WP Townhall: Social Media Has Won the Content War w/ Matt Medeiros

Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody to another episode of WP Town Hall.
This is the show that drops you deep into the heart of pivotal debates shaping the WordPress ecosystem.
Today we have Mr. Matt Medeiros who we’re going to bring on in just a minute.
We’re going to be talking about whether or not social media has won the content war.
Now, before we get started, you might notice we have a little bit different of a format.
So we are off of X.
We used to do this on X Spaces due to UI limitations and hassles and some other things.
We are expanding the scope of WP Town Hall.
We are now on a multi-streaming platform.
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We will be on Mark’s platforms as well.
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We always do participation halfway through the episode.
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Comment.
What do you think of the new format, okay, as we go through this?
We’re going to bring on Mr. Matt Medeiros.
We’re going to get him involved in this conversation.
Did I bring him on the wrong view?
I did.
Look at this.
I got to practice.
I got to practice.
Okay.
Welcome to the show, Matt.
Glad to be your guinea pig, Kevin and Mark.
Okay.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Well, I mean, you – I think this is a topic that you have a lot of opinions about.
I think that you are – last time I spoke with you anyway – maybe things have changed since then.
Last time I spoke with you, you were very high on text content and blogging.
And so I don’t know.
Why don’t you first tell everybody about you if they don’t know who you are and then just let’s open it by giving us your opinion on this topic.
Yeah, yeah.
So happy to talk about this.
This is a deep and very passionate topic of mine.
But you can find me at my day job at gravityforms.com and my side hustle over at thewpminute.com
where we talk a lot about this stuff and cover various WordPress news topics, topical news stuff.
But, yeah, I had you on the live stream a couple months ago sort of debating all kinds of things.
I think it was called Forking WordPress was that one.
And by the way, I tell you, my thumbnail game is just getting better and better.
Thanks for the Jerry Carl today.
I appreciate that.
I mean, what a phenomenal job.
I just had to pat myself on the back.
Yeah, so to me, it’s not simply about text.
It’s about having something that you own.
And, of course, WordPress is near and dear to that sentiment, right?
Because WordPress started out as a blogging tool and that’s how I got into internet marketing and just getting my voice out and having an opinion.
That later on sort of matured into podcasting.
So I’m very much all about the RSS feed when it comes to podcasting and not letting places like YouTube just become the de facto place for where you get your podcasts.
I think there’s an inherent issue in that.
And, yeah, when you fuse the two of them, like when you compare it up to social media, like, yes, certainly like social media has won the, I would say, like the attention game and the, of course, monetization game and the algorithm and all that stuff.
But I think as a human race and as somebody who has been publishing for a while and it doesn’t take somebody long to like figure this out is that we are constantly in the walled garden, not playing by the same rules.
Right. And things can change on a dime.
TikTok fan for a day.
Facebook algorithm changes all the time.
Google organic search.
People are like trying to sue Google now.
It’s like, well, you don’t you’d never own this, this walled garden to begin with.
And my last point, and then we can open it up to chat more about it, is like when we look at the face of in the face of AI, you know, and I don’t want to debate like the general intelligence stuff because I don’t have the brain cells for that conversation.
But I think that there is still a place where where humans will want human generated content and AI is still going to, I mean, look how AI learned.
It learned off the back of of Google, which stole from us to begin with.
I think you need to have a place where you put your thoughts, your information, and maybe even have something that says, no, I mean, this is like real far fetched, but like no AI.
You can’t have this content.
Click.
Click a button.
Right.
You can’t have this 3000 word essay that I wrote.
I don’t want it to ever be indexed.
I only want humans coming into this space.
And I think that that’s when you look at something like a WordPress is is why I’m so bullish on it.
And, you know, again, RSS and audio, because these are two things that are really easy to produce, publish in a very cost effective manner.
And I’ll leave it at that.
We can we can talk.
OK, so you’ve outlined some some principles.
There’s also a practicality side of this discussion.
You weren’t big on video last time we talked, but like but I’m not sure why you’re not big.
I mean, OK, so the practical facts is you do a lot of video.
You produce a lot of video.
Yeah.
Your podcast is video format.
We are talking right now on video on a social media platform, essentially.
And I feel like this conversation would be far more tedious if we were texting each other.
Right.
Yeah.
And in just recording some sort of transcript and publishing that.
And so how do you how do you balance that?
Because for me, I feel like video obviously is a medium that just transmits far more entertainment value and education.
And in just the format itself, I think people are trending towards preferring over sitting there reading.
Yeah.
I mean, video is going to be is extremely important.
Right.
I was talking to somebody the other day about how he would replace like a big agency owner.
He’s like, man, I could literally replace my entire marketing team with AI right now.
And, you know, you know, highly regarded, you know, highly regarded this person.
And he’s very intelligent.
And I’m just like, you know, I don’t see that.
Like I can see some of like the more daunting tasks, certainly.
But I think moving forward, it’s extremely important for brands to put their face out there to have some kind of human recognition.
And video is definitely, you know, the leader of in that space.
I think the issue is, is I don’t want people to forget about that ownership.
Let me zoom out.
I think it’s really hard for a YouTube competitor to come along.
Right.
And I think YouTube knows that.
I think YouTube loses money, you know, just for the sheer volume of videos that they host.
And I think that is the biggest defense.
Like Google will just lose infinite amounts of money so that somebody doesn’t take over that space.
And it’s a, it’s a, it’s a monopoly.
And if, if there’s a world coming where that starts to open up, then the, then the, the tune changes a bit.
But I think the costs of, of hosting video are extremely high.
AI could actually change that for us.
But I just don’t want people to fall into the trap of, oh, it’s only here.
And it’s only on YouTube.
Because when you say video, not you specifically, but I think when people say video in general, it’s YouTube.
Maybe it’s TikTok, but it’s YouTube mostly.
And that walled garden is the stuff that I just, I’m not into.
I, I mean, I’m into it to leverage the, the search and to get people to, to hear and watch and follow and communicate.
Like I leverage it, but I would never be like, oh, my, my whole thing is here and here only.
And I think that that’s the trap.
I don’t, you know, just like social media, it’s just like all my stuff.
Like I don’t need a business website.
I’m on Facebook.
Incorrect.
Right.
And like, that’s the trap I don’t want to fall into because I’ve been seeing it on, in the podcasting space specifically happen.
People were just like, like Spotify was trying to own podcasts and they were the ones like, oh, we’re the best podcast place.
Now YouTube saying it.
It’s like, wait a minute, what’s happening here?
Like podcast, the essence should be free and public to, to distribute.
So a long way of getting to like, I definitely leverage YouTube and video.
But I don’t ever look at it as like, oh, that’s where all my stuff is.
And that’s the only place I want to be.
Okay.
So technical question for you.
I, in back in the day with old podcasts that I was doing, I would run the RSS feed.
I would publish the posts on my WordPress site and run the RSS feed from my WordPress site.
With WP Town Hall, we don’t do that.
We use a podcast hosting service that generates the RSS feed.
Where do you fall?
Do you feel like people should be using WordPress for publishing podcasts?
No.
I mean, from a real tech, I mean, I used to work at a company that you could do that with our plugin and our software.
I mean, it’s cool if you want to, but just know that like your RSS feed will always be, not always, there’s technical ways to like redirect it.
It’s just a lot of headache.
If you’re like a super purist, okay, fine.
Then use your WordPress site.
Podcast hosting companies, the ones that are really good.
You know, Kevin, you and I, Kevin, have talked about this and people probably heard me say this before.
There’s a whole, there’s like a whole like WordPress of podcasting.
It’s called Podcasting 2.0.
There’s a podcastindex.org.
You could kind of like kind of call that WordPress.org, except one dude doesn’t just own it.
And there’s, that’s like the place that has any podcast RSS feed more than Apple, right?
Because it’s open and there are people who don’t want to be on Apple or Spotify or YouTube.
And this is like an open index.
Again, long way of getting to, if you work with a podcast hosting company that is, that you really like,
and they’re doing things the right way, that RSS feed can follow you, you know, wherever you go.
If you change hosts, sure, you can switch your RSS feed.
But I think the good hosts that are doing things really good with industry standards,
especially with Podcast 2.0 stuff, kind of like WordPress, you could say,
I’m done with Bluehost, I’m going to move over to Kinsta and you can, you know, switch, you know,
from one web host to another.
And I think that’s just an efficient way to do it.
At the end of the day, yeah.
Can you run it on your WordPress site?
Did I do it?
Yes.
It’s kind of a pain in the ass though, if you want to switch things later.
So I’m not super hardcore on that one.
Okay.
So where does WordPress fall into content then?
Because we’re not using it to manage video content.
We’re not using it to manage podcasts.
Logging is dead, in my opinion.
It’s mostly dead.
It’s on life support.
It’s on life support.
So what do you see the use case other than I have a business and obviously I have a website
to sell my services and things like that.
But in terms of content, where do you see WordPress fitting in 2025 and beyond?
I’m not a prolific blogger, but I also wouldn’t say that blogging is dead.
I was watching your live stream the other day and I think, I don’t know what the title
of the blog post was, but I think it was like how you broke down certain UI elements in page
builders.
Yeah.
And that is obviously like a really important blog post to you or really, let’s not even
say blog post yet.
It’s a really important topic to you.
Yeah.
And you wrote it out and you put it on your blog and it’s referenceable at any time.
And just like the debate of is a video podcast a podcast or is it audio only?
I lean to the audio side for an audio podcast because audio can be consumed in way more
contexts than video.
Sure.
You can listen to video, but also like you’re not listening.
You’re not watching the video, which is the, which is the obvious benefit over audio, right?
If you’re, if, if people, if like most of your audience is just listening, then why not just
do audio and why even waste your resources doing video?
But you can listen to it while you’re running, doing the dishes, you know, taking care of
your kids.
It’s, it’s, you can, you can also do other things where you can’t, if you’re a watching
video, leaning in and watching video.
I think on the blog post side, like when you have a very important topic, like you have there,
you want that to be referenceable and you just like, you want to put it up on the mantle
and be like, this is the, this is my piece right here.
And I want you to, to always know that you can bookmark it, find it right here.
And that’s a great example of why I don’t think blogging is dead.
And it’s just another medium for folks to quickly scan.
Like they’re not going to even, I think in that context, if you were like, no, you got
to read my piece.
Like I have this piece that I always referenced called the keys to the kingdom, like go back
and just read that and you can scan it really quick.
I would say even more effectively than, you know, than video or audio.
So I think that’s super important that we continue to do that.
And I, once again, like in the face of AI, how are these systems, you know, learning from
us?
Well, you’re putting out, you’re largely putting out text and hopefully those systems are scooping
that up and learning more about you or your brand or whatever.
So I think that’s, that raises a really, really good point.
Um, I wrote that article.
So there’s a, there’s a context of blogging that is, uh, SEO focused traffic focused.
The distribution channel is Google.
Okay.
And as you know, Google is, um, stealing, stealing content, uh, and it’s becoming harder
to rank in meaningful spots.
I mean, we have, you’re competing with a tremendous amount of ad spots.
You’re now competing with AI generated content.
Um, SEO topical stuff.
It tends to just be a lot of like people gaming the SEO system with their content.
Like, for example, uh, you used to be able to pull up recipes, you know, if you’re, I
don’t do a lot of cooking, but you used to pull up recipes.
You get the fucking recipe.
Now you pull up recipes.
It’s the person’s life story.
They, they, they wrote a narrative about the recipes because they’re trying to hit content
limits and all this other stuff, right.
Or targets, whatever.
So that side to me of blogging is far less valuable these days.
What is value valuable is like you said, I have something really important to publish and
I want to publish it.
The problem is people won’t do that if they don’t know how to distribute it.
Because if I write it and publish it, but nobody ever reads it, what is the point of writing
it and publishing it?
Right.
So I, like, I have ways of just distributing it.
Of course we can go to social media and distribute it and things like that.
Um, but I think a lot of places just feel like one is maybe people don’t want to read anymore.
And two is even if I spend all the time writing this thing, I don’t really know how to distribute
it to get it anywhere.
So, I mean, what is your, what would you say to those people?
Like, so like the marketing person in me is like, if somebody, and I say the same thing
about podcasting, it’s just like, if, if I do have people, people reading a particular
blog post, um, or newsletter that those are the people that I want.
Like, do I want the people who just like quickly scroll through and hit something on, uh, I
don’t even use TikTok.
What do they have a thumbs up?
I don’t, I don’t know what it is.
Like a heart on Instagram reels.
Yeah.
You know, like this is what I like, right?
Do I, do I want that kind of audience, uh, or customer?
If you’re like thinking about this from a business sense, or do I want people who are going to
take the few minutes to, you know, read this 800 word blog post or even scan through it to,
you know, to do the bullet points.
Um, you know, I think that when I look at it from the marketing lens, I want that kind of
person who’s going to engage with it.
The other side, um, I had a conversation about this in the WP minute Slack the other day.
I’ve never been, uh, I’ve never done anything to rank an SEO.
I mean, I have things that rank an SEO, but I’ve never, I’ve never executed a strategy to do that
because my, my content, I already know has like a ceiling.
Part of me just doesn’t give a shit whether, whether or not people come or not.
Um, and I honestly, at the end of the day, like the worst thing is, is, and I understand that this
is wrong.
Like I don’t have something to sell you.
Right.
Uh, you know, again, like things would be different if, you know, things would, could
be different, but I don’t have anything to sell you.
So I’ve never had this strategy, like, especially in the WordPress content space of like the top
12 plugins for restaurants, the five best page builders.
I mean, sometimes I’ll do some content like that just cause it’s interesting to me, but I
don’t, I don’t have never built a business, which a lot of my peers have with SEO and have
done extremely well.
Right.
Saed, WP Beginner is like the obvious like big elephant in the room in terms of like building a
blog with SEO keywords, whether it’s ad or affiliate links and then selling your own products.
It’s a tremendous strategy. But for me, I have never, I could never wrap my head around going,
I need to rank this in this search engine called Google, which I know is massive,
but they can also change the rules at any time. And like to me, and same thing with Facebook,
like I could just never wrap my head around that. I could never wrap my head around it. So I just
never did it, which I know is stupid on the business side. But it’s just something that I’ve
always been. So I’ve always been that with the answer I’m getting to is I’ve always created content
and tried to push it out to people and connect with other people and say, Hey, look, I’ve got this
thing. I made it. So I wrote it, let’s say in WordPress. And then I go to the social media
channels, or I do a video about it. And I leverage the social, I say, please come read this stuff.
And then hopefully sign up for my newsletter, or listen to my podcast, where I know you’ll be a
connected audience member by either subscribing or listening to audio. So I’ve always been create it
and then push it out to people, and then hopefully funnel them into a newsletter, you know, to connect
with them deeper. So I’ve never leveraged SEO to that degree.
I don’t know if that I don’t know if that’s typically what I see anymore, though. Like I’ve
been doing a lot of I mean, everyone everyone here, we do the same thing, though, like, you know,
it seems like the big thing now is you, you know, that the attention is on social. That’s where like
the easiest, cheapest attention is for the most part. Now, are they stealing shit for sure? Yeah,
but that’s where the easiest attention is. So you have to create content that’s unique to there,
like you have to create free content, like almost like that’s like the YouTube content is almost
like the lead magnet in some cases. And then you bring them into your I don’t know, your inner circle
or your community or something like that, where there’s there’s content behind there that’s even
more valuable. Yeah, but but it’s not the same thing as on the front end, like you give them a
little bit of a taste there. So I mean, I think we’re all on the same page, though, obviously, if we put a
blog post up, we’re going to share it for sure. But I feel like there’s a little bit of a of a
difference in how it’s evolved. And the other point I wanted to make is, you know, I’ve been very vocal
about not reading. I just read a book the other day, though. So you know, I mean, I still read.
But
I don’t know, I don’t know if this is a YouTube premium thing. But now I’m noticing underneath the
videos. Now there’s even a summarize this video button, and it’ll give me the text. Because there’s
a really good point that you made there of like, hey, do I really want to watch a 20 minute video,
or do I want to like skim through an article or knowledge base and see how to do it? There’s I don’t
think that’s ever necessarily going to go away. But my point is that you it’s way harder. I mean, it’s
getting easier, but it’s way harder generally to convert text into a good video or even good audio. Good
audio is getting much better. But video like a captivating thing. It’s harder to go that way than it is go
the other way. And I feel like you know, when I make a video, I take the transcript, I pop it in a
clot, it gives me the chapters, gives me like a description gives me title ideas. Now it’s literally
getting to that point. So I feel like that is just how we’re evolving. Now I do I do think it’s going
to come back around because we’re gonna have we already have faceless YouTube channels and things.
But you know, I just think it’s going to continue to get even cheaper to produce that type of stuff
too. And like, I feel like that’s one of your biggest arguments is that video is expensive to
to store, which is valid. But I, I just don’t like, do you think it’s not going to get better and cheaper
and easier? Or what’s the what’s the actual position, I guess? So a few things. So like,
just to like, set the record straight, I barely passed high school, right? Like I am not this like,
reading books, like some fine colleagues that I work with at Gravity Forms, I started a book club. And I’m
like, guys, not for me. Not only do I have, I have no time for this. I’m just not gonna do it.
If they had a thumbnail subject, you would have fucking rocked it.
Now, now, you are correct.
You are correct.
That’s like your gym. That’s like your gym.
Yeah, I love it. I love it. I was like, I sat down at, by the way, that was like in 10 minutes.
So yeah, like, I’m not this prolific, like writer, reader, right? I don’t consider myself highly
intelligent. And I think the essence of this is I grew up in a family that owned car dealerships.
And for most of my working life, it was under the brand of General Motors. And I think where this
all stems from is General Motors being this massive corporate entity that would literally tell my father
and my uncles like what they have to do. And here’s how you do it. And I just like seeing them go through
that process of being like, but that’s not how we sell cars in this small market. And they’re like too
bad. Sell this like pink Chevy Lumina, right? And like nobody’s buying a Chevy Lumina.
They’re buying Nissan Maximus and Honda Accords, you know, back then.
And when you see things like this, the point I’m getting at is like, when you see things like this,
where YouTube’s like, oh, summarize this video or YouTube’s introducing shorts, 60 seconds and under
or TikTok, 15 seconds, whatever. I’m like, well, that’s being put on us. We don’t have to,
you know, want this. I get it if you’re trying to like game the social media algorithm or the SEO stuff.
But that’s these platforms saying, look what we’re going to do now. We’re going to make people fly
through more content faster and not even care about the 10 minutes that you put into this video, which
was like three hours of recording behind the scenes. And that’s to me, that’s bullshit. Like,
I don’t want to accept that world. I don’t want to accept, you know, I’m still going to make the video,
but I’m not going to like do the, the TikToks and the shorts and all this stuff because I just want
my content to last. That’s just how I want to publish my content. Um, and the pricing thing,
it’s okay. So like the price of hosting video is actually fairly cheap. It’s the, the reach and
the search volume of, of Google that is like literally impossible. You know, like what’s the
closest one is, um, um, rumble. Right. And it’s still not like these things have to be like household
names, right? It’s just like, that’s the nature of this, of this business. And like people are,
why is YouTube air quotes winning for podcasts? Because now they’re counting any second, literally
any second played of something that you’ve put in a playlist. I don’t even know if the, if the traffic
is legit, you know, coming to YouTube, like how, how can we even like, how do we even know?
Um, and I think we’re just heading into a world that was on the published press podcast. We were
talking about this for like traditional publishers and you see this in the podcast space, podcast
space is going, Oh my God, we’re losing all kinds of money. It’s only like celebrities coming in and
making money. Well, should you have been making money all this time? Like maybe the bubble just
burst and like, this is what you have, like a hundred people listening to your podcast. That’s it, man.
figure out what you can do with that. Like it doesn’t always have to be this race to the top
because in fact, the market probably doesn’t demand it. Um, and I know that more than anybody in this
WordPress space. Um, like there’s only so few people who actually care about this stuff. Um, so,
you know, I just, I just don’t, I just look at it. And again, this is just my own view and totally
against how all these other lifeless people put YouTube videos out and they’re just like top 10 DNS
providers or top 12 domains. That’s the article version of video. Yeah.
Bro. And listen, more power to you. Like you want to, like you’re a creator.
Great. Like you’ve, you’ve, you’ve achieved, uh, being able to do a checklist of things,
right. Which is like, find a topic, make a thumbnail, buy a Sony a seven four, uh, you know,
get a 60 watt, uh, Apogee light, stick it onto the left side right here, make a nice scene,
check, check. Okay. All right. And now push this content out over and over again. How many freaking
videos I’ve seen with people that have like half a million subscribers?
in, in generic tech space, like apologizing. Oh, it’s been a while. I’m so sorry. It’s been a while
since I’ve uploaded a video. Fucking, this is what we’re living in. Yeah. Never make one of those
videos, by the way. Yeah. Like you’re coming back. That’s fucking come back. Just come back. Yeah.
Just come back. But this is like, this is the culture, right? This is the culture. And I, you know,
I’m, I’m against that. So I will leverage the social media as like a blue sky comes out. I’m on
it. Why? I don’t know. Right. Just because it’s another one. Right. And I’m just there. And like
freaking every year, every month I wake up and I’m like, I gotta do more on LinkedIn. And then I’m just
like, why? Like, why am I thinking about it? So I’ll leverage it as much as I possibly can find the
areas I really feel comfortable in. And for me, it’s, you know, the blog, the podcast and,
and YouTube, like I am comfortable in those areas. So. I do think, yeah, it’s like, so I’ve been trying
to just like the golden era that I feel that you, that I used to succeed really like just, it was,
it was too easy almost. I’m thinking back like 2012 ish. It was just my sites and then people I was
advising. I mean, we were absolutely crushing it with Google, just organic search with blog style
content, not the cheap style content, the actual like content depth, uh, content quality game,
because Google would rank the shit out of it. You would get a lot of organic traffic that was going
directly back to the platform you owned, which was your website, which was built on WordPress.
And then if you were smart, you were filtering the highest percentage of that traffic possible into an
email list that you also owned for the most part, like obviously an email provider can shut you down,
but you have the, you have the list, you know, the list is yours. You can move it to anywhere you want
to move it to. And just, I mean, that you can turn that easily into, uh, you know, whatever you’re doing,
you can build so much success off of that. And it, it felt like, cause it was the reality that your
website was that centrally owned most important piece of that puzzle and, um, everything centered
around it. And you would, you would leverage social media, but it was clear that it wasn’t primarily
social media doing the thing. And we had this thing called Google, which promised to give you the best
results out of the topic that you were searching for. And somewhere along the way, that algorithm
shifted and became a, a game and became a, and this is where like, okay, let’s do the SEO research.
Let’s find out what people are searching for. Let’s create a specific kind of content to fit that
specific kind of intent. And all like Google didn’t recognize that all of the top spots started to just
be gamed content, essentially. Uh, that didn’t have a lot of life behind it. Didn’t have a lot of soul
behind it or passion behind it. Right. Um, and then along the way they started, they started tailoring
the algorithm to corporate interests very, very heavily, especially in specific genres. So health
and finance, there was the medic update that came along. Right. And so suddenly you were searching for
things and you could only get, like, if you were in the health space, for example, health line, um,
web MD, like these were the only results you could get. You go to search for something of a political
nature. You only get CNN, MSNBC, and these players, right? You only start to get the major,
major, major corporate interest. And then all of the actual voices are now on page three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine that nobody rarely ever goes to. And we started to shift into an era.
I feel where websites are now, it feels like the secondary thing, not the primary thing because of that,
because Google specifically because people can’t find the smaller players because content’s not winning
anymore. It’s content, it’s reputation content, and then a bunch of political bullshit. Like,
you know, are, are you in the corporate sphere kind of thing? Um, that, that to me is, is what,
and made everybody run to these other platforms. Like now in order to get people to my site,
I have to go to YouTube. I have to have a podcast. I have to do these other things and these social media,
areas, uh, areas, and then maybe even, uh, platforms that are, uh, more discussion focused,
right? Yeah. That’s where we were pushed to. Um, and, and I would like to get back to an era,
like, I love the era where I own my website. That is the central hub of everything that I do,
and people can actually find it in a fair search environment, but we don’t have that anymore.
Yeah. So I would say again, like remembering my roots and like, uh, distrusting corporate America
is, uh, I would say that, you know, one, it was never something that, that we should have just
thought was, was a thing, right? It wasn’t a utility. Like those roads leading to us were just
owned by Google and they could change that at any time, right? Like we didn’t have the right to get
this traffic. At least that’s the way that I looked at it, you know, and now it’s like,
where do you get that information? Are you even going to get it on social media anymore? Or is Grok
or ChatGPT just going to give you the answer, right? So I don’t have an answer, but what I have hope for
are that humans actually go, you know what? Fine. I’ll take my news headlines from Grok, right?
Whatever it is, my sports team won, the president did this, this country is doing that. Um, I’ll take my
headlines summarized from, from a Grok, but I want the opinions, uh, from the human, right? And
you know, I was, what I was saying before about being on that, uh, published press podcast is I think
there’s a full stack that publishers have to do, um, or marketers, uh, business owners, uh, what freaking
WordPress companies have to do, especially in the face of AI, where people are going to be making
your plugin in instance, in an instant, sorry. Um, you have to do the full stack. You have to do all
the social media, you have to do all the content, and then you have to do all the community, which is
what you do. Well, you both do really well. Um, you create the community at the bottom because now you
need to funnel people in and say, Hey everybody, there’s a hundred of us or a thousand of us in this
room congregating around this content. And I think that that’s what every brand is going to have to
do at least for the next five years is the only way as far as out as I can see it. And it won’t be,
I want a fair playing field for folks to search and find me one, unless we build it number one. Um,
but number two, I think now it’s going to have to, you’re just going to have to get your passionate,
passionate customers into the room with you alongside whatever you’re doing, whether this
is a nonprofit, whether this is a plugin you’re selling, or whether you’re a fricking accountant,
you’re going to need to get people alongside of you. Uh, and that’s the, that’s the next step in,
in marketing. Cause I hear all these bean counters who analyze the AI space. They just say, well,
SEO is dead. Well, I’m not an SEO, but I’m sure all the SEO is like, no, no, it’s not. And now it’s
just everything under the term SEO. It’s going to events, it’s building community, it’s doing the
content. And it’s, it’s just marketing at the end of the day, marketing and branding. And that’s the,
the next, you know, frontier. And when I see WordPress, I’ve been trying to wave this flag forever
is like, get your face, uh, on video, get your voice on audio, get your words on a blog post
and start connecting with people because I’m an idiot and I can make react apps. I made a 2d game
the other day. It was just amazing. And I’m doing this because of AI. I’m making WordPress add-ons.
I am not technical. And everyone who’s in this space is going to be under the gun of like, well,
I can make this now. So why am I going to buy it from you? So the WordPress product companies need to
get better at marketing and telling that human side, extracting the human side and putting it in
front, just like Kevin and Mark do on their respective live screen live streams. You have to
get in front of people and say, I’m a human and here’s why you buy from me. Right. And that’s just,
again, that’s where we’re at with, you know, with content marketing and building a brand these days.
So I want to put out the walled garden thing as a, as a quick, uh, just want to get your take on it.
Webflow people very commonly, cause I bring up the open source thing. I bring up the owned platform
owned content concept, which I do, which I do. It’s fundamental. It’s very, very important,
but the webflow people, for example, and you would say this about YouTube, cause you’re making this
argument about, you know, don’t build on YouTube because you don’t own YouTube and YouTube can shut
you down at any time. The webflow people, same thing. I mean, I tell them all the time, like the
CEOs of webflow could literally wake up tomorrow morning and decide they don’t like you and just
delete your website. They have that power, right? Matt doesn’t have that power over our websites.
Um, and their responses, well, one, they deny it. Okay. I don’t know why they deny it. It’s just a fact,
but I think they deny it from a place of, okay, there’s a, what, a 0.05% chance of that happening.
Uh, fucking 0.07. What, what is the percentage? And they, they calculate in their head as it’s not
even worth discussing cause it’s never going to happen. Um, and I think a lot of people with
YouTube, for example, because I’ve, I’ve been feeling like, you know, my website, again, I used
to love the fact that the website was the central platform, but even I feel about my own website,
it’s like, I put way more priority into YouTube, way more priority into these other areas. Okay.
And the website is a secondary or tertiary thing. Um, and am I concerned about my YouTube channel
getting shut down? No. I mean, if I was in a specific genre or topic for sure, you might have
that concern. My topic, I’m not concerned about that. Webflow people are like, I mean, dude, I’m,
it’s like a painting, like it’s a painting company website. Who’s who cares? You know, like,
is Webflow going to wake up one day and not like painting company websites? Probably not.
So what do you say to that? Where it’s like the wall garden doesn’t matter to them because they
don’t think there’s any relevant risk. Yeah. I mean, I, I just, you have to be happy with the cost,
right? So, um, you know, if you’re fine with paying, I don’t know, whatever it is, 50 bucks a month to,
to Webflow and that’s cool. And you know, their business and you know, like every other business,
it’s going to go up. Uh, I think they recently within the last few months raised prices or something.
And so you’re always going to have that, that you’re just, it’s just, you’re dealing with typical
business and you’re just making that, that sort of, that sort of exchange and saying like, I’m fine
with them charging me. I’m getting a good value from this product and you’re, you’re good with it.
The pain points of like, they could shut you off. Yes. Or there’s all like the false, um, uh,
what is it? False positive when they flag you for something that didn’t, that wasn’t right.
Right. It’s like, Oh, you just did like 45 terabytes of bandwidth. And you’re like, Whoa,
I was getting attacked by like a Chinese bot farm, you know? And then you’re like dealing
with them and like, no, you got to pay the bill. Right. So there’s all that stuff that happens.
And then like the same thing with, um, with YouTube, right? Like when you get flagged, um,
you get flagged for something and you’re just like, you know, I didn’t use this, that music wasn’t in
the background. Right. Or like, why are you flagging me with this? Like, and then you get nobody to talk to.
So, you know, some people are fine with those costs. Um, you know, on the, on the WordPress side,
like I’ve been saying this, like if you’re supporting WordPress right now, then you’re
also comfortable with the fact that Matt is in leadership. A vote for WordPress is a vote for
Matt. End of story. Um, whether you like it or not. And you just have to be comfortable with that
fact. And can you deal with that? Yes or no. You have to, you know, work it out in your own,
uh, in your own, you know, mental bias. And, um, I think it’s important for something like, um,
you know, I got stuck when I got into this game is because I just the game of like tech and,
and open source was because I discovered Linux and I was like, Oh shit, I can run my own server and do my
own thing. And I can like run this computer behind my cable modem and people can access it from an IP
address. And then I can put an IP address to a domain name. Like those, it sounds foolish today.
It’s like, why would you ever do that? You know, but if you were running a website and blue house said,
no more, you can’t run this website over here. And you’re like, okay, I’m gonna go over to here
against that. And then the kids was like, no, you can’t run it here anymore. And then you’re like,
I’m going to put this on like this steel, uh, this, uh, this rented server in this data center.
And the data center said, Nope, you can’t run it here either. You could bring it to your own,
like Apache server sitting in your cable modem. And then the last leg is Comcast, right? To be like,
Nope, you can’t be serving that up anymore. And you know, that’s that portability, uh, of open source.
At the end of the day, somebody owns the connection. This is why, you know, I talked to you about a low
frequency bandwidth wifi spread across America. Uh, but you know, we won’t get into that in this show.
Yeah. What did we get into last time? Wasn’t there some threat of war or something?
I talked, I told you like this, this is why these technologies have to have to exist.
It all comes out of the end of the world with Matt.
Yeah. I’m on the banks of Massachusetts.
There’s an over under, yeah. There’s an over under on the minute mark, but by the time we get to
war conspiracies.
Yeah.
Global war conspiracies.
Yeah. It’s the portability. Yeah. It’s the New England, it’s the New England enemy.
It’s the portability of, of this technology that, and, and that’s the attraction to it,
right? Like people always say like, ah, you know, if they get shut off, they can move.
Well, guess what there? I mean, these are all hardwired connections to somewhere in the world
and, uh, someone can shut you off, you know, regardless. So, uh, but on the open source side,
like that portability, um, again, this is why I, uh, I still vote for WordPress, like over a web flow,
uh, in those cases.
Yeah. I I’ve been, and by the way, we’re going to, we’re going to go to viewer participation
in about two minutes. We’ve got Bobby in the room. We’ve got, uh, Newman or Naman in the,
in the room. Uh, they’re going to be coming on. If you want to join, uh, go to WP town hall.
So, uh, just go to that link, jump in and you will be in the list to, uh, jump in and voice your opinion.
You can be on video. If you want to be on video, if you don’t want to be on video,
when you get in, just don’t turn it on and we’ll just bring you on audio only. If your video is on,
we will assume that you are okay coming on video. Um, so, uh, just to piggyback off of that,
what I’ve been doing lately, when I have these conversations with people,
I focus less on, well, for sure, less on the minute men, uh, concept more so,
more so on just costs. Like you said, bandwidth costs. Cause I do hear, I, we see web flow people
all the time, like, dude, I’m successful. And now I have this giant bill, right? Um, they scaled and
didn’t realize the cost of scaling on that platform. Or it’s like, man, what, what is with the limitation?
I think they call them collections or something, which is like custom post types. It’s like,
you’re limited on the amount of custom post types you can have, or the amount of posts in a,
in a custom post type or the amount of custom fields or the type of fields.
And they just constantly are complaining about this. Like, man, I, like, I didn’t realize
these, uh, limitations were here when I joined the platform. And these are the kinds of limitations
that obviously don’t exist on WordPress. So to me, it’s like, do you ever care about scaling your
success? Because if you do, you’re going to run into a lot of gotchas on those kinds of
platforms that don’t exist on, on WordPress. That’s the big argument that I’ve been using.
I it’s because they don’t see the risk of getting shut down. They don’t see the risk of their website
disappearing. Um, and you can use examples of that happening, but it’s just a, it’s not going to
happen to me kind of concept. So I’ve just gone away from that completely. And I’m over to all of
the costs and the limitations as they scale and grow. Yeah. The, um, well, it was the direct
question. If I, if I’m scared, if I switch over those platforms, no, it’s just how you discuss
this in general, when you run into these same people, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, you know,
I honestly, from like the, when I did three years in the audio world, um, at Castos, the, we, I consulted
a lot of folks starting a podcast, right. And then basically everyone walked into the room and they’re
like, uh, you know, when we did like our monthly office hours or new customer calls and they were just
like, okay, how, like, how do we start making money? And it was like, we want to be, you know,
Rogan or, you know, insert your favorite podcaster. And, um, it’s just like, it’s, it’s such a backwards,
uh, you know, way of, of looking at it. I, I, you know, I hope again, a vote for, you know,
humanity is that people want to get into this space because they, they do love the content that they’re
putting out. Um, you know, I, I know there’s plenty of people who just want to do it for the,
for the clicks. And, um, yeah, I was, I’ve been seeped into this AI content lately. And there
are people, you know, you’re just every, every video that’s coming out as a clickbait, how I made
$10 million, uh, in a weekend with this stuff. Right. I watched this one the other day and this
guy was like, yeah, man, it was like, I’ve been growing my email list. I don’t know if I told you
this Mark, but he’s like, I’ve been growing my email list. I got into the game late, uh, three years ago.
You know, I started my newsletter and I’m just like, this dude’s like 20, I don’t know, 20,
21, maybe, you know, and he’s like, I said, I got 30,000, uh, 30,000 subscribers. And you know,
I, I really started growing it when you could do Twitter threads, but you know, that doesn’t work
anymore. So now what I’m doing is, uh, I’m making video games and I’m, I’m growing my email list that
way. So then the host is like, Oh, what did you do? He’s like, Oh, so I show, I show people how I
cloned call of duty. Right. And I’m just thinking to myself, this kid is like, what is happening? Like,
this is like Zemansky jr. Right. That I’m listening to right now. So how am I catching
strays from the call of duty? Wow. So, so anyway, the long story short is the dude goes into like
talking about what he did. He’s like, yeah. So I created this, uh, top down 2d shooter and, uh,
I call it a, I call it a, um, I call the duty clone. And I’m like, bro, you made contra on
Nintendo from like 35 years ago. You didn’t clone call the duty, but people don’t care.
They’re click baity. Um, you know, I, it’s just people will choose whatever they want to do. I hope
people choose for creating content. Um, you know, because they, they love creating the content that
they’re, that they’re up to. All right. We’re going to start moving into our, uh, guest segment.
Well, not our guest segment, our participation, our viewer participation segment. Uh, we’ve got Chris
in the room. We’re going to bring him on first in just a second. We’ve got VJ and then we’ve got Bobby.
Now, Bobby, uh, I’m being told that your devices are not connected.
Yeah. Our producer, our producers in our ear. Yeah. Hey Mark, get your finger on the kick.
Yeah. Ready? Uh, it’s going to be, we’re going to see, but Bobby, Bobby, if you’re going to,
I’m going to kick you, you’re going to have to come back and connect the device. All right.
Are you not? I can’t, I can’t even elevate you into the stream without a device active. So I’m
going to kick. That’s the second time. That’s warning. Number two warning for everybody else coming on.
I mean, uh, Matt is very spicy today. Uh, he’s, he’s abusing the cohost. He’s got more
conspiracies. Anything could happen here. Chris, we’re going to add you to the stage. How you doing,
buddy? I’m doing good fellows. How are you guys doing? Doing well, doing well. What would you like
to interject in this conversation? Yeah. It’s just to add to the point of we’re in a space. We’re just
kind of having your site alone, no longer cuts it anymore. And creating the content, whether it’s on
your site without distribution is pretty much screaming into the void with no one to listen
to. And it’s the sort of thing where whether it’s us as content creators, even business owners,
we’re now forced to be on multi-platforms. It’s more of an omni channel approach has to be done.
If you’re not doing it, it’s like, good luck to you, unless you’ve had a long list from years ago.
As where I look at for anybody new starting, it’s, you now have to learn these skills of video editing,
creating videos, photos, doing thumbnails. Like there’s no longer, I’m not good at it. Let me
have someone else or have the new kid do it as a business one, as an entrepreneur,
you need these skills because without it, no one’s going to find your content.
Are you publishing, just a quick question, text content? Are you, are you doing written blogging
as part of your omni channel approach?
I used to, but now it’s video first blog second. So I’ll do the video. And then from the video,
I’ll use the transcript and create a blog in my writing style, leveraging AI, and then just going in
and putting in the tweaks. It used to be blog first, but to go from blog to video is so much
longer. The process, it’s like with the video, you get the information out, you get a little flow going,
you get more stuff that comes out of your head, especially for having communication or conversations
like this, you can pull more information out. And I think the path forward for whether it’s agencies
is to interview their clients to get that information out. Cause you, through conversation,
people share much more. And it’s almost like either do a podcast to tell them it’s a podcast to get the
interview out of them or just ask them for a straight up interview. But the days of just
write a blog and posts and hope for the best, you got to redistribute and reshare that same post
every three, four months over and over again. Cause those new people coming into your space or world,
whether it’s X or YouTube, never read that old post from years ago. That is getting tons of hits and
may convert them over.
That was the, uh, and I know Matt probably wants to jump in here and you see he’s itching. You said video
first, that’s, that’s the key word for Matt. Um, I was just gonna, I was just gonna ask because
you know, a lot of people think about AI written content is like, let’s let AI, uh, either expand
what I’m already writing, um, or just write it all for me. Okay. And then there’s the video side where
people just think about auto transcription type stuff and then maybe publishing a transcript.
I, and then a lot of people used to get the transcript and almost like try to edit it into
like some semblance of what, which is to me that’s horrible because like, I don’t know,
I just rather write it from scratch at that point. But is there a good AI that you know of,
or that you currently use where you’re taking a video transcript and it can actually produce a,
a decent article out of that?
Yeah. So this is the thing. It’s not so much. Is there a good AI is that I’ve written stuff
pre AI for about years. So I’m able to put that feed it into the eye to understand my style and learn
more about what my writing style is when I use emoji that like to use howdy, I like to use what’s up and
stuff like that. So then when I started using the AI, pull the transcript, my tone and talking sort of
matches. And then for them, when it’s starting to write out my style and tone is already there.
Now it’s a matter of me just kind of fact checking and inter adding in a bit more pertinent information.
So if you don’t have an old set of content history of content, good luck. Cause like, that’s just,
it needs to learn off of text. Like the whole AI thing was built off of learning off of text. Like
that’s how it’s built. So if you don’t have the text to teach it, you’re going to have a hard time
trying to get that done. Is there a specific AI you’re using for using chat GPT, Claude, like,
or is there a specific service for this? Yeah. I’m just using chat GPT and sometimes Claude. So I have a,
like on the Mac, I think it’s whisper, something whisper, Mac whisper. And then I just put my prompt in
there and it pulls it back out. But these past days, I just create a specific prompt of here’s
my transcript that I’m going to feed you below. I want you to create a blog based on the information
provided. But before you do that, give me a summary breakdown and whatever sections you think makes
sense for my target demographic or ICP of insert business type. And then I want you to give me a brief
and then give me a draft. And then from there, you can do a one shot. You got to do it piece by piece
Got it. It’s all about the prompting. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. I do the same thing with,
um, so the last few blog posts that I wrote were, uh, pulled from just an audio transcript. So,
you know, I’m getting older. I can’t run as long as, as I used to. So I’ve been doing these things
called walks where I walk right for exercise. And, uh, as I walk, I, uh, record a transcript. And then I,
when I get back to the house, I run that through, um, uh, various, uh, prompts and, uh, start to put
together a blog post and I go through a night and I edit it. Um, you know, but I think Chris is right.
Like for that, for that same point of having this, um, you know, silo library data set, whatever you
want to call it. Um, you know, writing this stuff out, uh, you know, his strategy happens to be video
first. That’s fine. Um, but if it’s, if, if you are writing blogs, you know, you’re able to, to repurpose
this stuff, you know, at a later date, right? People can search for it. You can feed it into AI,
other AI systems can learn. So, um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t think any, either, uh, strategy is,
is wrong. It’s just slightly different. I think that’s the key word you said there,
right? Is repurpose is all of this is just three purpose of content over and over again. That’s
the whole point of it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you go transcript first, Matt? You are like,
are you doing a teleprompter type deal? Um, I would say like only 30% of my videos are scripted.
Uh, yeah. 30% of my videos are, are scripted where I would actually like write something out for
gravity forms. I do more script because I don’t want them to fire me. So, uh, but on my own personal
stuff, it’s usually just like, uh, off the cuff, but you know, the, so the trend is like with the WP
minute, Eric, Eric Karkovac runs it for me now, like the, the five minute podcast, but it’s the same,
it’s the essence of write the blog post, read the podcast and, um, you know, and then do,
do the newsletter, right. Based off of that piece of content. So there’s no video component on that
one, except for the tutorials that I do. Um, but that was very much just like write first and then
repurpose into podcast, uh, in newsletter. So it was just like, how can you write a five minute monologue
about something and then, you know, record it and, and help distribute it on the newsletter.
So Chris, one thing, cause you had mentioned transcript there, Kevin. And one thing I’ve
been playing around with for myself and with clients is that there is an app for your phone
called prompt smart, prompt, prompt smart.com. Yeah. And what I’ve done is I’ve taken some of
these interviews with clients, create a little 60 to 90 second script. And what’s great is from the
phone, as you’re looking at the camera, you could use your thumb to move the script up in the app.
And that helps these business owners to kind of at least create a talking head style video
without having to overthink it. Cause everyone’s like, Oh, I’m not good at video. I can’t talk in
front of a camera. It’s like, how do we do reduce the friction? Here’s a script. Here’s an app,
just record some talking. And that gives more of that personal touch. People want to see people’s
faces and allows them to just kind of scroll with their thumb to manage the pace. Excellent.
Pro smart pro will actually do voice recognition and scroll for you. If you pay that. I’ve tried some of
those. I’ve tried some of those. It seems to be, I don’t know. It’s a little iffy. It’s a little spotty.
It doesn’t always follow exact where you, where you need it to be. That’s why I like the manual
control. Yeah. I don’t think you’re a script guy, Kevin. I’ve done, I’ve done a couple,
I’ve done two or three. I will tell you the two or three I’ve done the auto didn’t work.
I had to use manual scroll. I was trying to do it. Um, what is retained genius? Chris,
is this your agency? Is this, uh, yeah, retained genius is I used to do agency and now it’s a lead
management system. So it’s essentially a lot of people hiring service businesses. No one’s following
up on calls. You call the plumber and electrician, nobody picks up the phone. And I’ve had clients in
that space. And I realized there’s all this money on ads being spent to come to your site to fill out a
form, but then they miss the form or something happens to spam. The business owner is not checking
his emails. So this is a way where I could set up an automation to at least reply back to the customer.
Like, Hey, we got your message. Hey, it’s been about six hours. We’re really swamped right now.
We’re going to get back to you. And that’s where it’s done via email or SMS, just so that the person
knows that you got their information and that you’re going to get back to them. And at the same time,
I then prompt the business owner and their team, like, Hey, you got to call this person back.
It’s been four hours. They’re like your competition is going to win based off of how fast respond to
leads. So it’s a way to kind of help these business owners not drop the ball and not lose money based
off of their ad spend. And are you using YouTube and video primarily for marketing that service?
Starting with YouTube. That’s where the whole getting the video stuff done and doing emails
is to get a base of content. And then the next step is to do more outreach so that when they do come
find my name, they have that video content there to build that trust. Cause like, yeah, there’s cold email,
which is scamming. It is what it is, but it’s a sort of thing where like, if I know you have a product
that could actually help a business and not try to sell them, I scam them. I got to do what I got to do.
And if I got to reach out to them by a cold email, they’re just calling them on the phone, cold calling.
So be it. And at least that when they find my name, there’s content there that shows like, I am serious about
helping and this is how I help you versus some random landing page with nothing.
Do you do any pay per click with that or anything though? Cause I feel like that’s something that you
could easily just put in front of a business owner on like a LinkedIn or a Facebook or whatever. And
they’d be like, yeah, that totally makes sense. I need that. It’s very straightforward.
And that’s where I’m going to be starting with Facebook ads. Like it’s SEO by nature in the background
and that’s where I realized it’s not going to work anymore. It’s where the whole doing the videos and
getting everything else on a blog is not going to cut it no more. And it’s a matter of like starting to learn
paid ads to not mainly Facebook for that to understand how to get in front of them and to
at least get that retargeting going. Cause I know it’ll take a few touch points and it’s almost have
to educate them on the thing. Like it’s once you see it, you get it, but I got to educate people on it so
they can get it. I know it’s not a, something that’s been done before and you know, it’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s,
it’s also a good foot in the door after to potentially sell other stuff in the future.
Any marketing services if needed.
A hundred percent.
So the kind of clients that would use a service like this, what else are they,
what else do you see them in the, in the marketplace doing for marketing? What is their current omni-channel
approach?
Biggest thing for them is just Google maps. That’s where a lot of them are doing. And it’s word of
mouth. They’re trying to get government contracts or trying to get contracts for stratas. And there’s
all this money on the table where you try to call an electrician. Nobody picks up the phone.
Or doesn’t call you back. And it’s a matter of if there are those businesses that want to grow
and they may not know that their team isn’t following up on people. And they may want to like,
where’s the revenue going? Like we have the leads coming in, but people aren’t following up with
leads and dropping the ball. So that’s where this helps with that. So maybe the solopreneur may not
be the best fit for me, but someone with a team at least who understands that we got to respond fast.
Like that hustle is still within them after five, 10, 20 years of doing a business. That’s where that comes into play.
Excellent. We lost Mr. Matt
Medeiros, Mark. I think he had a, he had some audio issues.
Okay. He’s coming back. There he is.
There he is.
I’m back.
Oh, he’s back.
Mike’s too expensive. Maybe that’s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What did you get that off of?
Timu?
Okay. Well, anything else you want to add to this discussion, Chris, before we move on?
That’s all, fellas. Thank you very much. It’s been a blast. Love what you guys are doing and keep it up.
Well, I appreciate coming on and participating today.
Thanks, Chris.
Sorry, buddy.
All right.
If you noticed one thing about that, new format allows you to come on. You’re going to get your
little name tag in the bottom on the video. You’re going to get, if you come on video, by the way,
if you come on audio, it’s not going to happen, but you do, if you are willing to come on with video,
you get your little name tag and you potentially get to, you get to put your URL or your, or your
company name, if you have an agency or whatnot. And we might involve that a little bit in the,
in the discussion matter. Are there any angles on this that we have not discussed yet?
No, I mean, I think, yeah, from like the content perspective, you know, again, my,
this is my way of doing it. I know it’s anti sort of like typical SEO strategy, but it’s just about me
putting out the content that, that I love to, to cover. And then hopefully others will,
we’ll join in, you know, on, on the fun. Mark, uh, I had a question for you. Follow up question.
I mean, you’re, you’re kind of, I mean, you’re in the, you’re in the game right now of like
omni channel. Like it’s, it’s like, where is the attention coming from right now? What is the next
move? How are you structuring all of your things to capture the attention that you do get? I mean,
what are you thinking about right now in terms of this topic? What’s your, what’s your game plan
lately? How much time you got dog? I mean, we got 30
minutes. We have exactly 28 minutes of you.
All right. But, um, honestly, I’ll be completely candid with you. Cause I’ve been completely
candid with both of you guys very recently. Right. I think that every one of these topics
is almost like directly correlated with obviously all web designers, specifically like WordPress users,
because that’s our main demographics that we talked to. And I’m gonna be honest with you. You guys
are a little older than I am. Right. And you’ve seen the cycles, you’ve seen things happen.
So I’m kind of like a little blind in that. I don’t, I haven’t felt that I’ve just tried to like live
that through you guys and so many other people. But honestly, I sit here right now and I think,
you know what, I’ve spent my time building websites and I feel like I know a good bit about
I’m not, I’m not an expert, like a hundred percent expert in every single domain of it,
but I feel like I’m, I’m every day I’m getting to be a better marketer or a better like web designer,
a better business person, whatever. And truthfully where I’m at, if we’re talking to like freelancers
and agency owners, what I’m thinking about is how can I be a little bit more future proof? And how can I
like try to see where this stuff is going to go rather than be extremely reactive? And genuinely,
I know this is a little tangential, but it’s all related to, to like actually getting attention
to business. I don’t want to be specifically talking about just like the basics of web design
anymore. I feel like we’re kind of past that. I feel like there is a lot of value there,
but I feel like there’s more layers. Like we’re just talking to Chris, like he was given really
good examples of like how he was actually taking business cases and making them better and getting
like a little creative with the way that he was doing it and stuff like that. So to kind of bring
that back to the attention thing, that’s what I’m thinking about specifically is,
am I going to continue to talk about just specifically like WordPress stuff as an example?
Personally, I don’t necessarily think that that’s in my best interest, nor do I think that’s in the
best interest of my audience, because that’s not something I want to do specifically as a business
owner. I think what Matt has done recently has been very interesting diving into the AI realm,
and not in like a shitty way. It’s like literally like exploring and seeing, it’s not like click
baity. It’s like here, like, these are the things that we can do right now. The last point on this is the
caveat. We’re all talking about this shit. Like it’s not going to change extremely in one year.
Like this is the, this is the bad part. I know things have moved fast before, but now it’s really
moving fast and we have no idea what’s going to happen in five years. So I think now more than ever,
you have to almost like take your audience on a journey with you and really like learn the side
them because we have no idea where we’re going to be in five years. But the one thing you can guarantee
is if you start to actually talk and have an audience, then at least at that point,
you will have some people that know you like you trust you when the robots, you know, fully take
over or something like that. So, um, or if we’re on the shores of, you know, Massachusetts with our
ham radios. So at least we’ll be, you know, at least we’ll have a community at that point. But that’s,
that’s literally where I’m at with, with all of this candidly.
Um, guys, we have an emergency. Uh, we, we have a, we have a, uh, you never know who’s going to stop
by WP town hall. I’m going to elevate a man to the stage right here. And, uh, and look who it is.
Look who it is.
He just wants to show off his podcast setup. That’s all he heard. We were given, we were given.
This is not my podcast setup. No, it’s not. This is, this is just my office. Yeah.
His B is better than Mark’s a though. So, uh, you know, we got to get the cohost.
We got, we got to get some of that Omni send money over to Mark. Yeah.
I wasn’t going to say it, but yeah.
Well, what would you like to add to the discussion?
Well, I think the title is an interesting one. I don’t think you really touched the title
as much as you could have, because the it’s a content war is what is being claimed here. And yeah,
yeah. I’m wondering if it is actually a war or it, or if it is actually the natural progression of how
things are meant to go. Cause if you look at the growth of any organism, uh, it it’s from expanding
contraction, expanding contraction, right? So if we started out from a contracted, uh, my blog is the only,
you know, version of what I put out there. Then at some point we were, uh, destined to end up where we
are now, which is splintered all over the place. Um, I think, uh, uh, I think I saw Jeff tweet
something, uh, uh, uh, post something on X. There you go. Can’t say tweet anymore. Yeah. Post something
on X saying, uh, I hate that I have to have my discussions over three, four different channels now,
but it’s what it is. Um, I think we’re slowly seeing that with protocols like activity pub and all that,
that we have an opportunity to sort of contract again. Um, but the, the content war thing triggered
me, like how much of it is an actual war? How much of it is actually just how things go. And,
you know, as we learn through this plow through this, and certainly, uh, for those of us who’ve been doing
this, uh, I’m going to age myself really bad here, but, um, more than 15 years, then, you know,
there’s, there’s a lot of different things we’ve seen over the years and how much of it is just,
you know, it’s what it is. And the next phase will be the phase that certainly I will enjoy more.
And I imagine the gist of this world as well.
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I said that earlier, I think it’s, um, when it comes to like, Hey, do you,
like, I want people, I want people in my audience to read a blog post, open up a newsletter, listen to a
podcast and you know, whatever, call me like content romantic. Like I, I want, that’s the kind of person,
uh, that, that I want to be, you know, consuming my stuff. I mean, obviously I want people to, you
know, watch the videos and, and, you know, be into the social media stuff. But even my social media
stuff is like, I’m just too tired to like stay on that, that social media treadmill.
Um, you know, I lose the Katie Keith all the time in terms of like reach, right? Because she leverages
that so, so well as she interacts with everybody. And it’s just not my, not my thing. I don’t mind
getting on there and ranting and stuff, but I also, you know, don’t mind having people
tune in.
So, Matt, when you started social media, you were very much like Katie.
Right.
Because it was much more about just dumping your thoughts 24/7. If Katie’s doing anything,
she is dumping her thoughts, her, her thought processes, her questions, her remarks,
all of that goes to X. And I think we all did that when we, you know, 2007, eight, nine,
when we started with social media, that was the norm.
Mm-hmm.
I think it’s interesting for Katie to have such success in what is it, two, three years for
her to, what is, I think she had 5k followers now on, on X. Mm-hmm.
I think it’s a perfect example of what she’s actually doing is what we all should be doing.
Mm-hmm.
There’s a guy on X, I forget his name right now. Alex Finn, I think is his name. And he’s been,
he’s been posting a lot about how X works as a platform. Now, you can, you know, choose to believe
it or not, or have all these opinions about what the platform is, who owns it and all that. But he’s
just talking about the mechanism. And one of the things he’s made very, very clear is that the whole
thing has moved to start becoming the reply person, start being the one who engages. It’s less about
broadcasting sending, it’s more about engaging. And if anyone is doing that perfectly, it’s Katie.
Yeah. And I can only conclude that if I look back at when I had the most growth,
that was mostly engaging. It always has been. And he highlights the algorithm, right? He looks into it,
he, cause it’s published for the most part. You can check out what the algorithm looks like. And it
actually says, don’t do these things, do these things and become the reply person. Katie Keith.
Katie Keith from barn two plugins. Yeah. What happened, Matt? What changed? Yeah. What,
what happened? Well, I had three kids. So there’s that.
Yeah. Prepping takes a lot of time. Oh yeah. Yeah. Bill in the ham radio. Yeah. No, I mean, I think on
the social media side, it was just like, yeah, we, we were, we got into it, you know, long ago and
sort of just like exhausted that, you know, in my case. Right. And then trying other things and
yeah, just a time thing, time and effort thing. I, once again, like I never even looked at
measurement of social, like I don’t check stats on anything. The only thing I check stats on is my,
just my newsletter, just because convert kit shows it to me right when I log in, you know, other than
that, like I am never, uh, looking at it, uh, looking at any analytics and it’s always just
content, you know, putting out stuff that I, I, I feel, uh, inspired to that’s it.
So I used to, I, I run to social media platforms like X and Facebook are perfect for me for casual,
short form or medium form, even thoughts that definitely don’t need to be a blog post and would
be too much hassle to turn into a video. Uh, and I know I’m going to get instant distribution on it.
I know I’m going to get instant engagement on it. And if I want instant engagement,
like I’m running a poll or I just care what people think like right now. And I don’t want to
publish something with WordPress and then have to distribute it on my own and try to get, by the way,
you can’t even really distribute all that much on these platforms because the minute you post a link,
they’re killing the reach, you know? So it’s just way easier to like, I can go communicate directly
with the people who follow me on these platforms. I can get that instant feedback and I can move on with my
life and it’s not an evergreen thing. And I don’t care that it’s going to die in 24 hours.
You know, like that is a, it’s perfect for that. I’ve seen you put out some pretty epic threads
though. And I was just like, man, he should have just wrote this on a blog post. Cause this,
I was going to say, I was going to say the same thing there, there have been quite a few things
that you raised or discussed or gave an opinion about where I went, this would have been better as
a blog post. Yeah. Cause it’s, it’s, it’s more fine line sometimes.
Yeah. Well, you can, you can look at it from that way saying, what is the line of, when is it a blog post?
And when is it just something I, I just, you know, uh, blast on social media, but here’s the other thing.
However, many people are actually watching right then and there are primarily the ones determined
to read what you are, what you’re sending out. And sure, later in the day, some algorithms can pick
it up and kind of help you push your content here and there. But I think, you know, if you, if you were
to publish it on a site, you’d have a canonical thing, you can refer to it and you can re-engage it.
And there’s at least that’s for the most part, how I try to do it. And I see good results with it.
However, like, so the downside to that, like, let’s say if I publish it as a blog post,
then it becomes very difficult to share. It’s like, you start to share it on Facebook,
they shut you down. You try to share it on X, they shut you down. I could email it to my existing
list, but that’s not audience growth. That’s just feeding the existing audience. Whereas if I do it
as a thread on, on X, uh, or I do it as a public post on Facebook that then gets shared, I do,
I don’t care about Facebook all that much. Cause it’s like friends is not really followers,
that kind of thing. But like X is a perfect example. My following does significantly build by doing those
threads where if those things were blog posts, that would likely not
happen. You know? So there’s that side of it is like, I can actually, if I am engaging people in
the WordPress ecosystem that don’t know who I am or haven’t seen me before, or maybe just seen me a few
times. And I write this big, long thread and it gets in front of them and they, and they’re like,
man, I’ve seen this guy a couple of times now. And then they click the follow. Now that’s somebody
that’s now in my audience there that I can hopefully consistently engage with. If these things were blog
posts, that would be very difficult to produce that. Yeah. Interesting thought here from Rob.
He says that, uh, he’s read a lot of your threads and then finds out that you had blog posts that
they weren’t aware of. And I mean, you have insights too, which I think are a really cool concept that I
might adopt. Um, but I, what have you ever thought about doing both?
If I stopped doing insights cause it’s a, it’s a, it’s that’s the, you, you run in the same problem. The insights are
never going to get ranked. They’re not going to get, they’re not going to produce any organic traffic. And then I can’t
share them on any third party platforms because of the link algorithm issue. So it’s just best. I just move those
insights to native posts on the platforms.
But if you share it in the first comment, it’s not that much of a deal because it’s
correct, but it’s still limits the, a lot of people don’t even click to look at it or they don’t even
know how it works. Like they’re not on the, that same page, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. That sure. Sure.
It’s not that. Yeah. And I would say that it’s not that you can’t share them. It’s just that you’re looking to,
to optimize. But if you, let’s just say like the hot topic with Kevin in the WordPress space,
welcome to Kevin’s therapy session, uh, is like Gutenberg related stuff. Like if you had many
threads, like many literal threads of individual ideas of Gutenberg, um, those are all then lost from
what, uh, Remkes was talking about before was, you know, somebody is on make.wordpress.org and they
want to reference you in a comment. Yeah. Like they’re, they’re not finding that X thread, but if they’re
like, Oh, I know Kevin blogs about this stuff, goes to your site, searches for Gutenberg sucks in the search
bar finds that blog post and then puts it into, you know, a link in the nav. I don’t even have to
search. Yeah. I’m going to check that right now. Yeah. Yeah. It better be there.
Yeah. Then those like really important thoughts are, or at least, um, you know, that’s why I like
it is like, cause it’s archive. You want to reference that frame of thought that I had there it is right
there. So I think maybe what you’re describing should happen is I, we may be free to do all of these
threads. And then I create a blog post that is essentially an overarching, like, here’s my
opinion on this topic. And you can even embed the posts and things like that, that, that might be
the best of both worlds. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I’m a strong believer of having a canonical version of
anything that’s worth typing out over more than let’s say two or three paragraphs. Cause if it’s more than
that, you are articulating something that will resonate with somebody else or not resonate, but it may
inspire somebody else. And you know, uh, I’m one of those old fashioned people who still subscribe to
people’s blogs by RSS, right? It’s, I see stuff they’re publishing that they’re not even sharing and
whatnot. Um, just think of how much you would enrich in the ecosphere if you did.
Yeah. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. We’ve got two questions, uh, that I guess I will put up on the
screen and anybody can take these. Uh, the first one is a short one and it’s a quick one. It’s from
Melanie and she says, how do I make, well, she, the question she gets from, I guess her clients and such,
uh, how do I make my video go viral? I guess this is just general topical advice.
Overnight success.
Yeah. Yeah. A hard one. Right. I mean, like if you’re somebody who’s creating content, uh, on a, at least a one a week
cadence, like there are videos where, you know, you’re, you takes you 12 hours to put out and then
nobody watches it. And then the video that took you 20 minutes, you just recorded end to end without
anything. All of a sudden it blows up. Uh, it’s so hard. Like it’s no rhyme or reason. I mean, again,
I’m, I’m not the kind, I’m sure there are YouTubers out there who are like, this is what you need in the
thumbnail. This is what you need in the title. Right. I really thought you were going to go to something
about the thumbnail. I was like, it’s part of the recipe. Yeah. You know, there are things you can
do, but, uh, I don’t know how to do it. Short answer is I have no idea. If I see a thumbnail go
where people go like, yeah, I’m out. Yeah. I don’t even click unsubscribe. What if there was a white
knight in a black knight and one had a battle ax, the other one had an Excalibur. I think I’ve seen
that thumbnail before actually it sounds like a really bad movie actually. What I, so Melanie,
what I tell people who asked me that, or I tell customers who asked that because yes, it’s more
people that are not in the know that don’t really do this stuff for a living. Um, I tell them to make
a video a week, uh, for, you know, the next 52 weeks or a video a day or however many they’re willing to do.
You’re, you’re probably going to get some semblance of a winning video in there somewhere every so often.
Uh, but there’s no method to the, like, there’s no recipe that you can just apply and boom, it takes off.
Uh, it’s just part of the process of consistent publishing, good quality publishing.
I think there’s things that you could increase your likelihood of that happening. Like, I mean, I’m, I’m trying to dive deeper into it now,
especially and actually see what like we’ll call them successful YouTubers actually do, but it is,
you know, as Matt was saying earlier, it’s a lot of the same shit. It’s like kind of click baity stuff that
your packaging of your video is really important. Like the thumbnail and the title to get people to click.
There’s some formulaic things you could do to increase your chances of getting people to click through,
but then your content has to actually be good too, because that’s how you build the actual consistency.
As you guys know, cause you know, you, you do it well. It’s like, you have to deliver once they’re in
there, but the viral nature of it, they can’t see what’s really in the video. So to speak,
they can’t understand the quality unless they’ve seen videos of yours before, or the packaging is
really good. It’s a really weird spot for people that I feel like just default to putting out good
content, but don’t care about the packaging because they’re probably leaving some views on the table.
But at the same time, it’s like, that might not be your goal is to necessarily go viral. So,
but other than that, I would totally agree with you saying the consistency is important.
There’s a marketing book. It’s, I don’t know how popular it is. I assume it’s popular. It’s called
Zag. I think it’s just called Zag. That’s it. Which is essentially the premise. I don’t even think you
have to read it. I might’ve read the first chapter and I was like, all right. Yeah. It’s like common.
It’s one of those like common sense books to me anyway. Like if they are going to zig,
you need to zag. Like you can’t zig with everybody that’s already zigging. And so instead of asking,
how do I make my video go viral, what you should be asking is like, how do I zag? So you look at the
content that’s being produced in the genre that you are going to be producing content in. And for example,
if all of this like wildly successful stuff is hyper polished teleprompter videos,
zagging would be, I record myself on my cell phone and I’m just me. Right. That’s the zag,
right. If the, if the zig is, it’s all just iPhone videos and unscripted stuff, the zag is go hyper
polished and see, and that’s just one angle on, on like zagging, right? There’s like so many different
angles and you can combine angles as well. And so that’s really what you should be looking for.
Not, uh, not just how do I go viral? I’d like to add two things. Cause one, uh, subscribe to the zig and
zag thing. Uh, everything happening in the fitness industry was very polished, very clean, super
professional and all that. And then along, then along came, uh, Sam Sulik who just raw recorded
everything he did talking through whatever he did, what he thought all that unscripted, just blabbering
into the microphone basically. But he’s, he’s got a, uh, a following that just, you know, it’s ridiculous
now. Yeah. Um, that is one way to look at the zig and zag, but there’s another discussion as well.
Cause how much, so first of all, is your content it let’s, let’s call it YouTube is the, as the platform
you’re going for. There’s two ways to publish. One is for search and one is for attention.
So you can build a very, very sustainable business entirely just search videos and vice versa. You can
do high quality, easy to process type of video content that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to get viral
to have a very, very sustainable business built on top of that. Cause what is the goal of what you’re
showing? Oh, it’s a funnel, right? So it’s nothing more than that. So I, I, I have a few clients who
are very active on YouTube and, um, one of them has said to me, I don’t care to get viral because if
I’m viral, that doesn’t, that, that means jack shit on conversion and I’m looking for conversion.
So every now and then he has something relevant, relatively, uh, viral. And you would say, you know,
you must be really happy with that one. And he goes like, but I hardly had any clicks. So what is,
what does it really matter to me? What I, what I’m, you know, what I’m trying to say is that
there’s different strategies to whatever goal or the idea behind, like, I need to be viral.
You probably don’t.
You probably don’t have to be able to do that. But I’m trying to be able to do that.
But I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to
be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that.
And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to
be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that.
And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able
to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that.
I make the content very entertaining, or very controversial, or very whatever. And then
that’s going to get the shareability side of things. Whereas nobody really shares pure SEO
content, because it’s not really designed for that. And then the pure entertainment or controversy
content doesn’t ever rank, because algorithms aren’t aren’t made for that in search. If you can
find something that is SEO worthy, a topic that is SEO worthy, and bake in the entertainment or the
controversy or whatever else that is designed for the shareability, that’s like the S tier. It’s not
easy to do. It’s very difficult to do. But then you get the best of both worlds. And that really,
you know, if you’re going to create content in this day and age, that is the, I would think the,
top tier approach.
I would agree.
Okay, we’ve got one more. I think we’re done with that one. Let’s go ahead and hide. Let me,
let’s screen this one first. If you’re known already,
you can start anywhere. If you are new. Yeah. Okay. Let’s, let’s tackle this from SK. I think
it depends on the stage of entrepreneur you are. If you are known already, you can start anywhere.
If you are new, you have to do well where people are thoughts.
I got some.
I think it matters.
Go get it, Mark.
Mark. I think it, I think it matters. I read this one earlier from SK and I thought,
uh, I thought to myself, um, I kind of have this, this note here too, where it’s like,
I wanted to run this by you guys of either. It sounds like a lot of what we’re talking about is
either have to play the game. You have to revolt or you just have to not care
somehow. I feel like there’s at least three options. Maybe there’s more, maybe there’s less, whatever.
But I think what SK is talking about here is yeah. Like I think one of the things is if you don’t
have a following, but you have a skill, then I mean, honestly, that’s kind of what I did. I mean,
I kind of just started putting that out there and then people became known of it because they found
my stuff and then they kind of know, knew me a little bit. I’ve had marginal success doing that.
So I feel like it, depending on where you’re at and what your goals are, you have to go to where
the attention is at first. And then if you can pull some of that off there, we obviously talked
about that strategy, but if you, for somehow your fame, and we see this all the time, like celebrities
get onto like YouTube or Instagram or wherever, and then they automatically blow up because people
know them. So I think it does matter where you’re at in your journey a little bit, as far as your
strategy of like where you can actually go or where the best ROI of your time is spent. And it might be
unfortunate, but it also, I feel like at some point is kind of the reality of just where we’re at. I think
you kind of do have to go and make a calculated decision on where you’re going to spend your time,
because if you do want to get that attention, which eventually turns into leads, which eventually
could turn into conversions, then you know, you got to go where, where the distribution is. That’s my high
level on that. I agree. I, I, yeah, I was going to say the, the, the, the downside of being splintered is,
you know, everything is fragmented. The upside of that is, uh, certain crowds, certain, um, types of
customers, types of audience will be predominantly on one of those splintered platforms. Um, so in, in a way,
it kind of makes it easier to make a decision to go fall in, there are certain businesses that will
never thrive on, on Instagram reels and whatnot. And there’s business who do do basically you would
expect to do as wonderful as, as they can. And on Instagram, they don’t, and they move over to
TikTok and it’s way more engaging and they have like mass audience. And you go like, how does that,
isn’t it the same video? Yeah, it is. And yet it isn’t. Um, it’s all dependent on where the audience is
and what the audience expects. And, and I think this is not just H brackets. I think it’s just a whole,
that particular problem that you’re solving, that your, your, your business is solving. Um, there’s an
audience for it and it is, it just lives somewhere for whatever reason. There’s, there’s audiences that
are in discord and never see outside worlds. Just harder to reach. Sure. But they’re there. Um,
it’s very difficult to find one place or maybe just two places where, uh, where you’re going to have
success. Hell, even on YouTube, you can be very successful in reels and just never hit off with
the main videos and vice versa. It just happens. So we’ve got five minutes left. I’m going to,
I’m going to put this question out here, uh, for everybody. And I think this speaks to maybe what SK is
saying as well. And I’m, I’m really curious to hear Matt’s take on this. If you are new to the game
from scratch, nobody knows who you are, got an idea. Do you start with a website or do you start with
social media? Uh, well, I would, if you know what you’re doing, you start with a website first, but
you, you know, you spend just enough time, uh, you know, to put your, you build out your portfolio
site for lack of a better phrase. Uh, you build your home base there, you get your email newsletter,
sign up there. And then if you’re like, if you don’t know anything, then my first social media site
is YouTube. And that’s where I invest, uh, most of my time, starting with YouTube, creating the videos,
whatever your topic is and optimizing to send back to your website, uh, to sign people up to your
newsletter. That’s, that’s the, that’s the, the formula I would use or would use, uh, launching
something new. Absolutely the same. Yeah. What if you don’t know how to build a website though?
You can do a link in bio, like start somewhere. Yeah. It really doesn’t matter. You have something
that is a little bit more in your control where you can add stuff where you can have your conversion
started, all that just do a little bit more than nothing. Yeah. I mean, obviously that was pretty
vague. Like we don’t know who that person is or what they want to do, but I did a video
week or two ago at this point where I was like looking at YouTubers, like big YouTubers,
none of them have websites. Like it’s, it’s shocking. None of them have websites and they’re
now we don’t know how much, how successful they are. Obviously they get views. How are they monetizing?
I’m not saying they’re good business people necessarily. I’m just saying that the attention,
they’re making some level of money. They’re garnishing a bunch of attention and they don’t have websites.
I don’t know if that’s our, our opportunity to step in and tell them that they need to do something
there. But I know what Kevin’s going to say, cause he just did a live stream on it not too long ago. And I feel
like I’m a little jaded on the fact that we need websites. We definitely need websites,
but like first at the very ground level, when the amount of time that I know I’ve wasted on my own
website, when nobody was coming to it is shocking. Like I could have been out like getting more
attention and more leads. I feel like there’s just so much, it’s just very different. I feel like than
it was before, but I can call it. Co 50 bucks a year. There’s easy ways. I’m just saying like how
much time just don’t waste any time on it though. It’s not what we’re missing here is the question,
the answer to the question. What is a website? Right. That’s, that’s exactly what I was about to
bring up. Uh, because I like card.co or whatever. Like, I don’t think it’s so actually consulted
somebody on this very, very recently. It’s like a Pilates instructor. Uh, well,
like a studio owner who wanted to start moving into the online space. And I essentially said like,
you know, you could, cause she was like, well, I need a website. I need to do this. And her studio
had a website, but not like her or, and not, or not the content angle that she really needed it to be.
And I, I essentially said, pick a, identify a platform that’s working for that niche with,
whether it’s Instagram or whether it’s Tik TOK or whatever, probably Tik TOK. And I would prove the
concept of you getting on video, you producing content that people want to see you getting likes
and follows you building up some semblance of a community and literally all you need as the link,
what I would be, what I would be sending them to is a free video series opt-in or something like that,
where they can get more. So you’re capturing them, but you don’t need a website to capture them. You just needed,
you just need to capture them, not on the platform, not as followers, but on something you own. Well, you own an email list,
capture them that way, but prove the concept before we go into this, like discussion of building out a website and all this other stuff,
just prove that you can get people’s attention, just prove that you can get them to take an action.
And once it gets to a certain, then everything is going to work itself out from there, but you don’t have to start. I wouldn’t even recommend starting with the website concept.
Honestly, honestly, just to try to put a bow on that, if I can, I don’t know a great way to verbalize this, but I’m gonna try my best is I think anyone
like can try to be an effectively, what you’re saying is try to be an entrepreneur and make money.
But I don’t know if everybody’s necessarily going to be cut out for it. I think that’s actually probably pretty ubiquitous when you actually say it a little bit better than what I did there.
So I feel like, I think that’s exactly kind of what you’re saying, Kevin, is just, if you’re on your very first crack at this,
don’t waste all the time and potentially money trying to get up to speed to be look like a professional business.
I’ve definitely done this in the past. Like you have to actually go see if you can, it’s not even just about video.
That’s a big part of it, but just get the attention and get some like literally make some money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because you don’t, I don’t think, I think the ultimate thing is a website is not a prerequisite for making money.
Like I think that’s actually the core of it. Websites important. We’re all in the business.
We understand how important it is, but it’s, it’s a timely thing. And I think that, like you said,
the proof of concept mindset, I feel like is a really unique way to go about it that I think sometimes I’ve
definitely been guilty of like, oh, you need a website, you need a website. It’s like,
yeah, really? I mean,
I made the point the other day on the live stream that you don’t, if I don’t need a website to sell
software, because I made the point that etch, like I didn’t need a website for etch. Okay. To do the
launch and do everything that we did. I didn’t need a cart. I didn’t need anything. I could have sent
them to a Stripe page. So I didn’t need a web. If I don’t need a website, a digital thing to sell
another digital thing, like the, the, the quintessential digital thing that nobody, nobody needs a website,
right? Nobody needs a website. Now with that said, the people who you’re talking about,
the YouTubers, cause I saw your video or part of video where you were pulling up different channels,
they had 500,000 followers and 250,000 and a million plus, and they don’t have a website.
Those people are morons. They’re absolute morons to, to have that level of attention and audience.
And you’re just risking YouTube, not deleting it. And you don’t, you don’t agree with that.
You haven’t captured them in any other form or fashion. You’re not like the amount of money that
they’re leaving on the table. Just having no semblance of capture convert is ridiculous. That’s
absurd. We can do a whole episode on just, yes, just that, just that. I, I, one thing I want to add
about Kevin’s remark though. I think what you skipped over Kevin is the fact that you didn’t need a website
because people already trusted you and that’s a huge, like, that’s a huge gap from somebody who’s
just starting to like where you’re at in your career. Right. And I think like those basics of like,
all right, at least set up a card.co site, put a bio, some photos, some description of your services,
whatever it is. Like, I don’t know where this person was, but you have to establish some form
of trust. And I think that that’s why, yeah. Yeah. Authority or, or trust when people start to like,
Hey, I heard this guy or gal does this thing. Let me go check it out. And then you’re just like,
Oh, what’s this random ass link to, you know, just a MailChimp account and, and their tick tock, like,
like, if they’re doing research. Yes. If, if you are selling something,
I agree because people are doing a financial transaction and they’re going to want background
info, things like that. But what I’m saying is if you’re just getting started out, you’re not
interested in selling anything yet. You’re interested in just playing the attention capture game.
And so all you’re asking them to do is give you an email address essentially, but you’re proving that
the most important part of that is that you can show up on a consistent basis and not just show up on a
consistent basis, but you can show up in some sort of entertaining or helpful or whatever way to get
people to say, you know, I do want to follow this person and I don’t want to just follow them on this
platform. I want to hear from them over. I will actually give them a piece of my information,
right. So that they can contact me further. That is something that you, in my opinion,
should just prove the concept of before you worry too much about a website. And by the way,
if you’re a nobody, but you have a super polished website, it can actually go against you. Like,
um, you know, this, this idea of, it’s almost a, um, a stick. You could like this idea of like,
uh, I don’t know what it look. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just putting out the best content I
possibly can. And like that, that super organic field that people, it almost lowers their defense,
right? When they see hyper polished things, they’re like, well, hold on. You know, who is this person?
Where did this come from? That kind of thing. Um, it’s the same with ads, like ad advertisers
are starting to figure out that if they send a hyper polished ad or an email marketing, if I send this
hyper polished visual email, people instantly in their brain go, that’s an advertisement. I’m ignoring it.
Right. But if it’s made to be organic, right? You go watch a, a war video and it’s like shaky
footage. And you’re like, you feel like you’re, it’s, it just feels like it’s more authentic,
right? Um, the same kind of concepts apply. Um, so I would say like, if your website is too,
right. Like you put us as web designers, if, cause we know how to do it. If we put too much
effort into the website before we go get the, it’s just, I don’t know. There’s like a weirdness factor
to it for a lot of people. Um, and this goes to the conversation of why do ugly sites convert so
well? Why do ugly sites often convert way better than beautiful sites? Because people care about
one, the, the, the content more than anything, but two, it’s like, it just has that kind of like,
um, it’s not corporate-y it’s not, um, super popular. It’s casual. I don’t know. I don’t know what
it does to them. It like puts a spell on them, but it’s very true. And it’s a, it’s a question that
people ask all the time. It’s like when Mark designed his first website and it’s like a picture
of like a data center. It’s like Pittsburgh’s lower east number one, it integrator. And then
Mark shows up with like a toolbox and they’re like, this guy’s like 16 years old, came in a
Honda civic. Like what the, why am I hiring this guy? Mark has got so many strays in this.
This is ridiculous. I have to know. I have to know. Was it a Honda civic?
Oh yeah. I got two Honda civics. Oh, there you go. 2010 into 24. So yeah.
Yeah. Big Honda guy in this house. I re I remember V tech when that was new.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t even have that one. I got the two point whatever leader,
but you shouldn’t have said that you, I had a perfect and now we were, yeah, it’s, that’s not a,
there’s not, it doesn’t make any noise. No, it’s just, it’s just, that’s a shame.
Yeah. That’s a shame. Yeah. As Brendan said, that’s, that’s why I keep my 1993 Camry and show
the potential clients office, disarm them. Exactly. That is a good car for that. Exactly.
Yeah. Only that. There’s, I mean, there are some niches, obviously like a real estate agent probably
doesn’t want to show up in the 1993 Camry, right? You know, you want, you want the Mercedes, the BMW,
that kind of thing. There’s it’s, it’s expectations being aligned with what the audience in that
industry is expecting. I know for a fact that the contract was not assigned to me because of the car
I pulled up in. So, well, I mean, you pulled up into BMW country with a Mercedes. So they said, please leave.
It was a G wagon and I parked it like 200 meters past. Yeah. I kind of figured that, but they,
they figured it out as well. So yeah, please leave. All right, guys. We had a great conversation,
but I just, uh, I could hear in how they were wording it. Like, oh, okay. I got it.
This guy’s driving a Mercedes. Get him out of here. Yeah. That’s funny. All right. I think we got to
put this one in the books. We’re at our time limit. Um, and Matt joins with us. The other,
was that’s a different Matt. Can we pull that up? Oh, is this you? Oh, this is you.
Yeah. Pull that up. What are we doing here? What are we doing? What is this?
Look at that. I mean, what a fantastic, listen, if you’re looking for a new producer,
what did you put it? If you’re looking for a new producer, is that Matt Damon in the middle?
He says to everyone, is that the guy that started the revolutionary war there on the left?
Oh, look at that guy. Oh my God. I’m not even sure what’s going on on the right.
He’s on the banks of the… What did you prompt for that hairstyle?
Can I zoom in? Oh yeah, I can do that right there. Look at that. Look at Kevin. You know,
Kevin, if you wanted a stern, double as a general, look at this guy. Look at this guy. What the hell is that?
What did you do to my face?
I’m reminded of the Persian war or something. What are you using for these? What are you using for these,
Matt? What are you making? That was a, that’s a multi-step process. So that is, uh,
uh, starting with a Mac app called Diffusion B. Yeah. Uh, and that’s where I created…
Can you come to a workshop on this in the inner circle? I’m doing a workshop here, actually in my
uh, co-working space next week. Uh, Diffusion B and then bring this into, um,
uh, face replacement AI, like any face replacement AI website to replace the faces and bring it into
Canva through the old font and bring up the brightness, lower the contrast.
Pump it out on social media.
Please don’t do that ever again.
I’m scarring people.
All right, guys, we’re putting in this one in the books. Thank you for being here, everybody.
Thank you for watching. We got a, this is a record number, I think on our streams. So, uh,
this has been fantastic and we’ll be here again in two weeks.
Yeah.
Look at that. Look at that.
All right, guys. All right, guys. Thank you.