Ultimate Content Warrior Challenge Live Q&A and Updates

hey guys um i wanted to take a few minutes and jump on here live i i will be taking some questions um today but i also wanted to jump on and give you guys some updates on the ultimate content warrior challenge um if you're doing this challenge then this is going to be a helpful information for you um first of all we got a whole bunch of submissions already for challenge number one it was technically due

this morning but we saw that uh with the email um sometimes people don't get emails from email lists in their normal inbox and so i know some of you didn't see the email that went out on friday first of all make sure that when you're expecting an email from us you check your spam folder check if you're on gmail check that promotions tab if your email inbox is doing anything to filter out emails make sure you

go do a search you will be getting an email from us if you signed up for the challenge you're going to want to check those emails because those are going to tell you when each challenge starts now for the rest of the month of january the plan is to send out a challenge every monday and every thursday so the first challenge was last friday and was due today but now challenge number two is up live on

the website and an email will be going out shortly um hey chris it's good to see you too um and but an email will be going out shortly to let everybody know everybody that's signed up but again i wanted to jump on here and let you guys know about this now um to see what the challenges are if you haven't seen the email can't find it whatever go to incomeschool.com uscw dash challenges um it's going to

take you to this page ooh this nifty page each challenge will have a little video um you'll watch the video for your track and it'll tell you exactly uh what to do uh it'll tell you what to submit and when to submit it um so make sure you go check out that page maybe bookmark it come back to it every monday and thursday um so that you can find out what your challenges are i'm trying to

think if there's anything else the other thing that i wanted to let you guys know about was the leaderboard now as of right now we're still scoring the first challenge it's gonna take a lot of work for us us to get through all of these challenges um but uh we are we are gonna get it done as soon as the first challenge is fully done um we will post the scores there will be a ranking one

for the blogging track one for the youtube track it's it's embedded here on the website at incomeschool.com ucw dash leaderboard um again you'll be able to see it there uh it'll be there embedded on the site you can scroll through you can find your name you can click on the little tabs at the bottom to see in each challenge how we scored your article we're taking the time to try to write to give you scores in

various for various criteria as well as to write comments as often as we can to give you a little bit of feedback on what you submitted so um it's all going to be there for you to be able to find so as of right now we're still going through and scoring these so the rankings aren't going to post until we're done with everybody for the first challenge now one more thing on the first challenge if you

didn't get to submit it before this morning because you didn't have an email you are in luck we've opened that form up for another 24 hours so until tomorrow afternoon at 4 pm mountain time so actually it's more like 25 hours um you're you can go ahead and submit that first challenge if you didn't get around to it yet um but going forward uh they're just going to be doing their do so uh there you go

now um now i want to take a few minutes and again i'm happy to answer questions i want to focus on the ucw challenge the ultimate content warrior challenge um by the way this is super cool guys um i don't know if any of you guys have ever watched like wrestling or or ufc or anything like that but it's it's pretty awesome belt there um no but i want to talk about some of the things that

we're learning as we're going through and just looking at lots of people's youtube setups and a lot of people's different uh blog posts um so i've scored several of both um so let me talk briefly about blog posts first this challenge was about formatting blog posts um and when it comes to formatting a blog post there are some things that just are going to make your formatting substantially better think about the user and what it is

that they want when they come to your blog post what is what's the question that they searched and how do we give them the best quick answer to that question as early as possible one of the difficulties i've seen is with list posts um a post that's like here are 15 tips for or 18 of my favorite places there's not just like a one-off answer and because of that we have to be really good about formatting

each of those tips so that they really stand out so that as i scroll through the article i can easily find each one and find the information i'm looking for the next one is with images images and videos it's great it's important really we deem it necessary to put some images into our blog posts but what's better what takes it a step further is when the image is highly relevant to what the content is at that

point in the in the in the post how to blog posts do this really really well often times there's an image like showing the step doing the same thing with youtube videos even if you don't have a video you don't even have a youtube channel finding someone that has done exactly what you're trying to describe and embedding their video and even embedding it so it starts right at the spot in the video where you want them

to watch can be a great way to help your user and use those images and videos to really help with their uh with what they're trying to do when they come to the blog post and then the other piece is with actually formatting the rest of the blog post and making important things stand out and making it visually interesting using some bolding is really great um it's a tip that i gave in the in the video

about the challenge but using uh call out boxes um infographics uh using um uh or some of the other cool ones we saw there have been just a lot of really really great ones i really liked those little quote or call out boxes that wordpress does lists tables anywhere where you're showing a list of information or steps do not do not write that out in paragraph four um all right so let me get to some of

your questions here and then we'll talk about youtube here in a second too um uh people asking where's the first challenge if you missed the email go to incomeschool.com ucw dash challenges um in fact i'll the link will be in the description for this video um so you'll be able to find it there is where that's where we're gonna post every challenge so each time a new challenge comes out we'll push the old ones down so

you can see what the old challenges were and we'll replace it with the new one people asking uh people want to know how many entries there were over 600 people have signed up for this challenge we had almost 600 of those people submit an entry by the deadline this morning i expect several more of you will probably do the same if you if you missed that email the first time around in a stable post what do

you think about adding an answer paragraph i think there should be an answer paragraph in any post where there's a specific search query which is very very often so if it's a list post or a how-to post or like a real like here's a how-to guide um we see a lot of posts that are like the complete guide to this or that it's it's hard to have an answer paragraph and in those cases i like to

have a short segment that lets people know that here is how here's the information i'm about to provide for you and then really make each of those individual steps or items in the list stand out but anytime there's a specific search query start off that blog post with an answer paragraph where do we get our images from we um we use 123rf.com 123rf has some really affordable options for and a good library and it's affordable for

the number of images we use we often recommend to people dreams time they have a pretty inexpensive option their library is not as extensive but with all of the content we create one to threat has a great library and a pretty great plan for us will this competition be run next year um we'll have to see i don't know how well we're going to be able to keep up with it um we are judging every single

entry um and and uh taking some time with each one and so it's just a lot of man-hours i hope i really hope we can do this again next year can we accept posts in other languages um there are some posts that were submitted in other languages for some of the challenges it's doable because um it's like in this one it's more about the formatting and so we're doing our best to score those ones it's going

to get harder to do um in in some of the challenges so ideally it's better if you submit it in english um and let's see let me just take a couple more um how important is alt text in photos it's great from a accessibility standpoint as far from like an seo standpoint it doesn't really do much of anything for you um google's getting better and better and better image recognition so if you're trying to rank in

google image search it's also becoming less important but it is valuable from an accessibility standpoint if somebody's using a screen reader it's nice if they can says here's an image of this so it's good practice to do we're admittedly not great okay here's a great question um what makes it good about page that's challenge number two for those of you who are looking ahead um a great about page is one that has the right information to

establish eat depending on your niche okay so if you have a medical site i mean you're going to want you're going to want to show like the degrees and diplomas and all the certifications of all of the authors on your website if possible you're going to want to show that in in a nice way that's formatted well but that information is going to want to you're going to want to have that there um if your site

is about pets and it's not from a veterinary standpoint but from a pet owner's standpoint then um photos of you with pets is is going to be beneficial because it's going to show that you actually own pets that's going to help make for a good about page so showing that you actually have some authority in the space or are at least involved in the space whether or not you're an authoritative figure is going to be really

helpful um building the right kind of relationship again if it's like really medical content or financial content that relationship is a lot more kind of kind of professional and you want to show that a little bit more professional error if it's more about hey here's how to here's how i do fun things you know with my pets or my kids or whatever you want to have a little bit more um you want to have something that's

just a little bit more friendly that makes you very relatable and so it really you really need to have the right type of about page for the type of content for the niche that you're in um even when not winning the snippet can a direct dancer make your post rank higher yeah i mean if i do think that it's very valuable um google is looking for great answers to specific search queries and so directly answering the

question even if you don't win the snippet is going to help signal to google what your content is about all right um okay is it fine to revamp and release posts on a two-year dormant site which really never got off the ground um yeah i what i would probably do with that is go watch the battleship method video go through your post that way um you may find that none of the posts have enough traffic to

be like a hit post but you'll find that some of them based they may have actually ranked but not had traffic and you would know these are not these are not search queries that i want to be revamping um there's just not enough search volume for that um and so i do think it's worth going through that exercise if you're going to revamp it there's not a problem with um you know this this domain didn't take

off two years ago so i have to now start a new website somewhere else that's not something to worry about all right um okay um let me talk a little bit about the youtube challenge uh before and go ahead and keep posting questions i will try to get to as many as i can in the time that i have i do have to get back to judging because we have so many um but it's awesome i

love that you guys are doing this um the youtube challenge was about creating a good setup for your youtube videos some of the things we looked at were how easy is it for you to just sit down and film without distractions without things that are going to cause you to to really struggle to make that video um that's really one of the best things you can do to uh make sure you're gonna succeed on youtube is

give yourself a space where you can just sit down and film um but beyond that things we looked at were lighting um if you if you are really badly backlit there's a strong light source behind you you're gonna be in shadow and the background's gonna be super bright and we see people do that all the time to stand in front of a window now using natural light can be beneficial if you're facing toward the window um

you can use that natural light to light you pretty well um you can do that without buying expensive lights another issue we see is you know people have these bright fluorescent lights straight up above them no other lighting source and so they get like me right now i don't have a light shining right on me um it's not terrible in this office but uh it's not great either and so you get like these shadows inside your

eyes and on your face it's just it's not quite as good so lighting is is beneficial but then you know just how nice is the background look and more importantly um how well does it fit the topic um does does your setup actually make sense for the topic so i want to go for a little bit of a walk here um to to illustrate a little bit of uh what kind of makes for an ideal setup

now obviously we don't there's no expectation that uh everybody's gonna have like the most ideal setup most most of you guys are just getting started i have to walk outside to get to the other side of the office um most of you are getting started and you're doing great to just you know have a camera and um have decent audio and decent lighting and that's great just start where you are but an awesome thing to work

toward would be an office here like what anna's got set up um this place is great um here's anna and we're gonna have anna take us on a little bit of a tour of this is my office i am so blessed to have uh all of this space to work with for my channel content warrior and then our other channels as well but this office is super nice is because of course it dubs as my office

where i work but we also have a couple different backgrounds we can use here so this is what i call my main background and that consists of course i have my reading light set up right here i have a tripod ready to go and then i have a camera that i can just put right on there whenever i'm ready to record and we've set this up so it looks really nice on it camera what looks nice

about this is this couch in particular is actually moved forward just a bit so it gives you a little bit of extra depth in the video and then we've got all this nice texture in the behind the scenes here we've got all these different items that add to the video but also add interest to the video i also have another very simple background over here so if you have some space you can create a few different

backgrounds it doesn't have to be all of the same this one is cool because we've got this um brick wall back here which can i let him on a little secret this is actually wallpaper but it adds some great texture as well i've got this nice little fireplace piece some artwork a couple different pieces that just add interest but doesn't distract the viewer distract them from what you're actually trying to say in your video yeah and

i like how um even here at the desk setup you know we've got some pieces here you know you got this like calendar thing on the wall and you got a nice lamp and stuff so being able to just you can still sit down at your desk um turn face away from the computer and look at the um the camera and have just a nice setup at your workstation and so in this room you can film

there you can film there you can film i mean you could film in that corner if you wanted to but you can definitely film in front of the fireplace and i like that the fireplace set up it can work as a seated setup but it can also work standing um i like to be able to do some video standing i'm more comfortable standing when i'm on camera and so i love being able to have that kind

of setup right and then another cool thing about this room is of course if you have the natural light coming in if you have a nice sunny day you can have that coming in but i like to close the blinds a lot and then just use my own light i have that ring light and then we have these uh little lamps over here which actually add some nice extra lighting it's like a little accent light like

it's not lighting your face or anything in particular it's just kind of there but it adds an accent one thing that um you know i would have thought originally is that having all that on the background would be kind of busy behind your head you know but when you're distanced a little bit from the wall um and you can kind of blur the background a little bit just a little the texture actually adds a lot to

the video um rather than just having a plain colored wall um that said in nate's office sometimes uses a plain colored wall and just shines the light up on it and that works awesome too so depending on what your niche is um what's the ideal setup could be different but i think what's awesome yeah and you can put some cool little knickknacks up there that are like relevant to the video kind of little easter eggs i'm

gonna show you guys a couple others um thanks anna thank you i want to show you guys too um you know nathan has a channel all about wordpress and so in here he just kind of has some different motifs got this artwork on the wall and so this is a cool spot here in the corner with some plants believe it or not we actually did a lot of this setup on a bit of a budget um

and so it's not it doesn't have to be super pricey to set this kind of stuff up um these shelves these are shelf brackets with literally just one by what are they like one by ten boards um like from the hardware store uh and then a lot of this stuff is just i mean yeah fair amount of it even secondhand um we said jim's wife emily is just awesome with the court and she just went went

to town we gave her a budget and she just like nathan has this cool like elephant motif you'll find elephants all over the place here so we got a lot of rooms that are set up um oh and speaking of like being relevant um making your background your backdrops really relevant um this is a room that is mostly used for the backfire youtube channel we have this you know wood wall we've got um you know just

the decor fits um you got a work station workbench over there the decor really fits with the topic of the channel so it's highly relevant i think that's going to help speak to sort of your authority in the space um if if it doesn't feel like it's totally homemade all right so there you go there's my thoughts on the youtube stuff i'm happy to take some more questions now um so some people asking about uh if

they didn't receive the confirmation email um i don't think that was an issue i think that uh um well i think if you submitted your email is it's auto confirmed and so if you haven't received anything since just make sure you go check your spam folder make sure you go check um your promotions tab if you have uh if you're on gmail or something that that tends to sort out some of your emails um let's see

um when will the leaderboard be available it's going to be available as soon as we get through judging each challenge so what i don't want to do is put them up there as we go and then somebody see themselves near the top and then throughout the day they see themselves like moving further down because we just haven't finished judging it yet so as soon as we're done judging each challenge the the leaderboard will be populated with

everybody from that challenge it might be as late as thursday when the next uh we will definitely have all of these judged by the time the next challenge is due um how can you be considered an authority if you're just interested in the topic of the website here's the thing you don't have to be um like the authoritative figure but you do need to show that this is actually something that you do especially on youtube in

a blog it's a lot easier to get away with just being a researcher um just being an avid researcher somebody who is learning about a topic and writing articles about it you can absolutely do that we've done it a lot you're going to do better going forward if you can breathe life into your sight and the easiest way to do that is actually immersing yourself in the topic um as far as like the about page goes

and showing authority you know over time it's gonna be great if you can get um interviewed on someone's podcast it's not as hard to do as you think a lot of podcasters are looking for people to interview go get interviewed on someone's podcast and then link to it on your about page link to your podcast episode um in their arts you know just uh if you can find a link to it or just you know show

featured on whatever um let me see what are some of the main mistakes we've noticed in the blogs we've checked so far i talked about a few of these before um but i you know the big thing that stands out to me is if the content isn't formatted in a way where i can find my answer without reading every word in the blog post most of your readers are not going to be patient enough to actually

read every word in your article not unless there's a compelling reason to and so burying the answer within the blog post not a good idea sometimes people have a really good clear concise answer but it's way below the fold i mean and when i say below the fold it means you have to scroll down if i'm on a desktop computer and i have to scroll down to where you know the entire screen has changed more than

once before i get to a good answer to my question it's just too far um can we still join the first challenge we're still accepting entries for the first challenge until tomorrow at 4 pm mountain time and so if you join by then you absolutely can uh as long as just you know as long as you submit one by then you'll be okay um let's see are the challenges worth the same points yes um the way

this is gonna work is we're gonna run several challenges throughout the month of january um there will be actually a total of eight challenges for everybody and then and each one is worth the same amount of points and then based on that there will be rankings and we're going to take the top um 32 in each track and they'll go into a bracket where they're actually head-to-head against another person um to see who's the ultimate content

where and in the end we'll narrow it down to two finalists who will battle it out in probably like kind of a multi-challenge they'll submit like three different challenges and we'll score all of those together and we'll have a final winner and you know we will probably be doing some lives all throughout the month to show updates um this is a really cool thing it's really fun for us but i think it only has value for

you if you guys get to see and learn from it as well um google core web battle is becoming a ranking factor um do i think amp will be a better option on a niche website um i don't know amp has kind of had um its pros and cons uh they're you know some people are really in favor of it some people are like no let's just in our approach has been let's create our aqua bottle

theme just to be lightning fast and to meet all of the criteria that google is testing for um just naturally and organically and in doing so we can skip the whole amp thing and we can um have great content that does really well on desktop and mobile without hurting amp can really hurt ad revenues um and so uh we're not using amp on our blogs right now um i don't know we may have to someday but

as of right now it it we're just focused on making our theme acabato compat you know compliant with the core web vitals um tests and so right now we're working on that and we'll get it um set so that by the time it matters to google it will be something that the theme just does for you guys um is it necessary to do the youtube challenge or can you just do blogging so the plan right now

uh is you do one track or the other when it gets to the final contest the actual bracket narrowing it down the ultimate content warrior is gonna need to be able to do some video as well and so at that point the challenges are gonna start intermixing a bit if you don't have a channel um it's it's okay uh creating a youtube channel takes minutes and it's free and you don't have to publish your videos publicly

we just need to be able to see them so you can share them with us either by publishing them as an unlisted video on a new youtube channel or if you just want to like upload them to google drive and send us a link to watch them there that will work too will the websites of the 32 finalists be made public we're willing to respect people's wishes i think the top two finalists at that point um

the and i don't think there's gonna be any way in that final round to um to make it valuable for everybody watching um and and not i don't know maybe we could if it was if it was a sticking point we'd figure it out um what we've found is that when we send a flood of traffic um by announcing a blog on our youtube channel the net benefit is substantially greater than um than any risk that

we found to like negative seo or having a niche outed competition or anything like that i know those things do happen um people's sites get copied all the time and stuff but if somebody's doing really really well if their blogs are doing well it's there's just the downside is so much lower but when you do get that sudden flood of traffic um going over to a site it um it sends some positive signals to google and

we have seen over and over and over again that um even after that spike in traffic the now organic traffic to the site stays higher and so i think it's only going to benefit the people that are willing to share their sites um let's see i'll take a few more of these here will there be prizes like project 24 membership to people who run the top x or the prizes limited to the winners um we do

have pretty good prizes for the for the winner um we are still kind of talking about what the prizes will be for um kind of the runners-up because i do think that um there's definitely uh there should be something and so we will have something i don't know what it'll be um some of them may be project 24 members and so they wouldn't they probably wouldn't benefit as much from a membership but um we'll we'll find

something good um feel free to if you have ideas feel free to post them um in the comments for this video um all right uh i could probably answer questions all day um let's see jim versus ricky in an arm wrestle who wins some of you guys might have seen me arm wrestle nathan that guy was a lot stronger than i expected like i'm a fairly decent arm wrestler um and it was like a deadlock for

several minutes before um i finally won of course no uh i don't know i haven't done an arm muscle against jim since high school i think it's me but uh i'm i'm also too nice to say that that's definitely true jim jim's been working out and and lifting and running a lot and stuff so um i don't know we'll see what do i think of blogs that turn into magazines um i i don't really have an

opinion on that uh one way or the other um i don't remember who won in the arm wrestling in high school i remember doing it we were with a bunch of friends and we arm wrestled against each other um i probably won um i but uh i don't remember for sure i do remember being surprised to get beaten by a couple of guys who were smaller than me but um in high school i played tennis all

right um and um some of these guys that did like wrestling and football they got the weight room all the time and the tennis team never got weight room time so i didn't really start like lifting until college and it improved my tennis game i know this has nothing to do with internet marketing it improved my tennis game like crazy it was awesome but in high school like i was already like i have a bigger physique

even when i'm even when i'm not overweight and so i'm naturally strong but the guys that lift they could beat me so even when they look smaller and wiry they could beat me in arm wrestling so there you go um people wonder why my picture's on the belt i don't know i've kind of become the um unofficial mascot of some income school things all of the milestone um icons in project 24 are my face so that's

just what we're doing now um will you bring the winner on to your channel to interview um we'll probably even go further than that i think so if they're if they're up for it um we plan to have them work with us to create a new course for project 24 um based upon the skill sets that they have um is project 24 good for the mom blog space i honestly i think pretty well independent of topic

um project 24 is going to teach bloggers things that are going to help them be substantially more successful anything new in project 24 all the time um let's see we've what did we publish most recently we have some things in the works we're working right now it's so close it's a little bit on me to finish up we've been working on this course about creating your own courses and info products that i think is going to

be really beneficial we have one in the works on affiliate marketing and a really cool tool that we're developing for project 24 members to help them do affiliate marketing on their blog will margin my income school come back i don't know we started a lot of projects earlier this year um with specific goals in mind and um the ones that the ones that had the most benefit are the ones that we continued with as we started

to as we basically had to prioritize more what we were going to do um well this live stream including the outdoor activity um it's pretty rainy out here now so probably not maybe i could go jump in a puddle here um i might have to do that for you guys one day jump in a big old puddle um when is the new design version of aqua bottle coming out the plan um this is a great question

uh well you know will there be a lot more design options we've been working on it um we have designs ready um it's going to be cool i don't know when it's going to be done development work is always taking us a lot longer than we expect it to um but the idea is to have like four different like major skins for the home page so depending on the style of your blog and then more customizability

from there um beyond that we're going to have some special designs for other pages sales pages and about pages and stuff um so you'll have you'll be able to um to do a lot more cool customized things um so you everybody using acabado won't have a site that all looks pretty much the same um man uh if i use do follow links for amazon well i missed that one i you've asked this a few times so

i'm gonna go ahead and try to take it uh um links like listing 10 items in a list post will my articles lose the top ranking position um you know i don't think that's having much of an impact on um on seo uh it's one of those things where it's like if everything else was equal um you and another blog post had just they were equally perfect and yours used to follow links for affiliate products then

it might have an impact it's one of those kind of ranking factors it's good practice to do all of the technical seo stuff for affiliate links you should be using the sponsored tag relational sponsored but if that's something you're not sure how to do and you're just creating the tags then that's fine our new affiliate plugin um that we're working on um the intent is to have it do that for you um so if it's an

affiliate link it'll just do it that way why is aquabato better than other themes frankly acabato is designed completely different than other themes aquabotto's designed it to be fast to score well on all the page speed scores as long as you don't um overly change it with lots of plugins and css bog it down with other things um it's also intended to be very simple to use so um somebody who's new to blogging can set it

up in a short amount of time and it won't look crummy there are a lot of themes that are very customizable but unless you take the time to really customize them they look like trash and um and if you don't have a great eye for design and you're not very technically savvy it's hard sometimes to take those things that can look amazing and um and make them not look really bad and so um that's uh that's

what we built akabada for it's certainly not the theme for everyone um but uh it it's it's a really good one i think if you missed a challenge can you um still make it in the top 32 it's definitely possible as long as your scores and all the other challenges are are high um i do think there are probably several people who will miss a challenge here there for whatever reason and some who might drop out

at some point because they don't have enough time and so i wouldn't give up because you missed one also i think this is going to be a great learning opportunity for everyone who participates to look at aspects of their content creation that they're not they don't already think about um a lot of times we jump in we write a blog post we're focused on a handful of things we write our blog posts we get them out

there this is going to force you to look at your content creation from different angles and so if you miss a challenge i would suggest still going back watching the video for that challenge and challenging yourself to do that thing even if you're not gonna get a score back from us all right guys i wish i had a bunch more time but i gotta get back to scoring um it's it's a lot of fun to talk

to you guys um i i plan to jump on here as often as i can especially over the next month um to answer questions help you guys through this challenge and help you guys on your journey to um create awesome content whether you're blogging youtubing both podcasting whatever it is you're doing we're here to support that uh we're all about helping people um build a business and support their themselves and their families um it's it's a

crazy world out there and a lot of people are struggling right now so um anyway so keep after it uh you guys got this all right well take care we'll see you guys next time