Creating Quality Blog Content with AI Tools with Barb Davids
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You'd be a chat GPT to create like interactive things. Like I've done that with quizzes. So I can just say, hey, I need an interactive thing so that I can copy paste it right into WordPress. And I want it to do this. I want it to ask these questions. I want it to output this answer depending on that question. And then it gives me like a full quiz and they can get it right inside of the blog post.

Welcome to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, the podcast that shows you how to leverage the power of AI technology without wasting your time or selling your soul. Let's embrace making AI work for you.

Hey, hey, my human friend, and welcome back to the Authentic AI Podcast. I'm your host, Kinsey, and today I'm talking with SEO strategist and podcast host, Barb Davids, and we're diving into how to use AI tools intentionally to support your blog, your visibility, and also your sanity. We talk about why most SEO-in-a-box tools fall flat.

how to make your content more searchable and more human, and some super fun ways to use ChatGPT to create interactive blog elements. Like this blew my mind because Barb is using it for quizzes and timers and custom flows on her blogs. I was like, tell me more.

And I know you're going to be as curious as I was. So if you enjoy this episode, don't forget to share it with a business friend who could also use to listen to it. And why not leave us five stars and make sure you're following us on your favorite podcast platform, because that really will help us to continue growing our Authentic AI audience. All right, let's get into it. Barb, thank you so much for coming on Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs. I'm so excited to have you on the show, lady.

Thank you for having me back. This is going to be a fun conversation. There's so much going on with SEO and AI and everything. Everything. I know, guys, we were talking before I hit record and I was like...

Barb, I'm just going to be over here asking all the questions. I was like, feel free to like tell me what's up before we dive into all the nerdy stuff. I do just want you to introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us who you are. Tell us what you do, all the things. My name is Barb Davids and I run a company called Compass Digital Strategies.

And I help small business owners get more organic website traffic and sales in the simplest possible way ever, mostly through SEO and content marketing. Yes. And I love simplicity. So thank you so much because, yeah, I think that's maybe my mindset holdup when it comes to SEO stuff is it just feels like

you know, you get into the Google analytics and insights and then you start having to like upload and download and put different code in your website. I'm like, that's when my like anxiety starts popping up. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. Am I going to crash my website? Who knows what's happening? So anyway, maybe let's start when it comes to SEO stuff. Like,

What are some of those things that we really should know in order to maybe be using AI tools in the best way to help us with this stuff? I think the first and foremost, the best thing that you could know is that I like your concept or your perspective about if you don't know the tool or whatnot, if you're not really quite sure, you're not sure how to use it, you might not try it. I think that's a good approach in a sense, because I've been seeing more and more tools come out as commercials or ads and things.

And they will tell you that they do SEO completely. Like you don't have to lift a finger. You put in a couple of words, bada boom, bada bing. They've got the post going up every month, da da da da. Part of the problem with that is it doesn't know your business. And so, for example, I had heard a guy use these SEO tools that did everything for you. You'd put in some stuff. It would create the blog post. It would write it for you. You could still look at it, of course, but then it would put it up on your website for you on WordPress, right?

And he was doing like hundreds. And first of all, if you're doing hundreds per month, first of all, that's not humanly possible technically. So pretty soon Google's going to see that and they're going to be like, is this a real person? I don't think so. And then they're not going to necessarily rank it.

But then you're getting into the idea of it not going to know your business. So things like keyword intention. So some of the words that it might want to do or it might want to target or write about might not be the same things that you talk about in some form or fashion. So...

like, I don't even know if I have any good examples, but it just doesn't know your business. So you might get stuff that doesn't really relate to anybody or it might not help. It's a lot of the times they write really surface level stuff and there's like no substance to it. And so it's just like everything else out there. And there's already like 20,000 blogs about how to do keyword research, the how is done or how to show what

I don't even know how to. I'm so bad with examples. No, you're good. Well, I was thinking like I this comes up for me with like feel good social, for example, my old brand. Like I if I would go to ChachiBT or just any SEO tool and be like, write me a blog post about social media marketing. Like it would not give me what feel good social brand would write. Right. Because feel good social is all about like rolling your

eyes at Instagram, you know, figuring out what works for you. I don't care about like hacking the algorithm or anything like that. But if I don't tell Chachi P. Kiro the tool, my perspective, or give it away to understand that or who my ideal customers are who also agree with those, then like it wouldn't write something that would resonate with them, right? Or work.

Yeah. And I think that's where I'll just plug your brand blueprint now because I started using that. And I actually have a copywriter that does my blog posts. I don't do those myself, but I use the brand blueprint for other things like social captions and some other material that I create. And it does a much better job. So when you can use...

this tool that has your brand information and then plug it in to write something, then it can create something that's more unique because it has some of your own stuff in there, your own stories. And I think that's where that can help when you do that. But like some of the SEO tools too, like there was one that said something about internal linking. And so when you can put internal links inside your website, it's a good thing for Google, right? So you go back and forth between different blog posts.

And there's this tool that does it for you. But what it doesn't tell you is that it just does it on the front level. So what happens is it finds like two words and it links it to a new blog post. And while that's great, because it doesn't do it on the actual back end, it only does it on the front end. Google can't see that. So it doesn't really do any good. And then if you quit the tool,

all that goes away. So it's not really changing anything. So yeah, this is like why it's just good to be aware and also like be in community, right? Like we have Barb, you guys, this is why we all I think it's really important for us to all talk to each other as women entrepreneurs online, because you don't have to know everything. But like talking about the tools that the experts really recommend, or like how to think about using these tools, because I

wouldn't have known that. I would have been like, oh, look at this. This is great. You know, without even realizing that this tool that's promising me better visibility on Google isn't actually getting me that right. Yeah. I think the big thing that is coming out now, probably more so than before, is if you're trying to get organic traffic to your website, the idea behind the credibility of your website and the expertise that it shows is

has become so much larger now because the AI tools like the Perplexity and the ChatGBT, they're starting to be used more. So when somebody types in a service that they're looking for and you're trying to get your website shown in there, the idea behind showing your expertise and becoming one of those credible websites is more important, at least so far. So here's the kicker.

Perplexity mostly shows the top results from Google, like a large part of that. So you already have to be ranking in Google in order to show for AI. So that means you have to do traditional SEO stuff. But what happens is then out of that information, perplexity is looking at, OK, is this person for real? Is it credible enough?

Is the information more than surface level? So not only do you have to rank for Google, but that content has to

look a certain way that perplexity even likes it as well. So you're almost doing SEO twice. It's really kind of funny. Yeah, no. And it makes sense too, right? Because actually my husband was like complaining the other day about how like he's the gardening you guys and like I'm the garden supporter. He's the person who's out there like at his hands. And it's so funny too because I have a garden client actually. So I'm like kind of learning a little bit about gardening and then he comes in and I tell him something like, did you know this? He's like,

Duh. But anyway, talking about gardening blogs, he was telling me the other day how he's like, I don't even, I can't even look things up on Google. He's like, I'm going and buying like gardening books and like published books and stuff where I used to like...

like look up blogs and stuff is getting kind of like overrun by the generic AI content where it's like, okay, I do this search, I open up a blog and it's like the most generic information. Sometimes it's not even true, you know? And, and I think that the good news there is like, you're saying, thankfully, actually tools like perplexity and Google is like kind of weeding out the bad content because they want people to keep using it. Yeah.

They are trying to support like the more unique and like in-depth content and stuff. They'll thought leadership content, all that stuff. And like that, you know, might be a little bit more work for you. You guys are like copy pasting from chat TPT. And like that is that means that you are way more likely to like actually stand out online. You'll leg up if you do that.

Put a little bit of extra legwork into making sure that your blog content still reflects your uniqueness, even if you're using AI tools to help you, right? Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, that brings to mind all those recipe websites, right? Because how many different recipes can there be for chocolate chip cookies? Apparently, there's like 5,000 kajillion of them. But it depends on the story and how many people link back to it. There's definitely ways that you can make it unique. And that's part of the brand blueprint has like saved me. Yeah.

So much time. It allows me to have that creative thinking. So when I'm going through my blog post or I'm going through my social captions or anything like that, I have more time to sit instead of trying to hurry up and push it out there. I have time to really think about, OK, how can I make this different?

And I know we've probably been saying this like forever, like how can I make mine unique? How can I stand out? What's my unique selling position? All of those pieces. But now I can really sit and think, OK, what hasn't been done before? What have I not seen? And some things are like different layouts even or like instead of like you can use ChatGPT to create like interactive things. Like I've done that with quizzes. So I can just say, hey, I need.

an interactive thing so that I can copy paste it right into WordPress. And I want it to do this. I want it to ask these questions. I want it to output this answer depending on that question.

And then it gives me like a full quiz and they can get it right inside of the blog post. And that's something that not a lot of other blog posts have. So it allows me to do some things like that. That is so cool. OK, tell me more about this. Is it coding or like what? How what does this look like? Tell me how you went about this.

It's as geeky as it sounds. So I actually, let's see, how did I first start doing it? I would ask it to give me ideas first. I would like some interactive ideas that I can make work for whatever blog post I'm on. And then it will come up with some different ideas. Now, a lot of the times I don't really like them, but that's also because I'm really kind of picky about what I put on my pages. But sometimes I'll ask it like, well, for like this one client I did, for example, it was a spring cleaning thing. Yeah.

So what we did was we had it say, okay, if they choose this option, then we have this output. And I literally just put it into words. If it says this, I want it to output this. If they choose that, I want it to do that. And then I say, I would like it to be a dropdown box so that all they have to do is click it

And then it appears right on the page. I would like it in a purple background or whatever color it was. And then I want the font to be this or that and this. And then what happens is it builds it all out. And it looks like actual code, like with all the brackets and all that kind of stuff. But then you can just click copy.

And then you go into WordPress or even Squarespace or whatever and put it into the HTML code box. And then when you paste it in there, you can put it and do it on a test page or something and then put it out there and take a look at it, use it, run it. And then if you don't like it, what I do is I stay in that same thread. And then I just say, OK, can you change the purple to blue and say and then it'll output the whole thing for you. And you can just keep tweaking it back and forth.

So I think dropdowns and quizzes are quite common. I'm trying to think of what else you could do. You could do like a countdown timer potentially. Yeah, I did that with ChatGPT myself, actually. Yeah, that's usually one of my like coding troubleshooting examples that I actually share. But I have not thought about doing a quiz situation yet.

So that sounds so awesome. And also, I know that like I'm wanting to see an example and I know our listeners probably are too. So I will need you to send me an example like after this so that I can link it in the show notes for everyone to just go check it out. That's so cool. So also like when we're thinking about different quizzes to do with different blogs, what a cool

way to like actually pretty easily customize your content, right? Quiz, I'm sore. And it's like huge, like a huge task and stuff. But like, this is a way that like you can kind of create fun little interactive elements like within individual blog posts easily. That is such a cool idea. Can you give an example? Can you think of anything off the top of your head of like what the question was that then you would have them click for different outputs and that sort of thing just so that I can like get a clearer idea?

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Yeah, I think the one that I did for myself was like, what kind of traffic do you want? Or it was like an SEO planner. And I have since moved it to Gravity Forms. But in the very beginning, it was on that, just on that code. And so I would say, okay, what do you want to do with your website? Do you want more traffic? Do you put more leads? Do you want to convert more leads that you have? Or do you want to increase your visibility? So I gave it like four or five goals. Yeah. And then once they chose the first one,

I would ask them a question like, okay, well, how many are you getting now? And then I asked them another qualifying question. Yeah. And then it would say, okay, like hit submit or something like that. And then it would reload with, okay, here's what you want to do next. And it gave them like the three steps to do next.

Oh, okay. I'm nerding over for a hot minute to figure out how I could do all the things. Because also too, I always forget about coding. I, yeah, I did the countdown timer for my Squarespace website. Generate a code for like my email newsletter. And it's not that cool, but still it kind of is the prompt boxes that I share with like my Reels Club and stuff where it's like, I have this long prompt. I wanted it to be in like kind of a more compact box in my email newsletters that I sent out. Yeah.

created that coding with ChatGPT and stuff. And like also thinking about different ways you might be able to add this to like an online course, things like kind of the sky's the limit with like AI tools, all these things that you need to kind of like open your mind up again to like, oh, is that possible? Let me go ask ChatGPT. And if it can't help you do it, it can probably point you to something that can help you do it. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's tools out there that used to do this and you would have to pay the subscription fee. And it got pretty complicated because you'd have to set it up and learn their tool. And now you can just like speak it or type it, like whatever you're thinking of. And it's just there. I mean, you don't have to do anything with it. So I think that was the other one too, another great one that I did. It was if...

They could, again, it was like, it's not like a quiz, but it was like an interactive thing to ask them, like, why are you here today? And then it would, you would click the button, the radio button, the circle ones. And then it would be like, oh, okay. And then it would spit out certain words. And then if you do that, you could do it this way too, is like, if you have some resources on your website, like,

you could say, okay, what are you here for today and give it some options. And then depending on what it chooses, it could output links to your blogs or to different places on your website, depending on what they're looking for. Yes. Oh man, so many fun ideas and ways to use this. Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about

like your specific ways of creating blogs and then also using AI tools for blogs and stuff, because I know you have this super cool new thing coming out. Blog, tell me about it. Yeah, the Instant Blog Planner. Yes. And yes, it was inspired by your brand Blueprint. And it's allowed me to really, really, really take some time to build out my editorial calendar.

I used to really just hate trying to come up with ideas and having to come up with new ones and like, okay, now what do I do next? And it does take a lot of time and trying to balance that with keywords and how many times people are searching for my particular industry. Very intentional. I can't just create. I don't want to say what I ate for breakfast this morning. Blogs have kind of turned into this more intentional thing than they were before. Right.

But I want to make sure that somebody's actually searching for them and that I can help them with whatever they're looking for. So what I've done is I've taken this blog planner and I get some files ready. So for example, there's some keywords I want to target in particular. There's a full list of them. But then I also get a file from my Google Search Console and I say, okay, well, which keywords am I ranking for currently?

And then I take that and a couple other pieces and I do that with my brand blueprint. And then I say, okay, generate a six month editorial calendar, one blog post per week that targets keywords that are not the top 15% competitiveness. I try to get something that I can actually hit and work with and give me one per week and give me a possible title, even though I know I probably won't stick with it, but a possible title.

And then add one other format to it that can go inside of that blog. So it's a blog plus infographic or it's the blog plus video or something like that. And then also provide me repurposing ideas. So it'll give me like a 10 carousel Instagram post or it'll say this will be good for Pinterest or whatever my channels are. Like I don't do Pinterest anymore, but I use Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn. And so it'll give me just for those tools.

And then I say, please output it in this format. And I give it the columns that I want it in. And then it outputs my editorial calendar for the next six months. So I can copy paste that into Google Sheets.

And then once I do that, I say, OK, now I'm going to take this keyword. Here's the title. And I would like you to create a blog brief based on this template. And so I upload the template with it and then it creates a blog brief and then I go back and forth with it a little bit. But it has taken the pain away completely.

from the anguish of trying to figure out, okay, well now what? What do I do next? I can just focus on creating. Yes, I love that so much. And also too, it is so funny with content creation, like any kind of content, podcasts, Instagram, blogs, all the things. It's like, there's...

two ends of the spectrum where you're either feeling like a deer in headlights and you don't know what to create or you are like overwhelmed by ideas and it's like actually not two ends of the spectrum two ends of the circle that meet at the same point right because no matter what you're just like this feels so overwhelming and like hard like too many ideas not enough ideas it's all swirling together and like I can't take action or organize my thoughts so like

that feels like such the solution to that sort of thing. And also, as you're talking, I'm like, Barb, we need to be talking about some like custom GPT action or maybe like maybe creating some of these like actions or, you know, I've been playing around with that development tool lovable too. Okay, like let's talk about this some more because it feels like

great way to like organize your posts and also like connect. I don't know. I feel like there's some connection stuff that could happen there too. Yeah, I think it's a more logical way too. I feel like sometimes when we create blog posts, we are writing things that we think maybe people want, but

The flip side is sometimes we write about stuff, but there's no search volume on it. So it really doesn't help our SEO initiatives because if nobody's searching for it, then it's just kind of sitting out there not doing anything for us, for our leads. So I think that's where when you can put everything together and then upload it and say, hey, here's what I want to do. It just takes a lot of the...

Otherwise, you're like sitting there trying to figure out, OK, I've got this keyword. And also you can do it in mass, right? Because you have so many of them. Then you can do it in batching and then you can focus on just the creating. I love that so much. I know that's like my issue, right? Because like I can I can create content all day. I can figure out a story. I can tell like talk about stuff. But like I struggle with that, like finding out what are people actually searching for and then creating content within that and stuff. Yeah, I always forget.

But like I try to remind myself all the time and tell people that like your brain has trouble organizing mass loads of data and also like making connections between a lot of data. That's like overload for your mental capacity. But like Chachi VT can do it so easily and in seconds. And so if you're ever needing to compare data for different things and like hone in and figure out what is the best actions that you want to make, like...

then that's where the AI tools can really come in handy. And that's what it sounds like. The Instant Blog Planner is going to be. Yeah. I used to procrastinate a lot on it, too, just because of that. It was like so overwhelming and too many decisions. I feel like I'm a pretty decisive person. But when it came to like too much and I had the world open to like, I can write about anything like, OK, well, let's dial that down just a little bit. Yes. Oh, man. I can't wait to give this tool a try. It's going to be so awesome. Barb.

Thank you so much for coming on here and sharing with us. Can you please tell everyone how they'll be able to find you, connect with you and any free resources as long as where they will be able to find that instant blog planner? Yeah, I think the easiest way, because we're on a podcast right now, can jump over to small business sweet spots.

Lots of information over there. And you have a couple of episodes over there that are really good. I just love listening to them about, you know, you don't have to feel guilty using AI. That was such a good one. And the other way is just to compassdigitalstrategies.com. There's a resources tab. There's free. And then this will be probably front and center on there when it's ready to go. Yay. Thank you so much. I've loved our combo, lady. Thank you.

How awesome was Barb, you guys? She seriously is like so good with the blogging content, SEO stuff. Her podcast, The Small Business Sweet Spot, is super good. Definitely go take a listen. And I have been a guest on that one multiple times. I'm so honored. So definitely connect with Barb online as well because she's so good.

She is one of those people who will dish up all the knowledge and get super detailed with what you need to be doing, right? All right. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and I'll catch you next time I catch you. Thank you so much for tuning in to Authentic AI for Entrepreneurs, my friend. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your shows.