202: Want to Future-Proof Your Blog? Here's What You Need to Know for 2025

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Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today and my special guest today is Liz Stapleton. Liz is the host of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit and she has been a blogger and a lawyer for many, many years and she loves helping people make their life easier with action oriented content and training. So Liz, you have been an attorney since 2012. You've been a blogger since 2014. You're also the founder and voice behind the Less Debt and More Wine, which is a personal finance site. We're in also your personal site which is ElizabethStapleton.com where you help readers understand the legal side of blogging. But today we're going to be talking a little bit about your upcoming summit. I'm going to let you tell us a little bit more about that in just a second. But. But we're also going to be digging into blogging and touching upon AI and how that is changing the landscape there. But before I get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?

Sure, because it probably sounds a little bit weird going personal finance, lawyer, blogger. Turns out law school is expensive, right? Lots of student loans and so that's how I started, ended up on my first blog starting a personal finance site. I had credit card debt at the time. I got that paid off and just talking money in general, as I was doing that, I saw people kind of being scaremongered about the legal side of blogging and I was like, that's just not necessary. It's important, but it doesn't need to be scary or hard. So then I started a site on that and then eventually I was like, people, you know, need to be able to like figure stuff out faster. You know, back in 2020 was the very first Blogger Breakthrough Summit, happened February 2020, before the world shut down. Just, you know, we're timing with that and 2025, we're back for the sixth year and it is one of my favorite things to do. It's such a fun event that I love seeing everyone be excited about and engaging.

Well, it is one of my most look forward to events of the year, but I'm especially interested in it this year because I think in 2024 we saw a lot of changes in the blogging world, and I'm super excited with you today and get your perspective of it to see if yours is the same as mine. Can you walk us through? You've been doing this since 2014. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges that bloggers face today? Or moving into 2025? I should say.

I think one of the biggest challenges is there's so much different technology. Technology is changing rapidly. Social media platforms are changing rapidly. Like TikTok. TikTok might be banned. You know, there's. There's just everything's really quickly. And I think that can cause a lot of overwhelm, a lot of uncertainty, you know. And what I'm seeing more and more is, yes, we adapt to the new technology, but we are going back to basics at the same time. Right? Because we want to connect with people and provide answer their questions, which is really where it all boils down to. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more kind of going back to those basics.

I love what you said there, going back to the basics, because that's one of the things I really started doing in 2024 too, is just going back and talking to people, hosting the live workshops, getting to know my audience better, having those email conversations with them. So going back to the basics. But let's talk a little bit about AI and how do you see AI playing into blogging? What should we consider there? What is the future?

I think there's kind of two parts to that. So first of all, there's like, AI search, which I think is going to grow, especially with all the different legal actions going on with Google. If you. Nina Clapperton, who's speaking at the summit, touches on this a bit. And I know she actually follows the Google lawsuits a lot more closely than I do, so she's a great resource for that. And Nikki Robinson at the summit talks about kind of, you know, the ways to use AI, but also the sort of AI search that is growing. It's still very new. I feel like not everyone knows about it, but it is growing. The other side of that coin is the way to use AI to really speed things up. So we were talking before we recorded about how I processed my summit, and I actually didn't have a VA this year, and I didn't outsource anything. And the reason I was able to do that was because of AI. Like, AI just helped speed up my processes so much, and it just made it a lot easier. I still had to review everything I still had to double check stuff, right. But I didn't have to do the manual tedious labor. And so I think AI, you know, kind of goes into helping you in the background and then it's the front side of okay, well where does it fall within search and within all those other aspects.

So I'm glad you talked about some of the presentations that are in the summit that's coming up that are going to be specifically looking at and kind of walking us through that AI search because that is really fascinating to me. So. And I've done some tests, like I've gone into some AI platforms and typed in, you know, where can I find mostly local stuff, but where can I find somebody in Milton, Georgia to do xyz, Y, Z or something? And you know, it's starting to come up like all of that starting to come up in terms of go to this website or this website does that. So I'm super interested in those presentations in the Summit.

That's one of the things I love about the summit is I learned so much. I fortunately have months to process and get ready, but I end up learning a lot. And that's the struggle when I'm prepping everything is to not get distracted by ideas that I get from like processing the sessions.

So I know we can use AI to actually help us create our content, our blogging content. What are you gone through some of these presentations? I know there's going to be some covered in the summit, but can you give us some tips today on how we can actually use AI to create our, you know, to create our content, to give us some, you know, maybe ideas for our blogs or even help us create some of that content without compromising our, our voice or the authenticacy that we have our brand. What, what would you say there?

I think there's a couple things. First of all, treat it like an assistant. Don't just try to hand over your content creation, especially because that's honestly for a lot of us, the most enjoyable part of work. Trying to hand over things you don't enjoy as much. But use it as an assistant, especially because you don't want to take whatever AI comes up with and just like paste it on your site because then it's not copyright protected. Right. There's a legal element there too, which I do talk about in the legal sessions at the summit. But, you know, do it step by step. Right. Think of it like a small child who, you know, you can't give them more than like two things at a time to do and Honestly, two is pushing it because they don't want to listen to you in the first place. So it's like, do one thing. Okay, hey, help me come up with 25 different headline, you know, options. Because I really need a good title for this post. And then oftentimes what I find, and I think we've discussed this before, Destiny as well, in your session, where it's. We do some combination of two or three, right? It's not necessarily that we take one as is, but it gives us the ideas. All right. Hey, can you give me an outline? This is the keyword. This is some of the information I want to make sure to include. And then another thing I like to ask it when I'm using AI and like, ChatGPT is, hey, is there anything else you can think of that would be helpful? Right? So it can help flush out maybe an area you hadn't thought of to include in your article. Hey, what information do you need from me in order to be able to do this? That's another thing I do. A lot of times, me doing stuff with AI is just asking, hey, what's the easiest way to do this? What do you need from me? And then you're like, no, that's not what I meant. What additional information do you need for me to do? It has been a huge helper when I'm using AI to help me with things.

I love that. And, you know, here's what I'm looking to do, but what do you need from me to accomplish that?

So I love that I can't write a like prompt to save my Life. I asked ChatGPT to write it. I go, hey, this is what I want to accomplish. Can you help me craft a prompt that accomplishes X, Y and Z? And then we work through it and we test it, and it's, you know, it's an assistant. It's someone to bounce the ideas off of. In a sense, it helped me do some coding the other day, which was awesome. So you just. You got to have a conversation with it and you got to treat it like an assistant and not just like. Because it is dumb technology. You have to really step by step explain what you want and say, hey, that wasn't actually what I meant. Let's go back. So otherwise it can be really frustrating when it goes down this weird path of like. And it. When it hallucinates, you have to be like, no, no, don't make things up. You know, stick to what was in the transcript or stick to whatever piece of information I provided you do not do, you know, do not infer things that aren't there.

Yeah, and that's a good point because sometimes when I've had it, help me create some blog post and I've done this with hobby school in particular, it'll come with these examples that are these completely fake examples. And I'm like, where do these come from?

When you ask it, you're like, where did this even from? They're like, oh, you're right, that's fake, let's not include that. And you're like, yeah, like let's not do fake stuff.

Exactly. Well, I want to go back to something you said just a few minutes ago. And it had to do with copyright considerations. So you're a lawyer, so you're a perfect person for me to ask this to. What should we be thinking about when we're using AI? What does it mean that we need to be thinking about copyright considerations based on the outputs it gives us?

Sure. So first, quick disclaimer. This is not legal advice. It's informational, educational purposes only. I am not practicing as an attorney currently. I am very interested in the area and I like educating, but I am not practicing. I'm not your attorney. So with that in mind, the sort of better what the courts have said when it comes to AI, because there was this case actually where this guy built the AI and had it like generate an image and it wasn't copyright protected. Okay. Because even though he built the AI, it was the AI that created the image. And so what it is, it comes down to human authorship is the bedrock of copyright. So if you're taking something straight from AI and pasting it, it's not copyright protected. It needs to, you know, human authorship, edited, revised format, there's all sorts of things. If you're using it more as an assistant, then you're in pretty good shape to be able to produce copyright protected content. If you are using it to just try to like take over and you're pasting ads, people can steal your stuff and there's not anything you can do about it because it's not copyright protected. And that's on the like content side. On the image side, things get even more complicated. First of all, AI generated images are not going to be copyright protected on that same basis. Now using AI to edit images you own is right. Like it could still be copyright. So I think AI can still be super helpful. And we've been using AI and image editing for years, background removers, things like that. So there's kind of two sides to it. And I do dig into it like I said in I think two of the three legal sessions, each of the sessions in the summit are broken out by level, beginner, intermediate and advanced. And so I do touch on copyright and just the basics of it, especially when it comes to AI in those sessions.

The last question I have for you, and this comes down to how fast everything's like changing in the industry. And I know that, you know, with the Blogger Breakthrough Summit, you foster a lot of community there. So can you walk us through exactly what you do and why that's important?

Oh, that's a big question. I mean I, I would say I bring together the summit, but I mean what truly makes it are the speakers and the attendees, right? So the speakers give incredible presentations. They're super action packed, they're fluff free as you know. I'm like a stickler for that. I will edit out pitches if they're, you know, I little bit at the end, but if there's anywhere else I edit it out and then the attendees that can ask questions in the comments or at the live panels. And so you see those conversations happening, that's the speakers and attendees. I kind of create the environment and I'm happy to foster it and I'm happy to encourage it. We also have a Facebook group and stuff, but I don't know that I do that much apart from creating the environment for it to happen. And I love seeing it happen on all these relationships thrive. I've had speakers say, hey, we met, I met this person being on a panel with at your summit last year. Now we're like biz besties. And I've had, you know, attendees be like, oh, this person that I met in the comments is now like my accountability buddy. So that's stuff I really enjoy seeing. But I can't really say I made it happen.

Well, you know, you do make it happen because you're there. You're facilitating all of it. So Liz, before I wrap it up here today, any last minute tips for the audience?

I mean, I'd say make sure you get your ticket because you're going to learn a lot at the summit. Does that count as a tip?

That is absolutely one of the tips and we're going to make sure that the link for that is in the show notes so everybody has it.

And make sure to check out Destiny's session because it's fantastic.

Well, thank you so much. Well, Liz, thank you so much for joining us today. And I am looking forward to the 2025 Blogger Breakthrough Summit.

Yes, me too. It's happening end of January and again.

We'Ll make sure all of the links to sign up and join us are in the show notes. And Liz, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.