Why Your Business Needs to Be Blogging (Even in an AI World) | Ryan Robinson

Is blogging still worth it for businesses today?

In this episode of The Website Growth Show, we break down why your business needs to be blogging, even in a world dominated by AI, video, and declining organic clicks.

Ryan Robinson shares real, experience-backed insights from over 15 years of blogging, building businesses, and adapting through every major shift in SEO, content, and search. This conversation is especially relevant for business owners who feel blogging no longer works or are unsure where to focus their efforts.

Rather than chasing traffic alone, this episode explains how blogging now supports trust, authority, video content, email lists, AI discovery, and long-term business growth.

If you are a consultant, coach, service business owner, or professional brand wondering whether blogging still matters, this episode will give you clarity and a realistic path forward.

🔍 What You’ll Learn

• Why your business needs to be blogging in today’s AI-driven search landscape
  
  
• What blogging looks like now compared to 10 years ago
  
  
• Why text-only blogging is no longer enough
  
  
• How blogs support video, AI tools, and authority building
  
  
• Why publishing AI-only content does not work
  
  
• How blogging acts as training data for AI and search engines
  
  
• The role of blogging in trust, credibility, and conversions
  
  
• How to use blogging to support services, products, and email growth
  
  
• Why quality matters more than publishing volume
  
  
• Common blogging mistakes businesses still make
  
  

👤 About Ryan Robinson

Ryan Robinson is a long-time blogger, content strategist, and founder of RightBlogger. He helps business owners and creators build sustainable businesses using blogging, video, SEO, tools, and email rather than relying on short-term traffic tactics.

⏱️ Optional Timestamps

00:00 Is blogging still worth it for businesses
 01:10 Why blogging feels broken today
 03:00 Ryan’s 15-year blogging journey
 07:05 What blogging looks like in an AI world
 09:40 Why businesses need video and blogs together
 12:25 How blogs train AI and search engines
 16:40 How long blog posts should be today
 19:15 Quality vs quantity in blogging
 22:00 Updating and refreshing old content
 25:50 Why informational traffic is declining
 28:00 What type of content still works
 33:45 The role of email lists
 38:30 Common blogging mistakes
 46:30 How to start blogging today

📌 Subscribe for Weekly Episodes On

• Website growth
  
  
• Blogging for business
  
  
• SEO fundamentals
  
  
• Content strategy
  
  
• AI and search
  
  
• Sustainable marketing systems

#blogging #podcast #websitegrowth

Transcript

0:00

In an AI world, is it still possible to make money from a blog or grow a business? 100 % it's still possible. However, you have to be making video content these days because people want to see you. They want to feel what your vibe is like. And if they're going to buy something from you, video is such a good way to just build that trust more naturally. Do you have any secret formula that what people can do to appear on these searches? Think of your website as now you're training. algorithms. Your website is your living portfolio. It's your representation of you, your service, who your business is online. And so it's your training material for the AI LLM. So I really say build a business and use your blog, use content. Think of it as content, not just blogging only. Build a business, use content as a way to bring people into your business, to attract and to retain your audience. So I still see people all the time. trying to create blogs and publish almost all AI content. And then they hit me up a few months later and they say, Hey Ryan, why am I not seeing any traffic? And I go look at the blog and I'm like, dude, I read one sentence and I could tell that this was totally AI generated. Why do you feel like you deserve traffic to this content that I could have created clicking one button? So what is the new formula of blogging success for those people who have businesses? Website traffic has dropped, Google barely sends clicks anymore and after all the time spent writing, the return just isn't there. That frustration is real, especially for business owners who were told blogging would grow their business. But now, feel like the rules have changed overnight. Today's guest, Ryan Robinson, has lived through every shift in the content world. He started blogging in college, kept going for 15 years and built a career, clients and multiple businesses from the skills he learned along the way. Even as the old SEO book stopped working. Ryan is one of the few people who truly gets what blogging looks like today. He has adopted, evolved and found what still works in a world of AI, video and collapsing site traffic. If you're wondering whether blogging can still grow your business, Ryan is here to show you the answer and the path forward. and Ryan welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. I'm so looking forward to learning from you how to make money or grow a business through a blog. But before we jump into these hot and spicy questions, can we start? How did you start blogging? I started way back in college and I have to give credit and props to my internet marketing professor that's gonna kind of date me a bit back to like 2009 here. But my internet marketing professor, the first thing we did when we sat down the first day of class, he said, all right, everyone, pull up your laptops. We're gonna register a domain name. And that was the day my blog was born. And through that class project, you know, we... We blogged about our experiences as we were learning marketing and, you know, fast forward 15 more years into the future and here I am today, but it has been a really fun journey. Amazing. So I think this is the first time I heard someone saying that their professor taught them something about internet. Usually it's other way around. Kids teach their professors about the internet. That's fantastic. And the college professor introduced you to the blogging. And you love so much that you're still doing after 15 years. It's gone through a lot of iterations and evolutions, I would say, a lot from necessity, some out of joy and creative expression. But yeah, I'm still doing a version of it today because it really does. Blogging still supports all of my different businesses that I'm running. So I've found a way to make it work. amazing and this is the way we are looking forward for our listeners so how they can make money through blogging and growing their business. So what is your favorite part of the blogging? These days, I enjoy making videos the most, honestly. And so to me, like I have so much more fun, like getting intimate with the camera, doing creative stuff, having multiple camera angles and getting nerdy about my scene and my setting. And so if I look at any common theme throughout my journey, it's have fun with the process. And 10, 15 years ago, that was pretty strictly blogging, just writing. long-form content designed to drive SEO traffic and tell fun stories at the same time. But today what's holding my interest more is making videos. And so I make primarily videos and then inside right Blogger, my SaaS company, we make tools for bloggers and content creators. And so one of my most popular tools is the video to blog tool. It takes all of all the videos I make, automatically generates long-form optimized blog post from my actual words in the video. I'm still finding ways to blog even though it's generally fueled mostly by videos today. Excellent and when you started blogging, when did you realize that it become a full time thing for you? Ooh, I would say I really got full time with it in 2018, 2019, but since my very earliest days, like 2010, 11, 12, when I was kind of graduating from college, I was already using my blog as a vehicle to get myself work. It just didn't look like earning, you know, tens of thousands a month from affiliate commissions or selling courses back then. I use my blog as a tool to get freelance clients. I was a marketer by trade. That's what I went to school for. It's what all my first jobs were. And so I'd publish content that basically was a living work sample of what I could do for other companies. And then I'd start reaching out and some of them would hire me. So I was making money blogging pretty early on, I'd say, my journey after a couple of years. And then that eventually just became more like the affiliate program revenue. selling courses, selling membership communities, doing much more like hands-on stuff, teaching blogging as I learned how to grow my own audience. And then all of a sudden people were asking me, Ryan, how did you get to 50,000 readers a month? Teach me how to do that. And so that's kind of really around 2018, 2019 when it became a full-time thing for me. Excellent. And at that time, did you have any inspiration? You were looking at someone who had done it and you thought if you keep doing, you can achieve that kind of success? totally. gotta, know, bloggers, stand on the shoulders of giants, right? And the giants in these industries, people like Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, I loved Darren Rowse at Pro Blogger 2, Copy Blogger, Copy Hackers, there's Joanna Wiebe. There's so many people, I can't even like name them all, but I've been super fortunate enough to start a podcast back before podcasts were kind of really, really popular and so. I got to interview all my blogging heroes. Everyone that I looked up to in the industry was on my show. And so I got to tell their stories and have fun with it too. Excellent. All these names which you mentioned are great examples of blogging successes. On this note, so the real topic of today's discussion is, in an AI world, is it still possible to make money from a blog or a grow business? 100 % it's still possible. However, what a blog looks like today is different than what it looks like 10 years ago. A successful blog today pretty much has to incorporate some sort of video content element. And more than anything, you need to have an existing business behind the blog. You can't just publish long form listicle SEO content and hope to drive affiliate revenue through that. Maybe you can carve out a little bit of a niche or something in this space and make a few thousand dollars a month or something like that. I'm not gonna say it's impossible, but it's really, really competitive to drive that affiliate revenue from SEO traffic today. And that's kind of what blogging was for a really long time. And so today, what I see working from my blog, from other bloggers that I know, is the people that have some sort of underlying business behind the blog, whether it's coaching, consulting, selling courses, offering some sort of agency service or freelance service, having your own software products. AI is great at helping you build software tools now. And so there's a lot of ways that you can monetize your audience. And that's the real common theme here. Don't get too hung up on a blog needs to be written content only, that just doesn't work anymore. In a world where people can turn to chat GPT for pretty much any answer they want, and a lot of those answers, they're gonna be shallow, surface deep. But if you're consistently educating people over video and text content, so still publishing blog posts because the LLMs, they like to learn from written content on a page. So it does still serve a role, but... You have to be making video content these days because people want to see you. They want to feel what your vibe is like. And if they're going to buy something from you, video is such a good way to just build that trust more naturally. Excellent. So the first main change is you can't rely on the text only anymore. You have to create videos, other images. So that's the first thing. The people listening who have existing businesses like coaches, consultants, maybe professional accountants and lawyers, these type of people. Usual blogging formula was pick a niche, create better content than your competitor. get some link and you are in business. But is that still working or what is the new formula of blogging success for those people who have businesses? It's no longer that simple. It's kind of the key takeaway here. But those aspects still do have a positive benefit for your website as a whole. think of your website as now your training algorithms. Your website is your living portfolio. It's your representation of you, your service, your business is online. And so it's your training material for the AI LLMs out there. Teach everything. that you can about who you are and what you do, what you offer to chat GPT essentially through the content on your website. And so everything you just mentioned, publishing content that's better than your competitors, building backlinks to it, having a website that loads fast, looks good, is a strong representation of you and your brand. Those are all still important, but they're not gonna move the needle in the same way that they used to. You still need to like layer in these other things like making videos and you know, the good thing about making videos and publishing them online is that YouTube is an entire search engine of its own. It's the second largest search engine in the world. And so it's a discovery platform. It's also a credibility platform and publishing shorts on all the social platforms like the TikToks, Instagrams, LinkedIn's of the world. It can very quickly get overwhelming, but I would just recommend choose the one or two social platforms where you know your target audience spends their time online and then focus on publishing content there. Excellent. And you touched upon on teaching algorithms to appear on AI searches. So do you have any secret formula that what people can do to appear on these searches? Yeah, now we're getting into the good stuff. There's a tool inside right Blogger that you can try for free. You can make a free account and use this tool. called the AEO tool, the Answer Engine Optimizer tool. And essentially what it does, you could get this from ChatGPT too. You could just ask ChatGPT to generate some key takeaways for you. So things that the AI LLMs really, really like. They like to see somewhere in the introduction of your content near the top of your page. Have a key takeaways section, something that's SEO rich for the headline. So if you're writing about, you know, how to make money blogging online, your key takeaways header would say key takeaways for making money blogging. And then below that, you just have a few bullet points that are all the clearest, most impactful takeaways written for someone to scan easily and the AI LLMs out there love to scan and ingest this content and you're gonna increase your likelihood of being swooped up as a source in something like ChatGPT if you have these key takeaways. And then the other really big element, if you're doing SEO best practices, you're gonna be doing pretty good job at this anyway. But the other big element, ta- or having uh FAQs rather. So frequently asked questions that pull from Either Google auto complete suggestions or check out Google's people also ask box to see what types of actual real questions people are searching related to the topic that you want to rank for and then answer all those questions somewhere in your article. Maybe near the bottom you have a frequently asked questions section, but as long as they're in the content, you're going to be setting yourself up for some more success. Amazing. You mentioned SEO best practices. When I started, think it was hard to find SEO best practices. But over the time, it got to that point that you are confused which SEO practices, which are the best SEO practices and which one you should follow. So I'm curious, are your top three, five SEO best practices which works for you? I love publishing. So if we're talking SEO best practices for a post or a page, something that you essentially want to rank number one in Google for the target keyword phrase you're going after, you want it to be the number one source that's cited in chat GPT. What really matters most here is having, so let me back up a second. The LLM crawlers, these AI algorithms that are, crawling around your websites to make sense of what your content's about and how it should rank you. These crawlers are incentivized not to read an entire article. It costs money to crawl an entire article. And so they're gonna wanna crawl the top portions of your content the most consistently. Now, sites that have been around for a really long time, they'll get more crawl budget from these tools, but you really... need to focus on making the first, let's say third of your page of your post, the most optimized section, like invest the most energy there. And what that looks like to me have a really strong meta title and meta description. So really orient your headline, the H1, the meta title, the meta description towards being the best possible answer to the search intent. for the query that you're trying to rank for. Now, if you go to Google, you type in the keywords that you're trying to rank your page for, and you see that there's a ton of different ways people are trying to answer that query from their headline and their description, try and draw out. If I'm the user actually searching for this, like put yourself in their shoes, which one of these do I wanna click on and why? Which one feels right? Which one's going to give me the highest likelihood of an answer. And hopefully you have some sort of gut reaction to that when you're looking at the search engine results page and you can figure out for your own content what kind of the leveled up version of that's gonna be. But I love taking inspiration from competitors out there and then spotting what the gaps are that I can do better on these elements. And then, hey, beyond that, on-page SEO optimization. We're looking at the things I mentioned earlier, key takeaways section somewhere in the introduction have like a nice header hierarchy structure of H2s with H3s nested underneath and like really scannable kind of like I guess SEO rich content in these like more scannable elements. using bullet points, using formatting elements like bold. to kind of draw people's eyes in and then ultimately wrapping up with something like a frequently asked questions. That's kind of what my formula looks like. Excellent. And how about we started back in days writing 500 words article and then it gone to 2000 and maybe 10,000 words article. So what is the sweet spot nowadays? This is the best, I love this, this is the best question. These days I'm doing, I can tell you what I do, right? And what I do is usually something around 1500 words. I used to be a total maniac having like 10,000 plus word articles. I have an article on my site. I think it's about how to start a blog. It used to be 23,000 words, which is crazy. That's like half of a book for some people. And so... I really have pruned that back over the years to being closer to like 10,000, which is also far too much. If I were to be recommending today my sweet spot range, what I do is 1500, 2500 words is on the very high end, I'd say. My intention was to learn success stories from you, but I think we are getting into technical stuff. So while we are discussing on these number of words on a page, there was another case study I stumbled upon a few years ago. I think that if I remember the site name is StrongLifts. He's a guy, a personal trainer, the weightlifter. And he had, I think still have probably maybe eight or 10 guides on his blog only. But each guide was around, you know, your blogging guide type of guide, 25,000 or 30,000 words. And he was killing on the Google probably half a million traffic a month with seven or eight just detailed guides. So I didn't check him recently. I don't know how is he doing because having a solid content It was ticking all the SEO boxes. He picked the niche. He created a content, very detailed logs with images, videos, everything on there. But on the other side, most SEO recommends that you have to publish regularly. I don't know how he was addressing that part on the blog, but Google loved his blog, and he was doing great. So another challenge, I totally agree. I'm on the same page. I think it's about the addressing Google's intent because search engines have gone very, very intelligent. You can't beat them. if you can answer, Google is in a business of answering best questions, questions in the best way possible. So the concise, the better if you can answer it. So only use words where it needs to be. That's my understanding is. the people, another question here are most people is, Should they keep posting once a week or twice a week or daily? Or should they have few good quality content pieces on their websites and maintain those pages? Do you have any insights on this type of strategy? I've always been a fan of quality over quantity and that has pretty consistently served me well across all of my different websites. And that advice rings true today. I think what quality, what quantity means, those things have changed definitions over time. But today, what I recommend to people is having one piece of content that you really feel proud of per week is a really good place to aim for. Now, if you have the capacity, to do maybe two a week and you're really proud of that content. It's actually good and it's strong. It does the best possible job of answering the query out there. Then absolutely go for two a week because you're going to be able to grow faster and capture more audience from the different topics you're ranking on. And I would just recommend, please pair this content with videos as much as possible because you double your discover ability. You get something on YouTube. you get some short form clips for your social channels and all of these things now factor into your website's rankability overall. The AI platforms especially are understanding like, this person posts regularly on LinkedIn, they post regularly on Instagram and so your social channels are more important now to the overall health of your website and your business than they ever were before. And so I would just encourage people who may kind of have the reaction of, don't like video, I don't like how I look or how I sound. Like, I hear that all the time, but if you just figure out how to have some fun with it and take yourself a little less seriously, it goes a long way. I could not agree more. So I think regularly publishing, when you start publishing, I think you have to start and keep optimizing as you go. on this consistency part, I just wanted to make it clear. So it's a once a week, you should publish once a week or, know, Brian Dean back from Backlinko, he published just a few good articles or good guides. Not good means a massive guides. But he was on the quantity side as well. He was not publishing on a weekly or a daily basis as pro blogger or copy blogger, other blogs were doing. And he did great. So I'm asking this because we deal mainly with small businesses. The challenge here is creating a weekly blog quality blog post is a challenge for most businesses. That's the first challenge. And when they keep publishing it, so 50 blog posts in a year. 100 blog posts after two years, then managing those pages become a challenge. So Google doesn't say that you just publish. It starts de-indexing those pages. So I'm just putting you on the spot. So if you have any takeaway on that, is there any solution for this problem? Yeah, and you you walked right into a trap that I've laid for you here, Rana, because I have a tool called Refresh. It's at itsrefresh.com where we actually integrate with different CMSs to automatically update, optimize, and improve your existing content libraries over time. So if it's been six months since you've had an update, that kind of triggers, ooh, we got to update this content and AI will handle the heavy lifting for the first draft. So. Use tools to your advantage. There's plenty of tools out there that do versions of this. You can even interact directly with ChatGPT to help update your content. But yes, you hit the nail right on the head. If you have a large existing content library, it pretty much after around maybe six months, most content kind of starts to decay. And so especially for those important pieces that have like a direct impact on the health and growth of your business, you need to be updating that kind of content like once a quarter. That's what I do in my businesses. so leaning on tools becomes super important once you have, you know, a hundred posts on your site, a couple hundred, few. I have sites with several hundred articles. And then it's like, you know, it'd be someone's full-time job to manage an existing content library without tools to help. Fantastic. So how's your tool doing? Must be doing really good helping people with this interesting content management. Yeah, we just launched it a month ago, so it's still new, but we have a handful of customers that we already kind of onboarded from our existing pool of customers with right Blogger, kind of my main project, and this Refresh project. It's geared a little more towards existing, like pretty established businesses that kind of already have that, you know, 100 plus content library, and it's awesome. What we're seeing happen is essentially somewhere in the like, 10 to 20 day range after an update is published, we're seeing the Google Search Console chart starting to go back up again. the ceiling on that kind of has a lot of factors, but we're seeing a lot of people recover traffic losses that were pretty substantial. And they climbed the rankings right back up for the really competitive keyword phrases that they used to rank for. So. Yeah, that content hygiene thing. my gosh. Your existing content library is just as important as publishing new. Yeah, I agree. And you again touched upon the site traffic drops after AI overviews and everything. So how are you recovering? Do you have any solution or mainly for informational content, people are struggling to get any clicks? yeah, I've seen tons of content pages on my sites even, let alone clients and customers of mine. I've seen tons of content like really decreasing the amount of traffic it's getting. And the pieces that decreased the most were things like I had a blogging, I have an entire blogging glossary of terms on my site at one point in time where every single turn, know, 150 different terms all had their own page or something. And all of those got totally obliterated because That's something that AI overviews answers now. And so if you have that really simple informational content that AI can answer really quickly and easily for someone, that traffic will disappear at some point in time if it hasn't already. so things that I'm seeing work really well instead are much more in-depth education focused stuff. So if you can teach people a process, a technique, something that they stand to gain from in their business by learning a process from you and then, by the way, you offer to help them with that process as a part of your business. That's a really good model. And then number two, what I've seen like the most traffic from is making free tools and publishing free tools on my websites. And those have gone crazy. Like I'm still getting somewhere between 200, 500,000 monthly visitors to my blog today, whereas five, six years ago, I was getting half a million monthly readers, almost all to blog posts. Today, most of that traffic goes to free tools. And so I've got, you know, a wide range of tools on there that are free for bloggers to use and they're super easy to build these days. Yeah, I agree. The tools are highly underrated used to traffic generator wheels. And when you get rankings for a mortgage calculator or a different kind of calculator, which you can easily create, and if you have a good optimized page, that can be very lucrative in these days. And also, a commercial page, I think commercial intent to oh service pages if you have good quality service pages because this is where somebody is looking for a service not information there are still chances that you can get traffic big time. Like if you make those really dialed in from an SEO perspective, those kind of commercial intent page, service pages especially, not a lot of people in a niche where you're offering a service are spending a ton of time, effort, energy on optimizing the content of those pages. So you can often kind of like punch above your weight class for how much authority your website has if you just do a really good job dialing in your service pages. Especially if you have like niche focused services or location focused services, you could do a really good job with traffic there. Yeah, I agree. And you mentioned the tools. So is there any other type of content? Because mostly we were reliant on informational type of content when we were doing blogging. So now with AI, overviews in the mix. So apart from tools, is there any other type of content you're seeing doing well? I mean, video content, really, can't say that one enough as kind of the elephant in the room. But to me, I like to think of content, like to take a step back, I think of content, good content is something that solves a user's problem as it relates to your business. And what I've seen has been kind of a renaissance in courses too. having something like, you know, on my site, I teach an SEO masterclass, I teach an. AI writing class and having these kind of deeper, like more meaningful education experiences where people have to sign up with their email address in order to take the free course and watch some video training modules. This type of stuff has way more like value appeal to it. And so I think if you get deeper into education in your space, you pretty much always are gonna win. just make sure you're educating over video too. It has to be part of the mix these days. if we have to do a rapid fire blogging course for people, businesses, consultants, accountants, or doctors, if they have to start today, how would you advise them what step they should take? using your AI skill as well, AI in the mix, how you go about creating a site and growing a traffic? My first stop is pretty much always gonna be talk to your customers. So if you have an existing business, figure out how these people found you in the first place. Talk to them, understand where they're going to look for help. Are these people turning to LinkedIn, posting about needs they have? Are they joining Facebook groups? Are they scanning Reddit? Really try and put yourself in the shoes of your customers and... understand what they're doing in order to try and find the help they're seeking. And so I think that is kind of the necessary foundation to understanding all of the other like downstream marketing efforts you should do. But to me, I would general advice type stuff, I would say, get your website dialed in. Like if that's not your area of expertise, hire someone who can help. There's so many good agencies like WP Minds out there who can help you have a website that actually represents you well and positions you to drive leads to the site. And so having that foundational home base really dialed in is super important before you start making content. And so once your kind of website home base is done, once you understand how to reach your customers, then it's over to you to start making really strong, impactful content. And my bias is to go for things like free tools on your website and making videos using tools like the one we have inside right blogger to turn your videos into SEO optimized blog posts with more or less a few clicks and then your bases are kind of covered. Then you'll just share content on the social platforms where your audience spends time. And if it sounds like a lot of work, it kind of is. So if you can afford to either have partners in the mix who have more interest in this marketing stuff or hire some help for it, then that's always a good resource to lean on. Excellent advice. And do you have any example of your recent students or someone you advised who started a blog and what they did and kind of type of research they achieved recently? Yeah, I have a friend, name's Chad, so shout out to Chad. He has a blog called The Literary Compass, and he essentially does book reviews. This is something that's been around for a really long time. There's entire platforms like Goodreads dedicated to the community of people who want to read about books and stuff. so Chad took a really interesting, unique approach to this where he is creating review content on TikTok and so he's leaning into the social platforms that are timely of this moment and he's creating videos that are funny, that are interesting, that you know aren't just him reading a book to a camera but they actually get really creative and so he's seen a lot of growth. He's starting to have indie authors reach out to him to do sponsorships on his site because he has a newsletter where he sends out you know what he's reading this month or his favorite book of the week. And it's really cool to see a blog starting to like earn some revenue and drive some meaningful traffic. I think he's somewhere around 10,000 people a month hitting his site. And so still kind of the early days, but he's carving out a really cool, interesting niche. And I think he'll also like price start kind of like an indie authors podcast where part of the sponsorship of getting a post review on his site is that they'll also join his podcast. So he's doing some interesting things. It's cool to see that method still working. you mentioned TikTok. So I'm just curious. He started a blog. That's the first thing he did to review books. And then he promoted the blog through TikTok. Yeah, he's still publishing SEO rich content on his blog. And so he's driving traffic from search engines, but at the same time, he's seeing like kind of more traffic, more interest, more engagement from publishing short clips on Instagram and TikTok. It's really fascinating. Amazing very good. So yeah, Tik Tok reach is there if you're putting the right type of content So wherever you can bring traffic to your home base, which is blog That is always always good How important is the email list is still? I would be out of business without my email list. Like an email list gives you the direct, you know, essentially one-on-one communication channel with your audience and platforms come and go. We've seen, what was it, Vine, think Vine totally disappeared overnight, right? Twitter turned into X, like platforms change. Sometimes they disappear. Sometimes they get banned from countries. I don't know that TikTok will ever actually get banned, but. it'll be a perpetual conversation topic. anyway, your email list is one of the most important things you can start building from day one. And if you're watching, if you're listening and you're saying, my God, I don't have my email list yet, the best time to start was yesterday. The next best time's always today. So start setting up an email list, publish some free tools on your blog, have really strong lead magnets like courses for people to join your email list and exchange for. And you'll start building up a reputation and building trust with people. And then you can always ask questions of your audience to figure out how you can best serve them. I think the thing that has served me best over the years is really keeping closely in touch with my audience and asking them how I can best help them. That's led to all of my best ideas. What is your favorite way to build email lists? right now, the way I think about this is anything Chat GPT can do, I can't really gate with an email signup form. That's kind of just done. And so things like checklists or download the PDF version of this guide, people aren't really doing that anymore. Sometimes templates work really well, depending on the niche you're in. Like I used to teach a lot of like freelance business people. And so I was teaching people the business of being a freelancer and I had a lot of really useful templates like freelancer contract templates, freelancer proposal templates, surprisingly those do still get like quite a bit of downloads every every day. I see several of those downloads, but the stuff that works the best is free tools and maybe the first use is free. Then you ask an email address of someone who wants to use it a second time or something like that. That playbook works really probably the best for us right now. And then the second thing is courses. So making video based courses that you gate with an email sign up form in order to access and you really make it a genuinely good course, not just the, you know, five minute YouTube video that they could find anywhere online, but take some real time and effort to put together something that's pretty comprehensive and useful to people that they'll get an actual outcome from if they go through the material of the course and they're gonna feel pretty good about giving their email address for that. Excellent. getting an email used to be hard work. It's more work now. But I think just having an email doesn't solve the problem. Once you have the email, you have to stay in touch with the users to stay on their mind. So what are your favorite ways to nurturing your lead? That's a technical term. I'm trying to avoid terms as much as possible. What is your favorite ways to stay in touch with your email list and making the most of it? I'll still send kind of the weekly blog post, you know, I'll publish like one thing a week or so on average on my site and I'll want to send that post out to people. But I think the stuff that has done the best for me, like the lead nurturing things that have worked most effectively are giving people that free tool usage on my site. And then after they use it once or twice, showing them that email sign up form, sign up to get more and then letting them get some more after they sign up. and then, you know, maybe they run out of free credits. I'll send them an email after they run out of free credits that says, hey, I just restocked your credits. Pop in, use them some more. So really like consistently like hitting them with the value, value, value, and just showing that you're giving a lot of like goodwill deposits to them before you ever ask for something in return. I try and make sure that I don't sell to my audience. for their first month or two with me, I really try and suppress sales related emails to new subscribers because I want them to just receive several value touch points from me before I ever ask anything of them. Great advice. And people who are still with us and still think they can use blogging as a tool to drive traffic and grow their businesses, what are your best advice if they are looking to make most of them from blogging? I'd say today, like it really has to come back to having some sort of underlying business model. Blogging for the sake of publishing words on the internet and hoping to earn money in your sleep isn't that common anymore. I mean, you can find niche examples where that playbook still works, I'm sure, but I can promise you it's way more competitive than ever before. And so... I really say build a business and use your blog, use content, think of it as content, not just blogging only. Build a business, use content as a way to bring people into your business to attract and to retain your audience and you will do fine. It's going to take time, takes a lot of repetition to get good at any new skill and so using AI tools to help with things like assisting your writing process is great. If video feels really daunting to you, figure out what about it could be solved with the help of some tools. I personally use AI for scripting plenty of my video content and I find it to be super helpful. So there's tools out there that can help you with each step along the way, but I'd say really, really, really please consider video. Consider how you could use video in your marketing and there will be a payoff. Yeah, I agree and I think as we used to focus on finding a niche which sounded easy but was very difficult because when you find a niche, hard work starts, you have to start creating content, doing all sorts of blogging stuff and if you find out after 6 months or 12 months that your niche is not related or you are not enjoying it, it was quite a bit of shock for many people who started blogging. But now I think probably if I see how you can add value maybe can we change that niche part with the problem so the more better problem if you can discover for a very niche kind of audience and add lot of value to solve that problem if you think content through that lens. What do you think about that? That's exactly right. If you view your role as a problem solver, an educator and entertainer of your audience, and you are there to help them solve their problems, you can pretty much never go wrong. That type of way of thinking about it will always keep your nose on the right path. Yeah, when you said educator and entertainer, I think that that's where the TikTok is booming because people like to be entertained and anybody who has that kind of skill to entertain the TikTok is there to grow their audiences and build businesses. Ryan. I always ask people, look at your own consumption habits. Do you like reading tons of blog posts still? And maybe you do, but most people that I know like to watch videos on their phone or on their TV. so like you got to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and make the content in the format that they desire to consume it in, not just what's easiest for you. So when you get over yourself, and you meet your target audience's demand, you just will do better. Yes, ah I agree. one thing I would add with my experiences, which I learned with trial and errors, is don't start just something for money. It will be very uphill battle. So it's a very long term game. So I think you should pick something you enjoy, even you are not earning a penny. Then if you do that, then somehow you will find a way to make money out of it as well. Yeah, if you can talk about it every day for the next five years, you'll do great. If you can't, then you might be in a little bit of trouble, or you have to figure out a way to get yourself engaged in it. Like I think of my journey with blogging for 15 years, I've had several points over the years where I felt like I've said everything I have to say about blogging, or I've gotten burnt out. like, ugh, I don't wanna talk about blogging again. And I've had to really challenge myself to keep myself interested and to find new ways to get interested in my business again. So you'll have to do constant reinvention, but if you view that as fun, then it's a way more enjoyable experience than like being dragged kicking and screaming into it. I could not agree more. And while we are on this topic, do you see any common mistakes which people do on blogging and fail? Yeah, I think the most common one really that I see, I still see this all the time actually. I see people start blogs, publish mostly AI written content, which I'll be clear, I run an AI tool company. I think these tools are great, but these tools should not be replacing you in your content creation process. You still need to have your take, your real life experiences, your examples. the things that make you special embedded into the content you're creating. So if you're not taking some time to do that, either upfront or during kind of the editing process, or maybe you're making a quick video, quick audio note to serve as the inspiration for the starting of this content, you need to be embedding yourself in it. So I still see people all the time trying to create blogs and publish almost all AI content. And then they hit me up a few months later and they say, hey, Ryan, why am I not seeing any traffic? And I go look at the blog and I'm like, dude, I read one sentence and I could tell that this was totally AI generated. Why do you feel like you deserve traffic to this content that I could have created clicking one button? So I think the laziness factor, people will love to do less work rather than more. And there's nothing wrong with working smart, but you also... have work hard too. There's no avoiding doing some actual work in building up a blog business. It just requires it. If it was easy enough to just publish a site, click a button, have content published that makes you money somehow, everyone will be a millionaire. Yeah, that's true. And I think your creativity is the soul of your content. So if you are not putting your creativity into your content, as you said, then anybody can press a button and produce a content. And even I realize that while using this chat GPT, so if you are thinking and if you're trying to create, even in AI tool, this takes time. It's not just one click solution. What's your experience in that? my gosh, yes. When I'm creating content, it's always a multi-step process. I'm never just putting, you know, a keyword in and saying, generate an article based on this. Like I'm always doing a lot of additional instructions and inside our tools in right Blogger, we kind of force you to be involved in the process, like pretty intentionally. We have an auto blogging kind of, you know, automation scheduling piece to the product, but We do encourage people to be really invested in the creation and the editing process because we've just found that it's so important. can't just publish straight AI content and expect it to rank and drive your business growth just solely through that effort. You do have to be somehow involved in the process. we do kind of force our users to be involved in some way. we see that the people who do that benefit more as result. agree with that part as well. Ryan, so far I think amazing advice and I think you answered all my questions, you difficult questions generously. Before we close, normally ask the guest is there any question I should be asking you around this topic that is it still possible to make money or grow a business through blog which I haven't asked. I'd say, you know, the thing that I'm not asked often enough is that that that piece around like How do I do video content? Like how do I get myself into it? Because I've been I've been speaking about this a lot lately that I'm encouraging my audience to try out video and there's a lot of people in that audience who have a lot of fear in doing so and and the the biggest piece of advice I would give you is that it's not about having the best gear. You don't have to have a crazy nice camera. You don't need an amazing microphone. You don't have to have fancy lights in your room. It's really about just becoming a little more comfortable with yourself and being less judgmental of who you see back on the screen when you review your recordings. talked to someone that just yesterday I was talking to a coaching client who has a blog and He's really in his comfort zone when he's writing, but with video, he's kind of terrified to really put himself out there on the internet in video format. And so with him, I've been working with him slowly, baby steps, giving him challenges. All right, you're gonna make one video that's one minute long. You don't gotta make a 10 minute tutorial video where you look amazing. Like make a one minute video from your phone. and you don't even have to publish it online for the world to see. Just put it as unlisted and then hit the publish button on YouTube. See how it feels to do that. And then share the link with a few people and get some feedback from it. But there's no way to get better at making videos until you just do a hundred of them. That's unfortunately the only way to get good at it. And just like writing, it took a long time for me to become a good skilled writer and video. It's no different. You got to learn the process and the more you can enjoy it along the way. Hold it lightly. Don't view it as something where you're a failure if your video only gets 10 views. The lighter you hold it, the more you'll encourage yourself to want to do it more. and I read somewhere that you can become a number one podcaster just by publishing 20 podcasts Because most people me most most most people just you know It could not stay consistent that long. It's not easy. I think start today, optimize later if you can keep going and you will find your thing. I think consistency can do wonders for many people. The last thing I'll offer you on this point too, because it came up yesterday in my conversation with this coaching client, is that people will respect you so much for publishing your content online, especially video, podcasts, that more kind of vulnerable medium than writing. If you're writing, it's easier to hide behind the screen. But if you publish vulnerable content online, people will respect you. They may not like your content or what you have to say. but you will be respected for it and you will also be proud of yourself for doing it. So I really encourage people to just kind of hold the whole producing video content thing so much more lightly. Why do we gotta be so serious guys? You know, let's have some fun with this. love your advice and I hope if at least one person start doing this one after watching or listening to this podcast. So thank you so much, Ryan, and where people can connect with you and learn more from you. Hey, thank you for having me. The best place to find me online is RyRob.com, R-Y-R-O-B, my nickname. And I'm pretty accessible there. You can find my email address, hit me on the contact form if you got questions. I'm very generous with my time. I love chatting with people. I love giving free advice. I look very kindly at the people that have given me advice over the years. And so I always try and pay it forward to people. So if you find me somewhere online, on my blog, on LinkedIn. or at rightblogger, R-I-G-H-T blogger.com. That's where I spend the most of my time online and come on by. Amazing. I love talking to you, Ryan. So thank you so much for your time and hope to see you again sometime. Hey, thank you, Rana