standalone business model, at least for me. Maybe there are some people out there that are somehow making it work as just, let’s say, affiliate bloggers. You know, they’ve got affiliate links, they recommend product services that drives their business. I believe very strongly that that’s a dying business model. So if that’s the only thing that is propping up your revenue, then you need to reinvent. And I think we’ll, we’ll talk a lot about what reinvention actually should look like today. But for the most part, video, video is where I’m seeing everything going.
[00:05:29.870] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. But what— how do you think Google really sees AI? You know, you have a lot of people that used AI programmatically and churned out a ton of articles, hundreds, hundreds per month. And you got what is called Mount AI, and they got, they got that work for a while and then it didn’t. But what do you think in general Google’s attitude to AI content in general is?
[00:06:05.690] – Ryan Robinson
What I’m seeing on, on all of our sites, like I’ll try and couch all of this and like what real experiments I’m doing and what types of real-world data I’m collecting. So across the sites that I manage, across the sites for people that are connected with Writeblogger using our tools there, we’re seeing that good content, quality content, stuff that AI can’t totally and completely replace with the click of just a couple of buttons, that type of content is still doing well. If you’re providing actual answers, real solutions to people that are rooted in some sort of lived human experiment. So instead of, you know, the 5 best tips to a home listing that’ll get your house sold online, an article that’s like, here’s what I learned from listing my house and selling it for 10% above market. Something that is like very personal human experience driven is where we’re seeing effective, successful content go. And so what I believe we’ll continue seeing is Google wiping out AI chat platforms, wiping out the kind of content that you can make with just the push of a button. And where we still stand to gain is by producing content that’s paired with what our actual examples are, case studies from things we’ve learned, things that we’ve experienced ourselves.
[00:07:30.920] – Ryan Robinson
That’s, I think, the next level of content, um, that the search engines and AI platforms actually will want to reference.
[00:07:39.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, over to you, Kurt.
[00:07:43.350] – Speaker 4
I—
[00:07:43.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
wow, I feel like I want to clarify a thing. So when we think about blogging, right, because you just mentioned like first, like first-person narrative experiential type stuff, but like what kind of blogging do you think is like, like a food blog, a travel blog, a, you know, an IT how I built it from scratch blog, like How do— how are people approaching the blogging space now compared to, you know, like the romantic comedies we’ve seen from the early ’90s where it’s like, you know, travel blogger goes to Spain to meet the love of their life, right? Like, like, is that still a thing or is that— is it just gone? And blogging’s always got to support the e-commerce store, always got to support something else.
[00:08:29.250] – Ryan Robinson
What I believe now and what I’m seeing is that blogging itself is dying, essentially. And if you’re not using blogging and content creation, let’s just call it content creation. If you’re not using content creation as a way to bring people in to support some other sort of business model that’s behind the scenes, that’s where, like, you’re gonna eventually get kind of wiped out and replaced by AI answers. So the real answer to your question, Kurt, you know, is travel blogging dead? Is food blogging dead? I don’t think that’s dead across the board. The asterisks I’ll give it is that if your model for creating content in these niches is to just turn to AI tools and AI tools alone to produce everything, publish it on your site, and hope to drive an audience, build a community around that, that’s a very like, that’s a shrinking sliver of what’s working. And you’re competing with people who want to retain that business model too, because honestly, it’s easy, right? It’s, it’s so easy to push a push a button, publish content, hope to bring traffic, make money on ads or affiliate links, et cetera. And so because it’s now so insanely easy, it’s going to be getting increasingly competitive as the search engines and AI tools want to send people to sites like that less and less.
[00:09:50.080] – Ryan Robinson
And so video content, that’s something that buys the travel bloggers, the food bloggers way more time and flexibility. And it creates more opportunities for other businesses and other revenue models you could have behind the business too. So if you are a travel blogger and you make video content, if you’re a food blogger and you make video content, you have opportunities to work with sponsors in a way that sponsors more than ever, I’ll add, really want to work with creators. Like I’m seeing a massive influx in sponsors that want to do videos with me primarily because of my YouTube channel. And That 2 years ago was not the case. People were way more interested in my blog and the links they could get from it and publishing guest posts and stuff. But now today, YouTube is where I’m seeing most of my sponsor interest come from.
[00:10:47.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s so interesting to hear you say that because my YouTube is a complete failure. My website’s doing better than my YouTube. But to bring this kind of like full circle, right? Because you’ve mentioned video now twice, you mentioned it you know, obviously here, but then again, when you were talking to Jonathan, I use a tool in WriteBlogger, right? That whole YouTube video to blog post thing. And I feel like, um, and I don’t want this to sound like a commercial for WriteBlogger, but it kind of is. Like, I feel like when I use AI to create content, it doesn’t feel personal, right? Feels like maybe it’s my voice, maybe it’s not my voice. Would I really have written this? I’m not sure. But if I do an interview with somebody and I, and I take that link from YouTube and I put that into that tool and I give it those special directions, right? Here’s how you correctly spell this name, spell this name, these company names, blah, blah, blah. It kicks out— not just a summary thing, but it’s like sister textual, it’s almost a story, and it embeds the YouTube video into the post.
[00:11:49.130] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so to me, that becomes my blog post where I know that even though I used AI to create it, it has my words, my quotes, my, my guest’s words and quotes. It has our voice. It breaks it into, um, it breaks it into segments in the story that, that I probably wouldn’t have normally broken out, right? Not saying I’m stupid, but I don’t have unlimited hours to make these things, right? And so if, if I take the video and then I convert that video not into a transcript but into a summary textual sister article it seems legit. And I’ve noticed that I don’t seem to be getting like disallowed from Google or anything like that for having that content. Like that seems it’s legit content because it’s me speaking. Am I making sense or am I just talking in a circle?
[00:12:37.690] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, this is, this is exactly what my workflow is today too. And so I’m very rarely publishing articles that don’t have a video associated with them. So for me, my entire creation process now is video first. So I spend most of my time on the creative brief or figuring out like, who am I going to, you know, bring in to help support this piece of content? And from there, as you said, Kurt, like I have an automation in WriteBlogger that’s just connected with my site and with my YouTube channel. So every time I upload a video to YouTube, it automatically generates the blog post. It’s got all of my formatting notes, all of the, you know, internal links, all the best practice stuff dialed in. And so I get that like pre-optimized SEO post that’s also published to my blog and it’s got the video embedded, which YouTube and Google both really like to see that, that connection between post with video embedded from YouTube and then YouTube video with post linked in the description. Having that kind of as like a closed loop is a really useful thing. I’ve seen that content I post on my blog that has an embedded video, that tends to just do better now than like just a standalone article without a YouTube video.
[00:13:56.470] – Ryan Robinson
And I think there’s some sort of connection there that I can’t quantify. I’m not a data scientist, but from an anecdotal perspective, I do see that if I’ve got a post with a video from YouTube in it, it almost always performs better.
[00:14:11.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah. And then that auto-optimized feature is kind of cool because then you’re able to, you know, it reviews it and goes, yeah, you’ve got a 12 and then now you got a 92, right? Yeah. Jonathan, I’ll pass it over to you.
[00:14:26.410] – Ryan Robinson
Like, you’re— it’ll pick out your gaps too. Like, it’ll identify like, oh crap, you’re trying to rank for this topic. Like, you’re missing out this core key thing that’s not in here yet. And so those are the advantages of using AI. Like, it can help you do better at what it is your thing is, and it’ll, it’ll point things out and help add to the mix.
[00:14:47.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m going to— I’ve got a follow-through question. I’ll let Kirk— I think we’ve got enough time before the break for Kirk to do the next story more around WordPress, but I’ve got a follow-through question about video. Now obviously we’ve seen growth in competition in short-form video or divert video through Instagram and TikTok. Um, and obviously YouTube has responded in their own short-form video, but what about long-form? Um, like the traditional market for YouTube, like 8, 10 minutes, and then you got the whole area of podcast, long-form video. Really long-form video, an hour, hour plus. Do you think— I know that Spotify is trying to get in that market a bit. I’m not being totally impressed with their efforts so far, but I also know that Netflix is really looking at developing podcasting a lot of, a lot of YouTube is now being watched on TV. Do you think, do you think some of these established competitors, Quasar competitors, or do you think there’s going to be new competitors that are going to be able to challenge the dominance of YouTube, which does seem still to be growing at quite a pace? But I’m surprised that more competitors that can be really treated seriously haven’t entered the market?
[00:16:37.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Or is it— or is the moat around YouTube just too strong now, do you think?
[00:16:44.860] – Ryan Robinson
I think it depends on the content format quite heavily. Like for me, YouTube, YouTube is like it’s the long-form destination. I think Instagram Reels and TikToks like between TikTok and IG Reels, those two kind of own the like vertical short-form consumption for the most part. There’s so many caveats to what I just said, but I think there are platforms with like built-in advantages, um, because they’re like emerging with video, they want to incentivize video creators. And so I have a friend that works at Spotify and he told me that like, hey, if you, if you do a podcast and you upload a video, versions of your podcast to Spotify, there’s gonna be some algorithmic benefits in there that will surface you to more people right now because they want to incentivize that behavior. And so same thing I’ve seen with LinkedIn too, like LinkedIn started accepting vertical videos, you know, Shorts, let’s call them, um, a year or two ago. And it’s still considered like a new feature of the platform. And so I’ve seen content perform like exceptionally well on LinkedIn when I share the same vertical video I make for YouTube Shorts or for TikTok, for Instagram Reels.
[00:18:01.690] – Ryan Robinson
It’s the same cut. I just put it on LinkedIn also. It will get half a million views on LinkedIn and it’ll get 2,000 on YouTube Shorts. And so there’s kind of no saying which platform is going to like take off with a piece of content. So I would recommend if you’re making the assets already, try and experiment with putting them in more places where it could be useful.
[00:18:28.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, yeah. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:18:32.570] – Kurt von Ahnen
This one’s more of like a general kind of question, especially for our space and our listener niche, right? Which is the WordPress space. WordPress came out with 7.0, right? We’ve got connectors now for MCP. Everyone’s still trying to figure out— I mean, we’ve got we’ve got people, circles that are like, this is so awesome. I can connect. Like, but there’s a lot of people that just lost, right? People are still trying to figure a lot of this stuff out. And so what do you see? I mean, since you’ve got an AI tool and then you’ve also got your, your WordPress, you know, plugin to connect your tool to WordPress already, what, what do you see as like the major strengths or possibly weaknesses in the WordPress space, especially as AI is developing?
[00:19:17.780] – Ryan Robinson
I think the future of what I’m going to see happening with WordPress is that eventually, like, it’s going to do what the people want it to do. And I think what the people want it to do is to eventually be able to essentially, like, use Claude as your interface for almost everything. Like, that’s, that’s certainly the direction I’m trending in is like, okay, I want, everything that I use connected to Claude so that I can just work inside Claude and not have to go fiddle around with my WordPress theme or a template and like make design changes inside like a WordPress container itself. And so I think that’s being vetted out by some of the stuff we see happening. Like Elementor has been a huge player in the WordPress theme and template space for a long time, and they’ve released Angie AI, which is like, you know, they’re, they’re basically their connector AI agent type of a thing. And I know they’re extending capabilities to, to be able to work inside, you know, ChatGPT and Claude once you connect your site to it. And WordPress at the core level is trying to support this stuff too.
[00:20:23.420] – Ryan Robinson
So I think it’s all moving in the direction of less interfacing with an actual other tool UI and these chat tools becoming kind of the primary place where you interface with most of your connected things. And then that will spawn entire industries too, of things that connect and function in this way or that way for you. So I don’t think it’s going to like wipe out, you know, the entire WordPress ecosystem by any stretch, but it’s going to change what usage looks like. And therefore business models will have to adjust too.
[00:21:00.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve, I’ve got this interesting way of following up and it’s, you know, I’ve got 20 years in the automotive service industry, so I can’t help but get a— I can’t help but make this alignment in my brain about this. Um, you know, you could take a look at one of today’s— any, any of today’s newer vehicles, right? You know, 47 computers on it, everything’s a CAN bus network, everything talks to everything. And, you know, we buy these cars because they automate— they, you know, heated seats, uh, self-driving, like all these things, right? But sooner or later, something’s going to happen, right? Rats are going to get in and mess with your wiring harness, or something’s going to happen. And it’s like, you can throw the car away and get a new car, or you could actually find an expert in the space that’s able to say, okay, let’s do a diagnostic between this pin and this pin, find out where the break is in the, you know, the ground connection to fix this thing. But most people aren’t going to be able to be that level of expert. In my mind, I feel like WordPress is going this way.
[00:22:02.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
I feel like WordPress is gonna have a few master technicians, right? That, that understand how it works, what it’s made of, how things connect, how systems work with components and components make a network and a network makes a, a website that interacts with people. But I feel like the, the masses through AI are gonna lose that skillset, much like people can’t work on their own cars now. And I feel like it’s going to drive value to people that still maintain expert status in the space. But some people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that because they make it sound like AI is just going to magically band-aid and cover everything that comes up. And I just don’t see how that’s real.
[00:22:42.050] – Ryan Robinson
The rise of the WordPress mechanic. And I think I have a really interesting example from—
[00:22:46.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s a good name for a book.
[00:22:48.350] – Ryan Robinson
That’s it. That’s a good book right there. Or an episode title, maybe. But Yeah. Like I have an example that’s really relevant right now. Like we have a client for our agency. We do content. We help people with their sites, you know, getting discovered online and stuff. And so we have a client right now who, you know, bless her, she’s awesome. She has the best ideas. Um, and she’s very good at what she does, but she, she’ll ask the question kind of often like, oh, can’t Claude just do all this for me? And you know, the, the challenge to that is like, Yeah, sure, in a vacuum, Claude can make this tool or make this quiz that you can embed on your site. But when she goes to try and implement something like that herself, there’s 5 different points where something breaks or it’s not connected properly. It needs to be troubleshooted. It has to have the right API key plugged into it. Otherwise it’s using test dummy data. It’s not connected to our email service provider to send people a link with a PDF after they use the quiz. And so there’s just so many things that’s like, okay, sure, these tools are objectively awesome and helpful, but at the same time, it still takes the mechanic to understand how the machine actually operates.
[00:24:03.050] – Ryan Robinson
And so I think what we’ll see people, you know, doing as their role will change and adjust, but by using these tools, experimenting with them, that’s how you continue to like stay fresh in the space.
[00:24:17.480] – Speaker 4
Yeah.
[00:24:18.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Now going back 18, 20 months ago, I had a client that was like, oh, I vibe coded this thing with Claude, right? And then I said, well, how did you fix this, this, and this? Well, every time I had a problem, I just told Claude there was a problem and told him to fix it, right? And so it was like one band-aid with another band-aid with another. By the time the plugin’s done, it’s got so much bloat and malware in it, you know, you’re like, dude, there’s no way, there’s no way you’re hosting this on my server. This isn’t going anywhere near your website. But I think it’s gotten progressively better, right? And so, and so then that question does come. Would, would that customer that you have 6 months, a year from now be able to, instead of asking you, just say, hey Claude, I noticed the email didn’t send with the link, Band-Aid and fix that? You know, I hope that it can.
[00:25:06.710] – Ryan Robinson
Like, honestly, I wanted to do that because I want to be able to do these things too and not spend time working.
[00:25:12.950] – Jonathan Denwood
I suppose, do you think— and it’s an impossible question, you know, obviously you’ve got Lovable, you’ve got Wix, PineBase 44— but do you— but on the other hand, I really— do you think, because it seems to be going that way, that Claude works directly with WordPress? You know, you can set up, um, there’s certain hosting companies and there’s certain products now that a plugin, but there’s about 2 to 3 on the market now where you build the website in Claude, and then if, if you want to have a visualization, it’s in, it’s in WordPress and it’s connected to Elementor Bricks. A lot of them are using Elementor Bricks, and you can do the editing there. So I just wonder, do you think that— do you think Lovable and Base44 can really keep growing when just Claude itself connecting to something like WordPress does a lot what they’re doing, doesn’t it?
[00:26:22.010] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah. I mean, I think the reality is that the market wants WordPress meets Claude so badly that it’s obviously going to happen. And, and what we’re seeing is all these like funky, weird ways that people are figuring out how to make it work. And so Eventually it’s going to be a straight up connection. I mean, it pretty much is inevitable, I think. And then what happens? I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a doomsday type of person on any of this type of stuff. And so I think all of these other tools like AppLovin, Base44, Wix, even like basic Wix, I think all of these tools will continue to have like their own specialized focus and they’ll have a niche that they focus on, like a way of you getting your online presence dialed in, and it’ll just end up being a similar experience to what you can do with WordPress and, and Claude. And so I think that’s the direction we’re going in is that these companies, these tools hopefully will get better at focusing on really niche types of customers and like dialing in their toolset and ways things work for those audiences.
[00:27:34.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Just a quick follow-up, just a quick follow-up question before we go for a break. You know, you’ve got your own SaaS products, you’ve got your own agency, you’ve got a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. But would you feel that you still look at WordPress, or has your, your own commerce, you know, you’re thinking of starting a new online venture, would you consider WordPress, or, or in your heart, have you turned away from it really?
[00:28:02.930] – Ryan Robinson
I would say for me personally, like I was never a true WordPress developer. And so to me, WordPress was always a means to other ends anyway. And so I’m not choosing to build something that’s like WordPress native myself these days. Even WriteBlogger, like we have a, we have a WordPress plugin. And so it works with WordPress, but we also connect with Wix and Notion and Squarespace and Spotify or Shopify and all these other platforms. And so. I’m way more platform agnostic, I’d say, than I’ve ever been. Like, I wouldn’t build something.
[00:28:40.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, obviously. Obviously. Obviously WriteBlock is your SaaS, but I know your personal website’s still in WordPress, isn’t it?
[00:28:49.750] – Ryan Robinson
Oh yeah, for sure. Honestly, I love WordPress. Like, I still—
[00:28:53.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Are you happy with it or are you really waiting for the opportunity to just drop it?
[00:28:59.080] – Ryan Robinson
No, like, I’m not super motivated to drop it, but I’ve got when I start new sites now, depending on the functionality, what our, what our process usually looks like is we’ll build it with Claude and we’ll use Astro, astro.js. And so like we’ll use Claude to basically build forward-facing pages, but we’ll still set up WordPress on like a CMS subdomain. And so we’ll use WordPress for all of the blog pages because as a blog-like CMS, I still just love the functionality of WordPress and all the options it has and plugins and things like— there’s a lot of niche things you can accomplish with still using WordPress that is, I think, just still done better than otherwise.
[00:29:47.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, we got a fan of Astro.
[00:29:49.520] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, Astro is great. I mean, using Claude to just do Astro Pages for simple sites has become kind of our commonplace way of doing things now. What I will say is that I don’t think necessarily from a foundational perspective, everything is going to be as dialed in SEO-wise as when you’re using WordPress and you’ve got like Yoast, the plugin, et cetera, all connected and helping you verify and validate that things look really good. I still like that. Um, but I think we’ll, we’ll move into a future where something like Astro with the help of Claude will be able to patch a lot of these types of gaps.
[00:30:29.450] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I think it’s a great place for us to go for a little break. We’ve got some great discussion questions for the second half. Stay with us, folks. Ryan’s been a great guest. He normally has some great insights. He’s been up, up to speed. Um, we will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:30:48.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:31:25.580] – Speaker 4
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[00:32:02.950] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Want to take the opportunity, if you’re looking for a great partner, um, to build a white label solution in a community website using something like BuddyBoss, or you’re looking to build a large learning management system for a client and you’re looking for a white label partner, why don’t you look at WP-Tonic? We’ve got tons of experience in that area. We’d love to build something special with you, and then you can host with us as well. And we specialize in top performance hosting solutions for those type of products. To find out more, go over to wp-tonic.com partners, wp-tonic.com/partners. Let’s build something special together. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:32:53.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
I feel like we’ve kind of already covered the next question, but then it really applies to something that happened to me just 2 weeks ago with a client. I have a client we just signed up. It’s an e-commerce website and she’s selling artwork from other artists, right? And she was very direct in the meeting. She said, I can’t— she goes, if you use AI to build any of this, she goes, that’s, you know, I guess if we do, we do, right? She said, but there cannot be any forward-facing AI content on the website because her audience, her— she already knows that her tribe, her people group, uh, is, is not happy with AI, right? They’re artists, right? So they look at AI as like, AI’s stealing all of our intellectual property and making new things with And so, which is weird because there’s a whole section of artists that are like very pro-AI, right? So, but her audience is like absolutely no AI, can’t, can’t, no forward-facing AI whatsoever. And so when we take a look at the masses and I feel like sometimes we just get that, you know, we just get that tunnel vision look of like who’s actually commenting on our podcast without realizing that exponentially more actually listen to the thing.
[00:34:15.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
How much trepidation, how much anxiety, how much discourse do you think there really is on the subject matter?
[00:34:24.320] – Speaker 4
Hmm.
[00:34:24.340] – Ryan Robinson
I think it’s a huge dilemma for a lot of people, honestly. Like, I mean, sample size of one. It’s a dilemma for me. And I make tools that use AI to publish content. But at the same time, like, I don’t usually let things run on total and complete autopilot without me checking in on them regularly and monitoring what types of inputs I’m giving them. So I’m very careful about how diligently I instruct AI when I use it to help with content-related things in particular. But I would imagine this is a thing that a lot of people are struggling with because there are clear benefits to, let’s say, publishing more frequently. But at the same time, if you get dinged because your content is decided it’s low quality from Google or other search engines because it’s just AI slop, then, you know, you’ve created a different problem for yourself. So I think it’s fair to struggle with how to best navigate this. And I think artists in particular, like, they’re, they’re always going to place more value on the human-created side of things. And you have to sort of I think shift what you’re focused on.
[00:35:36.770] – Ryan Robinson
And so making videos as an artist is a way better way to spend your time than it is creating blog posts that showcase your artwork.
[00:35:49.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
Interesting. Yeah, you just got my wheels spinning because I need to give this client some homework to do. But if we switch the conversation And, and we say now you’re a digital marketing agency, right? So now you’re not the customer with the website and, and that now you’re a digital marketing agency and you are helping people with SEO optimized content. You’re helping people develop that audience and you’re helping that. What does, what, what do you think of like the biggest trends in that space? Because I, for example, I can’t make art videos for my artist client, right? Like, cuz I would, I would say you’d need to make the videos, right? So from an agency perspective, what would be the biggest trends for agencies trying to support their clients in this changing environment?
[00:36:36.730] – Ryan Robinson
You know, one super interesting thing I’ve been seeing a lot lately has been page speed. This has kind of become the most important thing that I don’t think people are talking about enough is how quickly your pages are loading. You know, if you’re not using a CDN and actually serving a lot of your resources in more locally optimized areas for your visitors where they’re coming from, then you’re like crazy missing out. You’re probably going to lose a lot of traffic. And essentially what we’ve kind of seen the LLMs like to do. So the ChatGPTs, the Claude Perplexities out there is that if your competitors have a page load speed, that’s on average 1 second faster or something than your site. Your competitor is almost always going to earn the citation. It’s almost always going to earn a higher ranking in Google’s AI overviews now. And so page speed, I feel like that has silently become one of the biggest things that is now a huge determining factor on whether you’re going to win a larger share of the shrinking traffic pie.
[00:37:45.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
That is so interesting that you bring that up because, well, maybe Jonathan’s going to want to shoot me through the screen, but I know that Jonathan and WP-Tonic have just greatly increased their server resources and their ability for page speed and those things. And it gave me a little bit of FOMO on my agency side. And so I started exploring, well, how would I move my websites to make them faster? And it’s become like this game. Um, I jumped on Post Status just yesterday and I was like, hey, this is the, you know, this is the host I use and do reseller accounts with for my clients. You know, who’s got experience with making these websites fly? Because, uh, sites on WP-Tonic, quite honestly, are loading faster than sites on Mañana No Más. Um, but I’m not really looking to go down the route Jonathan went because that, that work is more front-loaded on my end. I’m like, well, I really don’t want to do that work. I want to find a shortcut. And so, uh, the page speed thing is so interesting because the, the Google PageSpeed report doesn’t even accurately reflect what you just described.
[00:38:48.330] – Ryan Robinson
Yes.
[00:38:48.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
So it’s like that only. Yeah, I can have a 92-page speed listing for Mañana No Más. But then when I go to Mañana No Más in an incognito window, it’s like, da da da da da da da. And it’s because the servers are set up differently. They all react differently.
[00:39:07.690] – Ryan Robinson
Like, I’ll usually test with tools like GTmetrix these days because you can actually change your connection speed. You can change the geolocation of where it’s being tested from. There’s a lot of great tools out there, by the way, for testing in like more real-world settings. Not that, not just that one, but it is super important, especially if you have like an e-commerce site. E-commerce is the one I think where people are going to get nuked the hardest with slow load times because people are clicking through hoping to have a really quick purchase experience in the most part. And if those pages, if the checkout experience, like all these little things where drop-offs used to be like, ah, we could improve our conversion rate. They’re going to become much more like, do you get sales at all, period, or not? And I think that’s the direction it’s going in.
[00:39:58.170] – Kurt von Ahnen
Part of me is amazed that we’ve become that impatient as a society. Like a half a second is a big deal now, you know, and I’m old. I mean, I can remember, you know, you’d click to see a picture and go get a cup of coffee and it would go, you, you, you, you, and come down the bottom of the screen. We don’t have any patience now.
[00:40:19.140] – Ryan Robinson
Nope. I mean, people, people younger than us too, like they have less than no patience. And so it really like, it depends on who your target audience is. Maybe you have a little bit more, you know, room for, for error there. But I think if you’re using shared hosting plans and hoping to build like a real business on that as your foundation, you’re, you’re going to have a really hard time. You would need to over-index on other things that, that people really care about. You would need to have like viral videos every time you publish or something in order to compensate for not having a structurally sound website like that. That’s a hugely important factor now.
[00:41:01.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
That, that is incredibly insightful. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:41:05.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I got a kind of follow-up question. I’ve been I think definitely AI isn’t like— this is just my opinion, Ryan. Like, I definitely think AI has a lot more substance to cryptocurrencies because I am— I, I know some people have made a lot of money in investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but Um, I’m not a great believer in it, I, I think. But I definitely think AI has a lot more substance to it, probably a fairer thing. Yeah. Um, is like everybody was talking like Web3, wasn’t they? And that kind of disappeared, didn’t it? Um, but I don’t think— I think a lot of people online, a lot of people that should know better. And I’m in no shape and form am I saying that I’m an expert. I’m just running a little agency and a little hosting company, but I try to do basic education about how large learning models actually work, just the basics. And I just think a lot of people online on YouTube promoting a lot of the people in the industry themselves, they’re just kind of blowing smoke. They’re not really, because when you actually learn, have you spent a bit of time just learning the basics about how large learning models actually work?
[00:42:53.550] – Jonathan Denwood
And was you surprised that when you did a little bit of digging, that a lot of what’s been said online seems to be a bit deceptive, a bit. Or am I being unfair there, Ryan?
[00:43:08.270] – Ryan Robinson
No, I’m with you. I think a lot of people have benefited from and continue to benefit from the narrative that AI is some sort of magical thing, that there’s a little there’s a little curtain in front of it. And so I don’t think that that’s—
[00:43:27.670] – Jonathan Denwood
like, it’s— sorry to interrupt. It’s like The Wizard of Oz, isn’t it?
[00:43:31.380] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, it is. And I think what we’re going to see, unfortunately, this is, this is what I believe. I think we will see the financial markets also have this major correction in reflection of what this actually is. Because listen, AI has been juiced probably more than anything in our economy ever has in the— I don’t know, in my lifetime at least. I don’t even think the like dot-com bubble was juiced as much.
[00:43:57.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the only, the only problem I do fundamentally agree with you, but my only, my only counter and I, I agree with you is that like the dot-com, I think the insiders knew some of them and they were, you know, Like when, when the property market went pear-shaped, um, you didn’t hear anybody on the financial radio or the, on the TV saying there was a few people that knew something was up. So the point I’m trying to make is there, there seems to be a few people saying this is a well juiced up market, but normally it’s when nobody thinks, everybody, every, literally everybody’s piled in. Um, but it definitely is so enormous that it doesn’t need everybody for it to break, really.
[00:44:56.240] – Ryan Robinson
Now that is a good question. I wish I knew the answer to that one. Um, I mean, listen, I believe that the tools, the technology, the stuff that I’m using today in my daily life have fundamentally changed the way I work. I think that that’s a pretty undeniable thing. Like, I am using Cloud to do so many things that would otherwise have been cobbled together processes, frameworks, different people contributing stuff. And so for me, the tools, I find a lot of value in the tools, but I do think it’s overhyped, especially as an industry. Like, I, I get so much outreach from my YouTube channel from potential sponsors who’ve got some AI tool that does this or does that, and it just feels like there’s way too much to support what the actual market demand is. I think, I think we’re due for a correction at some point in time to be like, okay, listen, these tools are great, but they’re not everything, everything.
[00:46:00.350] – Jonathan Denwood
But with you using it a lot, where do you think it’s real?
[00:46:05.370] – Ryan Robinson
Is—
[00:46:05.610] – Jonathan Denwood
you’ve kind of answered that anyway, because do you think it just I don’t, I think it’s helping you be more productive and maybe cope with things better and be under, I get as a sense and I’m putting words in your mouth, it’s made you more productive, but kind of so you don’t have to use such a spread of cobbled together different things. But I don’t, it hasn’t in your own organization, it hasn’t replaced people yet in your own teams. Is that correct?
[00:46:39.290] – Ryan Robinson
Not in a large part, no. Like, we’re, we’re more so having people that are on our team use these tools to be more productive, to do more also. And, you know, if I can share like a really simple practical example, let me just— I’ll share my screen really quickly, you guys, because I think this is a, a useful way to visualize things. Um, so here here on my screen. This is basically just a simple pitch deck for a client that’s going to be sponsoring some videos with us. And so I have Claude make this in about 30 seconds. I still take my time to choose ideas that are smart, that would land well on my channel, but Claude can make an interactive HTML version of a pitch deck in you know, 30 seconds. And so something like this to me looks so much better than just like a simple, you know, Google Slide template, let’s say. And so these are the types of things where I’m using these tools to really like help me do more, yes, but also like do a better job at pitching and selling and those types of things.
[00:47:56.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Over to you, Curt. I think—
[00:48:00.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
yeah, I think that takes us back to one of our famous questions, Ryan, and that’s, you know, let’s, let’s pretend you’ve got a time machine, man. You’re in the TARDIS and you’re floating around like Doctor Who. You run back in time to the beginning of your career. You run into yourself. What, what advice are you going to give yourself?
[00:48:19.350] – Ryan Robinson
Ooh, the one that’s top of mind lately that’s been kicking me in the butt probably every day for the last year. Has been make videos sooner, get comfortable with it, get over the like little internal scaries, publish more stuff. Um, I started on YouTube 10 years ago, but then I stopped. Like I got, I got kind of nervous. I wasn’t sure how I was going to be received online. A lot of the like more inner work stuff had to happen in order for me to reemerge with confidence enough to be on video. And so the advice I would have given, start doing that work sooner, get to where you’re publishing videos sooner because video is still kind of a blue ocean territory, especially as written content is now so heavily commoditized.
[00:49:12.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I don’t know whether to be happy with that or depressed with that.
[00:49:15.710] – Ryan Robinson
Yep.
[00:49:16.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
You know, I’ve published books and done some, some textual work. It’s very difficult now because you look at that body of work and you go, go, man, if I would have just made 300 videos instead, you know, there’s always the what if.
[00:49:30.680] – Ryan Robinson
But I think it’s more like, for me, it’s more useful to focus on what can I start doing today given what I’ve learned in the past few years in particular, in order to set up what the next 10 years actually looks like. And I think there’s so many question marks floating out there that we won’t even know until we get there to answer them. But I do know that video is this way of interacting with people that’s way more human than just text. And so look at your own consumption patterns, guys. You know, like how, how often are you reading blogs now compared to looking at what’s in your feed on one of the social platforms? And I think therein usually lies the answer.
[00:50:10.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, good stuff.
[00:50:14.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, thanks for coming on, Ryan. What’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, which properties would you like to promote?
[00:50:24.410] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, my home base for everything on the internet now is Ryan.Biz, a relatively new domain I got, but I’m loving that site now. And I did make it using Astro and Claude, but we’ve got a WordPress CMS behind the scenes, so it’s kind of our, our test dummy site at the moment. But yeah, Ryan.Biz, WriteBlogger is still like really juicing. We’ve got a lot of of marketing agencies using our software now because we’ve got to this place where AI tools themselves can do a pretty good job of creating one-off blog posts. And so now WriteBlogger is focused way more on the automation system, the planning, the scheduling, the connections, and then the automations of everything in between.
[00:51:09.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you?
[00:51:12.750] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m the only Kirk Van Onen on LinkedIn, so that makes me easy to find and connect with. I encourage you to connect and maybe we can have a conversation.
[00:51:19.010] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s fantastic. And if you want to support the show, um, on iTunes, on Spotify, leave us a review, especially if you’re on a mobile device. It’s really easy. Good, bad, or indifferent, doesn’t matter, because it really does— I would imagine it’s going to be good. Um, but leave us a review. And we also got a great YouTube channel, got a ton of content on there. And leave a comment on one of the videos that— or like it. That really helps the show. Back next week with another fantastic guest. We’ll see you soon, folks.
[00:51:54.400] – Speaker 4
Bye.
[00:51:55.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? And also, to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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