Income School Live: Contest Winner, AI Impact, and Blogging Tips

hey everybody how's it going welcome to um this YouTube live it's funny because there's always a little bit of a delay so I'm talking but there's like literally nothing happening yet on the live um awesome well I am super excited to be here I'm excited to get to announce the winner of our comment contest uh for the end of 2022. uh this is a contest that I'm planning to keep doing um and I want to keep

doing it on a more regular basis so in the past we've done it with a much bigger prize where you know we dedicate a couple of full working days to to you to the winner and we run the contest for like a whole year this contest ran for just like three months um actually four months and so what I'd like to do is actually go ahead and for the first quarter of 2023 so um January February

and March all the videos that published during that time every comment will be entered into a contest and we'll have a prize like this one um I just decided to do this like in the last hour so uh it will probably be an annual project 24 membership but um who knows maybe we'll come up with some of the cool prizes in fact if you have cool ideas for prizes uh go ahead and comment on this video

if there's something else that you think would be really beneficial to you um maybe we can consider some other options all right I hope everybody can hear me pretty well so let me know if you're having a hard time hearing um but uh yeah we're gonna go ahead and get started so without any further Ado and by the way I am going to take questions so if you have questions you'd like me to talk about uh

go ahead and type them into the chat uh we will go for a little while I probably won't go like an hour like I normally do I sometimes go even longer um I've got my family where I'm home for the holidays it's um it's just nice to be here and so they will they're excited to hang out with me for the rest of the evening so I'll probably go at least a half hour uh but then

we'll probably stop it at that point so all right I have an envelope here the envelope does have the winner um for this comment contest but if you didn't win and you were really hoping you would it's okay again we're gonna keep running this thing um so here we go I'm gonna open it up here the winner is Steph Morgan this is the YouTube handle at stephmorgan39 um the comment I'm gonna go ahead and here I'll

even make it so you guys can see need to focus on that okay the comment that won it let me go ahead and share that with you real quick was this one uh this one right here um so Steph says hi Ricky project 24 member here love the video so this was on last week's video actually um just randomly that's the way it worked out um and she says it was hilarious I'm super excited to watch

you build this site I do have an important question though how are you not freezing your bits off honestly I had icicles for me just watching you LOL so uh kind of a funny thing and I replied to the comment but um I just thought I'd share this here too because I just thought that was really funny um I'm kind of weird in this sense I I don't know I just have like a different temperature profile

than most people so um I grew up here in Idaho where it's you know it gets pretty chilly and um but also just having done a lot of family history work and stuff um I have a lot of Scandinavian ancestry so I think that maybe has something to do with it uh my ancestors were growing very far north so um anyway that's why I can handle the cold it's kind of a joke um honestly that day

like I had no idea what what we were gonna go do I didn't know we were going to be outside of Fairmount um and so I just left I got in the car and I didn't bring my jacket with me at all but that's actually pretty normal for me um one of our video editors Cody he uh he kind of laughs because I'll come in to the office and it's like 30 degrees outside or less and

still just wearing a short sleeve shirt he's like still t-shirt weather right yeah anyway I think it's funny all right I'm gonna go ahead and go to the uh to the questions here in the comments in the chat okay so I have two questions here about Ai and I knew this was going to come up tonight so I knew I was gonna need to address it anyway but um anyway I'm glad that a couple of you

asked about it so where do I see AI going how do I see that affecting blogs they're um honestly obviously like none of us can completely tell the future but I do have some thoughts around this I've put a lot of thought into it and I I am planning to do a video um soon I I want to test out the tools quite a bit I want to um I have played around with chat GPT I

think it's kind of fun um and so I've seen what it can do I've seen how human it can sound I've seen how you can literally like have a conversation you can ask it a question and then with this response you can build on that and that's pretty cool um but I see severe limitations too so um we'll talk about that I do want to try it out I want to see how if I think it's

realistically that helpful for bloggers to try to use but also what the impact it's going to have so let's break that down just a little bit here um okay so AI what's the impact of it now in in the short to medium term as well as in the long term first of all yes Google's concerned about AI should be concerned because if people are going to go to a tool you know let's say they take this

they turn this into a tool that is just readily available and usable um you ask a question and rather than searching the web um you're just getting a straight answer directly from the AI uh now what does that do well it means that all the people that used to ask those simple questions that Google would answer with a snippet um now they're not doing that necessarily on Google anymore right they're going straight to the AI tool

and so Google loses traffic there however the kinds of questions that the AI can feasibly answer well and sufficiently are usually not the kinds of questions that we bloggers really should be answering and we're as guilty of this as anybody but a lot of times we have answered very very simple response post type questions where I mean it's a very simple question and the answer to the question is very factual I'll give you uh an example

um in fact in a recent video we showed an article and we use this example um Nathan and Anna reviewed an article and and talked about how they would improve it the article was about what's the difference between a dinner fork and a salad fork now the specific differences an AI tool can answer why because they're just very fact-based right there's no subjectivity needed whereas if somebody asks you know what is the you know what's the

best type of fork to use for fettuccine pasta now you know maybe that's most people would just say yeah just use a dinner Fork right but um you know some people might have a slightly different answer and have a specific reason for it and so when you're asking like what's the best of something now this feels like it could get into product reviews really fast and product reviews are fine but we don't want all of our

content to be that but there are a lot of questions like that where somebody's experience with the topic gives them a perspective that a beginner doesn't have if somebody's asking me what kind of piano should I get for my for my child who's starting piano lessons I might give them a different answer depending on what their goals are for that child um how old the child is ETC as well as what their budget is honestly and

so there's a lot of room for subjective responses and we as bloggers when we have experience in a topic or can at least do some good original research uh that helps somebody out we can provide those kinds of answers and so what do I think we as bloggers need to do I think we need to start focusing more on providing that kind of content where it we lean on our knowledge on our expertise as well as

on real research that we can do where we're not just answering questions that are purely fact based if that makes sense now there's room for that and we should answer some a lot of those fact-based questions within the content on our website I think that's totally fine but I'm probably not going to be writing so many response posts that are specifically answering fact-based questions I'll include that information in the content of the site and potentially rank

for it um quite a bit and get a lot of traffic that way but I do think that that's where AI is going to have the advantage now um when I when I look at AI content today AI is still it's still just spinning AI does not generate new thought it doesn't do it AI will never be able to completely replace real people um it may get to a point where it can do a great job

of aggregating data but it can never have its own real experience AI is not riding dirt bikes um AI is not you know um hang gliding or or you know jumping out of airplanes or anything like that it can't have those experiences and so it can't provide that you know advice and that experiential knowledge it can provide facts and here's another problem that I see with AI right now the AI is often wrong but it doesn't

think it's wrong so it uses the information available to it and um answers the question definitively as if it were totally right but sometimes it is completely made up um completely wrong in fact just the other day um Julia was testing out Julie on her team she was looking at it and she typed in what is today's date and it told her that it was April 20 whatever not even this year right and it was because

it was kind of the the date the end date of the of where that um ai's sort of information was able to pull from and she said are you sure and it responds yes of course I'm sure and she said what if I told you that it's you know December 27 2022. um and then it says well then I would believe you and then she says so you trust me more than you trust you and it's

like no I trust myself the most and she had this like little conversation with chat GPT and it definitively thought today's date was in the past there are limitations um still some severe limitations and anyway um we can't rely on it um we can't rely on it definitively even for fact-based stuff but I do think that that's where ai's strength is going to lie whenever it can answer the question from a data set from public you

know databases of any kind that that's where you know bloggers are gonna fall to that but you know years ago we got to the point where you couldn't really blog about the weather anymore right because Google just tells you what the weather is um apps just tell you what the weather is and so there are a lot of things that Google has just been answering for us for a while anyway okay um I got a question

here the spam update any words on that um not nothing that I really haven't set already um when it comes to Google updates it's really important that we slow down take a breath and wait for things to settle down and then we just evaluate where we are and what's missing now there is something interesting um that I've definitely been paying a lot of attention to over the last year or two right um and that is the

importance of eat and how and how we can establish eat on our websites I recently um actually had a great conversation with Kyle roof Kyle's an SEO expert he has been in the SEO space doing SEO studying search engines for like a decade or more he actually has a patent for a process on how he um he tests different factors to see if they are part of the algorithm and has done so pretty definitively and he

shared with me several factors that um the specific things that we can do on our websites to show eat that are very simple very easy for search engines to identify and that signal to the search engine that you're probably a more legitimate Source than other websites that don't have these things very simple things some of them as simple as just you know making sure that you have an address showing up on your website a lot of

us don't right because we don't want to show our physical address on our website but if you do have an office or access to another physical address you can use as a business address that could actually really lend a lot of credibility from Google because Google's not seeing a lot of the things that we do that make us look legitimate to people Google's Google's not reading our content and determining which of us is right right Google

is just looking for signals and so he shared with me several it's going to be a good video um it'll come out in a couple of weeks okay um so anyway there's uh there's that right um okay I'm gonna start get getting through these a little bit faster um Jonathan Coker asked do we think content Warrior will ever provide search analysis as a service yes we're planning on it um the real trick is we do get

um some turnover in our Riders every year or actually about every four months because they're college students we have several that stay on for two semesters in a row leave for the summer then come back so we're getting some that have a lot more experience but it's hard to train someone to be good at search analysis it can take some time and so we we train them on our own content and then once there's you know

their work is to a point where we're really happy with it we settle loose right um and so we need people who we we're more confident are going to stick around um people who understand more of what we're doing so um writing is a process that it's a lot easier to teach it's a lot easier for them to pick it up and just understand it the search analysis is something where they need to understand a lot

more about what we're doing here with our content for them to be good at it so just a little bit harder to teach obviously we teach it all the time in Project 24 but even there it often takes people a while to really have it click and so we're working on that we um we've got them now we have several or at least a handful of our writers who are auditing content for people um so people

can order you know an audit of five articles and so somebody we have a few who we have trained specifically and again tested them on our own content first um where they're going through our articles um every piece of it and looking at a whole bunch of different things and generating a report um so that was that was the most the most recent thing we did I think search analysis is coming pretty soon um all right

cool um let's see how do you broaden topical Authority the example would be having a site that ranks immediately for fabric fabric tent content but not General tent content how would you grow that eat to related topics yeah so um we'll just use this example okay so you know fabric tents um so if I wanted to expand that then you know I would look for areas where we have as much overlap as possible I mean most

tents use fabric of some of some kind but I might start talking about other aspects of tense and uh in In Articles and I would Interlink that's going to be a key there is anywhere where we have content overlap let's look for opportunities to Interlink from the Articles where we have topical authority to the new content another thing I often like to do is um from the very beginning when I pick a few different topics or

kind of sub categories to start with content-wise on my website I'll pick multiple that aren't right adjacent to each other and that's because I fully intend to cover a much broader space within my Niche um and so now I have a few starting points and then then what I can do is I can start kind of connecting those to each other by filling in all the space in between them but a big thing there is to

build up topical Authority um in in you know one or more specific smaller spaces but then start moving into adjacent ones and interlinking to those articles and you'll find that Authority will spread pretty quickly Tim asks how how important is passing core with vitals to having Google push your content look if you're if your site is not slow you're probably just fine um if I mean if you're like in the red right you're failing legit failing

um that could be a problem but if you're passing a couple of them you know one or two of the different tests and one of them has just Fallen a little bit into the yellow I have not seen it impact rankings basically at all and even Google has admitted that it's almost just a tiebreaker um they didn't go so far as to say that that it's just a tie breaker but it it's pretty close to what

it is they want us to speed up our sites it makes the internet better it certainly makes I mean if we can make our sites and then the ads on our sites load really fast Google makes more money they want us to make our websites fast but um still it's going to be much more important that we have highly relevant content and that we build up authoritativeness um okay uh mom Bennett says I think you gotta

think about your behavior what type of content do you look for when you have a question oh yeah this is kind of about the AI stuff absolutely very good um well project 24b implementing training on branding for your site yeah I think we will because um more and more I there's multiple paths you can go on right we have project 24 members there are uh several that I know personally um who I've worked with over the

years who build they love their portfolio of websites right they kind of started with one and then another and then now they're all about the business they start sites they do their search analysis they edit their content whatever and they get a whole process right and they get writers working and everything and they're kind of doing this at scale then um there's the path of I kind of want one or two bigger sites and I'm willing

to build a brand around this and to me that's more fun I do some of both um but to me that's a lot of fun and so that's something that absolutely we will start talking about more in project 24. um I think you're gonna see with the charity site we're doing as well as with the there's another project that I hinted at in today's video that I'm starting up first of the year and I'm this one's

gonna be a secret project so the site that I'm working on I'm not announcing yet um I'm committing to announce it after a year and I'm challenging myself to um to hit four thousand dollars a month within one year on that website and so uh I will be working on it I will be providing updates throughout the year I'm talking about learnings and things but um the specific details of the site will will be one year

before they're revealed so we'll have an um very open public one and then a behind the scenes one so it'll be kind of cool to see how that goes but both of those will be sites that will be building up a brand around so as we do that I think we can absolutely um include more of that within project 24. all right um I'm gonna jump down here um let's see when uh when's the next update

for akabato um as as soon as we can so here's here's the deal with our um with our our tools our software um it's not the primary thing that we work on it is important that we keep them up to date uh and I do actually have some cool things that I want to add to akabato that I think will make it better for us but um but here's the thing we have really limited bandwidth on

what projects we can do and um so do our developers so the developers we've been using on this team they they recently uh underwent a merger and then a split almost immediately after they're also working on another pretty big project for me right now um that I think will have a lot of benefit um for us and for project 24 members and for uh really all of you following us I think it's going to be really

helpful um but it is a big it's a big project the biggest we've done with them at all and so akabato is uh it's probably time honestly there's several things that we would like to um tweak and improve with it one thing I would love to do and I'm trying to decide if it's worth it but to either build out akabato or honestly maybe even create a new theme that has the full site editing capabilities that's

where we're headed um so WordPress is gone um honestly like building themes the old way it doesn't make sense to put a whole lot more into that other than to to keep it up to date and so anyway I'm I'm considering that trying to decide what to do with it but for now there should be an update fairly soon um for aquabato that should add some new things one of the things I want to add by

the way is some footer um customizability I want to be able to build out and have spaces automatically for for you to add contact information in the footer your site logo there on the footer and have it look nice have it look pretty right now the footer is basically built to be able to have a very simple horizontal menu and then a copyright line where it does include the current year for copyright which is kind of

cool that um it'll just stay up to date even when the year changes um but yeah we got more to do there okay um let's see Donato spoon Z Rossi says I'm a newbie can you recommend the best way to learn WordPress so far put 20 hours in with a little progress looking for a setup to set up a P2P website so members can communicate with each other so yeah the best thing you can do you

need to understand a few different things you need to understand like what functionality is WordPress and then what functionality is in your theme and then what you need plugins for so WordPress has a lot of built-in functionality but the theme you know basically determines how everything looks and some WordPress themes are going to have certain capabilities built into them that others will not and then for a lot of the things you're going to need plugins right

so if you want people to be able to communicate with each other you're going to need to find some sort of plug-in to put on your website or create a community in the third part in like a separate system um which you can do right so our project 24 Community is through discourse which is um hosted separately but we have a single sign-on with with our website so people log in on the website they go to

the community um and it's all tied to each other uh a lot of people will just use like a Discord server you can also use WordPress plugins that have um Community or at least Forum type capabilities a lot of those aren't going to look as nice or be as user friendly as like a Discord so there are a lot of ways to do it for learning project 24 the best thing you can do is just Google

you know how to create um you know community-based website in WordPress there are YouTube videos for everything there are so many tutorials out there uh and then that's it you just have to do it you just have to play around in the back end and do it um you got to put in the hours that's the best way to learn it it's not it's one of those things that like once it kind of clicks how everything

works it's not it's not that crazy um is blogging still worth it in 2023 is it hard for a brand new website I absolutely think it's still worth it I do think we are going to need to continuously adapt um there's a lot of you know other media I think it's getting harder to just build a Blog without putting any branding behind it I think completely avoiding social media is getting more and more difficult we probably

need to find what social media our intended audience is on and then just be involved in social media um you know whichever platforms that we need to be involved in if you're on Instagram right like go just participate on Instagram right if you're if if your audience is gonna be on Facebook go participate in Facebook groups um for your Niche participate with a you know under a profiler as a page that is branded as your website's

brand and just be out there participating that's actually going to do a lot of good to just help build up Rapport around your business um and so we just are gonna probably need to do some of that if you can incorporate video content into your blog that's only going to help even more uh Braden asked his appeal box adequate as an address I think it's better than not having any contact address um I don't think it

shows quite as much legitimacy as having a physical address but if I were working only out of my home I would rather use a PO Box than my home address personally just you know for personal safety reasons you just don't want to share your home address with everybody in the world and you want to get all the spam you know or spam mail and all that stuff um so anyway that's I think it's better than nothing

um let's see um Jonathan says uh project 24 lifer and I I appreciate that Jonathan um we try to make it value-added and honestly one of the other things we're working on is more value for people who are getting further and further along but we're getting to a point where in Project 24 we have a lot of members who are reaching high levels of success we do a quarterly Mastermind for people who are at the full-time

income Milestone and we have a lot of discussions around scaling their business around hiring people around I mean just all of those those kinds of things and so it's it's pretty neat so we're we're kind of looking on some of the sort of next tier opportunities for those people who who are sticking around um let's see um okay here's a good question uh rindy Tech says do you think that low score article will affect our good

score article even if they're on a different keyword completely so if you have an article that just doesn't do well is that going to impact your good content on your website according to Google um with their helpful content update this year uh the answer would be yes so if you have content that they deem to be not helpful or of a really low quality then it can impact the entirety of of your website's performance now I

don't think one article that's just not great is is a problem I think having an article that doesn't rank on page one two or even five necessarily means it's viewed as low quality by Google it may just be that it's high competition but if we are creating content that's very obviously mass produced um and I honestly if you just Google helpful content update and see what they list they list a lot of specific things I think

I talked about it in a video a while back um specific things that they're determining make for really low quality content and so avoid those things and you're going to be fine but if you do have a lot of that kind of content it actually could end up harming your website and so I would just work on improving that content um let's see I'm gonna jump down a little ways further uh can we just have a

hangout chat as a mastermind yeah um from Montana you all have changed our lives I think we should do some of that just um I think that'd be fun just to hang out I don't really like if I'm one of those people who it's like if I don't have like a like a specific purpose I I don't know I have a hard time I feel like um I don't know it feels like it'd be something nobody

would want to come to but but maybe they would um sounds like they would um let's see um uh I got several people asking about chat GPT they must have missed the first 10 minutes of this live um oh boy I know I have not been living under a rock I know all about chapter GPT again we already spent like 10 minutes of this live on that conversation so um yes we're researching chat gbt come on

guys um when does the giveaway start I did the giveaway at the beginning um you can watch the replay no problem um so I did the giveaway Steph Morgan by the way if you're watching Steph and even if you're not if you catch this later whatever um I found I have your email address so I will reach out to you directly um you're welcome to either use it to cover a second year of project 24 Steph's

already a project 24 member um or you're welcome to uh to gift it to somebody else so I'll I'll contact you via email and then we're gonna do another giveaway um for q1 of 2023 um so keep commenting and we'll keep it up um let's see Dr Geneva speaks asks please explain what you were saying about themes and no longer necessary um themes are still necessary you have to have one um you can't build a WordPress

site without a theme however uh the way that WordPress is going is that um they're building in a lot of capability to be able to do a lot of customization on your website just basically within WordPress itself it started with the Gutenberg block based editing that they use for pages and posts um and as that gets better and better and better the old way of doing like like page Builders especially to be able to have really

you know highly designed websites uh that's kind of going away because um you know Gutenberg is even capable of doing a fair amount there and so what a lot of modern things are doing is their their page building is block space just like Gutenberg um and so what they're doing is uh they're just building on top of it and adding additional block customizations and different block types rather than creating a whole new page builder that uses

like for example um we have a lifetime license with Divi and they're working their their tails off trying to speed up that theme because it's so overloaded with code in order to allow you to customize everything because it's not block based right it's its own it's its own ecosystem of design so it doesn't it doesn't work within native WordPress and so it's a lot slower so what a lot of themes are doing Astra um they're they're

starting we're just moving more and more toward full site editing themes that basically open up um all of the capabilities that WordPress has and so even if you want to just use 2022 theme that's free from WordPress uh they just put out 2023 um if you want to use the free theme there you have full site editing capabilities so you can actually edit like the header and the footer and all sorts of stuff without having to

pay for a theme that opens those up for you which is what you used to have to do right with with Divi I could make a really cool looking footer uh and that was needed nowadays as long as you have a theme that enables full side editing you can pretty much do most of that you know without needing anything fancy um awesome um autism some assembly required says akabato question that akabato is not updating their 1.2.6

now it's 1.3.1 they click update but it never updates so um I think it was at that spot 1.2.6 to 1.2.7 that um I don't know the details of why but the developers specifically told us that that would have to be a manual update because of something uh and they said they fixed something so that shouldn't ever have to happen again and since then everything's actually the updates have gone really really well so to do that

you just go to income school.com and log in and go to the aquabato area um and from there you can just download the latest version and then you just go to your website to appearance and themes and then add new and upload it and then your site will give you the option to replace the existing version of akabato and just do that and it'll be up to date so it only takes a couple of extra minutes

it's just not as simple as clicking the button one time but um anyway it will it'll work from from here on out so sorry about that um awesome well we're 35 minutes um and I should probably get back to my family but I'll take um let me take a couple more here so Joseph tarantola says just hit 2 000 unique views per month any suggestions or tips on finding legal lawyer slash property damage lead affiliate networks

find a network or build my own list of law firms per state so I don't know all the details around this but I remember um I remember Jim telling telling me because we bought we have a website a legal website um around patents right patentrebel.com and he said that lawyers are not allowed to pay for leads or something like that so it's it's kind of a tricky spot so you know for our website because it's about

patent law and you know we're kind of opening up and going into the um into trademarks copyright that sort of stuff uh we do have like we are working to become affiliates with LegalZoom there's a couple options and these are just legal services that aren't like law firms and they'll I mean LegalZoom right they'll they'll do documentation to create businesses like an LLC they'll do um they can do provisional patents which is patent pending and trademark

and copyright they can do those for you as services and so um they are allowed to pay for leads and so um we can be an affiliate for them however apparently we're not allowed to sell leads or lawyers are not allowed to buy leads at least in the US so I don't know the um I don't know the the specific laws around that so that's kind of a tricky one um it's a good question though uh

let's see I just launched my website a few weeks ago but I can't find it on Google when I search for it uh what can I do so if you want to search for it and just determine whether or not it's actually on Google because this isn't uncommon if you just started a site and it's pretty new um it could be that while Google has already crawled and maybe even indexed some of it it's not ranking

anywhere even for like the name of your website right so I just gave the example my website patentrebel.com if I just typed in patent rebel I would find it but when it was brand new you might not at first and so one way to just just check is to you know actually let me just show this because I can do that um here we go so I could do site colon patent rebel.com so the site colon

search is going to search for all of the pages that exist under this domain under this URL patent rebel.com that exists within Google's index and so if you do a site colon search and then type in your website you're going to see all of the pages that Google has indexed on your for your site so that's something you can do to just check and see whether or not Google has actually indexed your website if they haven't

I have a video series from earlier this year where I actually talked about some of the things you can do to make sure that you're not preventing Google from indexing your site and some things that you can do to help you know um ensure that your site has the best chance of getting indexed as quickly as possible Google doesn't have to index anything they they do what they want they want to index everything um and so

or at least as much as they can and so they they're incentivized to do that um but they don't necessarily do it right away especially on a brand new website okay all right I'm going to call it um so I can go spend a little bit more time with my family it's been a good holiday season I've been able to take a few days off um taking a few more days here just to spend time with

family I think it's fantastic to to do that so if you have that opportunity um you know enjoy the holidays take a little bit of time for yourself get refreshed if you if you're stressed um like most people are these days and then um and then just get ready to hit the ground running uh as soon as you're ready to get back to it so thanks everybody for joining us um again the replay will be up

shortly and so for any of you that just got here um but have you know happy holiday season uh it's been fantastic here I hope it's been great for you too we'll see you all later