What Is The Future of Content Marketing in the World of AI
With Special Guest Brian Jackson Co-founder, Forgemedia And Former Chief Marketing Officer at Kinsta
The future is here: discover how artificial intelligence is transforming the landscape of content marketing in this week’s show.
Uncover groundbreaking advancements like automated writing assistants, personalized recommendations fueled by machine learning, and cutting-edge SEO optimization techniques driven by AI algorithms. Get ready to be inspired as we explore real-world examples of companies leveraging these technologies to drive engagement and achieve remarkable results.
#1 – What are your views on AI and how it will affect content marketing in the short-term (1 year) and the mid-term ( 2 to 3 years)?
#2 – How do you see AI affecting data privacy, which is already a major concern for some people?
#3 – What are your plans connected to adapting to the new world of AI linked to marketing your business products?
#4 – What insight have you learned in your own journey connected Forgemedia that you can share with other small WordPress agencies and plugin shops?
#5 – What business tools and services do you use to run your business daily that you could recommend to the audience?
#6 – If you return to a time machine at the beginning of your career, what essential advice would you give yourself?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Sensei LMS: Sensei LMS
BlogVault: BlogVault
The Show Main Interview Notes
[00:00:11.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS. It’s Episode 882. We’ve got a returning friend of the show, always a great discussion. We’ve got Brian Jackson, the co-founder of Forgemedia and former Chief Marketing Officer at Kinsler. So, Brian, would you like to give a quick 30-second intro to the new listeners and viewers that might not have come across you before, Brian?
[00:00:49.760] – Brian Jackson
Sure. Yeah. I think you did a good intro to my background. So right now, it’s just my brother and me. We developed two WordPress plug-ins, Perf Matters and NoVA Share, and that’s pretty much what we do full-time right now. That keeps us plenty busy. Then I do try to blog on one of my blogs whenever I get time, but these days it’s pretty much just plug-in development, pretty much constant.
[00:01:10.840] – Jonathan Denwood
That was short and sweet. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:20.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. I own an agency called Manyana Nomas. We focus largely on membership and learning websites, and I also run the Manyana Nomas Podcast.
[00:01:29.700] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. Like I said, we’re going to be talking about all things AI, and how Brian thinks it’s going to be affecting content marketing in the short term and also in the medium term. We’re going to be talking about how it could affect privacy and a load of other stuff. It should be a great conversation. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Are you looking for ways to make your content more engaging? Sensei LMS by Automatic is the original WordPress solution for creating and selling online courses. Sensei’s new interactive blocks can be added to any.
[00:02:12.140] – Brian Jackson
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[00:02:12.930] – Jonathan Denwood
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[00:02:16.890] – Brian Jackson
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[00:02:17.530] – Jonathan Denwood
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[00:02:21.810] – Brian Jackson
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[00:02:22.330] – Jonathan Denwood
Tribe, just use the code WPtonic, all one word, when checking out and give Sensei a try today. We’re coming back, folks. I just want to say we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plug-ins that me and my team utilize all the time to save you a load of hassle crawling Google to find the best solution for your clients. You can find all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, and tonic. Com/deals and you’ll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that particular page. Brian, let’s go straight into it. I know you’ve been blogging a little bit. You’ve been discussing it in general a bit, so it’s probably been in your mind. How do you see AI affecting content marketing, let’s say, for the short term, for the next year, and maybe got any views about how it might affect things in the slightly mid-term, the 2-3 year term?
[00:03:42.630] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I think short term, I still think we’re in a testing playground because things are going so fast. I don’t think it’s slowed down yet. I think at some point it will start slowing down as far as what content marketers can do, maybe not other stuff as far as AI, but as far as just content creation, I think people right now, even myself, I’m just playing around with it every single day. I mean, I use it to quick couple of examples. It’s late at night, I’m writing something that I need to publish. I don’t like how I wrote it because it’s writer’s block or just because I’m tired. I’ll just ask AI to rewrite it for me and give me a couple variations. And then most of the time, I actually really like what they spit back sometimes, and you can even pick. So I mean, stuff like that is just huge compared to what we’ve had in the past. And I know growing up in high school, I launched tons of blogs. I has flipped websites. So I was constantly figuring out ways to produce content. I’ve done the, I don’t know if you ever heard of iWriter?
[00:04:51.800] – Brian Jackson
It’s a place to get dirt cheap content, not mostly the best quality. But these were the places that people in the past went to get content. They went to third sources, pay $5, pay $10, pay quality $500. It doesn’t matter, but people would outsource it. And so now, in my opinion, Eyrider is irrelevant almost at this point. It’s just like, why they give someone five dollars when you can just have Google Bard or ChatGPT just spit out probably the exact same quality as what they were going to do for five dollars? So that in the short term, I think you’re just going to have all these sites publishing all this AI data. So what I think is going to be interesting in the long term is you’re going to have a mix of AI-written content and human-written content on the web going forward. And so what I don’t know what’s going to happen is how Google is going to treat this. Because Google already has said that they’re going to-.
[00:05:53.890] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I interrupt slightly?
[00:05:56.410] – Brian Jackson
Sure, yeah.
[00:05:57.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you in your heart, do you think Google have any idea how they’re going to deal with this? Because I don’t think they even know.
[00:06:06.810] – Brian Jackson
I think the search engines are also scrambling, like a lot of other people are with the AI changes. But I also do think that they’re pretty smart, too. I know a lot of people don’t like Google and hate Google.
[00:06:19.640] – Jonathan Denwood
They do more evil, don’t they?
[00:06:21.890] – Brian Jackson
But I also think they’re pretty smart at detecting things, too. If they’ll figure out a way to detect AI content pretty accurately, that is long term I would be more worried about if I was to come to market or say making a whole site with 90 % AI written content. Because right now I don’t know how much you’ve tried this yourself, but you can still tell that things are not a hundred % quality yet when you spit out. If you try to do an 800-word article on what is WordPress, there’s a lot of stuff repeating right now. And it’s just not to the quality that a human would write it yet. And so-.
[00:06:59.310] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m sorry.
[00:06:59.690] – Brian Jackson
To- It won’t get there though.
[00:07:00.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry. Because you touch this. Obviously, you’re a very experienced content professional. You’ve based your own a lot of your career on producing and you were well-known for the quality of content and your part. Obviously, it was a team enterprise, but your part in the success, the initial success that Kinsler managed to generate. But you touched on it. We also got to be honest here. Before AI, a lot, and I’m not going to choose some specific titles and targets, but it’s well-known that there are certain WordPress-based businesses that just flooded search and WordPress-generated topics with basically low-quality content, which came from the far from the Indian subcontinent. They were content farms, which is well-known, isn’t it? I don’t think I’m saying anybody in the industry doesn’t know. What do you… What’s your response? What I just said?
[00:08:32.710] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. I mean, a lot of the content is written overseas because like five dollars an article, you couldn’t live in the US making that much. That’s why a lot of the low quality content is just written… I think these were.
[00:08:45.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Cheaper companies. Yeah, but what I’m saying is, I haven’t put it very well, is that Google puts out it’s all about quality, yet when it suits it or when it’s technology, it’s consistently ranked sites that are known in the industry just to produce consistent garbage. I find that interesting. Can you put any… Interrupted twice because I wanted to get to the meat of what really interested me. Can you give any insight why Google consistently puts… And you based your career on quality and it was successful for you, but there’s other sites that it’s just garbage yet they get results. So I’m puzzled.
[00:09:34.290] – Brian Jackson
Well, and I won’t name anyone either, but when I met with Kinsla, that was the whole goal was we see what’s in the WordPress space as content wise. We know we can do it better. Let’s just grind for two years as hard as we can at this, focus on quality. And that was really our whole goal. And I think we accomplished it pretty well. And then we saw other companies try to copy the stuff and start, let’s do longer articles. Let’s hire higher quality writers and try to replicate the thing. And so there is better content, I think, these days. But like you said, there’s companies that are still producing consistent, just like I don’t even understand why they even bother producing something because it’s so low quality on a consistent schedule. And so I think a lot of that still has to do with Google. I think people might not like this either, but domain authority, back links, all of this still plays into the equation at some level. It’s impossible to know how much. But time in the market as far as SEO goes to is huge. Consistency is important. I think Google looks at frequency of publishing.
[00:10:48.710] – Brian Jackson
It doesn’t mean you need to push out five articles a month, but do one article a month consistently, something like that. So all these things take place. And so some of the bigger companies, they’ve been pushing out content for what? Twelve years? Fifteen years? They have a lot of stuff floating out there. I think for a brand new company like just entering today, even with high-quality content, you’re going to have a couple of years of really hard grinding, regardless.
[00:11:15.630] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ll tell you. But my domain authority has increased recently, getting close to 70 using A-Ref.
[00:11:25.500] – Brian Jackson
Oh, good.
[00:11:26.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Which for small business, I think is an enormous achievement.
[00:11:31.910] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. And all I’ve focused on is always seen consistent small growth. It could be big growth or small growth. Either one is a win in my book. So if you’re seeing small wins, I think just keep doing exactly what you’re doing. But the AI brings a whole new kink into the equation type of thing, because before it was just like beat high quality content. That was the strategy against that. And so there’s a whole new situation here because when I was hired, AI wasn’t even really a thing in content marketing. Didn’t even exist, ChatGPT wasn’t there. So I think you’re going to see hybrid approaches, to be honest. If I was a writer right now, I would be using it to summarize things. I would be using it to write maybe less important parts of the article that are just more grunt work type of thing.
[00:12:23.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yeah. I’ve been working with my team and we just used it as a way of doubling the amount of content we’re producing each month. I’m not going to go into the specific tools more than we might do a bit later on. But you do need out. The more time you put into the outline, the more time you put in the keywords. It does need editing afterwards. The other thing I think, and this is only my opinion, I just want to see if you think I might be because you’re an expert. Once I was an expert, I’ve become very educated in it because I had to. But you’ve been paid for it, so I consider that you’re an expert. I have not been paid for it, so I don’t consider that I am an expert. When somebody actually gives you money to do something, that’s when I think you can start saying you’ve got some expertise in it, is that they’re going to look… I think if they see if their technology can sense that it’s been AI written and there’s something that hasn’t been AI written and they think it’s better content, they’re going to go for the better content.
[00:13:46.230] – Jonathan Denwood
I think they’re also going to see look for extra triggers like has it got a video? Is it linked to a podcast? Is it linked to a webinar? Is it linked to other signals that shows expertise or knowledge in that particular subject which the article is produced? Do you think I’m on the right track there?
[00:14:11.380] – Brian Jackson
No, 100%. I think they’re going to look at other factors. But like you said, I think they’re going to see if you have a high quality content versus high quality content with some AI stuck into it, that might hurt you at some point, too. They might use that as a detriment against you. So I would be careful with people out there just using AI too much to begin with because we really don’t know what’s going to happen yet as far as Ranky goes. Again, like I said earlier, it’s all testing playground right now. I’m sure there’s tons of people doing 100 % content AI based sites right now just to experiment. I know that’s happening. I would be curious three years from now to see how well those are actually performing. But again, it determines on what Google and Bing and them determine as far as what is AI content. I don’t think that’s the scary part is we don’t know what’s going to happen yet. I don’t think two years, three years from now. Just to be careful is the.
[00:15:11.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Warning, I think. How do you think they’re going to… Because obviously they’re in a dilemma because obviously, apart from direct purchasing of e-commerce products, a lot of their income, obviously, they’ve diversified, but the main profit center is still paid search. Obviously, the initial thing with OpenAI was it could answer your questions, so you didn’t have to do any searches. I always thought that was overplayed because you got to know the right questions to ask anything. A lot of people in their initial searches to find the right questions to ask, if you know what I mean. I always thought that was overplayed. But how do you think Google is going to… Because obviously Google is in between a rock and a hard place, because I think I am correct, they rely on search income. It’s the thing that just pours money in for them, doesn’t it?
[00:16:21.930] – Brian Jackson
No, you’re right. I think there’s always going to be that battle between paid serps and organic serps. Unfortunately, I think the organic just seems to be getting harder and harder and harder. Ever since I’ve started, it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse. And now with AI, I guess you could say it, I don’t know how you want to look at that. Some people might say it’s worse because of that. Some might people say it’s easier because of that. But like you said, a lot of their business is on paid search. So I wouldn’t be surprised if they take more space for paid search with all this stuff going on with AI. But another fun fact I was just remembering this is that Tom from Kinsta actually tweeted this out the other day, says, 26 of the top 100 most popular websites are blocking the GPT bot from crawling their sites. That means you have the biggest companies in the world not letting.
[00:17:22.820] – Jonathan Denwood
These AI do all the training. You just touched the other side because this is IP infringement on steroids, isn’t it? This is already authors, artists, they need to get together because this has always been part… Google has been the biggest thief in history, hasn’t it? No, fun of them. They’re robbers, aren’t they, really? But this is just putting it on steroids, isn’t it?
[00:17:54.140] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. I’ve gone through that thought process. If I wrote a high-quality article, do I want Google Bard and ChatGPT to be able to grab all the info in a split second that I just wrote without having to even go to my website? That seems like a negative thing to me. Just a bit. Yeah, just a bit. So I’ve thought about almost doing the block myself because I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve definitely considered it. If I was running a big company, I would have thought through this a lot more, but I definitely consider doing that because if something can just grab it and they just like, Oh, okay, don’t even go to the website. I got my answer. I’m done. I can go to my next thing. That’s a problem, and that’s going to keep getting worse. So I think that’s going to hurt content marketers in the long run, for sure.
[00:18:46.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:18:49.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, my question, Bryan, is an extension of the first question, but it’s from the other tangent. So you started to talk about things like content providers, almost like private label rights, like where people in the past or even still currently would say, Oh, well, I’m going to subscribe to this content source or whatever. Now we can do this for free looking at these new tools. But I’m always driven by, and you guys were touching on this with high quality, low quality and stuff like that, and I’m thinking about people that make their living doing this stuff, like being content marketers and content. You still have to be the subject matter expert. You still have to review everything that comes through that. And so I was wondering where you might think that leads for roles and positions in different, we say content marketing, but in the short term and mid term, 2-3 years, how do you think this will change the role or the placement of personnel based on working with AI? Because writers will still have a job, but I think their job might be different.
[00:19:54.610] – Brian Jackson
Their job will be different. Yeah. So I think it’s definitely going to speed up content creation. I think at different levels. It depends on how much the writer is using AI. But for right now, if I was at a company and hiring someone, I would not be changing any positions as far as editors go or any of that stuff, because we don’t know, again, what’s Google going to detect as far as AI. So I think it would be the base level writers if you had a structure already. The base level writers are the ones going to be benefiting, I think, from the AI in their workflows because they’re going to be this stuff out. Google Doc here, AI here, and they’re going to be going back and forth, and it’s going to be speeding up their workflow. But as far as editors go, I would not be touching that right now. I’d be that same workflow because I’ve just seen so many low quality things from Bard and ChatGPT that it’s just not there yet. Now, three years from now, I would be more worried about the editor roles and the ones that are pretty enough the content right before you go to publish, because I think AI is going to get better at this, and it’s going to get smarter and less repeat sentences and less generic stuff.
[00:21:09.500] – Brian Jackson
So I think companies need to be thinking about that, because I think it’s going to hurt writers at all levels, to be honest. Or maybe a company will say, take that editor position. Now he becomes the writer because we don’t want to lose the editor, and we can get rid of some of the lower level, maybe just content writers. I could see that happening, too, because now the editor, he probably knows the company really well already, workflow. If he can just publish content at a faster rate himself and then he’s already editing it, it’s just… Yeah. So I could see both of those scenarios happening. I think writers are going to be less and less going forward, for sure.
[00:21:51.530] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s.
[00:21:52.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Super interesting to see it all play out because I use the tools a lot myself. And it’s like I still need to go through it and go, okay, well, I need to add my touch, my story, my experience, but the facts are there. And then sometimes one of the facts is wrong. And so that’s where the subject matter expert has to step in and go, oh, well, this is incorrect.
[00:22:12.540] – Brian Jackson
But.
[00:22:13.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve been finding it real interesting to look at other people’s published works and go, Well, they’re missing that element. They’re missing that subject matter expert person that comes in and cleans it up and adds that touch.
[00:22:25.840] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. And they’re not going to win if they’re still missing that stuff, in my opinion, because just having done so much content at Kinsta, we made sure every article while I was there, none of that missed any of those things. We double checked everything. I would spend weeks sometimes on a single article writing it, and so many hours. You’re still going to have high-quality content winning in the end. Like you said, if.
[00:22:52.740] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re missing- Yeah, but you were the only other people that I really admire that I thought were up to your standard to some degree was elegant themes. Now the Divvy people, they’re monsters. They’ve always been good at their SEO and they just a monster machine. They’ve got a whole team churning out stuff, but they do a pretty good job. But most of the other people, they’re just crap, aren’t they? Just be honest about it. It’s just absolute shit they’re knocking out, isn’t it?
[00:23:31.450] – Brian Jackson
Well, and it doesn’t make any sense to me because you can go… I haven’t looked at this for a while, but I can guarantee you can go look at Ahrefs or Semrush and look at the organic traffic for Kinsda. It’s just constant growth consistently all the way up toup, up, up, and it’s still going. So it’s like, the other companies I’ve looked at some, and I looked at a lot while we were doing things competing, they had this up and down. So I have never understood why would you spend the money, the time, even with the workflow of the content, if it’s not going to produce results. It doesn’t make any sense to me. And like you said, I think a lot of them know that it’s garbage, too. If you ask the head marketer at some of these companies, I don’t think they would say they produce the highest quality content in the space.
[00:24:21.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it must work. But the only thing I would disagree with what you just said is it must work, wasn’t it?
[00:24:28.820] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. No, that’s it. But if the less work doesn’t produce the results you want against your competitor, maybe I look at it from a different view altogether. But if I’m writing content, I want it to work for me, essentially. That’s always how I viewed SEO and content. Yeah, it’s just weird. When I’ve looked at other companies, I never understood some of the workflows. Like you said, this consistent garbage cycle just over and over and over. And some are still doing it, even the ones that-I.
[00:24:59.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Would say 80% are doing it.
[00:25:03.050] – Brian Jackson
I’m not trying to be- They just never stopped.
[00:25:05.380] – Jonathan Denwood
There are some people, like I say, the Divvy, I remark to Kurt that when you look at their articles, I utilize them as a way of laying out my own articles, because I don’t know if you’ve been to my own website, but we produce a lot of content. A lot of video, a lot of podcast, and a lot of a lot of articles, a lot of everything, hasn’t made me a rich man yet, Brian. This is the problem.
[00:25:38.190] – Brian Jackson
No, but I think you might have an advantage going forward because I think with AI, I think personal branding and other forms of revenue other than content are going to help a lot more than they have maybe than even in the past. So having a podcast, having subscribers, having more than just relying on organic SEO. Because when we were doing Kinzta, we weren’t doing paid ads at the start. We were a hundred % organic content and word of mouth. That was the whole business model at the start. And while it worked really well for us, I would think it would be harder today. If you started literally today doing the exact same thing, it would be a lot harder. So I think what you’re doing, having different forms of places that people can find you, I think is going to be incredibly important going forward. I think.
[00:26:28.750] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re right. But I think the only thing that leads to what I call… I don’t think it’s actually English word, but it never stops me, Brian. I just make up words, if I like the sound of it, nicheify or find a niche. I call it nicheifying. I don’t think it exists. It should do, though. You should do it, Brian. It’s a fantastic word, is it? Nicheify. Yeah, I think so. Jesus, thanks. I’m such a bonkey interviewer. I’m just a focus in general. I know it’s a cliché. You go to all the experts and they say, Find your niche, but you come find a niche website. But I think there’s some truth to it, isn’t it? Because I think that’s linked to Bill. I think you were so right about domain authority and to get that. I’ve got another business and trying to get the domain authority up has been so… Well, it’s taken me eight years to get a pretty high domain authority with WP Tonic. I think that’s what you’re saying around domain authority, isn’t it? It’s becoming even more of a slog, isn’t it?
[00:27:51.940] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, and I think another important fact is I actually just sold one of my… I used to run a gluten-free website. I just sold that a couple months or so ago. And I don’t want to scare anyone here, but there’s two reasons I sold it. Is one, I didn’t have any time while we got to move out the FaceTime animation. We tried to think that.
[00:28:17.080] – Jonathan Denwood
It was a day.
[00:28:18.360] – Brian Jackson
I use the thumbs up, I think that did it. But first, I didn’t have any time to work on it anymore. But second was AI. Because of the reason that I didn’t have any time to spend on it, I know that people with AI, they’re going to be coming for it every single day, just throwing out new content like competitors. So having that in mind, I thought it was better to get rid of that site since I didn’t have any time and more focus on my plugins and stuff. So I would make just a word of caution to people, don’t spread yourself too thin with all this AI stuff happening with content because you want your content where it matters to really be the focus. Okay. That’s important too.
[00:29:01.250] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, we’re going to go for a break, folks. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Hopefully I’m butted in too much. I get complaints, Brian. I understand, but hopefully you could see why I’m butted in a little bit. Brian’s much more knowledgeable on this subject than me. But I think it’s been an insightful discussion. We’re going to go for our break. We’ve got some other great topics. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:29:27.400] – Speaker 4
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[00:30:05.670] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks, for the second half of this great discussion about all things AI, content marketing. It’s a passion for me, so I was looking forward to this discussion with a true expert on the subject, a true Seth Lorde of content marketing. But before we go into the second half, I just want to point out that if you’re looking for a great hosting partner in the WordPress space, why don’t you look at WPtonic? We specialize in membership and community-focused websites, but we offer great hosting for WordPress professionals. Plus, we can be your backup for when you’ve got tasks that you can’t handle yourself, we’re there for you. Plus, we offer 5, 10, and other website packages, hosting packages, special deals for WordPress professionals. To find out all these goodies, go over to wp-tonic-partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. Find out what we can offer and book a chat with me. We love you to become a partner with us. What do you think of that, Brian? It wasn’t too bad, was it?
[00:31:25.660] – Brian Jackson
Well.
[00:31:26.410] – Jonathan Denwood
There we go. I think that’s high price. I think you just touched that. You just flogged one of your sites into your pipeline. What are your planes connected to adapt into the world of AI? Link toI’m arguing that… Well, I think you just touched that. You said, Can I have you flogging some of your sites?
[00:31:49.800] – Brian Jackson
Is that bad? Yeah, I guess that’s the answer. Drop some of the low hanging fruit, I guess, is what you should do. But yeah, I think focus is going to be super important. I’m still focused on content on our plugin sites a hundred %. It’s just I didn’t have time to… In the evenings, sometimes I would get a passion for writing something about gluten-free because I’m gluten-free because of an autoimmune condition. So I have a big passion for that. But I just had to say, is the passion worth it with where everything is going? And so I was like, well, I’ll drop the passion because it didn’t make sense business-wise. So yeah, I think drop the low hanging is one thing. And what was your… Anything else I’ve learned? What was the question?
[00:32:35.990] – Jonathan Denwood
What are your plans for your own business to adapt to the world of AI? You got a small plug-in shop. A lot of the listeners to this particular podcast are WordPress professionals, agencies, plug-in people themselves, implementers. It’s the professional crowd that listen to this podcast. I’m sure they’re in… Because they’re in the same boat that you are with your plug-in shop.
[00:33:08.490] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. I mean, the first thing is, if anybody hasn’t started using it, is just to go out first and start trying to use it every day. I mean, make a Chrome web app, that’s what I do. I have Google Bard actually pinned in my Mac Doc, so I can click it and it’s one click away. That’s how much I use it back and forth. So that’s a great suggestion. I would start doing that if you haven’t. And think about, I’ve actually started using it for tickets, even. Now, I’m not talking about writing, but things… Now, I’m not the main developer. My brother is the coder, the hardcore coder. So I can code things, but I’m super slow. That’s the thing. But once in a while, I’ll try to take a ticket that trying to save him time because he’s working on something else. And I’ve actually started using Google Bard to sometimes we’ll need a code snippet for a customer that needs something more tweaked a little more. And so I’ve used it to actually double-check my code. And it’s actually been super handy as far as checking my if it’s correct or not, something that would take me a little longer to go look at Stack Overflow, piece it together because I’m not coding every day.
[00:34:20.310] – Brian Jackson
And so I use it a lot for that as far as tickets go. So if you can find a way to work it into your support ticket somehow, whether it’s code, maybe summarizing things that you frequently say back in tickets, stuff like that, I would think about that workflow. Then, of course, content production is another thing. I will be honest, a lot of our content is docs, so it’s so technical that I can’t really use AI yet because it’s so, like you said, niche that AI just doesn’t know what we’re doing. So that is going to be a tricky, I think, for some people, that it’s so far down the rabbit hole. I was talking about this on another podcast the other day with someone. It’s like, WordPress is messy, and I like to say that a lot. And anyone that’s been in it long enough knows how just messy it is. And so our plugins are so far down the niche that it would be hard to produce anything with AI as far as content goes, other than a generic your top five WordPress optimization plugins, which I don’t like doing list posts at all, anyway.
[00:35:31.540] – Brian Jackson
So as far as that go, you can’t really use AI to say, this is the setting you need to fix and enable to fix this and page speed insights, and then also tweak this other thing. It’s just too far down the rabbit hole. So I think it depends on what your business is and how deep you’re going into stuff. I think on your website, you probably deal with some more broader marketing topics, right? So I can see AI helping with that type of stuff. So I think it really depends on the business, what you’re doing. But try to work it into your content production if you can. That’s what I say.
[00:36:09.870] – Jonathan Denwood
If it’s you, Kurt.
[00:36:12.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s so interesting to hear Bryan talk about stuff because I can remember it wasn’t long ago I was working on an article, and it was like, SEO optimization and looked for the top questions and the keywords. And what struck me was the piece I was writing, it’s like, there’s not a lot of data or content on it yet. So then you’re like, Well, this is like the piece that SEO might be based on in the future, but there’s nothing really to go on now. So you just feel like you’re stabbing at it. You’re just like, Well, I hope this works. What tools and services do you think helps people in that regard? You’ve mentioned Bard and you’ve mentioned ChatGPT and stuff, but are there other tools that really help you ramp up? Or do you just stick to the two basic ones?
[00:36:59.110] – Brian Jackson
I stick to the basic. And already, I’ll be completely honest, I already feel old and behind in this space. And I know other probably feel the same way as far as there’s so much to keep up with these days. It’s just beyond almost ridiculous. And I do a lot of reading, and I keep track. And I even have a newsletter I put out once a month with an AI section that keeps me looking at things, too, because I don’t want to fall behind. But yeah, Bard, ChatGPT, let me see what else I’m doing here. I do sometimes use the Bing one as well. I know I think that’s based on ChatGPT technically, but Bing has some cool little features in there, too. But honestly, that’s my workflow at the start. Let me see if I have a bookmark still. There’s other tools out there like Surfer. Com. This is one someone sent me the other day that I haven’t looked at yet, but there’s a lot of these companies popping up as far as be my all-in-one SEO AI tool. Actually, another one I have played with a little bit, now that I remember it, is…
[00:38:11.990] – Brian Jackson
I can find it here.
[00:38:18.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ll send them on a search.
[00:38:19.860] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, send me on a search. Yeah, you’re going to send me on a search here.
[00:38:22.430] – Jonathan Denwood
But Surfer SEO, I’ve been using NeuroWriter. It’s not definitely not got the polished interface of SEO Surfer, but I got it at a special deal and it seems to do a pretty job. I can tell my competitors that are utilizing it as well because over the past couple of years, I’ve become… That’s all I do is SEO and knock it out. I’ve become a junior version of Bryan Jackson, actually. It’s scary, really. But there we are. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, haven’t you? Have you found what you were going to recommend, Brian, or are you.
[00:39:09.570] – Brian Jackson
Still searching? I did, yeah, writeblogger. Com. Andy and Ryan are two great guys that make the tool. Andy actually has a couple of WordPress plugins. And then Ryan has been a blogger full-time, I think, for the past decade. I used to chat with him while I was at Kinset, because I forget if he was a client or not, but I’ve been connected with these two guys for a while on the online. And yeah, their tool, I think, is really promising just because I know they both deeply understand the WordPress side and the blogging side, which I think is… These animations are going to get there. Which I think is the.
[00:39:49.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Important- I don’t.
[00:39:52.300] – Brian Jackson
Know if it’s Sonoma or I’ve seen this on FaceTime with my brother too. I don’t know what’s triggering. I have to figure that out. I have to Google that later. But yeah, I like their tool because I know the two guys and I know they know both sides. So I think I’m watching that tool to see what they’re doing because I think that might become really cool. But tools like that, I think maybe might help people if they find one that’s worked really well with their workflow. But for me, I’m primarily just using Google Bard when I can. And I’m actually making a Trello card with a list of like, I’ll eventually probably publish this, but of any task I’ve used AI for, like a huge task list of things that I personally use it for. So eventually, maybe I’ll tweet it or do a blog article, because I think that might be helpful for people just to see here’s a hundred different tasks of what I’ve used it for over the course of the last year, something like that.
[00:40:52.370] – Jonathan Denwood
So when it comes to ForgeMedia, how long have you been you and your brother been running ForgeMedia full-time?
[00:41:02.710] – Brian Jackson
I think the LSC has been around for, I think since 2017, but I left Kinsda in 2020. We’ve been going full-time for about, and I was in January, so it’s been about almost three full years now, full-time at this.
[00:41:20.500] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s been a couple of… What’s a couple of things you might be prepared to share that you’ve learned in this journey that you, I won’t say it surprised you, but you now realize you should have put more emphasis on at the beginning.
[00:41:42.710] – Brian Jackson
I think figuring out… When we originally launched, we had a WP coupons and Perf Matters. Those were our two. And again, these were plugins that we created on the side. While we were both working full-time jobs, we didn’t think they were more hobbies. We weren’t planning to start a business at all. That was never in the cards for us. And it just turned into one of those things people kept asking, what’s that plugin on your blog? Blah, blah, blah, blah, and then it turned into something more eventually. But one thing we learned was to do market research before launching the plugin, if you’re going to do it. Because our coupons plugin, we’ve actually phased out development on that now. So we pretty much shut that down. And because the space just isn’t big enough, that plugin was targeting affiliate marketers in the WordPress space that use coupons. There is. And I think the original thought was like, I’ve been doing affiliate blogging for years, and all these places have coupons, and you know how it goes. But that space is just not big enough to sustain a business. And so we’ve found that we’ve had to just phase that out on that plugin because it wasn’t growing and the space just wasn’t big enough.
[00:43:02.130] – Brian Jackson
So I think anyone starting out, make sure it’s not too far down in a niche. You want to find a niche, but not too far down because it could be just slow grinding and you never get anywhere if it’s too far down. So we then had Perf Matters, just that for a while. And then we launched our Social Sharing plugin, NoVA Share. And that one has been seeing slow and steady growth, but better. It’s a bigger space like social media sharing plugin. And so that one has been doing better. So find a niche, but not too far down the niche. I guess that’s the advice. And I know that’s hard to figure out, too, but at least do some research. We didn’t do any research at all. It just turned from a hobby to a business and that really hurt us because we had to go through, should we shut this down? Should we all this stuff you don’t really want to go through later. Can I.
[00:43:58.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Ask you why do you think that happened? Because you’re one of the sharpest people I know. You’re a merger, as we say in London. You’re very unassuming, you’re low profile, but you’re a pretty sharp dude. So why do you think that happened? Do you know why?
[00:44:23.160] – Brian Jackson
I’ll be completely honest. I think it was we didn’t do any research. We thought we had a good idea and could make money off of it, but we didn’t. We thought the coupon space would be bigger than it is, and it’s just not. And so there’s data out there for this stuff that you can go find better and look at search traffic, look at keyword traffic, look at all the stuff around your plugin space, look at the WordPress repository, look at how many competitors. We didn’t do any of that. But again, I think part of it was because we started it as a hobby. We got people asking for it. We decided to sell it and morphed into a business. But again, I think a lot of businesses just start that way in the WordPress space, too. But again, I think you need to do your market research. If you’re starting to do a brand new plugin, do the research first because you don’t want to end up in the same situation further down the road. It’s not fun. Another thing I would say is the thing I’ve learned over the course of my career ever since high school is consistency is more important than almost anything else.
[00:45:33.590] – Brian Jackson
I flipped so many sites. I’ve started so many new sites. If I could go back in time and change one thing, I think this was one question you had in your thing, Jonathan, was I would have blogged on one site and never changed ever. My personal site has been on brianleadjackson. Com, blog. Brianleadjackson. Com, OKmarketing. Com, Workup. And now I have brianleadjackson. Com again. So it’s changing all of these things. You get diluted with all your content over time, too. And so if I go back in time, it would just be focused on one brand, one thing for 10 years. A good example of this is… I don’t know if I’m pronouncing this name right. Saeed from WP Beginner. He’s done that website for the last, I think, 10, 12 years, and consistently. He has never stopped on that website. That’s why WP beginner, like when we were at Kinsda, that was one of our biggest competitors, was WP beginner because he was so consistent.
[00:46:40.210] – Jonathan Denwood
I know, Brian.
[00:46:41.290] – Brian Jackson
I know. Everybody in the WordPress space knows probably what I’m talking about. But that is purely like… Obviously, there’s technical SEO skills and writing and all this other stuff. But the number one thing he has for that was consistency. So if I could go back in time, man, I screwed that up a lot, a lot of times. I learned at Kinsta was a real light bulb moment of like, it took someone like paying me to grind doing the same thing night and day for a couple of years straight thinking like, Wow, I’m finally seeing things build on each other slowly over time. I think that is one thing I’ve learned that. What?
[00:47:22.950] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve reached you, Kat.
[00:47:25.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, please don’t be angry. But you spurred another question in my mind that we didn’t discuss earlier, and that is I deal with a lot of clients and a lot of masterminds where there’s agencies all together, right? Like on a GoWP day or something like that. And a lot of people argue whether it helps SEO or hurts SEO to use that subdomain strategy, right? Like the main site’s on the main URL, and then the LMS is on an LMS subdomain, and a blog’s on a blog subdomain and stuff like that. Do you think it helps to split things up and be focused in those areas? Or do you think it is better to keep everything compressed in one space?
[00:48:06.720] – Brian Jackson
From an SEO stand, from what I’ve personally seen, because I’ve had a lot of sites, I’ve had subdomains, and I’ve had not subdomains. I think it’s better not to do subdomains. However, there is also a structural thing that comes into play as far as like, what if you have a WordPress site? But then your subdomain is like non-Wordpress, like a portal that’s not WordPress.
[00:48:28.180] – Jonathan Denwood
You don’t want.
[00:48:29.030] – Brian Jackson
To do that. You don’t want to.
[00:48:31.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Do that. You need to talk to Jonathan at W. P. Tonic. We’ve got some education for you.
[00:48:36.940] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, it should be 100 % WordPress. But there’s other structural things to consider with that. But if I was looking at it just from an SEO perspective, I think it’s always better to have it all in the same domain. I can give you an example. When we at Kinsla were going to launch the multilingual version, because we have it like 10 languages or something, and we decided, do we do subdomains or do we do backslash the language or whatever? And we decided not to do the subdomains and went with the backslash. I think it was a wise decision with going forward from what we saw. So yeah, I think SEO wise, I try to keep it always on the same domain. And again, I’ve had sights on both, and I think I personally does better if it’s all in one domain.
[00:49:26.410] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I’m part of another mastermind, and that question comes up almost on a monthly basis and trying to explain it to people is, it can be mind numbing sometimes, but everyone has a reason for wanting to do it different. It’s WordPress, right? The curse and the blessing. It’s flexible, but.
[00:49:42.250] – Brian Jackson
It’s flexible. Yeah. And sometimes due to the structure, like how you’re separating things, sometimes it makes sense to separate it out. But if it was me and I could structure it all in the same domain, that’s what I would always do. I would always do that first.
[00:49:57.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Excellent. I think I’ll pass it back to Jonathan to see if we’re ready for a time machine.
[00:50:03.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, linking to what you just said with Kurt, I think the other thing is I think any idiot can make things complicated. The genius is making complicated things simple, isn’t it?
[00:50:19.440] – Brian Jackson
That’s true. If you’re just a simple thing of like choosing, Should your blog be on a subdomain or just backslash blog? Always choose a backslash blog. That’s a no brainer, my opinion. But yeah, I think people can overcomplicate me sometimes.
[00:50:35.180] – Jonathan Denwood
You know what I’m saying? I’m not trying to be funny here, but when you are dealing with people in the Fortune 500, I’m going to… You find that their art is making things as complicated as possible. We’re true entrepreneurs, people that are building a business themselves, they learn their art is to make things as simple as possible because they are of very two different mindsets based on my experience, but there we go. Obviously, I’m a bit English. I’ve been living in America quite a while now, but I always see myself as English, really. I was a great watcher as a child of Doctor Who and The TARDIS. If you had your own time machine and you could go back to the beginnings of your career, Bryan. Is there any advice that you would give yourself? Is there any tips that if you’re mentoring the young Brian Jackson that you would have liked to have somebody to have told you?
[00:51:48.230] – Brian Jackson
Also, I.
[00:51:48.990] – Jonathan Denwood
Binge- Don’t come on WP Totic for interviews.
[00:51:54.780] – Brian Jackson
I binge-watched Doctor Who last year. First time I had never seen it. Amazing show. But yeah, if I can go back in time, the one thing I said earlier was consistency. That’s one thing. But another thing is that it might be helpful… I have a blog post on my site, 18 things I’ve learned from building WordPress plugins, like good and bad. Maybe go check that out on my site later. I need to update it again. But I try to share things like that. Is like handling taxes for your business. That’s a nightmare that I didn’t anticipate when I first got into my business. And so do you do an LLC? Do you do an sCorp? Do you pay some run to do the bookkeeping for you? And yes, I actually do pay someone to do the bookkeeping and the payroll. I think that’s a good decision. And you can find someone that’s actually pretty these days that that’s all they do is that for everybody. But stuff like that, like should you charge that or not? That’s an interesting discussion. I would be interested in the Mastermind groups hearing what people are saying about that, because I’ve chosen to charge VAT to sales that…
[00:53:21.320] – Brian Jackson
We have an EU VAT number and a UK VAT number. So when we’re doing sales in the EU or UK, we charge VAT, and then we submit it via the ridiculous mini one stop shop thing that submits it to the member states. It’s so ridiculous over there. But I’ve chosen to do that because I’ve never known like, well, if I was to move the business overseas, I would already have this workflow in place. There’s some reasons to just do it, even though I’m in the US. But do I need to do it if I’m in the US? Because they can’t come over.
[00:53:56.080] – Jonathan Denwood
And do anything to me. Definitely. I’m definitely don’t tell me that. I’m not only thinking to you, this.
[00:54:01.570] – Brian Jackson
Question, bro. And I’ve seen people on both sides of this when I’ve talked to them in the WordPress space for US businesses. So that’s an interesting thing, another discussion. But things like this that I had no clue that would come up when I went just like, I’m going to start a WordPress business and it’ll be great. So think about all the things if you’re going to go full-time that maybe you haven’t thought of. Do some research again in the space. Another thing, too, was if you’re selling multiple products, you should probably split that out into multiple Stripe or PayPal accounts, not put it into one. We did that early on, and it was a mistake. You pretty much are screwed at that point if you can’t separate it. So separate that out. Unless you plan on selling your whole business later or something with every product. So separating things out is super important. I know if some people are hearing this now and they’ve already done that, I just probably do like to go back in time and change it. But anyone new, think about that.
[00:55:10.790] – Jonathan Denwood
But stuff like that. I think you give it enough value there. We’re going to end the main podcast, hopefully. Are you okay just to stay on for another 10 minutes? Are you okay with that?
[00:55:23.950] – Brian Jackson
Oh, sure, yeah.
[00:55:25.060] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re finished with the main podcast part of the show, folks. We’re going to stay on for some extra content. You’ll be able to watch the whole show on the WPtonic YouTube channel. Please subscribe to that because it really does help the podcast and WPtonic in general. We will be back next week with another great guest. But, Bryan, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your thoughts, Brian?
[00:55:54.700] – Brian Jackson
You can go to our agency site. It’s forgemedia. Io or my personal site is brianjackson. com and I’m on X as well. I’ve got to try to start saying X.
[00:56:09.380] – Jonathan Denwood
No, it’s always going to be Twitter. Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:56:20.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, the agency’s name is Manyana No Mass. Anything that’s Manyana No Mass online and social will come to me. Then I’m the only Kurt Van Ounen on LinkedIn, which makes me super easy to find. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn almost every day, so maybe we’ll connect there.
[00:56:35.480] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. As I said, we’ve got some fantastic guests this month, and I booked her some really amazing guests for November yesterday. You’ve got some great content coming your way, listeners and viewers. We will be back next week. Remember, there’s some additional bonus content that you can get on the YouTube channel or part of this interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. 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. We’ll see you next time.
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