How to Blog in 2025: AI Tips & SEO Strategies from Ryan Robinson

This AI thing is a call to building deeper, like, real human connection with people. Because when someone watches your video and they really feel something or they really internalize it and change something in their lives for the better, that's incredible.

We'll welcome Ryan up to the stage and get our first session started today.

Hey, how you doing? Thank you for having me, man.

So good to have you here.

Where, where are you going in a big week?

You're, you're, you're overseas now, right?

I'm in Barcelona for a month. I've never done, like an extended stay kind of trip like this where I live, I work. I've got my streaming set up even in my Airbnb. So I'm having a good time.

Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks for calling in while you're, you're, you're away. Actually, our first session yesterday, Amanda was on family vacation. And this is kind of what I love about world that we live in is you can be in Barcelona, take an extended stay and be doing work. Amanda can be on family vacation and doing something. The flexibility of it's really great. But for those of you who. Those are those of the people here who don't know you, give us a little bit of background of you and write blogger and everything else. Like, I can, I can kind of read off a script here, but tell us what we should know about you for those who don't know you yet.

Oh, for sure. I am a blogger by trade. I've been blogging@ryrob.com as you said, Darrell. Thank you. For like 15 years, a really long time. And I think the coolest thing about my message is that my blogging journey has gone in so many stages of like, ups, downs, side to sides. My primary sources of traffic have changed over the years. My primary sources of income change every 12 to 18 months. And so I think I'm a really interesting story of someone who's like, really grown and changed and shifted a lot with how content has evolved over the last 10, 15 years. And it's been super fun. So fun that as soon as AI came on the scene, I started Write Blogger, my suite of content creation tools, things that help creators repurpose their content. Our most popular tool takes any video you make and it automatically generates an SEO blog post for you. It writes your insta captions, your newsletter draft, all that kind of stuff. And so basically building the tools I wished I could have and afford when I first got started.

Amazing. So I've been blogging. I started blogging in 2004. So it's been 21 years since I've been in this world. And back in the day, I mean, we all were called bloggers. Nobody was called a creator. That term wasn't even really around back in the day. I think you were around during those days too. And I remember the whole deal about blogging back in the day was like, can I make $100,000 a year blogging? Is that a thing that can happen? And at some point early in my journey, there was a guy named Chris Guillebeau who wrote an ebook called 279 Days to Overnight Success. Do you remember that one? Yes.

Chris is awesome. I had him on my podcast like a very inspiring dude from the super early blogging days.

And now we're seeing creators making millions and tens of millions and even more. The world has changed so much, but what has not changed in the last 15 years? So, like, obviously we know about AI and all this stuff going on, but what have you seen be exactly the same today as it was 15 years ago? What are some of the principles that aren't changing when we talk about blogging and long form content?

I think it's the same thing that will probably never change. I don't want to eat these words too much, but the human element is what has always been so special about blogging. Same thing applies to being a creator, a content creator. People follow individual creators or purchase products, services that you offer because of you, and that really deeply human connection that you can make through the content you create or through, you know, doing live streaming, more interactive stuff, events and whatnot too. But that's what I saw the most success with when I first started blogging was telling the stories. This, you know, in this era, it was more in written format than it is in video and podcasts like today. But the stories where I was most vulnerable, most personal, shared the darkest, like the crappy stuff, the most painful things, the. The things where I didn't look so good, whenever I share those, I always got the greatest response. Those were the posts that like, you know, went viral on Hacker News and on Reddit and all these kind of earlier sorts of distribution channels. And the same thing applies to today, it's just more applicable to video. And, you know, when you really nail it on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, or with some longer form stuff, same thing applies. But when you really nail that human connection, that vulnerability piece, and when people just feel through the screen the authenticity that you're bringing to whatever it is you're doing, then like they're gonna wanna stick around and do more with you because you get to kind of create your own reality vortex. And I believe that's so much easier to do today than it was 15, 20 years ago.

How so? How is it easier today?

Video is everywhere. It's the expected medium, right? And we have all of these tools that make it so easy. Literally, in my pocket, I have almost everything I need to make content every single day. Like, I'll travel around with some, like, smaller microphones that, you know, you can clip on right here. And between that and an iPhone, that's really all you need to make pretty good content. And then there's levels to it as well. But I think just the tools have come so far. There's tools like Sub Magic I use to do auto, you know, short form clips from my longer form videos. There's stuff that automatically removes bad takes. And so it's gotten so much faster to put out more content. And as we all know, the more you put out, the more you get to learn. And so you get to refine your message, your character, your Persona, whatever it is. You get to refine it so much more quickly now if you. If you can summon the courage to do it.

Yeah, you've really anchored yourself in the term blogging, which I personally really love, because it's like, so nostalgic for me. Why is that a term that you have anchored yourself into? Why the term blogging still? I think a lot of people would call themselves YouTubers or Influencers or maybe that term's even coming out now, or creators. Why the term blogging? Why is that such a important term that you've anchored yourself into? And I'm curious to hear a little more. More about that.

You know, I was talking about this last night with a friend, actually, because they were talking about how isn't blogging, like, kind of dead? Or, you know, is anyone a blogger anymore? And what I like most about it so personally, I really just resonate with it because the term blog is like, you know, a shortened version of a web blog. Like, that's the original version weblog and a log of your activity, a log of your life that you want to share on the web, on the Internet. And so to me, there's something that's like, so deeply. I think nostalgic is the right word. Honestly, like, it is nostalgic to me that, oh, my. My weblog has lived for 15 years and it's documented my journey as a creator, as a person. Like, I've gotten to share so much of my life through my blog. And I've really just like, I connect with the term and I think there's something to be said for really like anchoring yourself as who you are, who you speak to, who your audience is, what you teach and like really just owning that rather than say going with whichever term is in vogue, you know, for this two to three year period. Creator is in right now, Influencer was in maybe five to ten years ago. Right. And so I think, you know, these terms often come and go, but to me, blog, web blog, it seems to be like much more rooted in like the OG concept of sharing on the Internet.

Yeah. In a world where short form feels like it's taking over in a significant way. Talk to me about why we should be thinking about long form and how you're thinking about long form and all that you do.

Yeah. To me, I love long form in part because I'm long winded and so keeping it short is a little bit more of a challenge for me anyway. But to me, long form is like the real relationship building stuff. Less people are consuming long form content, even, you know, video or podcasts. Right. But I think that gets a little bit of a, you know, a cheat code because people want to listen to an hour and a half long podcast episode with people they really enjoy listening to. So that format I can't. I think it's a no brainer to really like do the relationship building, nurturing with your audience in long form on video and audio. But to me, writing is so expressive in ways that video and audio format aren't because you get to refine your writing more. You develop a style of like, I process so much of my own thoughts, feelings, emotions through the act of writing. Like there's something about the through my fingertips piece that I do just genuinely love as a person and so I don't want to not write. And I think the transition we're seeing in terms of like, can my long form writing actually translate into some sort of real business results for me, that is the thing that's changing so much these days.

Yeah. That's great. So are you like, how are you doing? Are you just still writing long form content on your website? Like, what does that look like for you in practice? Long form? And then how are you connecting that into the world now where it's, you know, 10 to 60 second clips on the regular? Like, how are you, what's the relationship between it and how are you actually still doing long form right now?

This is such a fun one for me because Right now I'm actually, I'm writing a book called I Am Not My Business and it's about disconnecting your self worth from your successes and failures in life. Writing it for myself, but it's a lot of tools, strategies, lessons I've learned kind of along my journey. And so that's been sort of the ultra long form test for me lately of creating kind of a plan, a roadmap of how do I write a book in three months. I've never done this before and so I hired a coach to help me. I think this is like low key, a super important thing when you get like deep into a really big long form project. Someone who just helps me like hey, here's your assignment for the week. Let's have a weekly check in call, talk about, you know, where your struggles are, where you need to make more time for writing and whatnot, but zooming into the actual process itself. Like my day to day content, I'm still publishing long form stuff on my blog. I pretty much always pair blog posts with a video. Now there's still some exceptions, but I tend to take a video first creation process these days. So even as someone who identifies as a blogger, I'm not writing start to finish entire long form SEO blog posts that are, you know, 2000 plus words. I think if you enjoy that, go for it. But with AI tools like even using Write Blogger's video to blog tool, that's what I use every week I'll shoot a video even if it's just going to be raw and not published on my YouTube channel. But I like to talk things out in a video for five to 10 minutes around what my take is on the subject. And so you know, feed the tools the video as your source material and then it'll automatically write a blog post in my own voice style tone. Like we kind of train the AI on the account level to learn how to sound like you based on all the inputs you give it over time.

Amazing. You've talked a lot about SEO as a traffic source. How are you seeing SEO change in the world of AI where people are not using Google or Bing or other search engines in the same way they used to, but they're using ll, are they using things like ChatGPT and Claude and other other tools like that to do searching now? How are you seeing that world changing from an SEO standpoint?

It has changed so much already and more changes coming. I think you know the biggest changes is are likely coming in the next like 6 to 12 months would be My guess, you know, Google at, at their I O conference, they talked about AI mode in search and they sort of preview that. You can preview it Now, I think google.comai mode maybe, or slash search, slash AI mode. You can kind of see what it is they're experimenting with to essentially replace the search experience. And it's a pretty dramatic difference. It's more or less a version of ChatGPT with some sources a little more clearly cited and whatnot. But what it means is that there are a lot more changes coming to SEO. And so I've seen through most of my sites, like, it's been a story of fluctuations. And so I haven't like seen traffic fall off a cliff on any of my properties. Around 100 different sites and various niches and fun little things I've launched over the years. And so from a portfolio perspective, I get to zoom out and not freak out as much, I think, as a lot of people who maybe only own one site or have one blog, one main business website. Right. Like, you feel those pains of a traffic dip so much more. And what I'm seeing, probably the number one takeaway, is that for the most part, any traffic I'm shedding from my sites is kind of vanity traffic anyway. It's stuff that, if my business model was purely advertisements, display ads on my blog, yes, that would affect my income sources. But this is now kind of a call to anyone who's, you know, still identifies as a blogger, someone who earns from, say, display ads, sponsorships on your site. The emphasis needs to be on diversifying your revenue streams more away from just these super duper, you know, traditionally classically easy traffic sources like do this SEO stuff, then rank in traffic, rinse and repeat. That model is changing. So I'm seeing vanity traffic disappear a little bit more. You know, if you had a glossary of all the sales terms on your blog about sales, that's the kind of traffic that's easily replaceable by AI snippets. And arguably it was never traffic you should have earned in the first place. Right. Like, that's the kind of stuff that people don't need to click through for a blog and try and find the definition of term on the page. Google's been working on trying to answer that kind of stuff in the serps with featured snippets and whatnot for a long time. And so what we're seeing is just the next iteration of this, which is, you know, LLM optimization, as we could say. How do you become a recommended answer, a Source cited and these things. And the best thing you can do about that, like if we're talking real quick takeaways, is focus on long tail content. Stuff that answers really specific questions, challenges, problems that your audience has, where you're uniquely positioned to swing through and help people on those topics and like really carve out your niche. Those, I think are the top opportunities now. And as people ask more specific questions to ChatGPT and whatnot, like you have an opportunity to be the top source on those things.

Amazing. So back in the day it was like a volume of content. And I think I remember I was blogging daily and we were like a lot of ways this was like pretty, pretty archaic way of thinking which was like, just get as much content out there. We weren't doing lots of keyword research, maybe a tiny bit, but it was like thinking about our person, just right, right, right, right, right. And we'd use a lot of things like Digg and Reddit and stumbleupon trying to get traffic from those like referral sites. Then social media came around and then it was like, now we're kind of taking that daily blogging content, posting on social media, trying to drive traffic that way. SEO became a huge part of driving traffic. This AI world feels like maybe the biggest shift, even bigger than social media from a website traffic. So if I'm just getting started and I'm just wanting to think about building moat around my business from a content and traffic standpoint, how would I think about it differently today versus writing as much as you possibly can and getting it onto reference sites, then playing the social media game. That game's changing a lot. And now we have AI. If we're just getting started, like how would you think about building a moat around your business to get people through your funnel, using blog web traffic, things like that, how would you be thinking about it or how are you thinking about it?

Think long term. I think the days of quickly spinning up a site and, you know, juicing it with a bunch of SEO traffic and maybe some gray, you know, gray hat stuff, I think those days are gone. That's the kind of stuff that search engines have been trying to weed out for a very long time anyway. And so take the long term approach. Really think about like each individual person who watches your videos, signs up for your newsletter, whatever it is, as an individual, think about your relationship you have with them and always focus on adding as much value as possible. Now, like from a content mix perspective, there's, there's a few big things going on right now SEO, AI, ChatGPT, like Google's AI search mode, all of these things reward people who are authoritative, they're trustworthy. Like, all these similar things that SEO kind of is are still remaining true that the details of how they're being expressed and surfaced are just changing more than ever before. But if you do things like post once or twice weekly on all of your major social accounts, you engage with the comments, you share a weekly or every other week post on your blog, that's a value ad, provides real, meaningful help and solutions to people in the space. It's, you know, dialed in for SEO search engine optimization and for real readability for people. If you're doing this mix of stuff and you're sharing a mix of video blog content, you have a newsletter with that more personal touch point. That's the mix that I'm finding working really well right now. Because this AI thing is a call to building deeper, like real human connection with people. And that's something that we only can get from other humans in this particular way. And so I think what we're going to keep seeing is people want more depth of relationships, especially with creators that they follow. And, you know, if you become a source of knowledge, education, or like entertainment or companionship even with your people, that is so special in ways that can't easily be measured by just the traffic or just the views. Because when someone watches your video and they really feel something or they really internalize it and change something in their lives for the better, that's incredible. That's the foundation of a potential business. And so taking those more qualitative insights, I've found to be the best ways to like, guide my future activities. And that looks like a mix of video blogging, newsletter stuff.

Yeah, I think it's. So this is the theme throughout this entire event so far is the people who win in this creator world are those who have the ability to connect to people the best, period.

So how you translate it through whatever your mediums are, that's the hard part.

It's the hard part, but it's also like the good news for everybody here, right? Is the good news is all I have to be thinking about is how I can have an impact on another person. And I think that that boils all of this down. It's like the tools, the tricks, the tax, the tactics, all those things change frequently. And the great news is there's lots of people who talk about this, including yourself. But like, the core message that never changes is the core of all of this is helping A person solve a problem or helping a person overcome something, or helping a person feel something. And that's the core of all of this. The best creators I know invoke some kind of connection to another person, and that's the core of everything. And so, like, we could. We could burn all the business books in the world and kind of distill it down to that is the people who can connect to a person and solve a problem or make them feel a certain way. Those are the people who win, full stop. And that's exactly what you're saying here as well.

The more you, you can be like the weird. Being your weird self is an actual superpower because you will turn off people who aren't for you, but the people that are for you are going to be like, oh, my God, where is this person been my whole life?

That's my person. I belong here. Like, that person is like me and I belong here. And it's like creating that belonging which is really the goal here. And I think a lot of people have. Have fear of being themselves and then them not being themselves. There's just no possibility for you to connect to people in a real way.

That's the first, like, doing that inner work. That's the first step. Don't worry so much about, like, the perfect camera, lighting, audio equipment. This is all whatever. Do the inner work to be comfy with who you are and be super expressive in that. And oh my gosh, the rest is so much easier.

Okay, so let's talk about the mix of content a little bit. So you obviously have a website. You've got content there. I know that you have a newsletter. I know that you've got things on social. But as you're creating content, what's the mix that you're doing here? What are the goals that you're striving for? And for those folks here, like, how should they be thinking about that mix?

I think it's super important to recognize you need goals. I need carrots and sticks in my life. So I, like, set up positive goals where I get to reward myself by maybe going to a breathwork class or taking a yoga class, something that I enjoy very much in my days and my weeks by, like, okay, I got to get this video out on this particular day. And then afterwards I have a yoga class scheduled so that I know here's my reward. And also I have to show up to do this thing in order to do it. So, zooming out a little bit, what does the content mix look like? I try and Schedule myself to film one to two longer form videos per week. This is a snapshot of what the ideal week looks like. How often does this happen? I don't know. Not, not every week, I'll tell you that. But I aim to make one to two long form videos every week. And then typically from that I derive my short form clips of the stuff that seems to probably pop the most on social media, on the Instagrams and TikToks and LinkedIn's vertical and whatn. Um, but sometimes when I just feel inspired, I'll shoot a quick short, something that really comes to me and I just want to capture real fast. I'll go for that. Just sort of randomly in the mix. But I'm trying to publish at least one SEO optimized blog post weekly on my major properties that usually comes from those longer form videos. So this is a way that I actually save a ton of time now compared to the previous way of writing an entire post yourself before. You have AI tools that can now help with this stuff. And so taking these videos and making already and then using it as a source material for the blog posts is perfect for my process. And then I aim for one newsletter each week as well, usually with a call to action around some content that I made recently that's helpful for people sometimes, you know, releasing of a new course or hey, there's this, you know, new thing we added in Write Blogger. There's kind of a mix of what the newsletter is, but I usually use that as a tool to bring people to check out more value add content.

Okay, so the core of it is this. Two long form videos, then there's one SEO blog post, one newsletter, and then a bunch of shorts that kind of come out after that.

As many as I can. I'm usually not like super rigid about I need to publish a short, you know, five times a week on these days at these times I'm much more flowy about that. I kind of allow them to be posted when I feel like it or when I schedule them if I really get on top of it. But yeah, I think aiming for two to five a week is a pretty good number for me. Talking about, you know, marketing, SEO, blogging, writing, business and AI stuff. That seems pretty good.

That's great. You've mentioned this term a couple of times and I'm curious to have you unpack this a little bit. You said one SEO optimized blog post. What does that mean? Unpack that a little bit. For those who might not know what that means and Then what are you doing specifically, how are you doing it? What tools are you using? And then are you like just like old school, posting a blog on your website? Is that what that means?

That's exactly what that means, yeah. The blog posts that I publish on my website, you know, SEO optimized blog post, a piece of content that's typically longer form in nature, that could be something like 1500 words. We don't need to be talking about super crazy long stuff. But an SEO optimized blog post is something that distills my answer or solution, my process, sometimes a story, but it's usually teaching something that's a value add to a real problem that someone's either expressed to me or that I've gone out and done research and said, okay, yeah, it looks like, you know, 300 people a month are searching for answers around this particular topic. So I'll write a post or I'll film a video that I then turn into a post and kind of the search engine optimization piece of it is just getting all this checklist of best practices all dialed in that search engines like to see, you know, very clear headings that break down the topic and different stages and steps that makes it sort of readable and digestible to real humans. Search engines are also taking into account, you know, in, in the 10 headings that are in this blog post, do any of them mention the primary keyword phrase or the primary topic that you'd like your article to appear at the top of Google results for? And so there's a long checklist of it. We don't need to go super deep into the, into the weeds unless you want to. But for me, that balance of what an SEO optimized blog post is is it's written for both search engines and humans alike. So there's key takeaways near the top. This is super important for LLM optimization as well. Have really clear key takeaway section so that both search engines, AI crawlers and the humans that land on your site can quickly get the most valuable piece of information from your content. That's the kind of like really concise upfront value stuff that especially the LLMs like to see.

Yeah, that's good. I know the question that comes up for so many people here is like, okay, so two long form videos a week. How are you even coming up with ideas? Or like what is your process like? Somebody was asking about content pillars earlier. Do you like have a batch of ideas? How are you coming up with ideas? You've been doing this for 15 years. Like, don't you run out of things to say time to time? How is this working? What do you, what do you. How are you generating the ideas to start this whole process and matrix?

I would say I have frequently run out of things to say and. And more often than not, I've run out of the energy to want to talk about the things that are still left. But as with, I think any niche in blogging and SEO AI, things are always changing. And so there is kind of a continual flow of new things to talk about, of new angles to talk about the same or similar things from. So from my perspective, I allow myself little periods of like being demotivated sometimes or feeling like, oh, I think I've said everything I have to say about blogging. And that phase lasts a few weeks. And then some questions from readers show up. And so I like to take, you know, my topic identification process is kind of a combo of things that bubble up from inside me. So real questions I have or challenges that I go through, failures I see wins that I get to experience. So looking first at my life, the things going on in it, and seeing which ones may be relatable, which ones can I pull out an insight and answer a helpful tidbit for someone else and share kind of, you know, more vulnerably, more vulnerably around that stuff. And then the other bucket is, you could call it reader questions, comments on blog posts, replies to emails. You know, I think there's communities that you can source answers and questions from that you don't necessarily need to own. So I'm a member of some Facebook groups, I surf some. Some Quora writers and questions still. Sometimes I'll check out Reddit threads even. And so I feel like I can continually find inspiration when I want to find it. And then the last resort, this is, I think, the ones that have produced maybe some business results, but the least joy. This bucket is doing keyword research. This is more of the like just opportunity identification and okay, Ryan, can I put together a cohesive video and article to answer this kind of search engine need?

Yeah, that's good. I think that's the. Somebody had said this yesterday. There's like only two. Like in a musical chord, there's only 12 notes. And it's like all music of all time has been replaying those 12 notes in different arrangements over and over again. How do you think about repurposing content and like rewriting the things that maybe you've said before, but saying it, you know, a hundred different times a Hundred slightly different ways. How frequently can you do that? How frequently are you doing that? Or is it like once I've said something, I've kind of said it and I'm like literally coming up with new ideas all the time.

This is, you're touching on something really important here. Because in my observation, and I'll say my limited personal experience because I'm not redoing, let's say I'm not giving my new answers to everything that I've written about all the time. I kind of selectively drop in and revisit. I know some posts on my blog continually rank, you know, near the top of search for valuable terms for me or when I update them every six months or something. So I'll do reviews of the important posts and say, okay, this needs to swap out. My feelings about this have changed. The data I'm collecting these days is different than it was 10 years ago. I ought to update this blog post. And then there's some stuff where I just know, like once a year, every year, I need to make a new video on how to start a blog for 2025 and what that means because there's so many different tools to do that today. So I think kind of a combination of how I approach this stuff a little bit less systematically than I think others do, it's more of a feelings based thing, like, ooh, this thing needs to be updated because my experiences with it have changed. But yeah, I will say the creators that I've seen do the absolute best talking. Millions of followers building massive businesses around it, they are saying the same thing hundreds of times, rinsing and repeating, talking about it in new settings with slightly different angles or pulling in a new example, a different question that someone asked. But when you zoom out topically, thematically, there's a lot of repetition going. And you know, that's also the human experience. We need repetition in order to internalize things and, and take action on it.

Yeah. And I think the core principles of the world and of business have never changed actually. And it's, it's fun thinking about and reading, you know, books that I liked 20 years ago where it's like, oh, like we're not doing it this exact way anymore. But the underlying principles are exactly the same. And it really, it really is that nothing has changed while everything has changed at the same time. Right. Like AI means our world is so wildly different. And I'll never forget the first time somebody showed me chat GPT like four years ago or three years ago, and I was like, what is this crazy? This is going to change everything. I literally canceled all my meetings for the rest of the day and just started playing around. This is wild. This feels like the Internet or the importance of the Internet. But then at the same time, at the beginning of this conversation, it was like, actually the people who win are the people who can connect with people the best, the people who can understand people the best, the people who can write and create content that connects with people in the best way. And that has never changed. That hasn't changed since we were printing on printing presses and doing magazines and newspapers to the time the Internet has come till now. And AI like that has never changed. And the people who do that the best and understand the people and connect on that is.

And you just keep doing it in new mediums that arise and you learn to play with different platform advantages, right? Like a TikTok emerges on the scene and then the creators that do really, really well learn how to adapt their thing to that new platform's specificities. And you know, same thing goes with LinkedIn. Right now there's still a really cool platform advantage for people that are posting vertical short form videos on LinkedIn since it's a much newer feature of theirs and they're trying to get in on this, you know, short form video content game. And so I've seen videos of mine on LinkedIn get half a million views and I don't get that kind of play on of my video content on other platforms. So figuring out where your audience exists, where there might be some platform advantages for your, you know, type of content or your style or, or even your Persona, like who you are and, and where people are going to resonate with you most. These are the kinds of little details that can take these, you know, timeless principles and translate them into like modern specific, like strategies, I guess.

Love it. Okay, so 2025, I've got this playbook now from Rai Rob about how I should be thinking about long form content, SEO content, newsletter, short form, that kind of matrix. But my website has no traffic, it's never had traffic. How should I be thinking about posting on that website or building that website up in a way that it can become an asset into monetization, which we're going to talk about next. But, but how should I be thinking, what things should I be doing? Should I just be posting and hoping that the traffic comes? Or how should I be thinking about building my website into an asset for me from a blogging standpoint?

Oh, I love this question because I'm about To give an answer that, you know, if someone's watching this, two years from now probably won't be as relevant. But I think this is. This is kind of the beautiful nature of the role that a website can play in your business. There are things that are timeless, and then there are things that are inevitably going to change. So today, what this means to me, what I teach people to do, is use your blog as your homepage on the Internet. It's where you get to control the entire experience of how people interact with you. And so it's kind of an invaluable asset that I think everyone should have. Even if you're not posting content on it all the time, you still get to set the tone of all the relationships you have and build through this property. So I think just have it, please. Instead of relying on only Instagram or only TikTok or just your, your LinkedIn and then TikTok as well. Because when you zoom out, platforms come and go. There's tons of examples of this. And so having a blog and, say, a newsletter as well is like the best way to kind of shore up your moat for your business. Because once you bring people into the inner fold of getting them on your newsletter, maybe they come to your blog once a week, once a month, to read something a little more in depth than what your newsletter covers. Once you get people inside that sort of reality vortex, I like to think of it as, then you have a crew that you get to validate everything else you're considering doing over the months and years. You could try testing out a course. You could have affiliate partnerships. You could do a virtual summit, right, and charge tickets to people to come. There's kind of infinite opportunities for what you can do as a business just by building that closeness with your audience. And I think, you know, rather than focusing on, like, here's how many posts to publish a month and expect SEO traffic, I would really use a blog as your place to curate relationships with the people that want to click through and become closest with you, basically. And so what that really means to me, pick a super clearly defined niche. I think this has been timeless advice that you can always find counterexamples to. But it has served me really well to focus on just a kind of a single main niche where I can brand myself as a trustworthy source of information, as an authority. And then once you're sort of publishing some regular stuff on your blog, have a mix of videos going out on all your social channels as well. And then this is when you, I think you want to like, kind of spread out your authority. Building guest blogging, building relationships with other creators who have platforms where you can publish content, even if it's doing some joint live streams together or doing videos together, having other types of collabs, great. Getting in other people's newsletters. It doesn't necessarily need to be writing blog posts because all of the LLMs and Google's algorithm, even for search, they're trying to take into account everything about you online, not just. Did Darrell publish a new blog post this week? Should we, you know, give him two thumbs up on the authority meter for the week? There's a lot more to it now. And so publishing regular blog content, yes, it's helpful. I think if you do long tail topics where you get to really tackle specific needs that people have, you'll get less traffic from a top line perspective. But the quality of people who click through, whether you're cited in like a ChatGPT or from the top of Google search results, those people who do click through are instantly your most engaged audience. And so have a website that's prepared to ask people, hey, join my newsletter, take my free course, grab this free template, use this free tool. There's lots of ways I think you can kind of bring people in. But yeah, use the blog as like an asset for helping you generate your audience and test out products, services, things with them.

So it sounds like trying to get traffic to the website kind of as a hub. And then at that hub, you're translating people into subscribers, newsletter subscribers. And I know that you have a newsletter that has, you know, quite a few readers to it as well, but it's like taking that authority, you talked about collaborations, you talked about social content, you talked about SEO, all leading to this hub. And that hub, you're then translating to newsletter subscribers, it sounds like.

Exactly. And with the newsletter subscribers, you can also, like, test products. Right? So whenever I want to like launch a new course, I'm doing some topic testing. I'll even ask people to vote, hey, what's the topic that you want a new course on? And I just released a new course inside right Blogger called SEO Mastery and it talks about SEO for the age of AI. That's the number one question I've been getting lately. And so I made an entire four hour course with videos and activities and templates and, you know, copy and paste prompts and things that are super relevant to where SEO is at today. And I don't know that I necessarily would have chosen that topic if I hadn't kind of polled my audience and gotten lots of qualitative feedback around it. So that has proven to be super useful in validating different like product ideas. I go with amazing.

Okay, so talking about monetization, I know there's lots of ways that you monetize, you've mentioned some of them here courses and you've got some software. But how are you then taking the attention that you're gaining here and monetizing it specifically in 2025? Because the world has shifted a little bit on how you monetize your content. But how are you doing now?

Yeah, these days software has become the number one for me. With Writeblogger we've got about 35,000 content creators that use our tools on there. And so that has by far become my number one source of revenue these days that I also attribute to my blog because I have a ton of free tools, 50 free tools on my blog at ryrob.com tools that are unrestricted, like go nuts, use them. They're all AI powered stuff from article writers to a tool that, you know, I talked about here takes a video, turns it into a blog post for you. It's kind of like my, my giving back place on my blog is like my blog has served me so much over the years that I just wanted to make free versions of all my tools available. But for the people who want much more than just super quick free tools, Write Blogger has been that place and I've put so much energy there over the last couple of years that it has become the number one income source for me and other stuff that I still have smaller portions of than I used to like the number one income source has changed every 12 to 18 months for me, I'd say over the past 10 to 15 years. So what once used to be 50, 60k a month in affiliate earnings that's gone down to between like 5 to 20, let's say on like a really good month or if I'm promoting something specific but just energetically. I think the software is a much better like fit for how I want to provide value to people. And so those are still kind of the two main ones. There's occasionally like I'll do course sales still somewhat often, but I've put a lot of my courses inside Write Blogger where it's kind of bundled with the software education and tools. But yeah, those are, those are really the main ones. Occasionally I'll do consulting or you know, people can book a one hour blog strategy session with me where I'll run through all of Your content, your key pages help you get some really actionable takeaways on how to improve your site for conversions or you know, figure out how to come up with a traffic plan. And then yeah, a little bit of sort of consulting, occasional sponsorships. But I think the days of quickly spinning up an affiliate site and hoping to just instantly earn a ton from that are kind of behind us. I see that one going lower and lower. Similarly, ad revenue sites that are, you know, just on mediavine or other ad networks like that is playing well still. But I see that one having fewer and fewer success stories in the current moment.

Yeah. And I think the big shift that I want everybody to hear, and this is why we are so bullish on community, is recurring revenue is a massive part of what makes a business successful online now. And that's been a shift in my mind over the last three to five years is it was always like build a product and sell as many of those products as you possibly can. Hey, let's have these massive launches. But like you're on a treadmill if you're not having some kind of recurring revenue. That's a big takeaway I'm having from here is like recurring revenue and so you're doing it via software. We at Mighty obviously believe very, very heavily in community being a part of that recurring revenue piece of it. But that was your number one thing. It wasn't, hey, I sell a bunch of course units or one off things or I do a bunch of, you know, just affiliate earnings that might be one off but it's this recurring revenue piece that creates, creates that hub and stability and defensibility of your business long term when you have people on recurring revenue totally.

And you also get to like something that I've had a lot of fun doing is you get to figure out how to bring you into whatever that sort of MRR recurring revenue product is. And so a huge thing for me has always been education. I love teaching, I love talking with people. And so inside kind of the right blogger universe is courses. We have a private discord community where we go live sometimes. Like I'll do private live stream events where just right blogger people can come and ask questions and I'll do website reviews and stuff. And so like I figured out how to to inject myself into these new sort of business formats. So it doesn't necessarily need to be like some sort of crazy complex software tools business anymore. Like you can figure out the ways in which you want to interact with your audience. And you know, as you said with Mighty, like community. Community is the best. That's some of the most, like, raw, real stuff happens there. And from my private communities, I get, I would say, almost all of my best content ideas. The stuff that, like, really hits and lands well with people.

Yeah. And that's the flywheel that you can build is like having an engaged community. Talking to people on a regular basis gives you the questions that people are asking, the problems people are trying to overcome, that then becomes the flywheel for what content am I creating? And it's that flywheel that can be really, really powerful. And again, all of this hinges on having relationship with people. And the best businesses that I know are thinking about people first. They're listening to the problems they have, they're listening to the struggles that they're going through, and they're creating solutions to those things. And I think that a lot of creators, and I'd love your perspective on this, where I see creators start to stray away is when they start thinking about themselves too much and they start thinking about how smart they are or how much they have to offer or I've, like they've built themselves on a little pedestal or something else. But what you just mentioned is huge, is I get the best content ideas from listening to people. And the second that you start thinking that it's about you, again, you've kind of lost your way. So what are your thoughts on that?

Oh, I think that that totally nails it, actually. And I've seen that borne out in my own life plenty of times too. Like the. The bet. Truly, the best ideas that I've had for content are the things that people ask me in their own reality words. I've chosen my topics based on things that are relevant to my experience or my life. And I've seen some of those, like, kind of be duds, honestly, because it was. It was created for an audience of one. And I think when you're creating content, it's super important to make sure that it's going to connect with the people you want to connect with. But yeah, I mean, I think no creator's immune to that sometimes happening. So when you do it, which is kind of inevitable sometimes, maybe be kind to yourself about it, but internalize, like, internalize the lesson from it. And I think come up with a validation process that does involve, like, maybe chatting with some real people in your target audience about the merits of a particular idea or topic beforehand. And sometimes AI can be helpful as a chat sort of experience with that.

And I'm convinced that writer's block or Things like that all come from us not having the relationship with our real people, right? It's like, if I, like, have a relationship with a real person or real community of people, or like a real ideal member or ideal customer, that person. It's like, very easy to think about a person in that realm where it's like, oh, I actually have something to say to that person. And you're getting super moody over there. I kind of like it.

I know we just got. We turned it down for the evening here.

But I think that's where writer's block comes from, is like, you're like, oh, I don't have anything else to say anymore. It's like, oh, well, do your people stop having problems today? Do they stop having questions today? Of course they didn't. And the more that you can have an intimate relationship with your people and your community and your ideal customer or member, you will never run out of things to say, because people have not stopped being people. And I think that you can grow and mature as the community does, too, in that way.

I think the thing that I've, like, learned the Most in my 30s about what you were just talking about is I've learned how to be so much more actually connected to and receptive to other people through going inward, through doing a lot of work on myself. And what that work looks like has been kind of a long list of things. Meditation, therapy, cold, plunging, like, trying it all yo. Daily yoga, right? So finding things that are like daily practices where you kind of shore up your relationship with yourself and you learn how to be more present, maybe to listen more with other people. These are the kinds of things that I really credit to, like, massive changes in how I show up in my various different worlds as a friend, as a son, as a partner, as a, you know, business person. I have completely changed. And in a lot of these ways, and a lot of it has been for the better because of sort of my, like, you know, you could call them spiritual practices even. But doing things that just shore up my relationship with myself, whatever that means to each and every one of us, where I feel the love inside my own body. It allows me to show up and give love to people in various different expressions throughout my day. And so doing that to start my day is like this priceless thing. I can't jump in and start writing or start making videos right away. I have to take care of myself first.

Yeah. Okay, last question. It's gonna be a little bit of a juicy one. Where are advantages in the content world right now? That people should be aware of. You had mentioned short form on LinkedIn, but where are some advantages that people maybe should be thinking about? And I think the people who I have seen grow quickly, quickly they've become aware of some of these advantages and those advantages sometimes have like windows of time. But where are you seeing advantages? And we're not talking about hacks or tricks or skips, but like where should people be focusing or where are some advantages that they might not have thought about before?

Yeah, number one, like to double click on this one because it is I believe probably the best platform advantage right now that I've seen and experienced myself is LinkedIn short form. Vertical videos on LinkedIn. Do that once a day for like one month and I can pretty much guarantee you, no matter how many followers you have right now, that you will see a meaningful pickup in your growth and engagement that people have on your content. It's close to inevitable I think on LinkedIn right now. So that's my number one. I've also just seen, you know, you've got Tyler on from Beehive here. Beehive substack. A lot of the like More Newsletter kit newsletter focused platforms have done a super cool job of figuring out how to make community and recommending other creators a built in part of these writing focused tools. And so I found a lot of results from building relationships with other creators through these three platforms. And so those, those would be my top two right now. I think something else that you know is a kind of a curveball but if you're willing to do like really creative, inventive, maybe kind of wild, maybe a little bit out there, maybe you adopt a Persona, a character if you want to be entertaining and how you do your thing then TikTok and Instagram Reels are still really, really good. I think what I'm seeing, maybe this is just representation of my feed, but what I see is that the more creative, the more like inventive with the format or the story that's being told in these videos on those platforms, the better it seems to do if you're going for, you know, a little bit more of the produced style of content there.

Yeah, that's great. Well Ryan, thanks for being so generous with your time today and telling us all about how you're thinking about blogging and long form content in the world of 2025 and as AI is entering it. I appreciate you giving us your insight over the last 15 years of doing this. Super, super helpful. Appreciate you being with us today.

Hey, thank you for having me years of doing this.

Super, super helpful. Appreciate you being with us today.

Hey, thank you for having me.