For sure, A.I. can accelerate your content production and overall productivity, but what’s more important than AI content creation for your blog?
To find out, better listen to this episode!
I have invited Jeff Coyle today on the BOB podcast to talk about combining the power of A.I. to your content creation while giving importance to other aspects of an online business.
Jeff Coyle is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at MarketMuse. He has over 20 years of experience managing products and website networks. The technology at MarketMuse combines advanced A.I., natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms to help inbound marketers get the most out of every dollar spent on content.
We had a good discussion about why so many content sites will no longer exist in the next few years. How good will that be for us all? What do those sites look like so you don’t buy them, and what does a good site look like so you can buy them? And how do you get around depreciating content sites?
We also had a great conversation around the relationship a business should have with A.I., and editors and what the most important roles are for blog owners moving forward.
Do you want to learn how to integrate technology into your current system? Go check out this episode to learn more!
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Episode Highlights
04:15: How can MarketMuse help site owners?
11:34 Streamline your business processes through AI
16:57 AI is NOT the answer!
25:55: What type of content gets more conversions?
30:30 Why hire people with experience in the space
35:33 Why providing more value for the audience makes you more money
41:53 MarketMuse’s evolution
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ There are branches of AI that can solve your problems. It doesn’t mean that if a tool doesn’t work, there are no other tools that you can use. Jeff emphasizes that there are AI tools available that can automate and streamline your business processes.
➥ Jaryd emphasizes that while AI is not the ultimate solution, it serves as a valuable tool to enhance productivity and efficiency within businesses. Rather than viewing AI as a standalone answer to all challenges, Jaryd suggests leveraging it as a complementary tool alongside human expertise.
➥ People tend to trust and believe content that is created by experts in their field. Experts are seen as knowledgeable and credible sources, and their content is perceived as reliable.
About The Guest
Jeff Coyle, the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at MarketMuse, has over 20 years of experience managing products and website networks. The technology at MarketMuse combines advanced AI, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms to help inbound marketers get the most out of every dollar spent on content.
Connect with Jeff Coyle
Transcription:
Jaryd Krause:
Do you have a website you might want to sell either now or in the future? We have a hungry list of cashed up and trained up buyers that want to buy your content website. If you have a site making over $300 per month and want to sell it, head to buyingonlinebusinesses.co/sellyourbusiness. Or email us at [email protected] because we'll likely have a buyer. The details are in the description.
Jeff, you're back. Mate, welcome back. It's so good to chat with you.
Jeff Coyle:
What's happening, Jaryd? How are you?
Jaryd Krause:
I'm really good. Thank you. How are you?
Jeff Coyle:
I'm good. Just a wild ride in the world of content and search in 2023. And every day, my laundry list gets longer and longer.
Jaryd Krause:
Hold that thought, because we're about to just go down a big rabbit hole with that. But I just want to say for everybody listening, Jeff has been on the podcast before, and you've also been on our online summits. Our first podcast we did together was episode 82. We're up to 228 now. And that episode was about how to buy and build content websites with you. So, guys, I’ll link to that in the show notes. I think it's such a great piece of content that you guys should listen to. Go back and check that out.
But Jeff, I wanted to get you back on because we've had some good chats after recording even on the online summits in the last few years, and lots happened. And 2023—what a world-winning time, especially with this AI conversation going on. And I'm huge in the camp of trying to allow people to not rip their hair out and just de-stress themselves by understanding where we're at with it and how it can be helpful, but not to get too distracted in a sense.
And then I was looking at guests that I've had on the pod, people that I enjoy talking to, who have dropped some absolute bombs, knowledge bombs. You came up, and then I saw that you guys at MarketMuse have some AI software that you're embedding and integrating with it. And I just emailed you, and you're like, “How did you even know that we were going to do this?” And yeah. So tell me, where do we begin? I have so many questions, but where do you think we should start?
Jeff Coyle:
Well, I think that there's a few things that come to mind for your audience. And I love your site and the podcast. And I'm always thinking about buying and selling podcasts and what's going through the minds of buyers and sellers. And so I really do want to get into the details and the thoughts that I've had on site valuations, things to look for, all of that, through the lens of this massive disruption, the AI disruption.
But just in a short stroke, from a MarketMuse perspective, a couple of years ago, we'd always been an artificial intelligence first company. So our core technology, which we have patents on from 2013 to 2015, is an AI technology. It's a branch of artificial intelligence called topic modeling, graph theory, and applications of machine learning, where we can basically determine what it means to be an expert on a concept. That was the core of what we built.
So if you say, What does it mean to be an expert on any concept, any specific thing you'd be looking for? I'm looking at your surfboard in the background. So what's the difference between a three-skeg surfboard and a four-skeg surfboard? What are the things that would be included if you were covering that particular intent and writing it? What other content would you need? You'd probably need to know about surfing. You'd probably have to know content about shapes of boards, materials, sizes, expertise, and skill development. You go through that.
MarketMuse's goal is to provide a site owner who wants to establish expertise and exhibit that expertise with the content with all the things they need to build, whether it's how to update one page or what the next 100 pages are that I need to write. That's always been our mission, right?
So a couple of years ago, we launched a large language model solution called MarketMuse First Draft. And it was the industry's first-generation technology. This is the fun part, because it failed miserably because it was too early. It was too expensive. But the quality is better than what you can get even today out of ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo, which would be the prevailing API in OpenAI. If you're a ChatGPT Plus customer, you can get access to 4 right now, GPT-4.
There are now more than 40 open-source large language models that anyone can get access to very simply and that are all at that level or higher. But when we were building that a couple of years ago, it would have cost $20 to $30 to generate one page, right? And we're like, “Okay. So if you're running a business, we have to charge 100 bucks for that.” Nobody was ready to buy a page of content that was generated for $100.
And now you can do it for fractions of a penny. So where we're at today is that we've got to be thinking about how to keep humans in the loop when the price of generation and the price of response—that's the way that I like to think about it, you can get information, but the price of that response is fractions of a penny.
And that's the world we're in. So I think setting the standard, setting the framework for, hey, everything we talk about, can be done. And it can be done for an unimaginably low price. So now everyone has to change the way they think about the costs of content, and websites. The cost basis just imploded. Because it's not the fact that the unit cost did, it's that we now need to think differently about the true costs that go in.
In the past, we might've been thinking that a page costs X dollars. Now we're realizing that the actual content on the page wasn't the all-in costs. And us not thinking critically about those costs has actually set us behind. What am I talking about? Opportunity costs, costs to edit, costs to publish, costs to promote, costs to interlink. All these other costs had previously been engulfed in the price I paid to my writer. So the true cost of content's now coming out.
Jaryd Krause:
: Yeah. You mean we're realizing that getting the content created is a lot cheaper. And then the real costs of everything else are, oh, it's getting more attention now because we've solved one problem in the pipeline with cheaper content creation, right?
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. So the market for humans to create pages of crappy content is gone. And that, over the course of the last nine months, went from a thriving business to invisible. And the impact of that is tremendous disruption. And it's the type of disruption nobody really wants to talk about either. Because it's the purchase of a low-quality raw material, right? Nobody wants to talk about that, right?
And so when that can be replaced, an entire industry changes overnight. So if you were ahead of that, you were thinking, Okay, what managed services can I provide? How can I improve this? But you're starting to see the trickling effects of that. And people are realizing that beautiful content, when it's written by somebody who really knows what they're talking about, is way more than 10x or 70x.
And that gap between what can be generated and what a person with true experience can produce may be getting smaller, but the gap between what a low-quality writer and the generation, can produce is not there. And that's that mind shift that nobody really knows the impacts of because we're in the middle of that disruption.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. I think there are two different types of people, and I don't want to categorize everybody because there are people that play in between, but what I see is that there are people who are getting low-quality content written by virtual assistants and writers and stuff like that and publishing it. And now they can do that with a tool, and they're still going down that path. People that are actually winning as bloggers and content site owners are the ones, because I see this all day, every day, when a site goes up for sale that somebody's built to sell, and they've just tried to rank for keywords and just put content on the page on multiple pages at volume. I've seen sites with, not that we need to use metrics, 800 articles, 800 posts, and 800 pages on the site with a DR or an authority score around eight. What have you even done? You've just wasted a lot of time and a lot of money and not provided any value.
And I think there's a lot of people—I'm hoping—in that camp that are realizing now since ChatGPT has been available for what, five, six months or something, a bit longer, that they've published a lot of that stuff at velocity, and Google's like, “Cool, we'll rank you quickly to test to see if that page is any valuable,” and quickly seeing it's not valuable and then tanking the site. And I'm hoping a lot of people now understand the value of human beings.
Jeff Coyle:
It's an odd paradox, right? So, I mean, I think it's also worthwhile for your listeners that you give a two-minute explanation so that you don't fall into the rabbit hole I'm seeing everyone fall into. And it is: ChatGPT is an exhibition of AI, but large language models and ChatGPT isn't AI, right? They're not equivalent. One is a thing that exists. And I'm talking, you might be sitting there, like, “Jeff, I know that.” But a lot of folks don't.
This was the most massive democratization of a premature early-stage product that we've experienced, Jaryd, in our lifetimes. This is the biggest product management gaffe that the world of technology has ever experienced. It was the instant democratization of a concept called AI. The first time that 90% of our world, who cares about this, got access to AI was this thing. So they equate AI with this.
And so when you see these people gawking, and I'm not classifying these people, like you said, there's two types of people. When you see a person saying, “Oh, it can't do complex math. AI can't do complex math.” you're wrong. AI can do complex math. That particular software product that you're using that you have access to cannot. But, for example, Google has an entire team working on a product called Minerva. It does complex college/university level mathematics, right? Stuff that will blow your mind.
There are branches of AI that can solve your problems. So when you think, Oh, this thing I have access to can't do this, there probably is something that somebody is working on that can. Don’t say that just because this thing I have access to can't do it, it can't be done. It can be done. Most likely, it's in the process of being done. So for everybody, thinking critically about that is top priority for me because you're not beholden to only using ChatGPT. There are so many different ways.
So what I like to tell people, and this is something that I'm really advocating for, is to do a personal process inventory. Everything you do manually in your business can be improved by artificial intelligence today in such a way that you wouldn't believe it. It sounds like a big elephant to eat. I mean, it does. Break it down into little baby pieces. And you might not solve all of them. But start by asking somebody who you think is a peer. Email me, [email protected], and say, “Is there something that is solving this problem right now with artificial intelligence?” We can probably point you in the right direction.
There's also the idea of the extinction of the if-then statement, or the extinction of business logic. So while you're doing this process, anytime you have business rules that are simple, if the prospect is from Australia, respond to that lead in four minutes, right? Anytime you've got if-then statements, they can be improved.
So these are the biggest things. People's brains are not ready for this disruption. With the disruption of the wave of artificial intelligence, every type of business and every type of software are about to either be swept away like a wave, and eliminated or completely disrupted. A business that doesn't embrace this and get on a path to migration will be obsolete. And we're not talking about a decade, we're talking about two to three years at best. And in some of these cases and industries, you're talking about months. Imagine you're a two-cent, three-cent content provider, months. And you no longer have a sellable product. You have to pivot. Pivot or die. There's going to be a lot of pivotal or dying industries that we can't even predict right now. So be thinking about that.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Especially in our world of content creation and optimization. There are tools that I have been looking at just to help us with content creation. Like you mentioned, look at one part of your business because everything can be more efficient, right? It's funny that people think, “All right. AI is the answer.” It's not the answer. And I've repeated this on multiple podcasts now. But it is a helpful tool to allow you to decrease a system or a process, make it more productive, and have your team spend less time on it. Do you still need your team for quality assurance? F yes. Hell yes.
Jeff Coyle:
More than ever.
Jaryd Krause:
More than ever. And really, by having that quality assurance, you're going to set yourself apart because a lot of people are going to throw that out like, “Cool, I don't need my assistant.” “Oh, I don't need this person anymore.” And that's what they're thinking of doing is saving money and time when reality is they're going to have an inferior product in terms of content compared to a lot of people.
And the way I like to think about it is that you look at one system or one process in your business, and it could be around content creation or something else. And then see if you can find a tool that can help you. Keyword: help you or the assistant or the person that's working in that role do that task to make their task or their time more productive. And also ask them, “Hey, if I buy this tool, how much time do you think you will save?
And how much better do you think you could make this piece of content? How much better could it be? And ask them. And instead of just going, “Yeah, cool, I've just found this tool, it's going to fix it.” and just buying it, using it, and spitting out crap. Because that's what I'm seeing people do, and it's scary for their businesses.
Jeff Coyle:
Oh, it's the ultimate. So what happens when there's a massive amount of supply for something like this? The governance of it and the initial shots on this become very heavy handed. So if there's going to be regulatory outcomes in the form of Google penalization or being very strict on it, the heavy handedness and the mistakes are going to come now, right? So what does that mean?
Jaryd Krause:
And they're already coming out. I've already seen it play out. It's crazy.
Jeff Coyle:
Oh, it's already playing out. The reviews stuff was getting ahead of them, and now it's all kinds of reviews. I saw a travel review site the other day, and the person clearly never went to any of the places. I mean, if you really know the places, I read they had an article about Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I live right now. And I was like, They’ve never actually been here.
Jaryd Krause:
I'm an AI, and I created a travel destination list of the 15 best things to do in Jacksonville or Jackson Hole. And I'm an AI, but I can't experience it because I’m an AI.
Jeff Coyle:
You've never actually been here. And there was a key reason why I could tell they weren't actually here, right? But that's the problem, right? And that's the search engine's problem. The litmus test for authenticity is hard to verify. It's a really hard challenge. That's their problem when there's fraud, right?
But let's just say this. If you try to get away with fake authenticity and then you get caught, the hammer isn't going to be a hammer. It's going to be the biggest hammer. It's going to be Thor's hammer, and it's going to hit you in the face. And if you're a baby site, if you're a little site, if you're a mid-market site, you get hit by the hammer, and you ain't coming back. Imagine if you're a big brand.
So if you're running allhomeroboticvacuums.info, okay, well, guess what? You go, you buy roboticvacuumsforme.com, and you try again. Okay, I've seen that I've seen a lot of the touts online. That's their business. If one of the sites explodes, they go run another one. But if you're working for Dyson or a publisher, the hammer comes down.
Jaryd Krause:
Gone.
Jeff Coyle:
Uh-oh, you can do some serious damage. So that's where I'm seeing agencies give advice to real brands on how to completely put them at risk—big publishers are already cleaning house on people making bad choices.
Jaryd Krause:
That's an unfortunate thing because content agencies like that have their way, which is built out over the last three years on their process and their systems and what the team's trained in and how it works for them. And it's a one-size-fits-all approach. A one-size-fits-all approach is not how you grow any business.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. So I like to say right now it's the rise of the subject matter expert editor. They're the most valuable humans in the room. And your content needs to be both authentic and original. Here's the trick, I just came up with this one. It's authentic and authenticatable. Jaryd Krause:
Yes, yes. You can actually see that they're in the industry, in the niche, and in multiple pieces of data on the internet, right? Like Facebook, Instagram, and other publications.
Jeff Coyle:
Or if they're a journalist, or if they have that skill, the reference to how the information was acquired makes sense.
So I own a beer brewery. Okay, many people know that. So I'm really into beer. Also, I've been doing ad servers, search engine optimization, product management, and everything else you could possibly imagine that relates to software. If I write a post about beer and brewing, I actually have experience in most of those things, right? I can wax it, right?
If I were to write an article about being a lab technician in a water treatment facility, it's adjacently topic related, but I've never actually worked in a water treatment facility. I could probably get there. And I'm saying this because water treatment is a topic one cares about in the beer industry, right? I've sent water out for analysis.
I've tested the water myself. But I've never actually sat in the chair as a technician, right? So I might be able to build a content item that tells the story of expertise. Maybe it makes sense how I would get that point of reference, but I've never actually been in the chair, right? I may be able to write about human resources software, but I've never run a payroll, right?
These are the things that are going to start cranking and being authentic. And that's where the proof is going to be in the pudding. Your early-stage awareness, consideration, purchase content, and support content are going to have to all make sense because you wrote them. And that's coming. I'm already starting to see it.
Reviews are the first hammer, I mean, and it's been a bad one. If you didn't actually review that dog food, if you don't have that dog chomping down on that food, and you're like, “Yes. And this comes in small bits, and it has a chicken flavor,” guess what? See ya. I mean, it's not going to last forever. Some of these big brands are still getting away with it.
I was talking to a big brand, and I told them a year ago, I'm not going to say which one or which site. I said, “This article gets $129,000 a month in affiliate clicks, one page.” And I said, “It's your worst page. And y'all haven't wanted to touch it because you're so afraid to touch it.” I said, “If you don't touch that page, one day you're going to call me crying because it's gone.” And I told them exactly why. And guess what? They didn't touch it. They were so afraid. And guess what? It's gone.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. And that's a decent paycheck just gone off from one page. And I have this example that I like to share.
Jeff Coyle:
Million bucks. Million bucks a year.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, a million bucks a year.
Jeff Coyle:
It was a big page.
Jaryd Krause
: Yeah. I have this example that I share with people that I do coaching and one-on-one coaching with in my Mastermind. And I say to them, “If your goal is to catch a certain fish and be a certain fisherperson, you've got to go get a fishing rod, right? So you type into Google the best fishing rods to buy to catch, I don't know, marlin.
And you go to two different sites. One page has 15 Amazon links to 15 of the best marlin fishing rods in 2023. And that's written by somebody who has nothing in the author section down the bottom. And there's no real person who runs the page that you can see is into fishing. And then you've got another site that you go to, and it's not the 15 best fishing rods from Amazon. It's the two best marlin fishing rods.
And the person who wrote the article is an expert in marlin fishing, and he's got videos of him using both of the different rods, snapping one, one staying intact, and catching actual marlin with the rods, showing it actually works. Social proof.
If I'm going to buy a fishing rod, which review, and which rod am I going to buy? Because I'm a human being on Google searching for it. Let's be honest, right? Let's be real. If you are the owner of a content site and you have the 15 best fishing rods in 2023 without having written, tested, or used them, I'm still amazed that Google has not wiped that out completely already.
Jeff Coyle:
If it's not part of a solar system of content that tells the story that you actually do know how to catch a marlin and you can get to it. And honestly, because we're building some AI, and some ways of processing our site level inventory data, I was actually profiling a friend of mine's site at a Mastermind retreat a couple of weeks ago. And I'm not going to do them either, but basically the evaluation by my system was: You've been too heavily focused on the middle-of-the-funnel content with low expertise. Clearly, that's it. And this is very relevant to what you just said.
So, a marlin fisherman. What types of content would somebody who was really into that likely produce? Skill development content, right? Experiential content. Well, that site about fishing poles has no content about different ways to troll lengths. I'm making this up. I have no knowledge of trolling lengths. And the line weights, the types of steel that's as far as I can get.
Jaryd Krause:
You're doing better than me.
Jeff Coyle:
I did all right. A rockfish might take your halibut line if you don't watch it, right? That's a real thing that happened to me when I was in Alaska one time. Rockfish ate my halibut line.
Jaryd Krause:
Rockfish—is that the same as a stonefish?
Jeff Coyle:
Yes, yeah. The one I caught had two different colored eyes. It was really freaky.
Jaryd Krause:
And they're very poisonous, right?
Jeff Coyle:
They're weird looking. In the US, we have sea robins on the East Coast. They look horrible. It's basically the beautiful Pacific Ocean Alaskan rockfish, but only an expert would know that. And if you don't have any of that, if you don't have any skill development, you're only there. Your purpose, you are a grand arbitrager.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, it's wild to think that people are still just going to find writers that can just write rather than going to find writers that have actual experience in the space and hiring them based on “Actually, I like how much knowledge you've got” versus this other person who may have been in the space for two years and you've been in the space for ten years. Hire your writer based on that. Not on “Can you write an article?”
Most people who studied English and went to school can write. So why not hire somebody who has more experience and provable experience on the web, even if they're not even writers? You could use MarketMuse to help get some content created, but use them as just the editor and quality assurance to make that piece of content far superior to anybody else's. Because you've got that person who's in space with their eyes on it.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. You almost have to say an expert has reviewed this. And I don't even like the review-only, “Okay, it's good enough.” I want them to bring something to it. Yeah, I want them to bring a personal narrative. I want them to add a story to it. I want them to have done a real, conscious developmental edit. Or maybe they did an interview with someone at the company who isn't a writer, but has that expertise, right? And those need to meet minimums. It's so cool. And this is an analogy I'll use, and you made me think about this one, but it's what everybody needs to be thinking about for their business.
One of the first implementations of natural language generation, which is this field of AI, was done before; we don't need to do a history lesson. There's a podcast of me doing a history lesson on this. I'll send it to you if anyone wants to listen. But in one example at The Washington Post, they had an internal product called Heliograf. And it was one of the first NL (natural language) generation AI solutions that was publishing articles. And I love this example.
First of all, it was what inspired me to build in this space—hearing the head of AI talk about these years, 2016, ‘17. But they had a real business problem they were solving. They couldn't cover all the events in the Olympics, and they couldn't cover all the elections in state and local government. They were only covering, like, 10% of the Olympics. They were only covering like 5% of all the elections. And this software allowed them to cover all the elections and all the events fairly and with a minimum level of quality.
And it couldn't be templated because judo, for example, has two bronze medals. So it can't just be ifs and thens. And so they had to build something that was better. And elections can be all over the place. A local mayoral election may have 30 candidates. You can't program just having two parties or something like that, right? So it had to be pretty sophisticated. But when they were done, the editorial team felt amazing because they were able to focus on being creative, and there was never a feeling like, “Oh my gosh, we missed a bunch of people.”
So my thought process here for every company, and it's why I advocate for the process inventory, is that you've got to find your Olympics; you've got to find your elections. What aren't you doing today? So the marlin fisherman site, where they've been producing top 10 rods at 10 feet, 16 feet, $100, $200. Well, focus your energy on actually going fishing and writing about it, on skill development, and on being creative. And the magical combination of those two things is going to be valuable.
And so I love the idea of, first of all, the low-quality content as a product going away, but also, it's about finding your why. Why are you doing this in the first place? Okay, cool, even making money on the FBA site suite. Well, this is the time to figure out how to build a foundation because you've been living on a house of cards. You might be able to build, and the foundation can be creativity, expertise, and just awesomeness. And you'll spend the same amount of money because the other stuff is no longer an asset.
Jaryd Krause: Exactly. Yeah, it's just the way you explain finding your Olympics and being passionate about them. For me, if I were to create a site from scratch, it would be about surfing. And I would absolutely love it, just froth out on it, and I would cover all the topics. I would make it the best site on how to become a surfer and how to get better. And the stories that I have, the quality of the content, the level of passion that I would pour into them—I don't care about just views. I care about people who are coming back, and I care about their journey as surfers.
I'm not just short-term minded like, “I just need views, and I need to add revenue and affiliate revenue.” I don't care about affiliate revenue and ad revenue. The joy that I'm going to get from helping them transform their lives by becoming better surfers is going to be the most valuable thing there. And the more value that I create there, the more money I'm going to make as a by-product through ads, affiliates, and digital products that I have to sell through my email list, right?
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah, I mean, you're going to get people. It's kind of like, What level of expertise can you get from the page? So the talent of an editor, or a content marketing strategist isn't always writing. For a while, people have been lost in that. Jaryd, maybe you're not the writer on that site, but somebody's coming in and they're interviewing you every day.
They're doing research to ask you about the things that we're getting from their topic analysis about why you would want, I don't know, a handle on your longboard, or not, right? One reason you wouldn't is because you'll scrape the hell out of your foot. And I did that a couple weeks ago. One of those silly longboard handles. But anyway, oh man, it's so brutal.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. You don't need to be. The writer doesn't need to be the writer, right? Because I'll give you an example. We just closed a deal, made a six-figure content site, and the owner of the business isn’t in the musician space, right? The owner of the business isn't a musician, but the person who edits and co-writes the content is a musician in that space, and they absolutely love it. And the person who bought the business is going to keep that person on no matter what, because they're going to have the experience.
They're the ones that are going to have the videos that they can make and the images of them and their guitar, whatever their collection of music is. And then it's just real. And that person doesn't need to become the brand; they can become the most valuable person to write the content. And you can have multiple people in that as well.
And the reason I say this, and I'm glad that you brought that up, is because people that are buying sites are like, “Well, I want to buy something, but I can't find something that I'm an expert in.” You do not need to be an expert in what you purchase in that niche. You do need to find somebody who is able to co-write and edit.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah, you nailed it on the money. It's really hard to get away with longevity. If you don't care about it and you don't know someone who does, I mean, it's like art theft, right? It's really easy to spot a fake in every space that I'm really into. I mean, I read so much SEO content. I can spot a fake. I mean, I've done no fewer than 1,000 site migrations. And I know that sounds insane, but I mean, in a two-year period, I think I did 200 or 300 of various shapes and sizes.
And, oh, I can spot somebody who's never actually done a migration, but wrote a post about it. You better believe that, right? You know how many content strategies we built? I built multiple ad servers, search engines. I know when someone understands information retrieval, and when they are just talking about search engines. I mean, it's like you're a surfer. If I wrote an article about surfing, okay, I grew up on the New Jersey shore, I grew up bodyboarding, skimboarding, and surfing every once in a while. If I wrote one and I was trying skill development, you could spot that I am an armchair quarterback at best.
Jaryd Krause:
No offense, I already knew by now what you'd talked about surfing. It's funny when most people see the surfboard here and start talking. It's a really good talking point.
Jeff Coyle:
But I have a shred of information. I can probably talk a little bit more about skimboarding, because that's what I'm actually good at. But surfing? Come on. It's the type of article you'd see, and I'm going to use this as an example. Because if you were these top 10 surfboards for big waves, small waves, what kinds of early-stage awareness content would you write? What's the difference between a regular and goofy foot?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. And it’s good that you mentioned this as well. Because even when you do use tools like AnswerThePublic and keyword generators and stuff like that, you can get all these keywords. Okay, cool, that's the most volume. I'm just going to go for that. But what is that going to look like in the journey of somebody going through the content anyway. Is it relevant?
And the same with MarketMuse. And I want to get some MarketMuse. I want to chat about how MarketMuse is evolving. First and foremost, for the people that don’t know much about MarketMuse, just plug it in a little bit and let us know what are the things that you can use as a blog owner or a content site owner within MarketMuse? And then let's move on to where you're going with it.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. The way I like to think about it is site level and page level. All the workflows that go from ideation and research all the way through post publish optimization and improvement and competitive assessment go through that journey. And the cool thing about the way that we built MarketMuse is that every stage in that content’s journey can be added to and amplified by keeping a human in the loop, right?
So when you're doing your research, when you're providing that ideation, when you're going from data to data to plan, we're going to be building some automated plans in the future. So we can actually say, “Based on what you've written, you're not covering skill development in your surfing site.” So we're going to be getting into that type of thing. We've already built it. It's just stuff that we have to get into software. We deliver it to all of our clients.
So it's ideation planning, but delivering the why for your content. Why are we building this page instead of that page? Is there a good reason for it? And then we were the first to automate a brief in software. So content briefs and outlines that you might need to deliver to a writer or have as a source of truth. Constantly improving and evolving that space because the content outline from AI is now a commodity, right?
You can build outlines that are okay. You can't build great ones. We can build pretty good ones. Good framework AI, great framework outlines. And then we have our suite of applications that work on specific workflows. Site level cluster analysis, site level quality analysis, who's ranking in the top 20 in search, and who's got good content versus bad content. And then how do I update my page to be the best page that exists from the perspective of quality and expertise?
And this is where I love MarketMuse with regard to expertise, right? We can pull a topic model from a really esoteric surfing concept, a really esoteric beer concept. In that topic model, there will be things that are unknown to me. I would have never thought to include. But you because you know, you're like, “Oh, yeah, that's obvious, right?”
And so the difference between an article written by an expert and someone who's not is that they typically cover the stuff that's at the top of the topic model, the obvious stuff, and they don't get into the stuff in the middle and the bottom. And when you figure out the middle and bottom of that topic model, that's when you're showing your true differentiated expertise. So what MarketMuse does is give you a reason why. Why should we budget for this? It starts to get predictive, and then it makes sure that the thing that you publish is differentiated and exhibits expertise.
And so some of the things we're doing, we did implement a ChatGPT API integration into there. So you can weave in your own prompts, it's kind of fun. We're going to be doing some additional stuff with our proprietary AI to process our own AI, which is kind of meta. We're training AI to learn how to use our other AI. And that's the stuff I love. It's really fun. I built what would have previously been a 40-to-50-hour plan for someone the other day in 15 minutes.
Jaryd Krause:
Like a content manager?
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. And honestly, it took me about three hours to make it beautiful and ready for primetime, instead of 40. And a couple of the items that I identified with it; I wouldn't have thought of myself. And by the way, I did both processes because I'm crazy like that. So I actually did it the hard way. And a couple of the items I wouldn't have thought of.
Jaryd Krause:
Oh, so the doing itself was inferior to using the tool and then optimizing it three hours later.
Jeff Coyle:
Well, there were blind spots. And so, even as an expert, you will have blind spots. Does it mean it's better or worse? When I look at it, it’s like, “Oh, crap.”
Jaryd Krause:
And bias could factor into that as well, right? You're being biased towards one type of way to surf a surfboard. So I'm not going to cover other pieces of content.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah, exactly. and/or different intents or meanings of the word that you want to exclude. I think, as a raw material creator, it makes me amazed. By the way, and I'm not saying the page, but three years ago, I created a 4,000-word post about something that I'm passionate about with our previous AI generation product. I went in, I spent four hours weaving in a personal narrative into this article, and it was all real, right? I think it still ranks number one four years later, and I'm not touching it because it's kind of like a secret experiment on the site. But I took this amazing framework that was built with this topic expert model, and weaved in a lot of real talk. Only somebody who had been to this place and knew their stuff could possibly publish this article. And I've seen competitors come and go this term and I'm still sitting there. And I'm not updating the date on it. I'm just letting it sit there. It’s 2020. I think it may be ‘19.
And because what I want everybody to realize is that it may just be that you're a foundation builder or a scaffolding builder. The output of it and you could be better than just you. And that's okay. That's okay. Because it could take less time. It could take more time. But the output, no matter what it is, if it's better consistently, that's the dream.
And when you're evaluating a site, you almost want to put every page through a pretty rough spectrum and say, “None of this is built with passion.” And then you might find the honey hole site, which is, “Gosh, this person wrote a blog for six years, had no idea how to monetize it. but they really care about this topic.” That's my dream scenario, right? Those are the different situations. But if a content site is created that doesn't exhibit expertise and does not ooze authenticity, I'm really sorry to the listeners that have those assets. That's a depreciating asset, and it's falling faster than you can ever imagine.
Jaryd Krause:
Especially in these times. And I have advised people that when we teach people to buy a business, we also review their due diligence before they go and make an offer. And we point out the risks. And if they understand the risks and are comfortable with them, then they can take on the business. And sometimes the risks are that, look, this site's traffic is not doing so well, but the content is very thin as well. Just say the traffic is stable and it's just going sideways. It's not going up or down. But the content is not great. And they don't have much EEAT. You're holding this asset, and it's a risk for however long you hold that asset to a point where you actually build authority, and show some credibility and some real valuable content.
So you can purchase those, but it is a depreciating asset because of the landscape in which the search engines are ranking certain sites and articles. But you can actually quickly hire somebody, get somebody on board to build that EEAT and then also revamp some of the content. And we've done that with somebody who bought something in the, let's just say, green thumb space, in the niche. It was going down, understood the risk, had a bit of seasonality, and it's just radically transformed it. But you need to know what you're doing. And I do not recommend that to everybody.
I still believe he would have been better off buying a different asset. And he believes the same thing, but he understood the risks at the same time and turned it around. Stressful, stressful time. But if you've got the opportunity, why not buy an asset that has great content from the start? And sometimes people listen to this, Jeff. They aren't in a position to afford to do so.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. But also, my best acquisitions were distressed assets. It's where I saw my vision of the future. But it's 2023. For your listeners, the definition of a distressed asset is weird and it's new. A site that would have been on top of the podium two years ago as something that would be their prom queen is now not even invited to the prom, right? So the definition of what a distressed asset is has changed, and you need to change with it.
So you need to say, “How am I calculating this?” And that's really why my soapbox couldn't even be bigger here, Jaryd, because content quality and expertise are what's driving value. And you're not just saying that, like, in a new age, in a new way. Oh, it's got to be great. Literally, the market's changing in front of our eyes. And the folks that get that religion as fast as possible are going to be able to assess the real value of these sites.
And it's not about today's market value because people are still evolving or devolving, and you may be able to sell something for more than it's worth right now. But you're probably going to overpay if you don't consider quality and expertise in your assessments.
Jaryd Krause:
And yeah, I spot on agree with what you are saying, Jeff. And just for those who are listening now to the podcast, we ended this podcast from now until the last two minutes. But what happened is we had a technical error with Riverside saying that we apparently couldn't give you the rest of the recording because you weren't connected to the internet. I'm not sure what actually happened. These guys are supposed to be the best in the business. But we lost the last sort of two minutes, and it was basically me wrapping up the podcast episode and reaffirming what Jeff has actually said that the market's changing and you need to stay on top of things. And that's why I'm here to help people buy great assets and understand the real value of what they're worth and what they're going to be worth in the future.
In saying that, if you are looking at buying a business, make sure you get my help. Get my free Due Diligence Framework. It's what I use, and a lot of our clients use it to help them buy sites. It's saved people millions of dollars and made people millions of dollars. So it's a really, really valuable tool. A lot of the brokers and places that people list their businesses for sale have based the data that they list on the businesses for the listing on a lot of the questions that we ask and set that sort of industry standard there. So it's a very valuable thing to have. If you haven't got it, go to buyingonlinebusiness.com/freeresources.
Also, Jeff, make sure you go check him out at MarketMuse or you can just email him at [email protected]. They've got some really, really cool things in their suite of tools. I'll put a link to them in the show notes. But as always, guys, thank you for listening. I was saying towards the end of the episode that we didn't get the recordings that I don't typically ask people to share, I mean, subscribe to this podcast, but I would like to start asking people to share it more because there's so much value. And why don't you give the gift of giving by sharing this with somebody who already owns a content site or is going to buy one? There's so much value in this. So I'll speak to you guys soon.
Do you have a website you might want to sell either now or in the future? We have a hungry list of cashed up and trained up buyers that want to buy your content website. If you have a site making over $300 per month and want to sell it, head to buyingonlinebusinesses.co/sellyourbusiness. Or email us at [email protected] because we'll likely have a buyer. The details are in the description.
Jeff, you're back. Mate, welcome back. It's so good to chat with you.
Jeff Coyle:
What's happening, Jaryd? How are you?
Jaryd Krause:
I'm really good. Thank you. How are you?
Jeff Coyle:
I'm good. Just a wild ride in the world of content and search in 2023. And every day, my laundry list gets longer and longer.
Jaryd Krause:
Hold that thought, because we're about to just go down a big rabbit hole with that. But I just want to say for everybody listening, Jeff has been on the podcast before, and you've also been on our online summits. Our first podcast we did together was episode 82. We're up to 228 now. And that episode was about how to buy and build content websites with you. So, guys, I’ll link to that in the show notes. I think it's such a great piece of content that you guys should listen to. Go back and check that out.
But Jeff, I wanted to get you back on because we've had some good chats after recording even on the online summits in the last few years, and lots happened. And 2023—what a world-winning time, especially with this AI conversation going on. And I'm huge in the camp of trying to allow people to not rip their hair out and just de-stress themselves by understanding where we're at with it and how it can be helpful, but not to get too distracted in a sense.
And then I was looking at guests that I've had on the pod, people that I enjoy talking to, who have dropped some absolute bombs, knowledge bombs. You came up, and then I saw that you guys at MarketMuse have some AI software that you're embedding and integrating with it. And I just emailed you, and you're like, “How did you even know that we were going to do this?” And yeah. So tell me, where do we begin? I have so many questions, but where do you think we should start?
Jeff Coyle:
Well, I think that there's a few things that come to mind for your audience. And I love your site and the podcast. And I'm always thinking about buying and selling podcasts and what's going through the minds of buyers and sellers. And so I really do want to get into the details and the thoughts that I've had on site valuations, things to look for, all of that, through the lens of this massive disruption, the AI disruption.
But just in a short stroke, from a MarketMuse perspective, a couple of years ago, we'd always been an artificial intelligence first company. So our core technology, which we have patents on from 2013 to 2015, is an AI technology. It's a branch of artificial intelligence called topic modeling, graph theory, and applications of machine learning, where we can basically determine what it means to be an expert on a concept. That was the core of what we built.
So if you say, What does it mean to be an expert on any concept, any specific thing you'd be looking for? I'm looking at your surfboard in the background. So what's the difference between a three-skeg surfboard and a four-skeg surfboard? What are the things that would be included if you were covering that particular intent and writing it? What other content would you need? You'd probably need to know about surfing. You'd probably have to know content about shapes of boards, materials, sizes, expertise, and skill development. You go through that.
MarketMuse's goal is to provide a site owner who wants to establish expertise and exhibit that expertise with the content with all the things they need to build, whether it's how to update one page or what the next 100 pages are that I need to write. That's always been our mission, right?
So a couple of years ago, we launched a large language model solution called MarketMuse First Draft. And it was the industry's first-generation technology. This is the fun part, because it failed miserably because it was too early. It was too expensive. But the quality is better than what you can get even today out of ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo, which would be the prevailing API in OpenAI. If you're a ChatGPT Plus customer, you can get access to 4 right now, GPT-4.
There are now more than 40 open-source large language models that anyone can get access to very simply and that are all at that level or higher. But when we were building that a couple of years ago, it would have cost $20 to $30 to generate one page, right? And we're like, “Okay. So if you're running a business, we have to charge 100 bucks for that.” Nobody was ready to buy a page of content that was generated for $100.
And now you can do it for fractions of a penny. So where we're at today is that we've got to be thinking about how to keep humans in the loop when the price of generation and the price of response—that's the way that I like to think about it, you can get information, but the price of that response is fractions of a penny.
And that's the world we're in. So I think setting the standard, setting the framework for, hey, everything we talk about, can be done. And it can be done for an unimaginably low price. So now everyone has to change the way they think about the costs of content, and websites. The cost basis just imploded. Because it's not the fact that the unit cost did, it's that we now need to think differently about the true costs that go in.
In the past, we might've been thinking that a page costs X dollars. Now we're realizing that the actual content on the page wasn't the all-in costs. And us not thinking critically about those costs has actually set us behind. What am I talking about? Opportunity costs, costs to edit, costs to publish, costs to promote, costs to interlink. All these other costs had previously been engulfed in the price I paid to my writer. So the true cost of content's now coming out.
Jaryd Krause:
: Yeah. You mean we're realizing that getting the content created is a lot cheaper. And then the real costs of everything else are, oh, it's getting more attention now because we've solved one problem in the pipeline with cheaper content creation, right?
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. So the market for humans to create pages of crappy content is gone. And that, over the course of the last nine months, went from a thriving business to invisible. And the impact of that is tremendous disruption. And it's the type of disruption nobody really wants to talk about either. Because it's the purchase of a low-quality raw material, right? Nobody wants to talk about that, right?
And so when that can be replaced, an entire industry changes overnight. So if you were ahead of that, you were thinking, Okay, what managed services can I provide? How can I improve this? But you're starting to see the trickling effects of that. And people are realizing that beautiful content, when it's written by somebody who really knows what they're talking about, is way more than 10x or 70x.
And that gap between what can be generated and what a person with true experience can produce may be getting smaller, but the gap between what a low-quality writer and the generation, can produce is not there. And that's that mind shift that nobody really knows the impacts of because we're in the middle of that disruption.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. I think there are two different types of people, and I don't want to categorize everybody because there are people that play in between, but what I see is that there are people who are getting low-quality content written by virtual assistants and writers and stuff like that and publishing it. And now they can do that with a tool, and they're still going down that path. People that are actually winning as bloggers and content site owners are the ones, because I see this all day, every day, when a site goes up for sale that somebody's built to sell, and they've just tried to rank for keywords and just put content on the page on multiple pages at volume. I've seen sites with, not that we need to use metrics, 800 articles, 800 posts, and 800 pages on the site with a DR or an authority score around eight. What have you even done? You've just wasted a lot of time and a lot of money and not provided any value.
And I think there's a lot of people—I'm hoping—in that camp that are realizing now since ChatGPT has been available for what, five, six months or something, a bit longer, that they've published a lot of that stuff at velocity, and Google's like, “Cool, we'll rank you quickly to test to see if that page is any valuable,” and quickly seeing it's not valuable and then tanking the site. And I'm hoping a lot of people now understand the value of human beings.
Jeff Coyle:
It's an odd paradox, right? So, I mean, I think it's also worthwhile for your listeners that you give a two-minute explanation so that you don't fall into the rabbit hole I'm seeing everyone fall into. And it is: ChatGPT is an exhibition of AI, but large language models and ChatGPT isn't AI, right? They're not equivalent. One is a thing that exists. And I'm talking, you might be sitting there, like, “Jeff, I know that.” But a lot of folks don't.
This was the most massive democratization of a premature early-stage product that we've experienced, Jaryd, in our lifetimes. This is the biggest product management gaffe that the world of technology has ever experienced. It was the instant democratization of a concept called AI. The first time that 90% of our world, who cares about this, got access to AI was this thing. So they equate AI with this.
And so when you see these people gawking, and I'm not classifying these people, like you said, there's two types of people. When you see a person saying, “Oh, it can't do complex math. AI can't do complex math.” you're wrong. AI can do complex math. That particular software product that you're using that you have access to cannot. But, for example, Google has an entire team working on a product called Minerva. It does complex college/university level mathematics, right? Stuff that will blow your mind.
There are branches of AI that can solve your problems. So when you think, Oh, this thing I have access to can't do this, there probably is something that somebody is working on that can. Don’t say that just because this thing I have access to can't do it, it can't be done. It can be done. Most likely, it's in the process of being done. So for everybody, thinking critically about that is top priority for me because you're not beholden to only using ChatGPT. There are so many different ways.
So what I like to tell people, and this is something that I'm really advocating for, is to do a personal process inventory. Everything you do manually in your business can be improved by artificial intelligence today in such a way that you wouldn't believe it. It sounds like a big elephant to eat. I mean, it does. Break it down into little baby pieces. And you might not solve all of them. But start by asking somebody who you think is a peer. Email me, [email protected], and say, “Is there something that is solving this problem right now with artificial intelligence?” We can probably point you in the right direction.
There's also the idea of the extinction of the if-then statement, or the extinction of business logic. So while you're doing this process, anytime you have business rules that are simple, if the prospect is from Australia, respond to that lead in four minutes, right? Anytime you've got if-then statements, they can be improved.
So these are the biggest things. People's brains are not ready for this disruption. With the disruption of the wave of artificial intelligence, every type of business and every type of software are about to either be swept away like a wave, and eliminated or completely disrupted. A business that doesn't embrace this and get on a path to migration will be obsolete. And we're not talking about a decade, we're talking about two to three years at best. And in some of these cases and industries, you're talking about months. Imagine you're a two-cent, three-cent content provider, months. And you no longer have a sellable product. You have to pivot. Pivot or die. There's going to be a lot of pivotal or dying industries that we can't even predict right now. So be thinking about that.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Especially in our world of content creation and optimization. There are tools that I have been looking at just to help us with content creation. Like you mentioned, look at one part of your business because everything can be more efficient, right? It's funny that people think, “All right. AI is the answer.” It's not the answer. And I've repeated this on multiple podcasts now. But it is a helpful tool to allow you to decrease a system or a process, make it more productive, and have your team spend less time on it. Do you still need your team for quality assurance? F yes. Hell yes.
Jeff Coyle:
More than ever.
Jaryd Krause:
More than ever. And really, by having that quality assurance, you're going to set yourself apart because a lot of people are going to throw that out like, “Cool, I don't need my assistant.” “Oh, I don't need this person anymore.” And that's what they're thinking of doing is saving money and time when reality is they're going to have an inferior product in terms of content compared to a lot of people.
And the way I like to think about it is that you look at one system or one process in your business, and it could be around content creation or something else. And then see if you can find a tool that can help you. Keyword: help you or the assistant or the person that's working in that role do that task to make their task or their time more productive. And also ask them, “Hey, if I buy this tool, how much time do you think you will save?
And how much better do you think you could make this piece of content? How much better could it be? And ask them. And instead of just going, “Yeah, cool, I've just found this tool, it's going to fix it.” and just buying it, using it, and spitting out crap. Because that's what I'm seeing people do, and it's scary for their businesses.
Jeff Coyle:
Oh, it's the ultimate. So what happens when there's a massive amount of supply for something like this? The governance of it and the initial shots on this become very heavy handed. So if there's going to be regulatory outcomes in the form of Google penalization or being very strict on it, the heavy handedness and the mistakes are going to come now, right? So what does that mean?
Jaryd Krause:
And they're already coming out. I've already seen it play out. It's crazy.
Jeff Coyle:
Oh, it's already playing out. The reviews stuff was getting ahead of them, and now it's all kinds of reviews. I saw a travel review site the other day, and the person clearly never went to any of the places. I mean, if you really know the places, I read they had an article about Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I live right now. And I was like, They’ve never actually been here.
Jaryd Krause:
I'm an AI, and I created a travel destination list of the 15 best things to do in Jacksonville or Jackson Hole. And I'm an AI, but I can't experience it because I’m an AI.
Jeff Coyle:
You've never actually been here. And there was a key reason why I could tell they weren't actually here, right? But that's the problem, right? And that's the search engine's problem. The litmus test for authenticity is hard to verify. It's a really hard challenge. That's their problem when there's fraud, right?
But let's just say this. If you try to get away with fake authenticity and then you get caught, the hammer isn't going to be a hammer. It's going to be the biggest hammer. It's going to be Thor's hammer, and it's going to hit you in the face. And if you're a baby site, if you're a little site, if you're a mid-market site, you get hit by the hammer, and you ain't coming back. Imagine if you're a big brand.
So if you're running allhomeroboticvacuums.info, okay, well, guess what? You go, you buy roboticvacuumsforme.com, and you try again. Okay, I've seen that I've seen a lot of the touts online. That's their business. If one of the sites explodes, they go run another one. But if you're working for Dyson or a publisher, the hammer comes down.
Jaryd Krause:
Gone.
Jeff Coyle:
Uh-oh, you can do some serious damage. So that's where I'm seeing agencies give advice to real brands on how to completely put them at risk—big publishers are already cleaning house on people making bad choices.
Jaryd Krause:
That's an unfortunate thing because content agencies like that have their way, which is built out over the last three years on their process and their systems and what the team's trained in and how it works for them. And it's a one-size-fits-all approach. A one-size-fits-all approach is not how you grow any business.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. So I like to say right now it's the rise of the subject matter expert editor. They're the most valuable humans in the room. And your content needs to be both authentic and original. Here's the trick, I just came up with this one. It's authentic and authenticatable. Jaryd Krause:
Yes, yes. You can actually see that they're in the industry, in the niche, and in multiple pieces of data on the internet, right? Like Facebook, Instagram, and other publications.
Jeff Coyle:
Or if they're a journalist, or if they have that skill, the reference to how the information was acquired makes sense.
So I own a beer brewery. Okay, many people know that. So I'm really into beer. Also, I've been doing ad servers, search engine optimization, product management, and everything else you could possibly imagine that relates to software. If I write a post about beer and brewing, I actually have experience in most of those things, right? I can wax it, right?
If I were to write an article about being a lab technician in a water treatment facility, it's adjacently topic related, but I've never actually worked in a water treatment facility. I could probably get there. And I'm saying this because water treatment is a topic one cares about in the beer industry, right? I've sent water out for analysis.
I've tested the water myself. But I've never actually sat in the chair as a technician, right? So I might be able to build a content item that tells the story of expertise. Maybe it makes sense how I would get that point of reference, but I've never actually been in the chair, right? I may be able to write about human resources software, but I've never run a payroll, right?
These are the things that are going to start cranking and being authentic. And that's where the proof is going to be in the pudding. Your early-stage awareness, consideration, purchase content, and support content are going to have to all make sense because you wrote them. And that's coming. I'm already starting to see it.
Reviews are the first hammer, I mean, and it's been a bad one. If you didn't actually review that dog food, if you don't have that dog chomping down on that food, and you're like, “Yes. And this comes in small bits, and it has a chicken flavor,” guess what? See ya. I mean, it's not going to last forever. Some of these big brands are still getting away with it.
I was talking to a big brand, and I told them a year ago, I'm not going to say which one or which site. I said, “This article gets $129,000 a month in affiliate clicks, one page.” And I said, “It's your worst page. And y'all haven't wanted to touch it because you're so afraid to touch it.” I said, “If you don't touch that page, one day you're going to call me crying because it's gone.” And I told them exactly why. And guess what? They didn't touch it. They were so afraid. And guess what? It's gone.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. And that's a decent paycheck just gone off from one page. And I have this example that I like to share.
Jeff Coyle:
Million bucks. Million bucks a year.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, a million bucks a year.
Jeff Coyle:
It was a big page.
Jaryd Krause
: Yeah. I have this example that I share with people that I do coaching and one-on-one coaching with in my Mastermind. And I say to them, “If your goal is to catch a certain fish and be a certain fisherperson, you've got to go get a fishing rod, right? So you type into Google the best fishing rods to buy to catch, I don't know, marlin.
And you go to two different sites. One page has 15 Amazon links to 15 of the best marlin fishing rods in 2023. And that's written by somebody who has nothing in the author section down the bottom. And there's no real person who runs the page that you can see is into fishing. And then you've got another site that you go to, and it's not the 15 best fishing rods from Amazon. It's the two best marlin fishing rods.
And the person who wrote the article is an expert in marlin fishing, and he's got videos of him using both of the different rods, snapping one, one staying intact, and catching actual marlin with the rods, showing it actually works. Social proof.
If I'm going to buy a fishing rod, which review, and which rod am I going to buy? Because I'm a human being on Google searching for it. Let's be honest, right? Let's be real. If you are the owner of a content site and you have the 15 best fishing rods in 2023 without having written, tested, or used them, I'm still amazed that Google has not wiped that out completely already.
Jeff Coyle:
If it's not part of a solar system of content that tells the story that you actually do know how to catch a marlin and you can get to it. And honestly, because we're building some AI, and some ways of processing our site level inventory data, I was actually profiling a friend of mine's site at a Mastermind retreat a couple of weeks ago. And I'm not going to do them either, but basically the evaluation by my system was: You've been too heavily focused on the middle-of-the-funnel content with low expertise. Clearly, that's it. And this is very relevant to what you just said.
So, a marlin fisherman. What types of content would somebody who was really into that likely produce? Skill development content, right? Experiential content. Well, that site about fishing poles has no content about different ways to troll lengths. I'm making this up. I have no knowledge of trolling lengths. And the line weights, the types of steel that's as far as I can get.
Jaryd Krause:
You're doing better than me.
Jeff Coyle:
I did all right. A rockfish might take your halibut line if you don't watch it, right? That's a real thing that happened to me when I was in Alaska one time. Rockfish ate my halibut line.
Jaryd Krause:
Rockfish—is that the same as a stonefish?
Jeff Coyle:
Yes, yeah. The one I caught had two different colored eyes. It was really freaky.
Jaryd Krause:
And they're very poisonous, right?
Jeff Coyle:
They're weird looking. In the US, we have sea robins on the East Coast. They look horrible. It's basically the beautiful Pacific Ocean Alaskan rockfish, but only an expert would know that. And if you don't have any of that, if you don't have any skill development, you're only there. Your purpose, you are a grand arbitrager.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, it's wild to think that people are still just going to find writers that can just write rather than going to find writers that have actual experience in the space and hiring them based on “Actually, I like how much knowledge you've got” versus this other person who may have been in the space for two years and you've been in the space for ten years. Hire your writer based on that. Not on “Can you write an article?”
Most people who studied English and went to school can write. So why not hire somebody who has more experience and provable experience on the web, even if they're not even writers? You could use MarketMuse to help get some content created, but use them as just the editor and quality assurance to make that piece of content far superior to anybody else's. Because you've got that person who's in space with their eyes on it.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. You almost have to say an expert has reviewed this. And I don't even like the review-only, “Okay, it's good enough.” I want them to bring something to it. Yeah, I want them to bring a personal narrative. I want them to add a story to it. I want them to have done a real, conscious developmental edit. Or maybe they did an interview with someone at the company who isn't a writer, but has that expertise, right? And those need to meet minimums. It's so cool. And this is an analogy I'll use, and you made me think about this one, but it's what everybody needs to be thinking about for their business.
One of the first implementations of natural language generation, which is this field of AI, was done before; we don't need to do a history lesson. There's a podcast of me doing a history lesson on this. I'll send it to you if anyone wants to listen. But in one example at The Washington Post, they had an internal product called Heliograf. And it was one of the first NL (natural language) generation AI solutions that was publishing articles. And I love this example.
First of all, it was what inspired me to build in this space—hearing the head of AI talk about these years, 2016, ‘17. But they had a real business problem they were solving. They couldn't cover all the events in the Olympics, and they couldn't cover all the elections in state and local government. They were only covering, like, 10% of the Olympics. They were only covering like 5% of all the elections. And this software allowed them to cover all the elections and all the events fairly and with a minimum level of quality.
And it couldn't be templated because judo, for example, has two bronze medals. So it can't just be ifs and thens. And so they had to build something that was better. And elections can be all over the place. A local mayoral election may have 30 candidates. You can't program just having two parties or something like that, right? So it had to be pretty sophisticated. But when they were done, the editorial team felt amazing because they were able to focus on being creative, and there was never a feeling like, “Oh my gosh, we missed a bunch of people.”
So my thought process here for every company, and it's why I advocate for the process inventory, is that you've got to find your Olympics; you've got to find your elections. What aren't you doing today? So the marlin fisherman site, where they've been producing top 10 rods at 10 feet, 16 feet, $100, $200. Well, focus your energy on actually going fishing and writing about it, on skill development, and on being creative. And the magical combination of those two things is going to be valuable.
And so I love the idea of, first of all, the low-quality content as a product going away, but also, it's about finding your why. Why are you doing this in the first place? Okay, cool, even making money on the FBA site suite. Well, this is the time to figure out how to build a foundation because you've been living on a house of cards. You might be able to build, and the foundation can be creativity, expertise, and just awesomeness. And you'll spend the same amount of money because the other stuff is no longer an asset.
Jaryd Krause: Exactly. Yeah, it's just the way you explain finding your Olympics and being passionate about them. For me, if I were to create a site from scratch, it would be about surfing. And I would absolutely love it, just froth out on it, and I would cover all the topics. I would make it the best site on how to become a surfer and how to get better. And the stories that I have, the quality of the content, the level of passion that I would pour into them—I don't care about just views. I care about people who are coming back, and I care about their journey as surfers.
I'm not just short-term minded like, “I just need views, and I need to add revenue and affiliate revenue.” I don't care about affiliate revenue and ad revenue. The joy that I'm going to get from helping them transform their lives by becoming better surfers is going to be the most valuable thing there. And the more value that I create there, the more money I'm going to make as a by-product through ads, affiliates, and digital products that I have to sell through my email list, right?
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah, I mean, you're going to get people. It's kind of like, What level of expertise can you get from the page? So the talent of an editor, or a content marketing strategist isn't always writing. For a while, people have been lost in that. Jaryd, maybe you're not the writer on that site, but somebody's coming in and they're interviewing you every day.
They're doing research to ask you about the things that we're getting from their topic analysis about why you would want, I don't know, a handle on your longboard, or not, right? One reason you wouldn't is because you'll scrape the hell out of your foot. And I did that a couple weeks ago. One of those silly longboard handles. But anyway, oh man, it's so brutal.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. You don't need to be. The writer doesn't need to be the writer, right? Because I'll give you an example. We just closed a deal, made a six-figure content site, and the owner of the business isn’t in the musician space, right? The owner of the business isn't a musician, but the person who edits and co-writes the content is a musician in that space, and they absolutely love it. And the person who bought the business is going to keep that person on no matter what, because they're going to have the experience.
They're the ones that are going to have the videos that they can make and the images of them and their guitar, whatever their collection of music is. And then it's just real. And that person doesn't need to become the brand; they can become the most valuable person to write the content. And you can have multiple people in that as well.
And the reason I say this, and I'm glad that you brought that up, is because people that are buying sites are like, “Well, I want to buy something, but I can't find something that I'm an expert in.” You do not need to be an expert in what you purchase in that niche. You do need to find somebody who is able to co-write and edit.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah, you nailed it on the money. It's really hard to get away with longevity. If you don't care about it and you don't know someone who does, I mean, it's like art theft, right? It's really easy to spot a fake in every space that I'm really into. I mean, I read so much SEO content. I can spot a fake. I mean, I've done no fewer than 1,000 site migrations. And I know that sounds insane, but I mean, in a two-year period, I think I did 200 or 300 of various shapes and sizes.
And, oh, I can spot somebody who's never actually done a migration, but wrote a post about it. You better believe that, right? You know how many content strategies we built? I built multiple ad servers, search engines. I know when someone understands information retrieval, and when they are just talking about search engines. I mean, it's like you're a surfer. If I wrote an article about surfing, okay, I grew up on the New Jersey shore, I grew up bodyboarding, skimboarding, and surfing every once in a while. If I wrote one and I was trying skill development, you could spot that I am an armchair quarterback at best.
Jaryd Krause:
No offense, I already knew by now what you'd talked about surfing. It's funny when most people see the surfboard here and start talking. It's a really good talking point.
Jeff Coyle:
But I have a shred of information. I can probably talk a little bit more about skimboarding, because that's what I'm actually good at. But surfing? Come on. It's the type of article you'd see, and I'm going to use this as an example. Because if you were these top 10 surfboards for big waves, small waves, what kinds of early-stage awareness content would you write? What's the difference between a regular and goofy foot?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. And it’s good that you mentioned this as well. Because even when you do use tools like AnswerThePublic and keyword generators and stuff like that, you can get all these keywords. Okay, cool, that's the most volume. I'm just going to go for that. But what is that going to look like in the journey of somebody going through the content anyway. Is it relevant?
And the same with MarketMuse. And I want to get some MarketMuse. I want to chat about how MarketMuse is evolving. First and foremost, for the people that don’t know much about MarketMuse, just plug it in a little bit and let us know what are the things that you can use as a blog owner or a content site owner within MarketMuse? And then let's move on to where you're going with it.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. The way I like to think about it is site level and page level. All the workflows that go from ideation and research all the way through post publish optimization and improvement and competitive assessment go through that journey. And the cool thing about the way that we built MarketMuse is that every stage in that content’s journey can be added to and amplified by keeping a human in the loop, right?
So when you're doing your research, when you're providing that ideation, when you're going from data to data to plan, we're going to be building some automated plans in the future. So we can actually say, “Based on what you've written, you're not covering skill development in your surfing site.” So we're going to be getting into that type of thing. We've already built it. It's just stuff that we have to get into software. We deliver it to all of our clients.
So it's ideation planning, but delivering the why for your content. Why are we building this page instead of that page? Is there a good reason for it? And then we were the first to automate a brief in software. So content briefs and outlines that you might need to deliver to a writer or have as a source of truth. Constantly improving and evolving that space because the content outline from AI is now a commodity, right?
You can build outlines that are okay. You can't build great ones. We can build pretty good ones. Good framework AI, great framework outlines. And then we have our suite of applications that work on specific workflows. Site level cluster analysis, site level quality analysis, who's ranking in the top 20 in search, and who's got good content versus bad content. And then how do I update my page to be the best page that exists from the perspective of quality and expertise?
And this is where I love MarketMuse with regard to expertise, right? We can pull a topic model from a really esoteric surfing concept, a really esoteric beer concept. In that topic model, there will be things that are unknown to me. I would have never thought to include. But you because you know, you're like, “Oh, yeah, that's obvious, right?”
And so the difference between an article written by an expert and someone who's not is that they typically cover the stuff that's at the top of the topic model, the obvious stuff, and they don't get into the stuff in the middle and the bottom. And when you figure out the middle and bottom of that topic model, that's when you're showing your true differentiated expertise. So what MarketMuse does is give you a reason why. Why should we budget for this? It starts to get predictive, and then it makes sure that the thing that you publish is differentiated and exhibits expertise.
And so some of the things we're doing, we did implement a ChatGPT API integration into there. So you can weave in your own prompts, it's kind of fun. We're going to be doing some additional stuff with our proprietary AI to process our own AI, which is kind of meta. We're training AI to learn how to use our other AI. And that's the stuff I love. It's really fun. I built what would have previously been a 40-to-50-hour plan for someone the other day in 15 minutes.
Jaryd Krause:
Like a content manager?
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. And honestly, it took me about three hours to make it beautiful and ready for primetime, instead of 40. And a couple of the items that I identified with it; I wouldn't have thought of myself. And by the way, I did both processes because I'm crazy like that. So I actually did it the hard way. And a couple of the items I wouldn't have thought of.
Jaryd Krause:
Oh, so the doing itself was inferior to using the tool and then optimizing it three hours later.
Jeff Coyle:
Well, there were blind spots. And so, even as an expert, you will have blind spots. Does it mean it's better or worse? When I look at it, it’s like, “Oh, crap.”
Jaryd Krause:
And bias could factor into that as well, right? You're being biased towards one type of way to surf a surfboard. So I'm not going to cover other pieces of content.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah, exactly. and/or different intents or meanings of the word that you want to exclude. I think, as a raw material creator, it makes me amazed. By the way, and I'm not saying the page, but three years ago, I created a 4,000-word post about something that I'm passionate about with our previous AI generation product. I went in, I spent four hours weaving in a personal narrative into this article, and it was all real, right? I think it still ranks number one four years later, and I'm not touching it because it's kind of like a secret experiment on the site. But I took this amazing framework that was built with this topic expert model, and weaved in a lot of real talk. Only somebody who had been to this place and knew their stuff could possibly publish this article. And I've seen competitors come and go this term and I'm still sitting there. And I'm not updating the date on it. I'm just letting it sit there. It’s 2020. I think it may be ‘19.
And because what I want everybody to realize is that it may just be that you're a foundation builder or a scaffolding builder. The output of it and you could be better than just you. And that's okay. That's okay. Because it could take less time. It could take more time. But the output, no matter what it is, if it's better consistently, that's the dream.
And when you're evaluating a site, you almost want to put every page through a pretty rough spectrum and say, “None of this is built with passion.” And then you might find the honey hole site, which is, “Gosh, this person wrote a blog for six years, had no idea how to monetize it. but they really care about this topic.” That's my dream scenario, right? Those are the different situations. But if a content site is created that doesn't exhibit expertise and does not ooze authenticity, I'm really sorry to the listeners that have those assets. That's a depreciating asset, and it's falling faster than you can ever imagine.
Jaryd Krause:
Especially in these times. And I have advised people that when we teach people to buy a business, we also review their due diligence before they go and make an offer. And we point out the risks. And if they understand the risks and are comfortable with them, then they can take on the business. And sometimes the risks are that, look, this site's traffic is not doing so well, but the content is very thin as well. Just say the traffic is stable and it's just going sideways. It's not going up or down. But the content is not great. And they don't have much EEAT. You're holding this asset, and it's a risk for however long you hold that asset to a point where you actually build authority, and show some credibility and some real valuable content.
So you can purchase those, but it is a depreciating asset because of the landscape in which the search engines are ranking certain sites and articles. But you can actually quickly hire somebody, get somebody on board to build that EEAT and then also revamp some of the content. And we've done that with somebody who bought something in the, let's just say, green thumb space, in the niche. It was going down, understood the risk, had a bit of seasonality, and it's just radically transformed it. But you need to know what you're doing. And I do not recommend that to everybody.
I still believe he would have been better off buying a different asset. And he believes the same thing, but he understood the risks at the same time and turned it around. Stressful, stressful time. But if you've got the opportunity, why not buy an asset that has great content from the start? And sometimes people listen to this, Jeff. They aren't in a position to afford to do so.
Jeff Coyle:
Yeah. But also, my best acquisitions were distressed assets. It's where I saw my vision of the future. But it's 2023. For your listeners, the definition of a distressed asset is weird and it's new. A site that would have been on top of the podium two years ago as something that would be their prom queen is now not even invited to the prom, right? So the definition of what a distressed asset is has changed, and you need to change with it.
So you need to say, “How am I calculating this?” And that's really why my soapbox couldn't even be bigger here, Jaryd, because content quality and expertise are what's driving value. And you're not just saying that, like, in a new age, in a new way. Oh, it's got to be great. Literally, the market's changing in front of our eyes. And the folks that get that religion as fast as possible are going to be able to assess the real value of these sites.
And it's not about today's market value because people are still evolving or devolving, and you may be able to sell something for more than it's worth right now. But you're probably going to overpay if you don't consider quality and expertise in your assessments.
Jaryd Krause:
And yeah, I spot on agree with what you are saying, Jeff. And just for those who are listening now to the podcast, we ended this podcast from now until the last two minutes. But what happened is we had a technical error with Riverside saying that we apparently couldn't give you the rest of the recording because you weren't connected to the internet. I'm not sure what actually happened. These guys are supposed to be the best in the business. But we lost the last sort of two minutes, and it was basically me wrapping up the podcast episode and reaffirming what Jeff has actually said that the market's changing and you need to stay on top of things. And that's why I'm here to help people buy great assets and understand the real value of what they're worth and what they're going to be worth in the future.
In saying that, if you are looking at buying a business, make sure you get my help. Get my free Due Diligence Framework. It's what I use, and a lot of our clients use it to help them buy sites. It's saved people millions of dollars and made people millions of dollars. So it's a really, really valuable tool. A lot of the brokers and places that people list their businesses for sale have based the data that they list on the businesses for the listing on a lot of the questions that we ask and set that sort of industry standard there. So it's a very valuable thing to have. If you haven't got it, go to buyingonlinebusiness.com/freeresources.
Also, Jeff, make sure you go check him out at MarketMuse or you can just email him at [email protected]. They've got some really, really cool things in their suite of tools. I'll put a link to them in the show notes. But as always, guys, thank you for listening. I was saying towards the end of the episode that we didn't get the recordings that I don't typically ask people to share, I mean, subscribe to this podcast, but I would like to start asking people to share it more because there's so much value. And why don't you give the gift of giving by sharing this with somebody who already owns a content site or is going to buy one? There's so much value in this. So I'll speak to you guys soon.
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Host:
Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives.
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➥ Market Muse (Content Marketing Software) – https://bit.ly/3Me39L0
➥ Rank Math (WordPress SEO Plugin) – https://bit.ly/3Acyjf4
➥ Content Scale AI (AI Content Detector) – https://bit.ly/3LlxRBV
➥ Surfer SEO (SEO tool for content writing) – https://bit.ly/3X0jZiD
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