Good Neighbor Podcast Northport
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of Tuscaloosa and Northport!
Good Neighbor Podcast Northport
Revolutionizing Website Creation: Todd Sobel's Vision at AI Web Magic
In this episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast, we dive into the fascinating world of AI solutions with Todd, a the owner and innovative mind behind AI Web Magic. We explore the impact of major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo on web traffic and discuss the potential for change in the tech landscape. As we navigate the conversation, we ponder the future of tech giants and whether they are too big to fail, drawing parallels to past antitrust cases like Microsoft's.
Todd shares his insights on how AI can revolutionize businesses, providing practical solutions for companies looking to optimize their operations. He also reflects on Google's growing dominance and its implications for the internet at large. Throughout the discussion, we emphasize the importance of diversifying our digital strategies to avoid over-reliance on a single platform.
Whether you're a tech enthusiast or a business owner curious about AI, this episode offers valuable perspectives on the ever-evolving digital landscape. If you're interested in learning more about how AI can benefit your business, Todd invites you to reach out via email at todd@aiwebmagic.com or visit their website AI Web Magic. Tune in and discover how AI can be a game-changer for your business!
#GNPBirmingham #AIWebMagic #AIBusiness #TechInnovation #DigitalMarketing #SearchEngineOptimization #AIforBusiness #PodcastEpisode #GoodNeighborPodcast #TechTrends #FutureOfTech #SmallBusinessGrowth
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Patricia Blondheim.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. I'm your host, patricia Blondheim, and today we have good neighbor Todd Sobel, and Todd is the founder and the owner of AI Web Magic here in Birmingham. Todd, how are you today?
Speaker 3:Doing very well. Thank you Yourself.
Speaker 2:I am doing terrific and you and I have had talks offline about AI and we're both really excited about it. Obviously, it's your business. Can you share your journey into the world of AI and how you began integrating it into digital content solutions for businesses?
Speaker 3:I would love to. I've loved AI since, I mean, alexa came out and I guess Alexa with the now I just tripped everybody's Alexas at home right now, so I apologize, but since the Amazon echo came out, I I guess that was the beginning of discovering ai to me, which it still is in a way ai, because it still has your answers, it's still going to a database, it's still getting everything. So that was my beginning of loving it. But then, when chat gpt came around, that was just that's just a game changer and I think people tend to forget it's just not even a year and a half old, or barely a year and a half old since we've been using it. So just at the distance that has come in a year and a half has just been absolutely amazing. So, yeah, I've been a big lover of AI and the AI stuff for a long time now.
Speaker 2:So give me a sort of outline about what it is that you do with AI. We're in the wild, wild west a great, huge frontier and you've selected a small slice of the pie.
Speaker 3:Tell me about your slice of the pie, all right. So my business and my business concept is with AI. If you want a website built, it used to take a lot of employees and it used to be really hard I would need a photographer back in the day to come out and take photos of your place good photos because everybody's just going to give me their iPhone photos and those are not going to be good photos. So, and then I would need a copywriter and that was the hard part Somebody to actually write all the stuff about your company and I don't need that anymore. I don't even need to give you I don't even need to give you any images, but if you give me poor images, I can at least upscale those in AI and use AI to make them the size I need for a website. So many times I'll build a website and somebody will just give me a thumbnail picture. I can have AI fill in the edges of those pictures now. So that is a huge help. And then with the copyright, I can have AI fill in the copyright on your website and then we can go back and change what you want. But I'd say nine times the time people make barely any changes because the copyright on the website is already so good.
Speaker 3:And then we use the ai. Unless you're in the medical field or unless you're a lawyer. We don't use the ai for that, because it still makes mistakes and on that the mistakes matter. But if you're a roofer, if you're a plumber, if you're a landscaper, it doesn't matter so much if the mistakes are small on ai, but it definitely matters. Mistakes are small in ai for something medical.
Speaker 3:So we we being me um have programs and we'll go out and write a blog post every single day for your website. So every day we're updating your website and that way Google or Bing or the search engines know that you're still in business. So many websites are put out there and they're old and stale. They haven't been updated, they haven't been touched in three years. So they and I know the stats good because I just checked it there are 33 million businesses in America. So how are the search engines going to know who's still in business? You have a website out there. They're not going to know if you're in business unless you update it. And that's what we do. We update it and we're really after the headline. We just want mainly the headline on the main homepage. So when the search engine comes and crawls it, they see that it's changed and that's how we're using AI.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of people don't understand what you know, what you just spoke about, which is how Google, which is the main search engine not notwithstanding the antitrust lawsuit is the main, it's the main search engine, how it indexes businesses using not only the consistency of your listing information, but also your website itself. It judges you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it judges you. Whenever they send out the bots to judge you, they're judging you.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Their business is providing accurate information to their customers. So if you can make it that you're the accurate information, then they'll use you. They're basically just using your website just to feed their customers. You're the product that they're delivering to their customers, so you want to make yourself as relevant to them and as useful to them as possible, so you want to make yourself as relevant to them and as useful to them as possible.
Speaker 2:Right, and the general attractiveness of your website has to do with how new, not how old it is, but how new it is, how fast it is, how well your programming is Even the small bits inside that you might not be aware of, google gets in there and checks them and how often you change images inside of your website.
Speaker 3:And what a lot of people don't know which this has nothing to do with me your Google business profile. You've got to update your Google business profile. When somebody leaves you a review, a good review, you have to respond. I know people just respond to the bad reviews and defend themselves, but you have to thank them for the good reviews as well. And you can use AI. I mean, we use AI for some of my customers and AI just automatically responds to the reviews. So it'll like say thank you, tony, for the great review. We hope to see you in our restaurant soon again. So you don't need to do it yourself, you would have AI do it for you. But that's important to respond to those and update your Google profile.
Speaker 2:Yeah, across all the platforms, because there are many places that people can leave a review for you.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately true.
Speaker 2:So and often the people who leave reviews on the most, on the most lightly trafficked web web spots. We're going to call them web spots because I'm making up words now, okay.
Speaker 3:I like web spots.
Speaker 2:Web spots is often there are people who who don't want you to do well, so maybe a competitor, maybe someone in the same industry in a different state who's trying to move into the region. You're not going to know about it necessarily that these have come across. You're not necessarily going to be on your desktop so that you know that they're there, but Google will know. True.
Speaker 3:Yes and they want yeah and exactly.
Speaker 2:What they want is they want to take down your ranking and to be vigilant about the quality of your website and the quality of your content, and then to be responsive to the things that are happening online is key, and so that's what you do, right?
Speaker 3:That's exactly what I do.
Speaker 2:So can you walk us through a real-world scenario where AI significantly improved a business's digital content strategy?
Speaker 3:Yeah, Actually I got a real. How about if I give a real-world scenario where it hurt somebody's strategy? Can I?
Speaker 2:say that oh perfect, yeah, that's always more interesting.
Speaker 3:All right. So I had a guy who wanted me to build him a website in New Hampshire. He was a private detective, okay, and he did. I actually do a lot with process servers and private detectives and that kind of stuff, so he's a private detective. He wanted me to build him a website. So I said I'll be happy to, I will. I he his. His domain name was, let's just say it was gibsonwixcom, so it was a Wix website.
Speaker 3:So, like a moron, I didn't get paid up front for some reason, I don't know why, dot Wix dot com. So it was a Wix website. So, like a moron, I didn't get paid up front for some reason, I don't know why. Normally I take half the payment up front and it's not much so. But I went ahead and bought his domain name and put out a website for him and I had AI updating it every day. He loved the website, but he didn't return my calls after a while and I'm like, well, it comes time to get paid. Wouldn't return my calls, wouldn't return my texts, wouldn't return my emails, wouldn't return anything. But the website was still up there, but instead of being like gibsonwixcom, it was gibsondetectiveagencycom.
Speaker 3:Google picked up my website website replaced his business profile from his wix site to my site, since mine was updated and more accurate, and removed his wix site from any part of google. So therefore my site was the only site left which I was not aware of. So I'd message him saying look, my site's ranking really well. Would you like to get it or I'm going to resell it? Never responded, so somebody else from the state called me and wanted a website. They're also private detective. So I said perfect, I already have a site. Just it's already built, just take a little monthly payments for it. So I just changed out the names, but Google still had it as his site and that other domain was still pointing towards the new site.
Speaker 3:Oh, so he's getting this other fellow's traffic as well 100% of it, and the other fellow is not on Google at all anymore.
Speaker 2:Oh, that hurts me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the other fellow called me quite irate and I'm like you know. I know I think I'm good. I didn't know I was that good, like I knew it mattered. But I'm sorry you wiped out. I actually wound up helping them out and saving them a little bit, but anyway, so it really works. They like it updated, they like content, they like new information and every time I add content, every time I add a blog post to a website, that's a new page. So, doing a blog post every day, after a year your website's already just added 365 days. I mean 365 pages. So your website's growing every single day and giving Google and the other search engines more content every day to search and Google's going to start to go toward you and not away from you, knowing that it can be fed.
Speaker 2:It's like plumbing, right, you've got to think about your website and your digital strategy as plumbing for your business. You would not have a home without water flowing to it. That's how important it is.
Speaker 3:It's very true. Yeah, you're better at pitching this than I am.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. I happen to be really excited about AI myself and I use it a lot, but I mean, let's talk about that. What are some of the most common AI tools or technologies that you use when developing solutions for your clients?
Speaker 3:Well, first I would start with ChatGPT. I'm going to use that first because it's the oldest and it's still really good, bard, I mean, even if somebody wants to just dip their toe into it, into learning about it, and they have a Facebook account. Facebook, I think, metaai. With your Facebook account, you can just practice with AI and see what it can do. So you can do that, and then I'm going to get the images.
Speaker 3:So I'm either going to use Photoshop's AI to help me with the images and fix the images you have, or I'm going to go to Midjourney and get some other images, especially if you're a landscaper. If you're a landscaper, I'm using mid journey all day long because I'm getting beautiful landscaping images. If you do stone retaining walls, there's no way the picture you give me of a stone stone retaining walls can be better or higher quality than the one I'm gonna get for mid journey, and that is just something that I would have had to send a photographer out. You know, you've just been spending $1,000 on images for that, just for your retaining walls, just to drive to your different jobs.
Speaker 2:And MidJourney is a fantastic image. Ai, oh, and getting better every day. I love how, when you use these platforms every day, you can see it getting better.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, that's true. I feel like Photoshop's AI has gotten a little worse over time. Yes, don't ask me how? But it's gotten worse. It feels like it's being throttled in a way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just not as good even the stuff I used to be able to do on it. It's just not as good, even the stuff I used to be able to do on it. It messes up now more than ever. A prime example of just how I used AI to save me a lot of time yesterday is I was building a site for a liquor store. He had a list of beers he carries craft beers all just down a list. I didn't want to read the list, I just copied the list, went to chat to BT and said how many beers are on this list? 153. So something that would have taken me probably four minutes took me four seconds.
Speaker 3:So, that's just an idea of how it speeds, how it speeds things up. But what I'm really excited about and what I'm working with now and they're just coming out now it's just getting good is AI videos, because I could add videos to a website all day long and make the website look really pop. I can put in the headers, I can make it look really nice. So these AI videos are just now getting great, not great getting good. We're probably in a couple years or maybe even a year, the way this is moving. You won't be able to tell if somebody did video something or just had it done in AI, probably within a year. So that's what I've been working with now is these AI videos. I'm really excited about them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you get into this whole sort of paradigm of and this is this kind of a media driven trope Deepfake technology, right? Oh yeah. So with AI becoming more prevalent, what ethical considerations do you take into account when you're developing AI-driven content solutions?
Speaker 3:Well, I don't know how to answer that, because I don't think I'm doing anything unethical. Yeah, so I'm not.
Speaker 2:But I think we're dealing with the perception that AI can drive unethical behavior.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I just turned down those clients, like if you wanted me to build you a website and slam another, say a politician wanted to do something against another politician.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I know I might think about it, considering some of the politicians out there. No, I'm kidding, it depends on the politician right.
Speaker 2:I don't know yeah.
Speaker 3:No, I I'm not going to go down that road. I'm not going to tug on Superman's cave and mess with that kind of stuff. So I'll turn down those clients who want the unethical AI stuff. They can go do that, figure that out by themselves.
Speaker 2:So can you? I'm kind of driving you to a different place right now. Can you share a success story where your AI-driven solution has had maybe a measurable impact on a business's content strategy?
Speaker 3:Oh, totally Like I've had right now I have a. Yeah, let me tell you basically how I charge. I charge $600 to build a website.
Speaker 2:Oh it's cheap.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, that's what the thing is. We used to charge $3,000. Yes, we don't have to anymore. And it used to take us over a month to do a website. And now it takes. I can have, if somebody calls me right now. I can have a nice, beautiful website up there in three weeks, three days, I'm sorry, three days.
Speaker 3:And we're going to change things once it's up, but we can get it up there and we can get it looking great. So, and you know it was when I say 3,000, 3,000 was a low end for a website, but we had all these employees we had to pay. That we don't have to worry about now. We had the overhead we had to do. You know, everybody had an office back there. We don't have to have an office anymore. So all that is overhead off the top. So and that's one thing I don't understand, when AI came out, uh, some website companies out there they didn't lower their prices.
Speaker 2:Their prices, their, their overhead went down, but they didn't lower their prices any I don't think a lot of the media agencies are staying with where it's at right now, but they're using ai you're right right yeah, yeah, but they haven't gone down any.
Speaker 3:They're paying less, so, um. But a prime example is I have a window fashion company and they're paying $5,000 a month to their old company that did their website. $5,000 a month, that's not even with Google advertising.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That was just for content, just for digital strategies.
Speaker 2:That's a lot, that's really a lot.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. They're paying me $100 a month. That's what I charge for the AI to update your website every day and for the updates on your website. It's $100 a month.
Speaker 2:So it's the world's cheapest webmaster.
Speaker 3:Yes, I like being called a webmaster. I am the webmaster, I'm the webmaster, I am the webmaster. I was never a master of anything else, so I'll at least be a webmaster. So yeah, they went from $5,000 a month to $100 a month, and their Google ranking has not been affected at all. Now they've only been with me for a few months now, so they haven't risen yet either.
Speaker 2:It takes a while for Google to index you and bring you up in the rankings Exactly. I'm sure it's happening.
Speaker 3:But I'm very excited that they switched and didn't go down at all. I mean, that's a big statement right there. So back in the day, you would have gone down if you switched servers, yeah, but it hasn't had an effect. So that's a major success story. And then I can't wait to see where they are in a year. Hopefully they'll go up and they'll have the next 60 grand in their pocket. Maybe I should charge them some more.
Speaker 2:No, I'm not kidding you. None of these agencies have brought their cost down to the consumer.
Speaker 3:No, no, and they're going to get hammered for it, I think.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's because it's invisible. It's so good that it's invisible. They don't know that you're just issuing sophisticated prompts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and on the other hand, too, they're not. I'm talking to another company right now, a flooring company, and they want to make a change on their website. The change doesn't get made for a month because these companies just got too big. Yeah, they have too many employees and they don't know who's supposed to make the change.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:When you know you call up here. I know who's making that change it's going to be me.
Speaker 2:Right, right, you're. Actually I've gone from webmaster. You're the key master because you've got all the passwords. I mean in such a short time. It's gone from who has the password and that's the person who's able to go in and physically make changes and eventually like losing your passwords and being frozen in time, which is like that's like the hand cranked automobile. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3:Yes, good point.
Speaker 2:To suddenly we're all driving Lamborghinis.
Speaker 3:I might have you do a commercial for me. You're great at this.
Speaker 2:I am a marketing professional.
Speaker 3:I can definitely tell.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's finish out with advice, right? What advice would you give to business owners who are hesitant about integrating AI into their digital content strategies?
Speaker 3:There's nothing to be hesitant about more anymore. That's like the Luddites being hesitant about sewing machines. You have to do it. You have to update your website. You cannot just leave your website out there anymore. You can't just make a website and say, all right, it's made. You've got to be doing it. You've got to be updating it constantly. You've got it. That's another thing I don't understand. I see some websites. If Google's out there with Google reviews, if you have Google reviews and you're not putting those on your website, put them on your website. And those we could put coding on your website or those even update. When somebody leaves you a new review, we can update it on your website. So that's just. That's another thing. Google can control your website for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can insert code into your website. I mean, you have to do it, you know, by hand. These are air quotes that no one can see. But now you can insert code so that AI puts it in there for you, right.
Speaker 3:Right, and the same AI that puts it in there can respond, can respond to them as well. The reviews yeah, so that's that's just what I'm saying to the people who aren't doing this. Someone else is your competitor is your competitor is and it works.
Speaker 2:And Google loves it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know Bing loves it too, and people seem to forget I mean Bing's, what 3% of traffic? But it's still traffic coming in, right it?
Speaker 2:still helps. Yeah, bing is huge. Yahoo Bing, all the other search websites, they all love it too. Yahoo Bing, all the other search websites, they all love it too. I guess we have just started using Google as the proper noun for the internet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do too I need something for myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not right. We're feeding into the whole antitrust sort of big Google monster machine.
Speaker 3:I wonder where that's going to go. I'm pretty excited to see where that goes.
Speaker 2:I know there's going to be some sort of change, or is it too big to fail now?
Speaker 3:No, remember they did.
Speaker 2:The Microsoft it's not too big to fail Right.
Speaker 3:They can break it up, they can do what they want to do.
Speaker 2:Well, Todd, how can our listeners reach out to you if they're interested in learning more about AI solutions for their business?
Speaker 3:our listeners reach out to you if they're interested in learning more about AI solutions for their business. Oh, I hope they do. You could email me, todd at aiwebmagiccom, or visit our website. Contact us for them.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I will link to that in the description below. And, todd, it's been a lot of fun and I'm sure I hope this is the first of many conversations, because I am totally into what you're doing. Well, I hope this is the first of many conversations, because I am totally into what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Well, I love talking about it, so it's one of my favorite subjects All right. Thanks a lot.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPBirminghamcom. That's GNPBirminghamcom, or call 205-952-0148.