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The Wellness Creator Podcast is your go-to source for expert insights and actionable tips in the evolving world of health, wellness, and spiritual-based business. Join us as we explore proven online growth strategies, chat about current trends, and interview fellow wellness creators who’ve managed to turn passion into profit by helping people live better, healthier lives.
Jeni (00:31)
Hello and welcome to the Wellness Creator Podcast. In today's episode, we are going to do another variety show where we are sharing with you what's hot, what's working, and kind of what the news is telling us about internet business specifically for you as a wellness creator.
Sandy (00:49)
So many things are changing, it's happening fast, and we're gonna be reporting on it.
Jeni (00:54)
Yeah, I mean we follow this stuff and send it to each other all day, every day anyway, so we just figure we're basically bringing all of you along into our private Slack DMs where we're sharing what's hot and what's going on in the world. Yeah. First story is kind of what's changing with respect to what's trending on short form video. So thinking Instagram Reels, thinking TikToks, thinking YouTube Shorts, although that's always a little different.
Sandy (01:02)
to a Slack channel. That's so true. That's so true. Okay, first story.
Jeni (01:23)
So one of the biggest trends that we're seeing play out on social with respect to short form video is that short reels are kind of out and I think that's really important for people to know because there were there was a period there were like really short reels where especially on Instagram were what we're getting prioritized by the algorithm from what we could see and now it's like what's really working on tik-tok and Instagram reels is like face-to-camera storytelling
And I kind of love that because that's much harder obviously for AI to try to replicate. People do, they use avatars. We've played with those things for fun. But like it's, I think a way for humans, for people to take like a human step towards their content.
Sandy (01:53)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. And it's hard to replicate and it is storytelling, which obviously AI can't do for you. ⁓ I also love it because so for the last number of years, there's been so much repetitive stuff on stories, on Instagram. And it's just like, I can't watch it. Like everyone's copying everyone. And I love this trend of like telling a story of something that happened to them, like in the moment, right after it happened, like,
Jeni (02:38)
Yeah.
Sandy (02:39)
You know, like, yes, like exactly. And it's,
Jeni (02:39)
Unpolished. Yeah. Yeah.
Sandy (02:43)
it really does feel human. So I agree. I love it though. You do have to get like, you have to hit record and face to camera. have to be comfortable with that. Or as you said, it's also possible to do these AI avatars, but it's not the same. Like it's not, that's, that's not the same.
Jeni (02:59)
It is totally not the same. Yeah, I think that
that's like, that we're just throw that in there as kind of a cop out, but really this is about you like bare faced, you know, going, essentially going live. I mean, you're not live, but it's like essentially an uncut, unedited story of you that you're putting up. And I love that it's face to camera like this because...
It just makes it easy, right? So for there, there was this period of time where short form video was like kind of hyper produced and you had to like think about what was in the scene and like the music cut to the next thing. And now it's really just like, hey, I've got something to say. I've got a message. I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna turn my phone on and I'm just gonna talk. And what a fricking relief. Yeah.
Sandy (03:34)
my god.
Here's what happened an hour ago. Yeah.
Jeni (03:45)
Yeah, and
Sandy (03:45)
Yeah.
Jeni (03:46)
I mean, I think that the reason this is working on Instagram right now is because this is what has been working on TikTok. And I think for all intents and purposes, Instagram is essentially just like a copycat that's three months behind TikTok. So if you want to see what's going to trend in three months, just go on TikTok and see what people are doing there. But yeah, I mean, this is what is really working on TikTok too. yeah, if you are in any of those kinds of, if that's your amplifier, if you're using social media,
in terms of short form video to amplify your content and your message in your business, thinking what can I share? What kind of short little stories that are a couple minutes long can I share with my audience that's really gonna capture their attention right away and keep them engaged and make me seem more interesting or more human or whatever?
Sandy (04:35)
You know, the other thing this just made me think of, it's not storytelling, but I don't see this on Instagram. So it'd be very fun for someone to try this, but definitely see it on, Tik TOK is that somebody will be like, Hey, it's June. So what are we all wearing for sandals this summer? Like hit me up in the comments. Like that's kind of a dumb, dumb example, but like get the, the crowds opinion on something that's trending or where's everyone going for summer holidays or whatever. And I.
Jeni (04:52)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Sandy (05:04)
freaking love it because you go to the comments and the person is not like coming in as the authority, but it's just simply like, Hey, I want to know what's what you all are thinking about this or what are your whatever. And it's so good. And the comments, you just read the comments, which just totally boosts the time that they're, you know, like it plays well for the, for the algorithm. Right. But I don't know that I've ever seen it on Instagram, but no, I know. Yeah.
Jeni (05:13)
Yes, yes.
I don't see that, yeah, I mean, I don't spend a lot of time on Instagram, granted,
but yeah, that is all over TikTok. I saw a great one the other day. A girl in Phoenix was like, where can I get a facial that's not $300 in this area? And then people are like, oh, this is who I love to go to see and this is how much it costs. And that's really a gold mine. Like, what a really awesome, powerful thing. Or where are you guys going to Pilates? Like, I don't wanna pay.
Sandy (05:37)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Jeni (05:50)
$40 a session, where are people going for Pilates this summer and who's having great offers? Those are the kinds of things which obviously all of you could be doing in your business as well, especially if you have any kind of brick and mortar or in-person operation. You could be thinking about what piggybacks, what services or other practitioners piggyback with what you do. And I think you could even kind of behind the scenes.
Sandy (05:53)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Jeni (06:16)
both agree to post similar things. You could say like, hey, I'm going to get a facial with so and so, where do you guys go? And then they could say, hey, this is where I'm going to Pilates, where are you guys going this summer? Whatever.
Sandy (06:19)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or I run a yoga studio and I'm looking for an Ayurveda, great Ayurveda practitioner in my area. Who, who do you guys go to or whatever? Like, like I think, but it also doesn't have to be niche specific. could be like, I hate my sunscreen. What are you guys suggesting? Like it could, it could just makes you really human when you ask those, those kinds of questions, right?
Jeni (06:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah.
And these are things that we're all doing anyway, just to be clear. Like Sandy, you and I are never telling people to be disingenuous. Like these are all things like that people would be asking on Reddit or in Facebook groups or in other communities anyway. Like these are real honest requests or questions. Like don't try to come up with something just to get engagement. Think through in your real actual life.
Sandy (07:12)
What are you
looking for?
Jeni (07:13)
What are you looking for? you
looking for a great accountant? you? Yeah, like what do need information on? So
Sandy (07:18)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's
great. That's cool. Okay, second one.
Jeni (07:23)
yeah, so carousels are trending again. And that's super interesting, because I think we've seen that go in and out of fashion. And this is also helpful for those of us that run ads. Carousels are kind of an easy way to create a Facebook and Instagram ad. And one thing about what's working with carousels is having them play to trending music. So that makes sense. Those are pretty easy, right? You can make graphics now in milliseconds with tools like Canva.
Think about putting together a little message in graphic form and find some trending music that you like and like quick way to get a win on Instagram.
Sandy (07:59)
Yeah, that's an easy one.
Jeni (08:01)
Yep.
Yep. And then just thinking about this kind of goes against like the first message, just this is with respect to editing. like, so obviously face to camera stories don't need to be edited. But other kinds of content that you are making is is being rewarded with editing. So you don't want all of your content to be the same. So thinking about incorporating AI video editing tools, if you haven't, think pretty much everyone is using these. But just starting to think about like picking one or two that you're
interested in learning and getting comfortable like this can be kind of your summer school is like get comfortable with an AI editing tool and this is good for long-form video too like you can obviously use a tool like CapCut to do long-form video or Descript also so thinking about like You know AI video editing has made video editing so much faster It's really cut down the workflow time for those of us that create video as part of our jobs so I would say just like this is kind of
a trend in just kind of a business practice to pick up this summer, which is like getting good at a video editing tool. Yeah.
Sandy (09:05)
Yeah, and it takes like a minute. we use Riverside, as many of our clients know, for recording this podcast, do all the editing in there for both audio and video, and it also creates our clips or shorts or ⁓ reels or whatever. So it's great. It's minutes per podcast now for that kind of stuff. it's... ⁓
Jeni (09:26)
Yep, and
final point is on this piece is that captions are everything. And so there's a lot of evidence that the captions you write on these platforms are SEO, optimized, they're searchable. And so making sure that you're not just like half-assing your captions on your social media posts, like hashtags used to be the way that people discovered you on social, those have kind of gone by the wayside, especially.
since AI has broken out because now search engines and AI tools can search the entire text that you're, you know, the entire body of work that you don't need to put a hashtag. So you just wanna be mindful of the words that you're actually using when you write a caption for a social media post or a YouTube video or anything.
Sandy (10:17)
Yeah. So for ours are real shorts and TikToks, I will use the actual, I will have a little blurb describing the actual episode and I just posted across all of them. ⁓ so that all of it's there. And in the past I would have put like new episode out and not, cause I hated writing captions, but now I just have AI write a summary, you know, one to two to three sentences. keep the same format.
pasted across all of the different platforms where these little clips go out.
Jeni (10:46)
Yeah, and I know we're going to dig into AI here in a few minutes, but I do want to say like Sandy just subtly pointed out one of the ways that we use AI. We're happy to always share those, but you're noticing that it's like creating a caption based on something that we did ourselves and a robot didn't do, right? So we come up with these podcast ideas. We do sometimes use AI to help us outline once we have the idea, but we always edit those.
And then we speak our content into existence in the form of this video-based podcast. And then we use AI, Sandy uses AI to kind of like create little summaries. So I think like that, again, I just wanna illustrate this as a moment of teaching here to the audience. Like we're using AI, but it's not to create the bulk of the work, right? It's like as these little tools, these administrative assistants for us, but the core content is our actual selves, speaking the content.
Sandy (11:41)
I feel like I'm the conductor of the orchestra when I do this and I know what I want and I know obviously know our voice and if, I'll just, I'll give it the transcript and I'll give it the gist and like, and then it will like, no, that you totally missed it. Like I don't just take it as, is. ⁓ but yeah, you're right. It is come, it's like top down. comes from us.
Jeni (11:47)
Yeah.
Sandy (12:06)
And then the, just direct it like use better verbs. Those are never used that analogy grow, you know, like, I just kind of fine tune it and get it to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it until I'm happy. It doesn't take that many rewrites, but yeah. But I feel very much in control. Like I am directing this tool.
Jeni (12:25)
Yeah, and I will say we used to have team members and agency team members that did this work. Like this was the work that that sort of assistants did for us in the past. And that is where the AI is replacing. Like we are still kind of at the top of that pyramid in terms of like all we always have been the conductor or the directors of the situation. And as we grew in our businesses, we filled in some of these tasks with
contractors or employees to do some of this stuff. And a lot of these kinds of administrative tasks now just are done very easily and inexpensively with AI. So it's not, ⁓ I think it's just, I just wanna say that so that people understand the context of how this stuff works. And I mean, truly AI kind of does a better job because our AI tools have been trained on us.
versus like, let's just say we had an agency, a copywriting agency or a podcast agency that was doing this prior, like whoever's working in that agency on our account does not know our work as well as our own trained AI does, right? So maybe not as good as like a full-time employee, but like way better than an agency assistant. Yeah.
Sandy (13:30)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
agreed.
Okay, second story is an interesting one. Yeah, write it.
Jeni (13:48)
Yeah, are we doing the Reddit one? Yeah,
okay. So we just want, we saw in the news, I saw in the news yesterday that Reddit is suing Anthropic, which is the parent company of Claude, which is one of our favorite AI tools for breach of contract and unfair competition. And essentially, this is a really interesting case. I think for those of us that put content out online, those of us that are creators or those of us that, ⁓
own companies that are professionally making content as our jobs. It's really interesting to think about the areas where AI companies are getting called out for sort of scraping the internet of that content and where they're not. And in this case, Reddit has chosen to call out Anthropic for doing this. And it's a little sketchy on the surface just because Reddit has recently signed a deal with OpenAI. So it seems like a little bit.
They're using this as an opportunity to go after a competitor. But it's just something I think is worth following because this is, time any of us put anything out on the internet now, whether it's a video, a podcast, an interview, a blog, a caption of something, like we all run the risk and the likelihood really of these AI tools scraping that content and using it as training data at least.
Sandy (15:08)
Yeah. Yeah. And
I just want to be clear that Sam Altman, the owner of open AI actually has a major stake ownership in Reddit who is suing his competition Anthropic. Yeah. And I think, I don't know, like it, it does. And maybe Anthropic really is kind of like using this material without ⁓ proper ⁓ permission, but it's like.
Jeni (15:19)
in Reddit. Yes, that's also true. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Sandy (15:37)
Hmm. It's just suspicious, right? Like I own this company and I'm going to take down my competition, but yeah, fascinating.
Jeni (15:44)
Yeah.
But I think it's also really interesting because this is clearly how all of the AI models were trained, right? Like they were all trained, for those of us that have been making content on the internet for decade plus, like they were all trained on all of our content, just to be clear. Like this is how they even function. And we don't know the specifics of that, that's sort of all behind, you know, intellectual property secrets, but like, I think we can all, you know, acknowledge that they're being trained on.
Sandy (15:50)
work.
Jeni (16:13)
on us and our work because if you search for yourself in these tools and they know anything about you, where on earth did they get that information, right? They're training on what they can find publicly available on the internet.
Sandy (16:25)
Right. But Reddit is saying that other AIs have agreements with them to go in and access and, but Anthropic doesn't, and they are doing that. um, so regardless, so whatever you say on Reddit is helping train these, comments or questions you're asking on Reddit, it's part of the training of AI, but yeah, that's, that's, that's how it works. That's how it works.
Jeni (16:30)
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, it's so interesting with Reddit too, because I don't think I know a single person that uses their actual name on Reddit. Everyone has other aliases. I would never use my own name on Reddit. can't. That's the worst thing ever. Because it's a place where you can sort of act, hopefully anonymously, right? Ask questions that you wouldn't say out loud to your Facebook followers, God forbid. So anyway, in terms of thinking about privacy,
Sandy (16:54)
No.
Yeah. ⁓
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeni (17:17)
This is maybe less of a concern for most people because ideally that information is already kind of like masked. But who knows? Like they're saying it's private user information. So maybe they're actually getting, know, maybe they're collecting IP addresses or they're collecting actual identifiable information about people.
Sandy (17:19)
Yes, it's not your name. Yeah.
No.
Yeah, I read that
and I was like, did they mean like actual private information or just like what they're saying, like the conversations? I didn't, I couldn't decipher that. Uh-huh.
Jeni (17:37)
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And neither
of us went in and read anything in the actual litigation where it maybe would say that. So if you're curious, maybe you could go poke around for those of you that are interested or heavy Reddit users. But I think this is just the world that we live in now, which is that what is your intellectual property, what is private is all really more than ever before. ⁓
Sandy (18:04)
Mm-hmm.
Jeni (18:07)
up for question in the age of these AI models that are just kind of like proliferating. Yeah.
Sandy (18:14)
Okay. So third topic, speaking of training AI models, we're going to talk about how you can train AI or influence AI to recommend your business. the search industry, I will say is, is changing dramatically. So in the past we would look, ask a question, look up something and we would have all these like different blog posts or
podcasts or YouTube videos or whatever companies and you click through the little blue links and you go find the answer. Now Google has their Google, ⁓ the AI summary. So if somebody is asking a question, they will be first fed the AI summary. And I used to ignore that forever and ever and ever. And now that's all I read. And then the poor companies and business owners and thought leaders.
Jeni (18:59)
Mm-hmm.
Sandy (19:03)
all their stuff is below, which is probably what trained to write the summary I'm no longer looking at. So it's really shifting. it made me ask the question of how do we get AI to, know, whether it is the Google summary or chat GPT or whatever, how do we get these tools to recommend our own companies to the people who are searching and asking the questions? So I dug up a little bit of some stats around this and people have been looking at this.
about how these AI summaries are reducing click through rates. how, when we, look, with just what I said, you read the blurb instead of going into each blog post to read it. So a company called AREVS, I don't sure if I'm saying that right, analyzed AREVS, H-R-E-F, AREVS, analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that when AI overviews popped up, the average click,
Jeni (19:46)
Arefs. Aref. Aref. Aref. Aref. Yes.
Sandy (20:00)
through rate for the top ranking page that appear on that first page drops by 34.5%. Like that is significant for, for companies. And another company looked at 700,000 keywords and reported the average click through rate declined by 15 and a half percent. So this is significant and it can, it can absolutely affect, ⁓ how our
potential new students or clients can find us if they're just reading the summary and never actually looking below that summary. So I thought it would be helpful if we could go through a couple steps ⁓ for our content out there. can we, ⁓ what can we do for our blog posts and podcasts or whatever our content is, our long form content, what do we do so that we can encourage the AI tool to discover us?
Jeni (20:52)
Yeah, so what is the first one? What is the most important thing that we do?
Sandy (20:53)
So
you want to write for the questions. Let's just for sake of ⁓ simplicity, just talk about blog posts. So ⁓ you want to write for the questions that people are actually asking, which isn't all that different than when we taught SEO years ago. You need to know the language. You need to know the phrases. You want to keep the language simple. So blog posts that answer the questions that people are asking and, ⁓ and then to even
Jeni (21:09)
right.
Sandy (21:23)
level that up again, you want to do a lot of FAQ pages. So question answer format, or even landing pages. If you're selling something that directly answers the questions that your quintessential client might be asking AI, right? So they sit down to chat GBT. And so in our example, they might say, ⁓ what's the best online platform for yoga teachers to sell memberships, right? That should be, for example, that could be an entire
title of one of our blog posts, right? So the exact questions you want to put that in H one, H two, H three, you want to just make sure that those, those headings are very, very exact language to what the client's asking. ⁓ the second one is like clear and specific language. So you don't want to use flowery language. You don't want to use jargony language because nobody is actually asking chat GPT in that manner. Right? So we've talked about this in podcast, like those woo words, you want to stay away from them.
You don't want to say all in one, you know, wellness platform. In our example, again, you want to say it's a platform for yoga teachers, Pilates instructors, and you know, course creators. Yeah. To run courses, to offer live classes, to whatever, like really, really specific, specific language.
Jeni (22:31)
Health coach is, yes, yes, yes.
Self-care, do not say self-care,
right? Because nobody is going into ChachiBT or Google for that matter and saying, how do I engage in better self-care? Right, they're like, how do I sleep at night? How do I fix my AHE back? Right, like you have to think about what you ask these platforms and these tools.
Sandy (22:45)
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
Yep, exactly. ⁓ The third one is using, this is a little bit technical, but there's sort of, you can take the technical route and then I'll also explain the non-technical. You can use what's called schema markup. So you can in a blog post, so you want to use FAQ schema or how to schema. So in your, let's say your Squarespace blog post,
you could put a little, code block in there. And there's a little bunch of code that chat GPT can create for you in about two seconds. You would just copy and paste it into that code block. And that will tell the AI, this is an FAQ blog post on this topic, or this is a how to post on this topic. So I'm not going to get into the details of how to do that. But for those of you who that's way beyond what you can think about is like adding some more
FAQ, ⁓ blog posts to your block. So question, answer, question, answer, like that format that is easy for the AI to scrape it, understood, understand, and deliver it to the person asking the question or how to blog posts. So, you know, how to step, step, step, step, step, like 10 steps to, ⁓ or it could also be like checklists. Like when you break down the answer to super simple,
constructs like super easy ways to explain it, that is going to be viewed more favorably by these AI tools that are quickly scraping the internet to answer the searcher's questions.
Jeni (24:44)
Yeah, so I mean, I also will just add this in. It's really easy for AI to generate these kinds of, this kind of content, but like, so that makes it also really competitive. And so I just wanna always be reminding folks like to add the human touch and to add your story to it. even like the entire, I just don't want people walking away from this podcast episode thinking that like,
Sandy (24:50)
Yeah. Yes.
Jeni (25:10)
all of their content for the next year every week should be like a listicle or an FAQ post. incorporate that into the structure of your content, but certainly right from a human voice because you're also going to be penalized by just plugging in these kinds of topics into say, ChachiBT and having it spit out one of these posts for you because the AI recognizes itself. It's like like meets like, they can tell.
Sandy (25:38)
Mm-hmm.
Jeni (25:39)
Right, so it's very, very important that you're also, you're taking what Sandy's saying in, but applying it to your actual human work.
Sandy (25:47)
Yep. Yep. And then part of that human work is your ego and you want to drop name, drop yourself in your, in your blog posts as much as possible. So in our example, we would say like at marvelous, we help yoga teachers build online, but like you want to use, use your name as much as possible in a sentence again, so that it can be ⁓ quickly found.
Jeni (26:10)
Yep, yep, yep.
Sandy (26:12)
⁓ yeah. And then I think the, the, last one here is just to create, ⁓ best for content. Right. So a lot of people will ask the question, like, what's the best yoga pose for sciatic pain or whatever. Right. And so those kind of, ⁓ titles
Again, this goes back to the first point, like you're really understanding that people are, you're understanding the questions that people are asking and you're writing to answer those questions.
Sandy (26:43)
So that's all I had on the AI. ⁓ And anything else you want to add to that, Jenny?
Jeni (26:50)
No, just the fact that we're always saying this, but the landscape with this stuff is constantly changing. What it means to successfully run an online business is always in transition. So this period of transition really isn't any different than any other ones. It's just, you've got to keep abreast of these changes and modify your strategy when it's called for. So it's just, think, we're gonna try to keep you all updated on the stuff that we think matters. So be sure to tune in every week to our show.
or every other week as it is right now to, know, we'll be sure to point out what we think is the most important information in terms of these advancements, but like, this is nothing to be afraid of or overwhelmed by. Like it's just sort of the normal course of running a business on the internet is that you have to kind of adapt as this stuff changes.
Sandy (27:37)
Yeah, absolutely. All right, thanks, Jenny.
Jeni (27:41)
Alright, thanks, Sandy. We will see you all next time.
Sandy (27:42)
Bye.