Ep 224: How To Create AI Content Google Loves & Will AI Kill Content Websites with Doug Cunnington

Jaryd Krause:

Is AI doing the opposite of what you think, and is it actually killing your progress? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast, and today I'm speaking with Doug Cunnington, who is a gun in the SEO industry. He's been featured all over the internet, including on Ahrefs, Empire Flippers, Niche Pursuits, Side Hustle Nation, and much, much more. Doug is also a Project Management Professional, coaches people on how to create great content using AI, is the creator of the Keyword Golden Ratio, and is a master at Internet marketing and course creation, especially for affiliates.

In this podcast episode, Doug and I talk about how AI is cool and can be used in our online businesses, specifically content creation, but why we're actually not doomed and why you need to stop fretting about all these new AI tools that are coming out. We also talk about how AI is actually going to make our online businesses better, and the rate at which it's moving, which is a lot slower than what a lot of people think because there's so much fear media out there around AI. And we then talk about the destructiveness of constantly learning and trying to be on the cutting edge of new AI tools that are coming out as an entrepreneur and how that can actually crush your progress, which I think is absolutely fascinating and something that you guys really need to understand.

Then we move into Doug's process for creating content at scale with AI that Google actually loves, the dangers of doing it at scale, and then the difference between doing it a little bit slower. Hint-hint, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, Doug is still using just writers for his own site, not just all-in on AI. So he does use AI but is not using AI at scale, which he talks about in the podcast episode. We also talk about how to actually add value to your content while using AI without fretting about it being SEO-friendly when you publish.

We also talk a lot about how we can improve our sites with AI, and why some speculation is just not good for us. And then, towards the end of the episode, we talk about some financial independence stuff, some things that I've gone through and learned about financial independence and Doug has another whole podcast on financial independence. So there's so much value in this podcast episode. If you guys are looking to buy an online business, specifically a content website, you're going to get so much value from this. So, enjoy.

Doug, welcome back to the podcast.

Doug Cunnington:

Hey, Jaryd, it's a pleasure to be here. It's good to see you again. It's been a little while, and I'm pumped to chat today.

Jaryd Krause:

Likewise, likewise. I reached out to you because I know that you've been putting out so much great stuff around AI, and we hadn't chatted. I didn't even know if you were doing interviews anymore, and I was like, "Let's see if Doug wants a chat. And yeah, you were up for it. So it's been cool just off-air, for people listening, Doug and I have been catching up on our personal lives, which has been great, and then we just organically started getting into AI. So I was like, "Well, yeah, let's just hit the record button.

So basically what you're saying to me, Doug, is that as you've freed up some space by working a little bit less, I do the same, and you said that you are able to have a bit more time to play around with tools, and you really have gotten a bit more excited with this AI stuff. So I want to talk about content creation and AI and your processes, how it's working for you, and how you are making it work. First, what are your thoughts on AI and everybody's fear around—oh, are we all doomed?

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah, I don't know. I have watched a couple interviews, some of the longer ones with people like Lex Fridman, I don't know if you check out his podcast, but he's interviewed some people that are very deep into AI, and they think literally the end of the world is pretty close. And I think that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. However, they're experts, so they have some pretty strong opinions.

For me, I think it's just fun to see the technology work in a way that can help us out and might be able to help our workflow. In our smaller world of content websites, I don't think it's the end of the world. I think it's interesting to be able to use the tools, and it's a great thought exercise and really learning experience to take the skills that we know from maybe SEO, content writing, or content creation in general, whether it's the written word, a podcast, YouTube, or social media. You can use these tools to do things better, faster, easier, or to save time, or maybe you can have your VA work on something different that really needs a human's touch versus some things that AI can do a really good job on.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, I'm glad you said that. A lot of people listening have just been able to stop holding their breath now because it's not the end for content sites or blogs. If it was, I'm sure that you and I would've pivoted a long time ago, and I'm very bullish that it's only getting better. And spot on, I agree with you. Like you've got some people that are experts in the space, but I think still, for my feeling, how I feel in the sense that I get, is when people do talk about this stuff and I haven't listened to that podcast or I don’t know who that person is, actually. I have listened to a lot of other podcasts, very intelligent thought leaders come up with speculations, and I haven't seen anything taken from a speculation back to where we're at today in a linear path on how it actually literally is going to make sense from how we get from where we're at today to that speculation.

So for me, the sense is like there's a lot of media and fear media, or fear sells, all right? So there's a lot of speculation, I believe, around it. There’re probably some truths to some of it but I'm very bullish on us not being in a position where we're all going to lose our incomes and our livelihoods because of content sites being changed dramatically in a very short period of time that we can't handle. What are your thoughts on that?

Doug Cunnington:

I agree. The other big part is the fear that I think some people have if they think, "Hey, I have a website, and now maybe ChatGPT or Google's Bard or Bing with ChatGPT integrated is all of a sudden going to answer all the questions. It depends on what kind of website you have. I think maybe on some websites you will run into a little bit of trouble. However, if you have a website where you review tech products, new ones come out all the time, so the data that the AI tools are going to provide is probably going to be a little bit out of date or potentially just wrong. So if you do play around a little bit, you'll quickly see that the information is often wrong. And it doesn't even matter what area or topic you pick, there are going to be mistakes, and if a person is not an expert in that area, they won't know that it's a mistake. The logic being, if they follow along with the AI tool's advice and it's wrong, they'll get burned once or twice, and then they won't trust it anymore.

So that said, we have seen a pretty serious acceleration in the progress of AI tools. I remember using Jasper like six months ago, and it was pretty much garbage. I mean, it was a little bit better than it was two years ago, but not that much better. ChatGPT made a huge difference, and I think if you use it in the right way, it can be a tool. But as far as our websites not getting any more traffic, people still need accurate information that someone looked over, and that will take whatever process it is that we're integrating on our site to publish content that's accurate.

And then as far as people just using the chatbots day to day, that could be something, but the fact is we're all in a little bubble of sort of high-tech leading-edge folks that are using things that are new and we're testing them. Most people are not using these, and they won't for a little while unless, say, Apple all of a sudden changes the default search engine or something like that, then we would all start using something different. But right now, I don't think change is going to happen super fast.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, I agree. And that's what people are worried about is super fast change. And to pick apart what you're mentioning about the inaccuracy of the data from these tools, to me, it only makes more sense to have an expert rewrite or at least edit the content that you may be generating from an AI tool versus when you may have hired a content writer, they're doing the fact checking prior to writing the content, and you could just have a little bit more hands-off approach when you’ve hired a writer and they just write the content and then publish it on the site with an editor in between as well, if you like. But I feel like even with AI tools, it cuts out a great portion of writer's block. That's the way I see it. It's really good to just eliminate writer's block, and it's even more important to make sure we have somebody, an expert now, making sure information is factual, in the lingo, in the language, and using the nuances of how people communicate in that certain niche.

I like your ideology around the tech space, how it moves so fast. Is AI and the data going to be able to keep up with it? Typically, I don't like tech sites because of the revolving amount of content that you need to continue to produce and then spending that money and resources on creating content that may not exist in the future. I don't feel it's the best use of finances for ROI.

Doug Cunnington:

I want to jump in really quick and completely interrupt you, but you mentioned something before, and I want to just hit a tactical thing really quickly. You can use the AI tools to write the content and then have an expert editor go through it and make sure it's factually correct. But perhaps a better way is to have the expert do the research, make sure all the input data is correct, so you have maybe a content brief, then you feed that into something like ChatGPT, and then you know all the facts are correct and you don't have any BS there. Then you save time. Then you don't need the expert to do the editing on the backend because the input data was correct.

So there's little things like that where we were doing things a certain way for a little while because it made sense to have the expert come in afterwards to double check. But now that it's better, at least the way things are right now when we're recording this, it makes more sense to go ahead and have the expert check it ahead of time. Now you can use ChatGPT to get a good outline and then maybe have the expert double check it and then feed it back in. But that will save a huge amount of time in general.

Jaryd Krause:

I love that you interjected there, and that's exactly why I got you on to talk about it in a bit more of a strategic and tactical approach on how you actually are creating content now using these tools and where you are using them in the flow of getting a piece of content, an idea, to a piece of content published on your site. So what is your process for creating content with these tools and team that Google loves, basically, and humans, of course, because humans come before Google.

Doug Cunnington:

So full disclosure, I'm not at a point right now where I'm publishing a whole lot of content. So technically, right now, I have a writer manually writing stuff, just like in the old days. She knows the niche a little bit. So just for full disclosure, that is what I'm doing. However, I have been coaching some people that are doing this, and I know other people that are doing this more at scale, which is a little bit dangerous because the tools can work faster than we can publish high quality data. But I will go over a few areas where you can use the tools effectively and have various touchpoints, whatever makes sense for your system.

The cool part, I think too, is that you could use ChatGPT, we'll just use ChatGPT for this case, but I played around with Bard, which is Google's tool, and it works pretty well also, not quite as sophisticated, but pretty solid. And I haven't used Bing as much, but I'm pretty sure that's limited. And technically, that's ChatGPT underneath the hood anyway.

So a couple areas. Number one, you can just do straight up keyword research and just say, “Give me 30 long-tail keywords in a specific niche and then put them into a content cluster.” Just yesterday I was doing a live stream and I thought, "Hey, maybe I can get a kind of project plan slash status table so I can have all those keywords put into a schedule. And I said, “Start it in a week.” I put in the actual date. You could say, like, whatever, “August 26th, 2023, publish two articles per week. Tell me what the article is. Put a status in there like started, not started, and then the specific date and what content cluster it belongs to and put it in a table,” and then it spit out the whole schedule for the next year or whatever.

Jaryd Krause:

Wow.

Doug Cunnington:

So pretty effective. And even if you know how to do that already, it saves you time typing. It would take at least a few minutes to create a spreadsheet that has all that data, and it did it in, I don't know, eight seconds, something like that. Pretty dramatic. So once you get the keywords, if you care, you can go to a keyword research tool, find the number of searches, and then prioritize however you want.

Jaryd Krause:

Keyword difficulty and all that sort of stuff depends on where your site is at in its level of authority.

Doug Cunnington:

Sure. You got it. And from there, you have the keyword, you have the cluster, you have a schedule, and you can get a very solid content brief after that. And one great way to do this kind of thing is to maybe look up what is in a good content brief. So you can feed a template into ChatGPT and let it know, "Here's what I'm looking for in a content brief. And you can give a couple of examples, and then it can understand what you've given it. You can say, “I'm going to give you these two or three inputs, this is the output I want. Here's one or two or three examples.” And it's very, very good at emulating and understanding what you want based on that sort of thing.

Jaryd Krause:

Great, great.

Doug Cunnington:

So I'll pause there because I talked a lot, and then you could ask some questions.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah, thank you. I would say I was going to ask around; in fact, I was just checking on keywords and which ones you actually wanted to use. I'm sure there are some that you can take out and swap around and put in the chronological order of how you want to start creating that content, which ones you want to try and publish first or get ranked first, and if so, why? Just purely based on the journey of the user taking them on that path.

And then, also, I was going to talk about, and ask you about checking the keywords for volume and keyword difficulty, but you mentioned that. So, yeah, I guess let's just keep going, and then I can break the pieces. So you basically got your content brief, and you got your keywords, so that's where we're at now, right?

Doug Cunnington:

Yep. And just to hit a couple of the points that you mentioned before. So you can use the keyword difficulty score in whatever tool you use. I'm pretty agnostic. Most tools are pretty good now as long as they've been kept up to date and are solid. And the KeyWord Golden Ratio is something I created a few years ago. It's a great way to really tease out the long-tail keywords in a data-driven way, which is a little complicated to talk about. So we can put a link in, and people can watch the videos. Luckily, it's held up for the last, whatever, six years or something.

Jaryd Krause:

I thought it was even longer since you published it. Guys, we've talked about the KeyWord Golden Ratio in other episodes that you guys can go and listen to as well, and there'll be links to that in their show notes. And also, in this podcast, we’ll link to it.

Doug Cunnington:

So going back to prioritization, I usually lean towards those long-tail, very low competition, very low search volume keywords in general, even for a site that's pretty well established, and I haven't tested it out in a few years. But in the last month and a half, I published, I think, 20 articles that are KeyWord Golden Ratio terms. And I think 15 of them ranked in the top five, and five of them were in the top 50. So pretty solid results overall. And it just sort of reaffirmed that it does work here, six years later, long-tail keywords work, they're very low competition.

So going back to the content brief, you can get the content brief and provide a template. ChatGPT will probably be able to give you pretty close to what you want. At that point, this is where I would fact check it and make sure it has the right information. Now, depending on the level of detail in the content brief template that you're trying to use, there might not be very much detail. That's okay. Because then you can go fill it in.

So, for example, let's say it's a product review article. You can go to the manufacturer's website, or you can go to Amazon. Just copy the data directly from whatever the specs are. And then put it into ChatGPT, or at least into your content brief. And then you know exactly what the details are, so you know that it's accurate. And at that point, it's perfect data. And then you can also hop over to the review section of Amazon and get some five-star reviews, some three-star, some one-star. So you have a mix in there of different user impressions. Now you may have to feed it in piecemeal because you could only put in so much data, but you kind of get the idea.

And the good part about ChatGPT is that you don't necessarily have to provide a huge amount of data. If you give it a couple of examples from each review, five-star, three-star, it will be able to figure out what's going on and make some pretty good assumptions about the quality of the product. If it's a camera and the battery life is bad, they'll see that noted a couple times, and they'll put it in there. And from there, it's pretty amazing how high quality the content brief or outline can be. And you can ask for tweaks. So if you see that maybe there aren't enough pros and cons or something, you could say, “Hey, can you give me more pros and cons for this specific product?”

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, great. So with that, basically, you're scraping content from other places and then feeding it into ChatGPT, and then you can have it rewritten into your own version, which works out well. And you are getting a writer, maybe a writer to do that for you? Or the people that you are working with, are they getting a writer to do that for them? And then what's the next step before putting it all together?

Doug Cunnington:

Sure. So, generally, people are not getting writers; they're just kind of doing this.

Jaryd Krause:

Oh, okay.

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah. I mean, they are publishing hard, and it's pretty amazing. I mean, they're publishing a huge amount of content, and they're not getting writers, they're getting editors now. So they'll have the content come through. They're not doing much of what we talked about before. They're having the editor check it afterwards. And I don't know how much fact checking they're doing. I think some of these are pretty general areas where the issues and incorrect information are few, so it makes it a little bit easier. And they're really just correcting grammar, formatting it, and stuff like that.

Technically, and I've only done this once, and I'll tell you the specific example, I got an outline from ChatGPT to write a blog post. And I published it verbatim, and it ranked number two. It's a very long-tail keyword, but it ranked second in a couple days. Since then, some competitors have hopped in, and they've written much higher quality stuff. So they've displaced me. It's still ranking at number five or number seven. But in this specific case, I actually recorded a YouTube video, grabbed my transcript, and then put that into ChatGPT. So if people were connecting the dots here, you could potentially go to YouTube, go to a good video, grab the transcript, and then ask ChatGPT to write a blog post based on the transcript. And it will be in someone's own words, right? I mean, you could put it in a different style.

Jaryd Krause:

Yoda?

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah. Don’t do Yoda. It's a little hard.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah. Or Jesus, or anything like that. But okay, cool. I wonder how that will look. I mean, it's going to be hard to detect plagiarism if you have it rewritten. But, yeah, it is an interesting strategy that can definitely be used.

Doug Cunnington:

And I think what I have noticed is that if you give it enough of your own input data, then it will be very specific to your voice. And that is one of the tips that I've seen a lot of times is to just have it written in a different style, and then maybe you ask it to rewrite it in a different style so it gets a couple rewrites, and you could pick well-known authors that do a good job . So like Seth Godin and Tim Ferriss. And then have it rewrite it a times, and then you end up with something that sounds pretty authoritative, and it's not in the default tone and style of ChatGPT.

Now, one other thing you could do is, if you've written a lot, or maybe, like you and I, we've recorded a lot of podcasts, we have transcripts. You can feed in your own style of writing or speaking and then say, “Always write in this style,” so then it will be in your own style. That's one thing that I had a hard time figuring out how to do. I thought it would be possible. And then, eventually, I figured out how to do it. And it's as simple as getting some of your blog posts and feeding them into ChatGPT and saying, “Hey, what kind of style is this? Always write in this style. Remember this style.” It's very simple.

Jaryd Krause:

I actually did play around with the tool to create emails and stories that I use. I use my email for Instagram. I tell stories about my personal life and then how that relates to business and the lessons that I learned—just a lot of philosophy type stuff. And I'll post images, GIFs and things like that. And I went to use ChatGPT to help me with some ideas and ways that I could start getting that to help me with my emails. And it just wasn't up to scratch. And what I did do is I said, “Can you take this story and write it how my name would write it?” And I hadn't fed it any of my podcast transcriptions or anything from my website, but it went and did a bit of googling and probably scraped some stuff. And then it sort of talked about passive income and things like that in the text.

So I have no doubt that the more data you feed it, the better it's going to get. And I know that William,who we're working wwith andwho's actually creating videos for BOB, he's been using the tool and training it to give the outputs that he actually wants that is just more in his style and more accurate,and more on brand. And this is where I start to get worried personally around do I want to feed this machine all of Jaryd and all of my IP and everything like that. And then, what, it's out there. I know it's already out there on YouTube and podcast land, but I don't know how it's going to be used or taken. So it's an interesting thing. What are your thoughts on that?

Doug Cunnington:

Like you said, I mean, the data is already out there.

Jaryd Krause:

We're too far gone.

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, there's thousands of hours. So yeah, they could fake almost anything. And I don't know, do you use Descript? Do you know that tool?

Jaryd Krause:

I know the tool. We don't use it.

Doug Cunnington:

All right. For people that don't know, this is a tool that you could feed either video or audio to, and then it'll create a transcript for you. It's pretty good. And then you could edit video or audio based on a transcript. So for podcasters, it's pretty cool. You can remove filler words, for example. Or it makes it easier to edit because you could edit the text, and then it edits the media files. So because AI is so good, one thing that you can do is feed it audio, and then it can learn your voice. Do you see where this is going, Jaryd? This is crazy. So I trained it on about 90 minutes of my audio, right? So you could do the same thing. Uploading a couple podcasts took about a day, and it learned my voice. Now you can just create a script in ChatGPT, feed it into the script, and then it will sound just like you. It is crazy.

Jaryd Krause:

I just had Greg Elfrink from Empire Flippers on the show. I think he wrote something. It was a blog post. And his friend went and took a lot of his audio and a lot of his video and deep faked him reading his own article as an AI, an AI version of Greg. And I had thought about that as well. And I was going to work with a tool and create a Jaryd AI where I just gave it all of my videos, all of my audio, my blog posts, and everything like that. And there is the option where people could ask me, Jaryd AI, questions, and it would answer them in a coaching sense. There's availability for that out there. And I noticed I was very close to doing it, but I just don't know how it's going to behave. And then who owns that AI, that Jaryd AI? Is it the person with the tool? Do they technically own it? Or do I own it?

And, yeah, that's getting a bit off track. So let's circle back to the pieces of content. Are you using ChatGPT or any AI tools to structure it in a way, SEO wise, before publishing? Or is that something that you sort of work out in the content brief that you have an editor look at before you get the context text from the AI?

Doug Cunnington:

So, generally, it would be in the content brief, or you can go and maybe ask ChatGPT, like, “Hey, what else should I include in here so that it ranks well in Google?” And we haven't said it here, but I do have a pretty strong SEO background. However, I'm one of those SEO types who likes to step away and take off my tinfoil hat and think, "Okay, does this make sense for the end user, the searcher that's trying to solve a problem? Or am I jumping through some weird hoops to make Google happy right now? And if it's the latter, I don't want to jump through any hoops. So I generally make the decision based on how it could help the user the best.

So with that said, I don't think as much about the SEO aspect as I do. Does this article make sense? Am I answering all the questions? Am I including pros and cons? Are there FAQs? If it's something that's more persuasive, if someone has an objection, can I go ahead and answer that objection? So I think maybe like a sales page or something. Go ahead and answer it, right? If you can get in the person's head, then it seems like you're a very good expert and you could already dispel any issues that they might have with those objections.

So from that perspective, you can use ChatGPT really effectively from the get go. As you're going through, you get the article. This is something that we can get into more as you have articles published. You can go to ChatGPT and then find where your gaps are. How can you improve the article? What objections do people have? Are there FAQs that you should include to make this a more well-rounded article?

So that's a really powerful way because a lot of us do have websites already. We have a ton of content. We can make great improvements. But let's face it. I mean, I have a to-do list all the time, and it's like, "Hey, improve that content. That's pretty boring compared to creating something new. So if you can get perhaps a VA to go through, put the article in, ask for tips for including more information, and fill in the gaps, then you save a huge amount of time.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And you are working on other high income-producing tasks if you're not creating new pieces of content.

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah. And one other thing related to it, I mean, let's say you have a pretty solid article. You can go and do some competition analysis and find the top five articles that are your competitors. You could put those in, do some analysis, figure out what the gaps are based on your article, and then pick the five best, and then it will tell you what you need to put in there. You could even get it to write it for you, but you could just get the bullet point, so maybe it's something highly technical where you actually need to put your expertise in there. Then at least you have the bullet points, and you know where you have issues that you need to take care of.

Jaryd Krause:

I'm a huge advocate for comparing or at least doing competitive research prior to creating a piece of content to see what they've done to get ranked. And is it just the article itself? Or is it also their level of topical authority and how well established their site is? Compare those, then break them down, and then take what you can to make your piece of content faster and superior than theirs and add different avenues of media.

There are a couple of directions that we could go here. One thing that I do want to mention is that I know agencies now that are testing out taking just the blog post, and having it read by an AI that sounds like a normal human being. You could have it in your own voice and just have it as an audio file on your piece of content so people can listen to it like a podcast or eventually in the future and probably even now have it watch a talking head, I guess.

So that's one thing that I see as how we should be evolving as bloggers or content site owners, is making sure people have different forms of media. And that's how we could use AI tools to ensure that our content can be consumed in the different ways that people may want to consume it. And that's not speculation. We’ve actually got a linear process on how you can do that now. How do you see it? How do you see content sites evolving?

Doug Cunnington:

I love that you asked this because I haven't really thought about it, but I had a revelation while you were asking. So do you watch YouTube and stuff?

Jaryd Krause:

I love YouTube.

Doug Cunnington:

Okay. I spent a little too much time.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. It's just surfing videos.

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah, yeah. And I'm into guitars a lot. So I'm watching all these slide guitar things. So my thought is that right now, this is pure speculation, but I think some of the technology companies are excited that they can do audio so someone could listen to it. My hunch is that if we're Googling something, we're probably on our phone, we're probably skimming, and we're at a store.

Jaryd Krause:

They want the information from us.

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah. I'm not going to listen to some robotic thing, even if it's in my sexy voice or yours, Jaryd, right? I'm not going to listen to someone read it, I'm just going to skim it. I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'm just trying to get a quick answer. That's my hunch most of the time. Not always, but a lot of the time.

So that's one aspect. So I don't think people are probably going to listen to it. Maybe a very small amount. And I think currently, even for dudes like us that like YouTube, if we see a video on someone's webpage, it's only 10% or 15% that actually watch the video. So a very low percentage even for people like us, right? You don't watch it too often on someone's webpage, right?

Jaryd Krause:

I never do. I'm just straight on YouTube.

Doug Cunnington:

Okay. So two data points. So it's not a scientific study. So that's one thing. The other part is you and I, Jaryd, we have awesome personalities, and if there's some robot behind it, even if they try to put it in our voice and it's AI versions of us, it's still going to be stale and artificial. And if it doesn't, even if it's not mimicking us, it will be even worse. And I've seen some of these, and again, I think the technology companies are excited that they can do it. But in the long run, I think video and audio are pretty safe.

Jaryd Krause:

I love that you say that because you're so spot on. And when I think about how humans connect, how are you going to connect with an AI that's perfect and robotic when we actually end up trusting people more based on the imperfections they do or don't have and their idiosyncrasies. Like you said, our personalities are what people will gravitate towards just as much sometimes as—well, I think they come for the information and the value, but they stay for how it's delivered. And so the delivery—you're so spot on.

I am agreeing. I do think that if in the future I'm on the phone and I'm in the store and I need an answer and I'm trying to look after my child and make sure they're not eating stuff off the rack and then Google can give me the answer in two sentences via audio, I think that would be helpful. But I guess people aren't going to listen to the whole thing. So Google or you could just take out different parts like schema, audio schema, and this is pure speculation. I don't know if this is yet available or going to be available, but I guess when we talk about this stuff, we speculate, right? And a portion of the things maybe 5% or 3% of the things will come into existence.

And this is my big qualm with the AI thing is there's so much speculation around it. Only a portion of it is going to come into existence, and then people end up listening to YouTube videos and podcasts and stuff like this and freaking out and spending and wasting so much time on things like, “Oh my God, should I even buy a business anymore? Should I even be in the online business game?” And they go into this doom cycle of, “I'm not going to be able to evolve with it” when the reality is it's moving so much slower than everybody's saying, right? And that's what I've seen on the ground, literally. People have been using AI Jasper stuff for two years. It's been available, but the news has just blown it up. What are your thoughts on the speed of this and people's fear around it?

Doug Cunnington:

I'm going to jump in because I'm promoting AI stuff right now. I basically ask, "Can we cuss?

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah.

Doug Cunnington:

So I shit all over Jasper and the other tools for two and a half years or so. And earlier, I mean, I still don't love Jasper, and people kept asking and asking, so I started testing, and it was not very good. And I'm one of the “affiliate marketers”. I just tell the truth because I don't need the revenue from the affiliate income. It is a great position, and it kind of frees me up to just say, “Hey, this is not that great; I'm not going to lie to you like everyone else.” So with that said, it was only in the last few months with ChatGPT that I was like, I can use this for some things. Everyone is freaking out. But it is useful for a handful of things, not everything.

So to your point and question around how quickly it's moving, I think I have been surprised at how there was kind of a new iteration and it really leaped forward. And I think, I mean, we may see a few more of those, but overall, I think a lot of it is YouTubers like myself. I'm guilty of this, right? I'm trying to get a handful of views too. So I'm publishing stuff. There are tons of channels that have popped up and websites and services that are trying to capitalize on this wave that's growing. And part of it, again, is that I'm a marketer, and I market some things sometimes, and there are some AI tools now that are a little more sophisticated, and I am promoting them.

The thing is, I think a lot of those are getting in our faces because marketers talk about them like we do. But I think some of them are just going to go away because, for example, I use the Google Suite of products, right? So in Google Docs and Google Sheets, soon there's going to be a little chatbot to help you out, and you won't need these external tools. So it's cool that people are doing stuff, they're building things, but they're going to be obsolete in six months, or something like that.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. It's such a good thing that you brought this up, and I mentioned this inside my community, behind the paywall, around the shiny objectness of this. A lot of people are like, “Oh, I need to stay up to date with it.” But the reality is that what's going to happen is that these bigger brands are going to take all these features, all these tools that other people have created in, say, six months’ time and just add that as a feature, right? And then people didn't need to spend that time fretting, stressing, worrying, and trying to stay up to date when you're going to learn about it from the bigger tools when it just pops up.

Doug Cunnington:

And I'm a big fan of either just-in-time learning or learning when it solves a problem for you. So I know I've had a couple students and folks that I work with, and they were like, “Yeah, I thought I needed to take a couple courses on this just so I could be aware,” which is a really bad reason to do it because they don't have a problem to solve. So even if they learn some things, they're not applying them right away. So they're going to forget it. And then whenever they do need to do that thing, which might be unlikely, they're going to have to go back and learn it again. So just-in-time learning makes sense here. And then it keeps you, I mean, if you can, whatever, stay off of Twitter, stay out of the speculation area, then it just kind of frees your mind. Are you on Twitter much?

Jaryd Krause:

No, I don't use Twitter at all. I don't use social media, to be honest. We have a social media presence for BOB. Love it. But actually, I will say I looked at TikTok because I was like, I'm going to get TikTok and check out how it works. And should we take some of their videos’ clips and put them on TikTok? I got on TikTok, and I spent three hours on the thing, and I was just in tears. There are some emotional things that are heartwarming, and then there are just some hilarious things on there. And maybe once a month, I'll just go on TikTok for two hours because it's just pure entertainment for me. But I know how addictive it is and how bad it is for mental health, and I'm big on my mental health. And yeah, I just don't. I just can't do socials because of that.

Doug Cunnington:

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not on Twitter very much. I have an account, but I hop in every, I don't know, two weeks. I deleted TikTok off my phone because it just ended up being ladies in swimsuits working out or something. I mean, it degraded really quickly. And then I'm on Instagram, but it's mostly just puppy videos and guitars. So I've refined it over there, and it's a positive thing. There's no comparison kind of stuff going on. It's cute puppies, couple guitars.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah. Feed yourself the good stuff. Doug, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, really appreciate it. I'm going to link to your KeyWord Golden Ratio. And also, where can we send people to your main site? Well, first and foremost, guys, check out The Doug Show. Check out his – I'm going to link to your YouTube channel.

Doug Cunnington:

Sure, yeah. So I wish it was a little simpler, but I'll lay it all out. So for some of the AI stuff that we've been talking about today, you can go to YouTube. I do some live streams, and there are some videos where I show exactly what I've talked about. I kind of talked over the details today, but you can look specifically and do the over the shoulder thing over there.

I also have a ChatGPT cheat sheet, which is a free resource. It's a five-pager. There's no fad there. You get access to some really cool prompts that I've found effective. One of them, which I have to mention, is a prompt generator. So you could just put in the title of what you wanted to do, say, an SEO expert for a camera blog. And then it will give you a prompt that you can create a chatbot for. So this is what I do. I created a chatbot dedicated to a specific thing. Maybe it's an SEO expert, or maybe it's a YouTube content expert. And it can help me come up with titles, descriptions, thumbnails, ideas, outlines for videos, and scripts. So you could train it to do exactly what you want and only that thing. So YouTube is for that kind of stuff.

You can go to Niche Site Project if you want to learn about affiliate marketing things, sign up for the email list, and get a handful of templates. And then finally, I have another podcast. It's called Mile High FI, and it's about financial independence and personal finance. So it's a totally different topic area, but that is probably what we're all trying to do is get financial freedom so that we can get our time back and do whatever we want.

Jaryd Krause:

Love it. Yeah. I know that you started Mile High FI probably over a year ago now, right?

Doug Cunnington:

Yes, it was almost two years ago.

Jaryd Krause:

Almost two years, okay. Wow, yeah. Look, I got into online businesses to become financially independent, and then I didn't know that this whole other FIRE movement—FIRE, for people who don't know, Financial Independence, Retire Early, so FIRE being an acronym for that—existed. And then I'm like, "Oh, I've been trying to invest in all these other things, online businesses, real estate, and stuff now, and I didn't know that there's a community of people that are sharing all this sort of stuff. I just went down one avenue. Are you much the same? You went down one avenue of just online businesses or blogs because of that.

Doug Cunnington:

Yes. I started in the side hustle area, so I had a corporate career for about ten years, and I got laid off and was kind of dabbling in side hustles, so I ended up in the entrepreneurship area. And then, around the same time, I was learning about financial independence, but I didn't pay too much attention. I like making money and starting things, and I slowly got integrated. And it turns out the Financial Independence, Retire Early group has a lot of similar values to entrepreneurs, especially bootstrappers.

So we want financial freedom, but one group tends to try to start businesses in the other group, not always, but often ends up trying to be frugal. Sometimes we entrepreneurs end up being frugal so that we can invest in our business, and maybe we drive an older car or something like that. There are a lot of overlapping values, but a lot of times we hang out in different circles. So you and I kind of have our feet in both areas, which I think is kind of the right way to do it. There are some things that I don't spend much money on and don't care about. And then there's other things that I care a lot about, like the guitars I keep talking about, and I'll spend some money on a guitar, and you probably have a couple surfboards, right?

Jaryd Krause:

More than a couple, yeah. But yeah, exactly, I think that's a very important point to make is that I was very, very frugal for a long period of time because I wanted to decrease my expenses and I wanted to travel longer, so I didn't spend too much money traveling. And I had a partner that I was with that actually helped me recondition myself to be okay spending money on the things that absolutely gave me so much fulfillment. And there's one thing there in the FIRE space, and this is very general, not picking on people, but the ideology that you should just be frugal up until a certain point. You can miss out on a lot of things that are very valuable, valuable in terms of fulfilling you and maybe amazing experiences such as travel and things like that, when you are trying to get FI (financial independence) really early.

But I guess we could talk about this all day. So, guys, make sure that you jump on over to that podcast there. It is the Mile High FI Podcast, and I'll put a link to that as well. So, yeah, Doug, thanks so much for coming on.

Doug Cunnington:

Thank you.