We Discuss How To Use Blogging The Right Way in 2024
Master blogging in 2024 with expert tips on using it effectively. Learn how to blog the right way for success. Dive in now.
Step into the future of blogging with our in-depth exploration of best practices for 2024. Learn how to craft compelling blog posts, leverage social media platforms, and implement effective marketing strategies for success. Our panel of industry experts offers practical advice and insider tips on navigating the ever-changing digital landscape.
Special Guest Ryan Robinson From Rightblogger.com.
#1—Rob, can you give the audience some background info on how you got into blogging and online marketing?
#2 – Can you tell me about your SaaS Rightblogger.com, what it does, and who it is aimed at?
#3 – What are some of the biggest things you have learned about building up Rightblogger?
#4—What have some of the significant problems you and your team had to overcome related to building up?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 919. We have a guest with whom I’ve been looking forward to chatting. I know I do regularly say that, but I do mean that. This week we got Ryan Robertson from us, from Rightblogger.com. He’s a really very popular and quite famous blogger expert. We’re going to be discussing blogging in 2024. AI. We’re going to be discussing his journey with a blogger. What are some of the key things he’s learned in trying to build his own SaaS platform, which he can share with you? So maybe you can avoid some of those surprises on his journey. So, Ryan, would you like to give us a quick 1020 2nd intro of yourself?
[00:01:05.170] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me. This is awesome. I’m pumped to be here. And yeah, I’ve been blogging for the better part of a decade, probably approaching more than 1213 years now. And my blog, the content that I create, has kind of just tracked my journey, what I’m learning, what I’m interested in. And these days, I’m pretty much-teaching blogging. With Write Blogger, we’re creating the tools you need to do the things we wish we could do for free or on a budget back when we first got started.
[00:01:35.910] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to quickly introduce the new listeners and views to them? And we’re getting a few more recently, so that’s good news.
[00:01:46.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
We are. We are. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called MananaNoMas and a podcast of the same name. I focus largely on learning and membership websites in the WordPress space and work directly with WP-Tonic and the good folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:02:01.190] – Jonathan Denwood
And Kirk’s been a gracious guest. I’ve been visiting him in windy Kansas for the past week. This my tribe. It was a bit of a journey, but I quite enjoyed Kansas so far. It’s been great to see Kirk in the flesh. That’s great as well. So before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a couple of major messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I just want to point out we’ve got a couple of great offers from the major sponsors, plus a created list of the best WordPress plugins and services aimed at the WordPress professional. You can get all these goodies by going over to WP-Tonic.com deals and WP-Tonic.com deals. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more. But that’s. I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it, my beloved tribe, but you’re used to it. So let’s go straight into it. Rob, so you gave us a quick intro, but what led us into the crazy world of blogging, online marketing, podcasts, and all the things you do so well?
[00:03:29.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Rob, what led to this?
[00:03:33.260] – Ryan Robinson
I am one of the very few people who can point back to college as being a pivotal investment for me. I had an Internet marketing teacher calling the class. Internet marketing is funny enough, right? Kind of dates me. This would have been in like 2009. And this professor just had a lot of foresight. And so the first thing we did, we sat down, we registered domain names. And so I grabbed my blog, ryrob.com, just my nickname. And ever since then, I’ve been blogging pretty much. I’ve had some phases where I’ve, you know, slow down, taking a step back. I think anything you do for a decade and change, it’s normal to have seasonality and stages. And so I’d say one interesting tidbit from my journey has been that the way that I monetize my blog has also changed every, let’s say, year and a half, two years, like the major driver of revenue sort of shuffles around a bit, you know, five to ten usual suspects in the bucket of generating income from a blog, I’d say. But those top-ranking ones do shuffle, which is fascinating.
[00:04:45.510] – Ryan Robinson
It’s always changing.
[00:04:46.970] – Jonathan Denwood
So what are some of the main ways that people are making any money from their blogs in 2024? What’s the top two to three ways, Rob, in your opinion?
[00:04:57.370] – Ryan Robinson
I think there’s, well, there’s different categories on how we could approach this one, but from my perspective, easiest way to turn on some income from your blog in the short term, let’s say, if you just get started, first few months, whatever that looks like is selling your services. So if you have a skill, if you have particular experience set, let’s say you’re a marketer, you’re a writer, a designer, a developer, you have some sort of trade, a craft, selling your services from your blog and creating content to kind of do that demand pull, creating some stuff for social channels, maybe YouTube to drive people to your site on topics related to what your services, your skill is and then saying, you know, up in your header menu, work with me, hire me something like that. That I think is the most approachable, easy way without setting expectations that kind of set yourself up for disillusionment because all the other stuff you know, Kurt, I know you know this for sure. Memberships, communities, this stuff, it takes time to monetize, to build a group that people want to say pay to be a part of or a course.
[00:06:03.300] – Ryan Robinson
Even if you begin creating digital products, which are great, it does just take time. You have to create the curriculum, you have to bring in the audience, you got to nurture people, establish trust. And there’s just way more stuff I guess that goes into that. But you know, to bring my ramble to a close here, affiliate marketing is also still really popular and works great for me, a lot of people I know, but there’s so much more nuance to this stuff these days. You can’t just publish a blog post with a bunch of affiliate links and hope that Google’s going to rank you and then, you know, generate free money as a result. Like you gotta get way more creative. And I like to think that the best way to approach affiliate marketing these days is with a video first content creation kind of process where you can use video and then use things like the tools inside Writeblogger. Other AI tools do this too, but repurpose that video into blog posts, social clips, other ways to promote your content on LinkedIn. And these are the kinds of ways that I like using AI basically to help me do more these days.
[00:07:14.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, so we’ve got, on this particular blog post podcast, it’s like I say, it’s aimed at the WordPress community, basically. So how do you see WordPress in blogging? Do you see it still as the premier platform for blogging or do you think that’s changed at all?
[00:07:37.880] – Ryan Robinson
I think for, you know, if we want to call it traditional blogging, which is maybe say text content first or text content forward, that I think absolutely is still, WordPress is the home. It’s the king. I mean, there are no other like CMS platforms really that I think are competitive with WordPress and the free ecosystem of plugins and ways that you can just really like tax stuff onto your business easily. If you’re from WordPress and you’re a publisher and you’re trying to drive revenue from bringing people to your website, I think that’s the best. But what case could be made for if you’re going to create video content only if you don’t even want to think about written content as a, you know, kind of like newer age blogger, then going straight to platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, like, really investing most of your time on those platforms is probably the best move. But I think that having a blog is the smartest home base you can ever have because you get to control that platform. You know, let’s say YouTube or Instagram. TikTok. TikTok gets banned, right? I mean, that’s a very real possibility.
[00:08:51.950] – Ryan Robinson
And if you’re totally platform dependent, you can end up pretty screwed. So I do recommend always having a blog and having a newsletter allowing people to sign up and get more of your, like, personal updates, that’s still super important. And WordPress is pretty impossible to beat, in my opinion.
[00:09:11.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally agree with you, Ryan. I think having your own website, your own, and digital sovereignty, having as much as possible, but using these other platforms as a way of promoting yourself is totally fine. But I think we’ve seen this over the years. Different platforms rise and then decline, and you could just say something and they get complaints. And if they do ban you, it’s a nightmare. Trying to get back on. Over to you, Kurt, for the next question.
[00:09:44.520] – Speaker 3
Well, I’m just glad Ryan didn’t mention Tumblr as one of the great blogging platforms out there.
[00:09:49.320] – Ryan Robinson
So, you know, I had a Tumblr blog. I tried that one out.
[00:09:55.060] – Speaker 3
Yeah, I had a tumblr, too. And then I went out of curiosity, I was like, I wonder if that’s still up? And sure enough, it was removed. I’m gone. So when you think about, like, writeblogger.com, right? So that’s your thing, writeblogger. So just tell us, like, what does it do? Who’s it aimed at? And does it have a position fit with that WordPress space we were just talking about?
[00:10:20.070] – Ryan Robinson
Totally. So write blogger is a collection of AI powered tools, for the most part, AI stuff. There’s some keyword research things in there that use different APIs and data sources, but it’s basically our collection of the 75 plus tools that we wish we had when we started blogging 1213 years ago. And I built the platform with my friend Andy, who I’m actually visiting right now in St. Louis. So we have a lot of fun working on this one together. And we really like, we position it to be an inexpensive option for people because this is another big thing I used to like, password share with five people on Ahrefs and Semrush. These tools that are, you know, they add up very quickly to being like $100 a month or something. So we have a really affordable, unlimited plan, no tricky pricing crap, no usage stuff like $29.99 a month. You can use literally all the tools as much as you want. Go nuts. You can have as many sites that you’re creating content for in there as possible. But for the most part, like, really, this is just the backbone now of my AI assisted content creation process.
[00:11:31.710] – Ryan Robinson
Different tools, you know, article writers, things that turn YouTube videos directly into blog post drafts, like, and then from there it kind of trickles down to here’s all the LinkedIn posts you need, here’s the Instagram captions. And so just trying to make the especially repurposing content, trying to make that really easy for creators.
[00:11:53.090] – Speaker 3
Yeah, as you answered the question, you actually spurred a follow up question, but it seems a little removed. So forgive me, but you said unlimited, like the number of sites. And so then I instantly in my brain went, you know what? People might be interested in that. Like, from a, from a professional blogging perspective, how I think people struggle with staying on point. Like, your blog’s about this. Next thing you know, like my own personal blog that I thought was wonderful ended up being about leadership, business travel to Italy, been to Spain, you know, like, and people would look at my overall list and go, what the hell does this guy focus on? He’s all over the place. So how, how do you coach people on that? Do you say, hey, have separate websites or do you do different categories? Or how do you approach that?
[00:12:47.030] – Ryan Robinson
I mean, honestly, in the product inside writeblogger, it’s definitely a free for all. Like, if you want to make content for tons of different sites, you can. But what my personal advice is, I always recommend people spend much more time going deep on less things than, say, having 10, 15, 20 websites. This is coming from someone who has more websites than that. I just don’t touch them as often because I’ve seen the value and the ROI on just staying super focused on one, maybe two sites. And sometimes I shuffle in some stuff here. Like I have a hiking blog. If I go on a great hike and I take a bunch of photos and it’s fun to me to edit together a little video, I’ll do that. But it’s all based on what are your expectations? If you have a site that generates income or a site that you want to generate income for, you somehow really focusing all your efforts on tinkering with that, trying out different ways of generating revenue, figuring out how to monetize with your people, get more traffic in the door. Like that’s a very full time job with just one site.
[00:14:00.590] – Ryan Robinson
So you really splinter your effectiveness when you’re trying to do it on a bunch of properties at the same time.
[00:14:05.680] – Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah. Thanks, man. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:14:09.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, just a quick follow up question before going to the main question. Right. We found at WP Tonic where we kind of picture ourselves as hosting plus where we provide all the tools to enable you to build a learning or community focused membership website. We provide all the plugins, the superior hosts and everything. But a constant theme with us is when I’m consulting people, and so the same occur is there’s a lot of balls. When you’re starting a membership or you’re starting a block business, there’s a lot of balls. And people tend to get sucked into the processes, the marketing optimization they get sucked into for understandable reasons about the look, the logo, the marketing optimization, this, that, the other, and they haven’t really got their first student or their first paying client, whatever it is. Have you observed that? And where’s the. Can you maybe give some advice if you think it’s possible, where to find the balance, because I’m not diminishing. Some of these things are important, but so many of the clients that we consult, they just get, they just go on a bit of a journey and they get a little bit lost and frustrated.
[00:15:31.190] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah. So I’ll give some really hard truth here because I’ve had to go through confronting this myself. Is that tools? Let’s say, let’s call it tools, right? Perfecting the look feel design of all your creations. Tools are often an excuse to avoid looking at the truth. And I think the truth is often for, and I’ve experienced this myself, the truth is often that we’re not quite ready to sell that course to make that thing at the level that we feel, you know, it needs to be in order for people to pay us for it. And so I personally really like, I try and go into the hard stuff first and actually like, go validate that someone’s going to pay me for educating them on this topic. Let’s say if you want to validate a course idea or a consulting service, go get fucking paid for that. Don’t make the course first and then figure out how to bring an audience to it. Like actually just confront the most difficult, challenging part that I think most people know. You know, like we all know, oh, that’s going to be the hard part. But it’s easier to avoid it and to go dig super deep into perfecting the look and the feel of something or creating all the course curriculum, for example.
[00:16:54.240] – Ryan Robinson
But go into the hard stuff, it’s, it’s worth it. You’ll also learn how much you like it. Right? Like you get, maybe you get super burnt out trying to sell this thing.
[00:17:04.930] – Jonathan Denwood
So is it possible to advise somebody that’s going down that journey because I found the enormous amount of resistance, or do you just have to lay off and you just gonna have to learn the hard one?
[00:17:17.770] – Ryan Robinson
I think you can say your piece, you can give your advice and then it, it’s over to that person to figure out how they want to incorporate that or not. Or maybe they’ll come back to that advice in six months or a year after they try things their way first, let’s say. So I like to just, you know, deliver some truth in a nice, kind, loving package and then allow them to go on their way with however they’re going to do it.
[00:17:44.670] – Jonathan Denwood
So on to the next main question. Thank you for that. I think your observation, I think I spot on. So, with Writeblogger, how many of you been trying to build it up and what have been one or two things that have been surprises to you on the journey with Writeblogger that you didn’t anticipate?
[00:18:08.420] – Ryan Robinson
First of all, tremendously surprised that people would pay me to use tools like this like that. That was a big surprise, I found. But I started making some, we really began by making free tools just on my blog back when, as soon as OpenAI came out, chat GPT was brand new, they started opening up an API to use their stuff. And so it all became really easy to make tools like blog headline generators, idea generators, article writers and stuff. And I say easy in air quotes, it’s not easy, but it’s a lot easier than it ever was before. And so like my, my business partner here, Andy, he has all the technical know how and he learned a bunch in order to do this kind of stuff too. And so we had this really unique collision of like, oh wow, I’ve got an audience. And previously, you know, I’d steer people towards the Ahrefs Semrush mozz of the world, but those tools aren’t really free. They aren’t affordable if you want to upgrade, like get unlimited and stuff. And so we kind of just slowly began to validate this business and published a bunch of free tools on my blog, I promoted them to my audience.
[00:19:27.620] – Ryan Robinson
They were some of the most popular emails that I’d been sending in quite a while. And so seeing the replies, seeing the usage numbers like that really told us, all right, maybe there’s a business here at some point. So we began just kind of collecting email addresses like for people that are interested in using tools, AI tools, and then before we built a super complex platform. So this is a difference in my advice that I just gave for something like software SaaS, that is usually something that people are going to want to like pay for and then get immediately into. So not many people are going to prepay to join a waiting list for when your software is ready. They want to see what it is. So we spent a week and built a very basic mvp and then opened up the doors, said, hey, here’s a 50% off. This is the cheapest this will ever be because it’s brand new. And pretty much right away we had about, what do we have? We had like between 51 hundred people that signed up the very first week. And so that’s great.
[00:20:35.960] – Jonathan Denwood
And it’s a manageable, and it’s also a manageable amount, isn’t it?
[00:20:40.480] – Ryan Robinson
Right. And like, you know, that’s a super heavy customer service load with people who are brand new to a brand new product. Like stuff’s broken, there’s bugs, there’s things that can be improved like rather urgently. So we learned a lot and we’ve just kind of kept passively growing it largely from my audience and from my email list and from some affiliate partners now that if I were to give another like surprise, it would be that affiliate program. Like now as I’m a company and have an affiliate program, I’m on the other end of this spectrum and I see just how useful it is to activate really good content creators in a space. And there’s so many great people talking about online marketing and writing, blogging, the SEO, these kinds of topics that we all like discussing. And so I’ve been reaching out to people I know and people who have shows and being like, hey, do you think, you know, this product would be interesting to your audience? And that’s gone really well.
[00:21:44.110] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve not been able to look at rightblogger with the intensity that I normally do because as I told you, Ryan, I’ve been traveling to wind in Kansas, so, but I had a quick look a couple of times. So what are some of its key differentials? Because um, I suppose I forgot the gentleman’s name, but we had somebody else that seems to have a similar product as you that came on about three months ago. More of an SEO focus, maybe, but it’s what are some of the key differentials that you think why people choose right blogger?
[00:22:24.690] – Ryan Robinson
Honestly, one of the big ones is that we, my business partner Andy and I, we’ve been blogging for 1213 years each, and we really do know what works in our experience. We have probably around 100 websites in total that we kind of maintain and manage together and we reach millions of people a month. So we have expertise that we bring to the table and we’ve gone super deep in engineering the prompts and the way that the tools function. I don’t know if you guys have ever tried like Jasper or copy AI. Like, those tools have gotten very, very flowy. So you show up and you start describing what you want and then it wants to take you on a journey here and there, and we find that to be incredibly not useful. The way you interact with our product is through specific tools, the article writer tool, the keyword research tool, the meta description generator, and there’s some things that connect all the tools together and there’s, you know, there’s a chat interface so you can interact with kind of like a chat GPT style thing, but for the most part, just making really simple and effective tools that creators can get something really tangible that’s going to be pretty close to what they want in a matter of seconds or minutes.
[00:23:47.430] – Ryan Robinson
And really like our, our repurposing tools are what I think is beginning to attract more people. So there’s a YouTube video to blog post generator. That’s by far my favorite tool because I like to create video first now in my process. And so I’ll create a YouTube video, I’ll set it to unlisted so it’s not totally public yet. And then I’ll just come back to writeblogger and paste the link to the video into that tool and it’ll generate a really good first draft blog post. And that cuts out the entire need to write an article from start to finish that becomes a companion to this video. So keeping that kind of stuff going and getting more, more useful as we continue to build out the tools is what we’re trying to focus on.
[00:24:35.170] – Jonathan Denwood
So I think just before we go to our break, I think what you’re saying is it’s really deep knowledge of your target market and building some core products. But then a religious fervor in slow improvements around those tools, gradually improvements from a feedback loop to make it a really truly polished and relevant tool to its target audience. Would about, would I be about right?
[00:25:04.120] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah. And we are, you know, we are creators. So these are tools by creators for creators. I think with a lot of the other AI creation platforms you see like venture funded companies or people who go raise money or just, you know, tech entrepreneurs jumping in on this stuff. And that is okay. It just brings a different flavor to everything about the product and how it works and what the outputs are going to be. And so we actually, you know, do this stuff ourselves. We use these tools ourselves and that is something that we notice, like a very clear difference in the outputs.
[00:25:40.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, thanks, Ryan. I really enjoyed the first half of the show. We’ve got some excellent questions for the second half. We’re going to go for our mid break and have a couple other messages from our WordPress sponsors that we really appreciate. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a great discussion. Ryan Robinson, it’s been really insightful, I feel. Before we go into the second half of the show, folks, I just want to point out that I do a newsletter aimed at the WordPress community. I write it myself. I scale the Internet to find the best WordPress and text stories of the week. I bun it all into this newsletter. I think it’s quite original. Why don’t you sign up for it? And you do that by going over to wphton tonic.com newsletter. WP tonic.com newsletter sign up and it will be in your inbox on Mondays or Tuesdays depending on how early I get up on the Monday. It just depends. But it will either be Monday or Tuesday morning on we go over to you, Kurt.
[00:26:56.330] – Speaker 3
Well, one of the things that still stuck in my head from the 18 or 19 minutes mark. So folks that are watching the replay go back to 18 or 19 minutes ago, 1818 or 19 minutes in the, in the podcast. Ryan, when you were answering that question, you, you specifically used verbiage that Jonathan and I used in a show just last week talking about, you know, pre selling your course. So pre selling your course, pre selling your SaaS, pre selling your, you hit on MVP, minimal viable product, get in some early adopters, get some paying customers, do intensive customer service to make sure that the early adopters are well cared for. Right. And then try to organically grow. And I can’t stress that enough that Jonathan and I, we talk about that all the time and then they have a guest come on and just spit out that that’s what they did before.
[00:27:45.180] – Ryan Robinson
This was not scripted either.
[00:27:47.150] – Speaker 3
No, no, that, I’ll send you the.
[00:27:49.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Check after the show.
[00:27:53.360] – Speaker 3
That part is really, really tremendous. The other thing I wanted to point to was I think you’ve nailed something and I, and I, and I hesitate to call out names of other products, but you know, there’s an AI product that does like WordPress blogging. There’s, I’ve used the Jasper that you mentioned by name, OpenAI, Claude. There’s all these things, but they don’t cater to a creator. It’s like you have to train yourself to figure out how to use it and morph it to your purpose rather than it just being there for your purpose. And when I looked through the right blogger site, I was like, oh, this makes sense because it broke into sections like, oh, I need help with SEO. Let’s see what this looks like with SEO in it. Or let’s see, maybe I got the wrong keywords, you know, and there was always a way to go, which I thought was pretty intuitive, so maybe I’ll get in there and check it out further. But, but I was impressed with the way that, that happened. That said, what are the major problems that your team had putting all that together? I just picture you guys like a lot of infighting.
[00:29:00.380] – Speaker 3
Like, that’s not the way that should work. Like, but, but you tell us what were the major problems putting this thing together?
[00:29:06.690] – Ryan Robinson
I mean even from the, like this starting point, it was a clear decision that we made to say, hey, what is the best, most effective way that we like to interact with AI? And when you go to chat, GPT or Jasper or some of these other tools, it’s kind of like just a broad open ocean and you’re in this tiny little boat and you’re left to figure out what do I do here? How do I get from point a to point b? And you have to know exactly what you want your point b to be. So with most AI interfaces, you have to have a really, really clear picture of what you want your output to, to be. And we wanted to take some of that pressure away from people because I think that often inhibits a lot of creators from ever even trying. And so you’ll pop open chat GP, you’ll be like, what the hell do I do? I don’t think I’m going to do this now. So with our tools, like everything is really clearly structured through a specific flow. But I mean, gosh, the really, the biggest hurdle has been we’ve been trying to figure out how to add teams accounts because there’s a frequent request we get where, you know, bloggers, creators, small business owners, there’s a lot of like, marketing agencies.
[00:30:18.580] – Ryan Robinson
We kind of cut a broad swath of people who use this. But one common theme is like, hey, I’d love for my VA to be able to get in here and generate, you know, the first draft articles for next month’s content or come up with all my social copy. And people don’t want a password share, they want permissions, you know, their VA to be able to see this kind of stuff, but not this stuff. So figuring out all the minutiae of how to essentially handle a more scaled software business rather than just the individual blogger customer. But as we get more complex needs, it becomes difficult to figure out how to structurally handle all that. It’s fascinating, as a follow up, how.
[00:31:04.780] – Speaker 3
Much of what you guys have assembled. Like, I’m looking in that page of features, right? Features and products, how much of that is client generated? Like, it was a feature request and you knew you had to build it as opposed to what you guys knew.
[00:31:20.210] – Ryan Robinson
To put together pretty close to 50 50. Like coming back to our conversation here around MVP’s and really like, I like to think of this as monetizing with my audience. And so I have a pretty good idea of what a lot of people will need because this is a product that I use myself. I am my own target market for this, which is important, but I also don’t know everything. And there’s going to be use cases that I’ve never even dreamed of, but maybe 10,000 other people have all the time. So asking for feedback really often, like we send that, we send emails even to people who sign up. And in the onboarding sequence, there’s requests for feedback. And hey, if you see something that even just feels a little weird or you think it could be better, like, let us know. And so we have this feedback dot writeblogger.com dot it’s a feature board, basically, and people can pop in, send requests up, vote them, and it’s actually like a shockingly active little community of people who are upvoting stuff, commenting, being like, oh my God, yes, I need this. And so we get to see people actually voting with what they believe are the most important things to change and add.
[00:32:35.500] – Ryan Robinson
And Andy is my partner here. He is crazy. Like, he will see a feature request or an idea come through and if it’s simple enough, he’ll just reply five minutes later, this is live now, which is remarkable. So we find that the people have any sort of individual interaction with us, whether it’s something product related with Andy or people reach out to me all the time, ask blogging questions. Right. Blogger customers can book a free 30 minutes call with me and we end up doing advice kind of stuff. So I think that’s really another unique competitive advantage we bring to the table is that, hey, you have access to people who run, you know, close to 100 successful websites and use us.
[00:33:19.620] – Speaker 3
Yeah, I’ll toss it back to you, Jonathan.
[00:33:23.430] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I thought I’d ask you this follow through question, because based on my own experience at Wptonic, when I was starting, one of the added services as part of the hosting plus vision I had, Ryan, was I thought I would offer video hosting as part of the package, which would save people money and be more useful to my target audience. So I scaled the Internet and I found a third party provider that would allow me to white label their core service and offer it to my customers because I didn’t want to build it out from the ground up. Right. And thank God I didn’t, because the clients weren’t interested. Ryan, a lot of them had pre bought Vimeo, Vimeo package, or they, they were only going to use YouTube, which, which I think is great in the right circumstances. But I wouldn’t generally advise somebody to host their videos on a paid course on YouTube. But they weren’t interested. And after about a year, I died, basically. I had a couple clients on it and I said, well, you’re going to have to find them. We give you some money back and I let it die.
[00:34:50.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Have there been a couple things that you thought people were gonna really be really crazy about? And they were a bit indifferent. And that surprised you?
[00:35:02.710] – Ryan Robinson
Not with write blogger, but I’ve had. So anytime I want to build a course over the past ten years, I have always used this like validation framework and I have a post on my blog. I think it’s just rirob.com validate and it’ll go to that post. But I have this framework that I follow and there’s nothing super crazy unique about it. It’s common sense stuff. It’s based on a lot of like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs kind of breaking their process down, and it’s essentially around like getting x number of people, whatever feels right to pay me for the thing before I build it and give them a heavy discount, like make it worth their while. But I would always send out an email to my audience. I do a series of blog posts to see if I could drive some organic traffic and validate the topic through search, but I wanted to make sure that I had either a waiting list of several hundred people for a course or people would pre purchase the course and maybe it’s $50 for a course that’s eventually going to be 297 or something. But seeing people vote with their wallets is always the best thing.
[00:36:13.940] – Ryan Robinson
And I’ve had course topics that I thought were going to be total bangers. Like, I did this one on how to banners.
[00:36:23.710] – Jonathan Denwood
I love that.
[00:36:27.180] – Ryan Robinson
How to pitch yourself as a freelancer, essentially. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff kind of layered into what pitching yourself as a freelancer is like. But at the core was like generating proposals and doing like, how to be on zoom and pitch people stuff like that. And I thought that was going to be great. Like, I was like, oh, man, tons of freelancers are going to want this. And I did a series of blog posts around it, and it was just like mild interest, you know, filmed a trailer for the course, like, here’s what it’s going to cover. And then pre order. And I think maybe one person, one out of, and I have a lot of people that are freelancers, like, on my email list and in my community. And let’s say there were 30,000 people who are freelancers on my email list. One pre ordered the course. And that was after a few weeks of planning and prep for this kind of little pre marketing push. And rather than ignore what my data was telling me, I was like, all right, I’m going to let this one be and explore some other topics.
[00:37:34.010] – Ryan Robinson
That was a good move.
[00:37:35.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Did you ever work out in your mind why you got that reaction? Do you ever make any sense, your.
[00:37:41.890] – Ryan Robinson
Own mind, what was with that one? I honestly just kind of moved on. I have not thought about it much since. But I don’t like, it was a.
[00:37:52.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Chip, it was a child that you just decided to forget about, was it?
[00:37:55.760] – Ryan Robinson
Exactly. I mean, I also learned something about myself through that experience, which is equally as important. It was that, okay, I ran up against the first hurdle and I don’t feel like trying to figure my way out beyond that first challenge. And so that was another signal of like, well, I don’t think I’m as invested in this topic either, so I moved on.
[00:38:19.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Fair enough. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:38:21.820] – Speaker 3
Again, I’m just amazed at how wise those words are.
[00:38:27.580] – Jonathan Denwood
I think they resonate a lot with Kurt.
[00:38:32.690] – Speaker 3
You know, when you have a passion project and you know for sure you’ve got the best thing in the world, it’s really hard to just let it go. Right. But you, if you don’t have a willing audience, if they don’t recognize the pain point or, or they elevate themselves above thinking they need the training, it’s just not going to happen. And so, you know, props to you for recognizing and cutting it loose when you did. You’ve mentioned AI a ton, and obviously it’s the backbone of what you’re talking about today. But where do you see it? Like, there’s the Joe Rogan types that say AI is a God. In the next four years, it’s going to be thinking for us and running governments and all these things. And then there’s other people that go, no, AI is a fad. It’s going to go away. And I know that there’s somewhere in the middle of those two extremes that make sense, but where do you fall? Like, where do you think AI is going to help business, including your own, but then also for scrubs like me?
[00:39:32.000] – Ryan Robinson
Well, if we’re plotting a line graph here, right, to take us back to high school geometry, Joe Rogan’s over here. And the AI is dumb. Always will be dumbs over here. I am a little, I’m in the middle, right? So I’m definitely in the middle. I’m a little more on the optimistic futurist side, I’d say. I do think that there are going to be unpredictably cool and unique use cases as this stuff continues to develop. I don’t think in, you know, in four years there’s going to be a bionic man that’s living forever because everything will just be continually regenerated. I think some of that stuff is just like, if you zoom out and look at history technology, like there’s hype cycles and then there’s disillusionment cycles. And I think we’re, we’re just in such a unique hype cycle. Like, sure, it always feels different to the people who are going through it in the present, but how different is it really? I think it is different. Like, I think this is the first, perhaps version of self learning technology where we will have things that can teach itself and continue like learning at like an exponential level.
[00:40:43.100] – Ryan Robinson
So I think that that does throw some variables in here that we just don’t know how it’s going to go. But I think, like, things that are repetitive and don’t require a ton of like human feeling and creativity, those are the kinds of things that, at least in the short term, I think will continue to get better and better addressed by AI.
[00:41:08.480] – Speaker 3
I find my own opinion of AI to be constantly in flux. And in that regard, I’m really glad I’m a person that’s open to change. Like 18 months, 18 to 24 months ago, we were reporting here that Google was changing the rules, and if you had a lot of AI content, you were to get downgraded for SEO. And then suddenly it was like, no AI’s and everything. So now it’s how you going to downgrade stuff if it’s part of the stinking software that comes on your platform and then just trying to think about where it’s going, like, because they have their right, they’ve, what is it, Gemini? And then we’ve got OpenAI. So if they’re participating, who are they to downgrade the end product? If they’re participating, the tools to make it. And so it’s been really interesting to say, okay, so we know that people that can prompt well are going to do well for a certain span. But then there’s also the other end of the spectrum where a subject matter expert, an actual human, will bring a lot of value because they kind of fact-check or whatever the AI results.
[00:42:15.630] – Speaker 3
How? I’m asking you to be a soothsayer here. I’m asking you to be a futurist.
[00:42:20.390] – Ryan Robinson
But I got something for you.
[00:42:22.310] – Speaker 3
How do you see that future shaping for people who have skills?
[00:42:28.790] – Ryan Robinson
I think, essentially here’s what changed with the proliferation of AI. Video overnight just became so much more important than it ever has been before. And video has always been important. It’s been a fantastic way to educate and connect with people. For people watching this video, how much more connection do you feel to us than just reading a blog post? Right? Like, there’s such a different experience that other humans have when they know they’re interacting with another human, even if it’s just a one-way watching of a video. So I know that I find that personally as a consumer of video content, and I do not believe that AI will be able to comprehensively, perfectly pull off, you know, imitation video, let’s say in the short term, I think that there’s going to be small ways. There are editing tools, right, that can change the way your mouth moves and make it look like you are saying a different word if you have to edit a script. And there’s going to be use cases like that that I think will be useful. But as humans, we have evolved throughout tens of thousands of years, and we are pros at detecting things that feel unnatural and just look a little bit off, and maybe we can’t put our finger on it.
[00:43:52.490] – Jonathan Denwood
I get that reaction from a lot of people. So just a follow-up question about that. I know this will be surprising, Ryan, but I do think so. I’ve been thinking, with the Internet, we’ve had this enormous access to information. Wikipedia, what you used to have to just go to a library, a university library, or go to a public library and search for a number of books and read them and spend days. And, you know, the main thing about going to university was learning things by rope. Enormous assumption of facts. And you don’t have to do that now. What’s in your phone? You’ve got access to endless information from your phone. But what hasn’t happened is that I thought there was going to be an enormous explosion in people’s ability to learn things and become, but that hasn’t seemed to have happened. There seem to be a lot of people who don’t have many skills or feel they haven’t. Do you think is that something you thought about? Do you feel you want to comment on what I’ve just outlined? Only a small question. Right?
[00:45:32.510] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, the small stuff. This is the small stuff. No, I do believe this gets into some really interesting human nature stuff. So most people, myself included, it really hard to continue trying to learn a skill or process, technique, whatever, and go super deep into it. If you’re not genuinely, truly captivated, and interested in it, there is no way to fake that. And so you have to find ways to either, like, carrot yourself into a new skill that’s daunting and looks a little scary, but you gotta get through the front door and see if you’re enjoying it. Can this become like an act of creation? Like the ability to be creative with it, video editing, or whatever, you know, these things look like for you. But I do think that a lot of people are stuck in the consumption loop as well. So you’re going to watch, you know, you’re going to take a course and never actually take action based on it. You will watch a YouTube tutorial and never do something with it. You’re just on to the next, you know, video in your feed. And so I think there’s some really interesting stuff going on with human psychology and if I could get any advice on how to combat that, a little bit from my experience has been restricting use of my phone.
[00:46:54.690] – Ryan Robinson
And, like, I go through phases of not having social media, even on my phone. This is someone who, like, creates a bunch of content, right? I don’t consume that much. I still, like, listen to some podcasts that I’ve loved for a long time, and, like, the discovery of new ones is always interesting, too. But I really keep my consumption time to a super minimum each day. Like, I use the limits on the iPhone that are like, oh, you’ve got five minutes on Instagram. Make the best use of it, dude. And it helps a lot.
[00:47:26.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you. I think you touched something. The emotional side of learning. I think there’s a lot of emphasis on access and material quality, but I think you’re on to something there. The emotional side of learning. I think that’s what you were touching. I’m going to leave the last question to Kurt. So, Kurt, off you go.
[00:47:47.780] – Speaker 3
I finally have an excuse for why I can build websites but have no idea how the thermostat in my house works.
[00:47:54.260] – Ryan Robinson
That’s exactly it. You’re just not interested. Sorry.
[00:47:57.420] – Speaker 3
I’m just not interested. So if you had a time machine, either an HG Wells thing or, you know, the Tardis from Doctor Who, you could go back, like, magically, you could just go back to the beginning of your career. What advice would you give yourself, man?
[00:48:14.950] – Ryan Robinson
The first thing I’ll say is that I wouldn’t change anything because I’ve had to experience it and this really specific set of sequences. But if I could whisper some advice, I would whisper take video more seriously. If I could start. Could have started 1012 years ago by making a video first and then writing as a kind of supplement and redistribution another way for people to interact with me. I think that would have opened up just a ton of different opportunities that would have been so unpredictable. But now is always going to be the best time to start a video. So if you haven’t started it yet, try it out now. Maybe tomorrow.
[00:48:56.280] – Speaker 3
Excellent. Jonathan, do you have anything to finish up with?
[00:49:00.950] – Jonathan Denwood
No. Ryan, it’s been a pleasure having you in the show. I think we’ve had a very broad discussion, haven’t we? We covered a lot of topics, but my tribe says that’s what they like. So you’ve been a great guest. I think it’s been a great conversation. If you want to support the show, tribe, please share this interview on other social platforms and maybe consider joining the wptonic YouTube channel and subscribing to that. We will be back next week with our monthly roundtable show. We’ve got Jason Cohen, the founder of WP engine, as one of our special guests and somebody else I’ll probably rustle up. Jason’s always got some great insights, so it’ll be fantastic for him. Part of the roundtable panel. But we also got some fantastic guests in July. We’ll be back soon. See you soon, folks. Bye.
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