Hey everybody. Uh, welcome back. Uh, I'm here live because I want to share a couple of updates, a little bit of kind of news. Um, and then I want to take questions. And so, um, I'm going to do a little bit of both. There's obviously a lot of change happening in the industry in blogging and SEO. And so, um, being able to answer some questions today, I think is going to be really great. There are also some changes happening at income school that I wanted to, um, share with you guys. So, while I'm talking a little bit about the changes coming at income school, feel free to go ahead and start typing your questions here in the live chat since there's a little bit of a delay anyway. Um, that way [snorts] I'll have uh questions to get to here. Um, anyway, so uh what's going on at income school? Well, first of all, as you can hear possibly probably the um [clears throat] the office here has been kind of like disassembled. All of our sound deadening stuff on the walls is gone. You can probably see some um like some patches in the walls here where I've um had to patch up some holes and things. [snorts] Um and so uh that's because we're moving offices. The the place that we've been for the last three and a half years um we're moving on from. We've had an awesome relationship with the landlords. It's been fantastic. It's a It's kind of far from my house. Um, since I bought Jim's half of the business, uh, and we no longer have to meet kind of in the middle between our two houses that are like half an hour apart. Um, I don't need to have an office here that's 20 minutes away. But, um, on top of that, I wanted a space that would be a better fit for the team that I have. So, um, the needs that we have as a team have just evolved over time. So, we're building out a new office space. This is actually about a year um a year in in the works. So I found a new space that I liked. It was what we call shell space, meaning it was just a building with literally nothing inside. Even the electrical and plumbing and stuff was, you know, it's brought to there, but not there's nothing set up. Um so anyway, I had to do the whole buildout and everything. So we're in the process of that. But what that means is that uh for a little bit we're actually without an office. Um [clears throat] we, you know, you have to work out the timing and everything. And I I worked it out for this lease to end. Uh got my landlord working on finding new tenants and everything. We got it all worked out. There's new people starting uh literally on Wednesday. Uh and so we have to be out of here. But our new office is probably going to be another six weeks before it's totally ready. So, for the next six weeks, all of us on the income school team are going to be working remotely. We're going to be working from home, doing things the way that most of you are, uh, in terms of your blogging, but also just everything that we do will be done remotely, which, um, definitely puts a little bit of a a change on things. Um, there's kind of a lot of stuff going on here at Income School that, um, most of it just doesn't get seen publicly. So, uh, it's definitely going to be a little bit of a shift for the next little bit. Uh it's kind of reminding a lot of us of uh when COVID first hit and we had to go home for like a month and a half before we were allowed to come back to work. So everybody's uh home and working on things. Uh here's so here's the other thing that that means. Um for the next month, I actually wanted to try kind of an experiment with YouTube. Uh and so this is kind of a perfect time to do it. So, my normal videos that come out every Tuesday that a lot of you guys are used to, um, there's one tomorrow as planned, but then for the following four weeks, instead of one Tuesday video, I'm going to be putting out some shorts content. It's not like I'm not taking other videos I've made in the past and like taking clips and making them into shorts. I'm actually like creating new, original, helpful, and sometimes really fun content for you guys, but I'm doing it in a short format. Um, and I'm going to be putting out a few every single week for the next four weeks. Uh, it's just something I've been wanting to try anyway. But that's something that I wanted you guys to know. The normal format videos that are really helpful and really in-depth, those are coming back. Don't worry. Um, and I hopefully I'll be able to do a live or two in the in the meantime as well to tackle any of these questions and things that are coming up given um what's going on in the industry. So anyway, that's what's going on here at Income School. Uh nothing too drastic, just um moving into a new space hopefully soon. I can't wait to give you guys a bit of a tour. Maybe I'll maybe I'll take you all through um [clears throat] maybe I'll take you through there uh pretty soon. Awesome. All right. Um, I'm gonna jump here to the questions. Okay. Um, I saw one here that asked how I'm doing. I'm doing pretty good. Thank you. Um, I appreciate that. Um, all right. Here we go. Can we use multiple answer par in a single post? This is from Barat Sutar. So, this is about answer targets. Um, the concept of answer targets I think is still good, but the days of just easily jumping to the top of the rankings through uh winning a snippet. Um, I won't say they're over, but it's just not as consistent now. Um, and one thing that we found was that by overoptimizing articles um for snippets that in some cases that caused websites to completely lose all their snippets. Uh, I don't know if that was the cause, but that was something that we saw correlated. So, putting more than one in an in an article to me, I still think it it makes sense in some cases, but just don't go overboard. What I do in terms of, you know, answer targets or answer paragraphs specifically, but same thing with tables or anything else is whatever would be most helpful for the user, I continue to do. Um, but I just don't go nuts with it. So what some people were doing was under every subheading, they would have another answer paragraph to try to win another snippet for another search query. And so they would have a whole bunch of answer targets within the single blog post. And I think that the algorithm maybe just saw that as writing for the algorithm and not necessarily writing for the user. But I think that one of the most helpful things we can do is give people a straightforward answer that's easy for them to find. So bolding and um putting it near the top, I think, is a fantastic thing. And I found that we won a bunch of our snippets back. We've won snippets on a bunch of articles since um a year a year and a half ago when snippets started to just disappear from a lot of sites. So, um I think it's perfectly fine to do, but just be um be careful with it. Um let's see. Um I got what's another question here. Will being search become more prominent because of being chat? So, here's here's my thought on Bing and the chat bots and everything. Um, [clears throat] I think that there's a lot of novelty right now. So, people are really excited about it. I think that we might see a bit of a push toward being just because um they are having the better experience right out of the gate. They're kind of ready to go. But, we've already seen some some real hiccups with the AI chat bots. Um, I actually found this interesting. I was talking to some people just yesterday about this. Um, and how Microsoft has had to go in and actually like tone back, you know, take, you know, draw back on the AI a bit because the AI started getting kind of mean to people. And why would an AI that's connected to the internet suddenly start becoming mean? Well, that's because humans on the internet are pretty dang mean. And so, the AI is learning from humans how humans communicate. And humans are pretty crummy communicators in a lot of senses today, especially on the web. So I think we trained the internet the uh the AI to be kind of mean. And so Microsoft is having to take to tone to dial back on the attitude. But but what does that mean? It probably means that the way that the chat bots can interact might become a bit more robotic until they can dial that in. Um at some point Google's chatbot will be just as good or better. And who knows? Um, I wouldn't mind one bit to see more search engines uh pick up more market share, but I don't know that we're going to see a huge swing at this point. Um, or that people using Bing for the chatbot is going to impact Bing search and the impact that it has on our websites. That said, the way we create content, we're not p we're not specifically catering it to Google. We're catering it to humans but writing it in a way that it's easy uh for for an algorithm to recognize what the content is about so that it can rank easily and rank well. So I think that's um not going to have an impact. We definitely get we rank really well in Bing and stuff too with the content that we create. So I don't think that's going to be an issue for for all of you for the most part. Um, let's see. As search engines expand with new AI elements to show more tailored results, do you expect they will extract more and more information directly from private website content? I think that um that consideration that that issue is really coming front and center from it for art, for um written content, for video content, for all of it. Um the I think that uh intellectual property law is going to have to take a huge leap forward. We've um we've reached a a point where copyright law that's just way it's not made for the internet is going to have to catch up. Um I could see whether or not the law catches up. I could see the search engines having to figure out a way to to do this properly. I know with being searchbot it's it's citing sources. it's at least linking. It's kind of like the snippets, right? Um and so it may I mean it's going to take that superficial information at least, but um you know I'm hopeful that they're going to site their sources. I think here's here's what I see. It's all about incentives and motivation. If we reach a point where there's no motivation to create content on the web because the search engines are just going to steal all of it, then people won't create content for the web. And I don't think it will take very long before the internet would become totally outdated. I I don't think it's in their best interest to do that. And I think they know that. And so they're going to try to walk that line um the best they can. I I think they still want people to create new and fresh content for the web. Um let's see. Um by the way, I I I really appreciate the comments that I get from you guys. I know there's always a lot more here than I'm able to address um in the live session, but um there's a lot of gratitude, a lot of appreciation. I So anyway, I thank you all for that. Um here's one here from Shrot Katawa. Um Kawa, hey Ricky, there's a quick question for you to take up. Last year, the top month I had was a little over 18,000. This month, my income is barely going to even touch 4,000. What do you suggest we do? Um, so there's there's a lot that impacts that, right? So what I would do is try to assess what are the main drivers. Is it literally that just traffic has declined that much? Um, I mean, we're talking about less than a quarter of the income, right? Is there some seasonality that's impacting some of that? If so, let's take out that impact, right? And just recognize that that's there. um if our traffic has dropped in half. Well, does that account for um this you know almost 80% drop in income? Um maybe because some income some monetization really does um scale almost exponentially and not linearly. And so it could be that it's just the traffic has has come down that much. But is it just that? Is it that the monetization um isn't working as well as it did before? And so we need to make some adjustments there. And so there's there's some analysis that you need to do. If if really traffic is a huge driver, then we need to look at at what's going on. And at that point, I'm I'm kind of diving into specific content. I know we had a lot of Google updates last year that were pretty disruptive. Um I haven't specifically seen major changes in my traffic since, you know, chat GPT and AI has started to creep in here. And I I don't know that that's had a huge impact on search volume for us at this point. Um I'm curious to see what that looks like going forward. So, it's probably, you know, if it's traffic, it's Google updates and um and then again, potentially just lots of other people creating way too much content and um the internet getting saturated and us just needing to make do a better job of building up that EAT and making sure that our content really is the best. So, anyway, I would try to figure out what it is that's driving that. um figure out which content it is that you know I've seen in a lot of cases one or two articles on a website that were driving a very high percentage of the traffic and they just got beat. Um and and so those a couple of articles drove you know they they were driving a lot of the traffic and now they're not anymore and the rest of the site is doing just fine. So it's not necessarily an overall systemic problem. It's more like a couple of articles got beaten. So, uh, there's a lot to lot to look at there. Um, Alex White Gomez says, "Um, Google's changed. I mainly notice big name brands like Forbes outranking smaller blogs despite the smaller having much better content. Um, the same with forums. Any insights?" Yeah, I think it has very little to do with how big the site is and has everything to do with the brand. Um, it's it's it comes back to the uh trustworthiness factor. You know, Google wants to be able to to trust that the content that you wrote was likely to be accurate. Um, and so it's a lot easier to trust recognized brands. And so I think what we need to do is do a better job, even if we want to stay small and be an independent blogger, we need to do a better job of building a reputation around our brand. And even even if that brand is just you, okay? Um, we, you know, I did that interview with Kyle where we talked about eat factors that Google can actually very easily measure with the algorithm. I would tick as many of those boxes as you're comfortable ticking to make sure that you're giving all the signals to Google that you're a legitimate organization. I think that might be one of the things holding some people back is they're just not doing a few of those things that just prove or at least are evidence of legitimacy and it makes it harder for Google to trust. And I think Google um and I don't know maybe the other search engines too. Um, but you know, Google is uh needing to be a little bit more scrupulous here about what content they're surfacing at the top in an age where so many people are creating massgenerated content. Whether it's outsourcing a ton of articles to a bunch of writers who don't know the topic, um, which, you know, outsourcing writing isn't something that I'm, you know, I think is a necessarily a bad thing. I think scaling up your business is a good thing, but we need to do it wisely and we need to provide them with enough information to be able to write good content. We need to have a process for reviewing that content before it goes live. Um, and then the other thing is AI generated content. It's been around for a long time. Um, you know, people have been using Jasper for for a while now and generating a lot of AI generated content and um, you know, some people are doing a great job of just using the tool to help them write, uh, maybe even help them with ideas and some research, but then they're still crafting that into good, helpful content that's accurate. That's fantastic. But there are a lot of people who are just literally churning out article after article, hundreds of articles almost at a time. And with the web filling up with that kind of content, I think Google's just got to be a lot more careful. And so I think EAT is just going to be something we can't ignore. Okay. Um, and yes, there are big changes coming to blogging. That's what we're talking about here with AI. Uh, that's really probably the biggest headline right now is AI. And there's a lot of fear. Um, but the reality is is AIS like this have been around. They've been in use for a long time. Um, chat GPT came out and became very publicly seen. And I think it was really the first time that we felt in general confident that the AI could generate human sounding content. You know, that just wasn't really really bad. Um, and so it's becoming more mainstream. And so because of that, we have a lot of bloggers who are just afraid about what's coming next. That I don't think is merited yet. I think for the most part when these kinds of technologies come out, oftentimes we we think they're way more advanced than they are. And then every time within 6 months when the novelty wears off, we find that there were serious limitations. It's not ready for prime time yet. It's it's not really going to change things as dramatically as we thought. The internet has been evolving for a long time. We don't blog today the way that we did 10 years ago or even five years ago. We've we've adapted and we just are going to continue to adapt. And so there there's probably a certain amount of use of these tools that we probably should do to help speed up the process um to help us create better content. But for the most part, I think the way that we differentiate ourselves is we we do we build the EAT. We build a brand. We build something a reputation, something that people are happy with, that they would want to return to. We create community. Um, and we teach. I think that that's what we as bloggers need to be doing. And I think that's the next stage of blogging. Um, if if the goal is just turn out 2,000 articles and try to scrape a little bit of traffic for each one, um, I think those days are I mean, a lot of people have been doing it for a couple years now. I think those days may be coming to an end with AI, especially because the kind of content that usually works for that um, is the exact kind of content that the AI is going to make obsolete. It's that kind of information that the AI chat bots will literally be able to just answer for people. Whereas when we add the human factor and we put in opinion and we share experience, actual experience with something, then that's something that an AI can't create. It can only copy. And if it's going to steal someone's experience, their actual, you know, story, what they did, then it's going to site them. I don't think Google's going to go so far or being at this point, they're not going to go so far as to take someone's actual real life experience, share that story or the, you know, the information even from that story and not cite it because that is blatant plagiarism and is illegal. So, um, anyway, there we there we go with that one. Um, what should be the ratio between transactionalformational articles on a new blog? Um, I don't necessarily see these as two distinct things. A lot offormational content on our blogs are going to be very transactional in the sense that people are going to come, they're going to read it, they're going to leave. Um, if you mean by transactional, you mean it's uh like a money post, like we're trying to really earn money from this. It's like an affiliate post or one where we're trying to sell our own product. Um, in that sense, I don't know that there's a specific ratio. I think it depends a lot on the industry that you're in. But I also find that some of the best money posts I've had, the ones that make the most money are the ones that are very information first. It's all about the helpfulness. And then in the process of helping someone, the part of the solution that they're looking for is a product. Um, and I'm able to provide them with additional guidance on that product. But it's the information first. It's helpfulness first. It's like someone coming to your door to try to sell you something that you may or may not even have any need for, but they try to convince you that it will make your life better. Versus you going and asking a friend who's knowledgeable about something questions about it and then in the end them saying, "Yeah, you know what? I do know some things about that." And guess what? I think what would help you the most is if you bought these trail running shoes. These are the ones I use. Look, I'm wearing them right now because I just got back from my run. These are amazing. They make it so my feet don't hurt and I love them. Maybe you should try them out. Your friend telling you that is going to be way more helpful. And guess what? Um, when people come for information, then we know that what what we're pitching them is something that they're in the market for. Whereas if we just start trying to throw products at people um then they may or may not even really be in the market for it. And when it's a very direct um sales pitch, people get really defensive right away and it's hard to break down that wall. So informational, I'm going informational 100% of the time, but my my in my uh monetization is happening throughout. I hope that helps with that. Um, if you have a site wi um which has both YMY and non YM and you first write 100 non YML articles and then YML posts, do the new Y posts make it harder for non YML post to rank? No. I in this sense there's I don't think there's going to be any impact from adding some YML content to your non YML stuff. For the most part, it's hard. There are some metrics within the algorithm that are sitewide and then where like what we do on one part of our site impacts the ranking of the site overall, but then there are a lot of other metrics that are just content specific. And that's why on a brand new no-name website, you can still rank content. Um, and so there's there's there's just a lot of the different um ranking metrics that are being used, right? And so um when we have a bunch of non YM content but it's on the same topic and we build some topical authority within our niche and then we add some YML content that that's not going to hurt it. Now one thing that that Google has said does hurt your whole website is when we create content that doesn't class that's unhelpful right with the helpful content updates. Google gave us specific guidance on what's considered helpful and what's not. And so if we have a lot of unhelpful content on our website, that content can d really drag down the entire site. And I think that may be something that's facing a lot of us is we may have some blog posts that we wrote a while back that really are unhelpful by Google's definition and they're pulling down even the really helpful content on the website. So that's something that I would um would look at. But if we're kind of building some authority in our niche, winning some traffic there, and then we start to move into the more YML elements of our topic, that I have absolutely no concern with. Um, let's see. A lot of good questions here. Um, outside of writing blog posts, what other suggestions would you have for creatively using AI like ChatGpt specifically in our blogging businesses? What I find it to be helpful for is um ideas. So, um I I did see in Matt Diggity's first video about chat a uh chat GBT, uh he shared this and so I don't I'm not going to share it without uh crediting him because this is where I got it from, but he showed how um he could take a search query, you know, and say, you know, what are some other semantically similar searches on this topic? and Google provides him with a list of ideas. I mean, that's a great way for your to do your first ideiation step just to come up with ideas of what to go then do some research and and try to figure out what's worth writing, right? Um, I have played around with chat GPT for helping me improve my headlines. Um, headline writing is something I can do pretty well, but it's not quick for me. I want a good headline and it doesn't the really really creative stuff isn't my forte. I'm more of a like I'm a process person. I'm a problem solving person. I can do a ton of things. But when it comes to just like pulling a brilliant idea out of the air, it's just not my forte. That's why I surround myself with other creative people. I've got several on my team that are awesome. Um, but sometimes, you know, if I'm struggling to write a good headline for a particular topic, um, and I am actually I have a YouTube short that I just recorded where I show it exactly how I do this. Um, so that you guys probably see next week, but uh, basically I go to chat GPT and you can even just type in like, uh, something along the lines of write me 10 good headlines for and then I put in quotes and I just put the search query um, or maybe my first idea for a headline. And what does it do? It spits me out 10 ideas. And sometimes those ideas aren't quite it. But man, they get those creative juices flowing. And it's so fast. But here is here's something that I would warn people about when it comes to using AI tools. Don't become dependent on them. We can use these tools to help optimize the way that we do our writing, the way that we use our time. That's cool, right? Um any sort of, you know, assistant that we have, right? whether it's a a human virtual assistant or a p a personal assistant that we have or um whether it's an AI assistant in this kind of case uh when we become dependent on them that we can no longer do things ourselves uh then we start to run into problems. If that tool were to become unavailable to you for some reason how do you proceed? You have to relearn something that you haven't used in a long time. Our brains are muscles and they do atrophy. If there's a skill that you have developed for your brain and you stop using that skill, you will not be able to use it again in the future without rebuilding it up. It's like if you just stop moving your body for months and then all of a sudden try to go play sports. It just doesn't work. And so, don't let your brain atrophy. Um, exercise it, practice some of these things. Um, force your brain to think about things every now and then rather than just becoming dependent on the tool. Use the tools to help you. Don't become too dependent. I I've seen this in a lot of different aspects of life. I you see a lot of people who, you know, like this seems kind of silly, but you know, somebody who's become an executive and, you know, now all of a sudden they retired from work and they don't know how to order their own lunch because they've had an assistant do that for so long, right? They just don't even know how to do anything um because they just they've had other people doing everything for them so that they could just focus on their job. Now, there's a certain amount of optimization that happens there when we don't have to focus on other things. But I'm the kind of person I love to have skills at like everything. I'm one of those kind of jack-of- all trades kind of people. I love to learn everything and get as good at things as I can. And so that's probably part of why I push back a little bit on dependency on these kinds of things. Um, does FAQ and table of content schema help rank better? Um, I don't know that it really helps that much. Um, if you are creating FAQs on your website, put in the FAQ schema. It makes it easier for the search engines to recognize it as FAQs. Um, table of content, same thing. And so, sure, add it. I don't know that it's going to make your content rank better overall, but it is going to help the search engines recognize it for what it is and then show it accordingly. And if it shows it accordingly, like if you have good FAQ and Google shows it that way in the SER, um you know, it can see all of those questions that are being answered and display it in a nice way, it makes it stand out in the SER, which I think is one of those real benefits to to schema. Okay. Um, wow. Like I haven't even gotten past the questions that were asked like before I started answering questions. Um, all right. So really, what does it come down to? What are the changes coming to blogging? Um, I they're the things we've been talking about. AI is going to impact blogging. How is it going to change is yet to be seen. And so for me, the way that I'm approaching this right now is I'm taking what I've been doing and taking the things that I know are changing, such as EAT, that we just know is becoming more important as the internet gets flooded with AI content. Um, I'm I'm going to focus on that. I'm going to focus on brand building um beyond just content creation. Okay, that's what I'm going to do. Um, industry outreach, all those things that we can do to really build a reputation and a brand. Um, that's what I'm going to do. So, that's that's where I see us going um as bloggers. I think we need to take a little bit more time to do that sort of stuff. And if you don't want to show your face or whatever, that's fine. I think we can still do that. I think you can still use a persona. Um, but build a brand. And if that brand, if you don't want it to be you and your face and your name, that's fine. Build a brand. Um, you know, come up with a name. Nobody, nobody cares who Nike is, right? Nike is a I think a Roman god, right? Um, it doesn't matter. It's not about a person, right? It was a brand and there's a feeling behind it, right? you know um we can create brands for our blogs and then you know the writers who wrote the individual articles is is a little bit less important right um I'll take a few more questions here um parvcon says uh you say no link building do you think it's possible to rank in a competitive niche without backlinks so I need to clarify this we've clarified this um hundred times uh backlinks are good when When I say no link building, what I mean is going about activities with the intent just to get a link is the wrong approach and it's not what I recommend. There are a lot of activities that people do that are really kind of spammy that really when I see them coming toward me, I just hate them. It just makes me want to have no interaction with these people, right? um when people are [laughter] just trying to tell me how great it's going to be when I publish the article that they wrote for my blog and I'm like no because your article has like it's contrary what you're saying is contrary to what I would say on my own blog why would I publish that information it's not helpful you know um writing a guest post is good but we need to be genuine about it and so what we need to do is we need to approach industry outreach not from the goal the standpoint of just I want a link, but from the standpoint of I want to build real authority and I want to build connections in my industry. I want to be seen as an authority in my industry. And so I'm going to create real connections. I'm going to put in real effort. And you know, and when we create these connections and we do write a guest post or we get interviewed on a podcast, then what we can do is we can actually build authority with that person's audience. It's a lot easier to end up getting those links when we're genuine about how we approach it. Once it's harder to create the initial relationship, but once you do, you can get loads of backlinks and they end up being very relevant. Now, we get tons of backlinks just organically by creating some of the best content on the web. The other thing that happens is when we create content that has that where we generate our own statistics, we do our own study, our own experiments, other people link to that. They cite that as a source because most people aren't willing to do those experiments themselves. And they're not, you don't have to do that much. It doesn't have to be that hard to do. But most people just want to sit down, do a little bit of research, write an article, and be done. And so what do they do? They site you. They link to you. We get back links from that kind of stuff all the time without doing any link building at all. But then on top of that, yeah, I'm going to go find people who have a podcast in my industry and I'm going to say, "Hey, I'm a blogger in this industry. I have um here's kind of my message that I want to get out there. You know, if this you would you find this to be a helpful thing for your audience. Get your I think getting interviewed on a podcast is probably easier than getting a guest post on a blog in the right now. Um a lot of podcasters are just they're looking for people to be to interview. There's podcasters everywhere now. Um so put in that effort. Go get yourself interviewed on a podcast. I know that for a lot of bloggers that feels like you're putting yourself out there. Um, it's it's okay. It's not that hard. And when we approach the podcast interview from the standpoint of I want a link, then all all it takes is getting an agreement. Somebody saying, "Yeah, I'll interview on the podcast." Woo! Goal achieved. As long as the episode isn't so bad that they still publish it, I will get a backlink in the show notes. If the approach is I want to build authority and I want to build connections with people, then we're going to put a little more bit more effort into the interview itself and we're going to actually be authoritative on the subject. It's a it's a mindset shift. It's not semantics. It's a mindset shift. Approach your industry outreach from the goal of actually building authority and building connections and you're going to be fine. You're going to get loads of backlinks. Um, yes, I think in a competitive niche, backlinks are still necessary. It's still an important part of the algorithm, but don't be out there just building links like crazy. Most of the tactics that people use for link building are not very good and don't work that well anymore, and you just get a whole bunch of links that aren't that great, or they're the same tactics that I teach, but they're not really link building. They're about connection creation and industry outreach and building authority. So, I have no problem with those. But don't do it from the standpoint of building links. do it from the standpoint of building authority. All right, I'll take a couple more questions and then I actually have to do a lot of work today because all these little um patches in the walls, I've got more of those to do because we put a lot of stuff on our walls and um and paint over them and stuff before I can hand over this building. Um but anyway, I will uh take a couple more questions before we call it a day. So, I'm going to jump here to the most the more recent questions. Um let's see. This one is from Rake Hassan. Hey Ricky, what do you think that AI is going to replace SEO? What's the future of content publishing or niche affiliate marketing business? Um, so I don't think that AI is going to replace SEO. I think AI is going to force SEO to evolve. It's that simple. Um, and there are going to be a lot of bloggers who either are not willing or not capable of adapting. And like evolution, evolution of species, um, evolution of anything, people who are incapable of adapting are not going to continue to, it's not going to work, right? So, what happens in a period where there's a massive shift and we have to adapt? Well, usually there's some discomfort. We're probably going to see um you know, websites that are going to dip in traffic. I mean, we're going to see this. We've talked about some of this already today. Um but we're going to continue to try things and as if we're going to build EAT and we're going to focus on brand building, you know, that adaptation, I think, is going to be an adaptation that really makes us strong and that as we come through this shift, then we're just going to be stronger than ever. And I think it's going to be fine. Actually, I think it's going to weed out a lot of people who aren't willing to put in the real work. I think the people who are trying to shortcut everything are the ones who are going to get cut. That's that's the way I see it today. Um so, um anyway, um I'll take one more. I'm trying to find a good one. Um all right, we'll take this one from Essa Shaw. I'm nervous to start blogging in 2023. I've been studying and researching about it for three to four months now, but I'm so afraid that I might fail. Any suggestions? So, I think this is um the thing that stops people from succeeding. And so, that's why I wanted to address this one. Uh being afraid to start something means that you already you're going to fail, right? Not just because you're afraid, but if you don't start it, then the odds of failing are 100%. And you might say, well, no, I if I don't start it, then I don't fail. But you also don't succeed. Your odds of success are zero. And so what I would do is I would take the very best information that you can find and choose what you want to do. What's the best fit for you? Do I want to start a blog? Do I want to start a YouTube channel? Do I want to be in here in the content marketing world? If it feels scary to me, then maybe it's not what I want to do. That's fine. Find something. Find something that's going to work for you. and and do it. But no matter what you're going to start, it's going to seem scary at first. There's going to always be a hundred reasons why to not do it. We made a video on this channel probably 5 years ago that was about all the reasons and all the fears to not start a blog. Five years ago. Five years ago compared to now, it was easy. And still then there were a lot of people who were like, "Oh no, blogging's ending. It's over. It's there's no way I'm going to be successful. There's too many people on the web." Now, it was easy compared to today. And today, it's still super doable. And so, I do think we can do it. Absolutely. Um, I just started two new blogs. And the only reason I don't have more content on those blogs right now is because I'm building a new office. Um, honestly, it's taken up way more of my time than um I thought it would, but I am allin on this. Now, am I taking the same approach that we took 5 years ago? No. um that approach is is evolving and you know what some of the stuff that I'm doing I will absolutely be using video. I'm not just going to write blog content and only focus on SEO, right? I'm going to create blog content that's going to be very well um suited for video content as well. I'm going to make content that really um supports one another and video content it's there's yeah there's a lot of people making video content today but still there's so much opportunity with video. So we can work those together. We can really have them supplement each other and end up with an amazing content business and just not worried about it. So we're just going to adapt. We're going to evolve. I would still start a business in 2023. I just did. Um and I'm all in on it. I'm so all in on it that I made a commitment that if I don't reach my goal, I will run a mile for every $100 below it that I that I um end up at the end of the year. And um that means I could end up running up to 40 miles if I completely fail. And I don't expect that that's going to happen because I'm still all in on this. It's going to be a hard year, a crazy year. There's a lot changing right now. And still, I chose this year to do a challenge like that. I'm really putting my, you know, my running, my feet, my legs where my mouth is. So, um, I'm all in on this and so I'm not gonna give up on you guys. I hope you don't give up on me, too. Anyway, everybody, thanks for joining me for this. I'd love to be able to answer a lot more questions. Um, it's it's awesome to be able to do this and to um interact with all of you. So, we'll try to do some more of these here in the near future, but uh until then, we'll