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We’re Jason and Caroline Zook, a husband and wife team running two businesses together and trying to live out our version of a good life in the process. In this business podcast, we share with you our lessons learned about how to run a calm, sustainable business—one that is predictable, profitable AND peaceful. Join us every Thursday if you’re an online creator who wants to reach your goals without sacrificing your well-being in the process.
[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a calm business, one that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an un-boring business coaching program and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.
[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's get into the show. Hello there, and welcome to the podcast. I had to teach Caroline how to do a countdown.
[00:00:41] Caroline: When someone is counting you... like, your instinct is to join them.
[00:00:45] Jason: Is to say the words.
[00:00:45] Caroline: You're like, three, two, and I was like, two.
[00:00:47] Jason: No, I'm like, I didn't say two. I said three, and then I put two fingers up because this is how they do it in the tv world.
[00:00:54] Caroline: But we're not tv world. But, yeah, and then you said three, and then I said two.
[00:00:58] Jason: Yeah. Which doesn't help.
[00:00:59] Caroline: No.
[00:01:00] Jason: Hey, everybody. Want to give you a very quick update. Very, very, very important news for all of you who've been on the edge of your baking seats. Your girl had a successful first bake.
[00:01:12] Caroline: She sure did. And I feel on top of the world.
[00:01:15] Jason: Might be addicted to baking.
[00:01:17] Caroline: Am I a baker?
[00:01:17] Jason: Huh?
[00:01:18] Caroline: We're gonna see. You can't... Much like the first bite of food that you always say, you cannot...
[00:01:23] Jason: This is one of my least favorite things about Caroline. There are, like, a thousand favorite things.
[00:01:27] Caroline: Sorry, are we doing that now? Because I could do a whole...
[00:01:29] Jason: One of my least favorite things.
[00:01:30] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:01:31] Jason: I'll make a plate of food.
[00:01:32] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:01:33] Jason: I'll hand it to her. She'll take a first bite, and she goes, mmm. And 14 years ago, when we first started dating, I was like, oh, she really likes it. But then what I've learned over 14 years is about 30 seconds later, she might go, this is inedible.
[00:01:47] Caroline: Hey.
[00:01:47] Jason: And I'll be like, what? The first reaction was...?
[00:01:50] Caroline: Yeah, it's involuntary. This should be the universal people pleaser test.
[00:01:54] Jason: Yeah.
[00:01:55] Caroline: Is do you...? Do you on the first bite of anything, it doesn't matter what it is, even if it's something you hate, do you... is your just involuntary response mmm? Because that... I have worked so many years, so much therapy of, like, breaking people pleasing, and that is the last vestige of it, is my body can't not. Okay.
[00:02:16] Jason: Yeah.
[00:02:16] Caroline: It could be...
[00:02:17] Jason: It's a real, I gotta say...
[00:02:18] Caroline: It could be a cold hot dog bun and I'd be like mmm.
[00:02:20] Jason: As the person who makes most of the things in our household.
[00:02:23] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:02:23] Jason: It's a real mind maze for me to go through where I'm like, okay, just remember, she's gonna take a bite. She's gonna go mmm. And that is not indicative of what she actually thinks. So she'll do that.
[00:02:36] Caroline: It might as well just be like any old sound.
[00:02:38] Jason: Yeah, it doesn't even matter.
[00:02:39] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:02:40] Jason: Like, it doesn't matter. Anyway, getting back to the... the actual awesome thing that happened was.
[00:02:45] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:02:45] Jason: I found a garlic...
[00:02:46] Caroline: Let's switch the script here.
[00:02:47] Jason: Bread, garlic butter.
[00:02:50] Caroline: It's a sourdough discard pull apart... like, bun or something?
[00:02:55] Jason: It's really hard to describe. It's basically a loaf of bread, and it looks like it's kind of sliced, but they're not slices. They're little, like, pull aparts. You don't have to do any slicing. You just rip them apart.
[00:03:04] Caroline: No. And the recipe was so easy.
[00:03:06] Jason: Yeah.
[00:03:07] Caroline: It was appealing to me because, first of all, Jason loves a little sourdough discard moment.
[00:03:12] Jason: I mean, there's always gonna be sourdough.
[00:03:13] Caroline: Secondly, full of garlic and parsley. We didn't even try rosemary. I'd love to try Rosemary next time. Thirdly, the recipe I found... I wish I would shout out the creator. Who?
[00:03:23] Jason: It's Jess Cooks.
[00:03:24] Caroline: Jess Cooks. Thank you.
[00:03:27] Jason: I'll throw a link in the description.
[00:03:28] Caroline: My algorithm is now just food on Instagram. But the first thing of the recipe was like, this is just throw stuff in a bowl, and blah, blah. And I was like, I can do that. Now, I will say Jason helped me more than I thought, because there were just a couple things, like, putting together the stand mixer was gonna be...
[00:03:47] Jason: Yeah. And to be honest, if you've never baked before, there's a lot of weird things to do.
[00:03:53] Caroline: Right. So and also, a recipe would be like, melt the butter. And I'd be like, what's the best way to melt the butter? Also, in case you're wondering, quick tip, you need to cover the butter when you put it in the microwave because it will explode. And I'm someone who definitely covers my things in the microwave. Like, I always, like, put a paper towel over a thing, for whatever reason.
[00:04:13] Jason: Just thought butter.
[00:04:13] Caroline: Because I was baking instead of cooking, I was like, no, don't do that. And that was the wrong move.
[00:04:19] Jason: Got a microwave coated in butter.
[00:04:20] Caroline: Just coated in butter. And I went, like, in another room, and I came out, and I just saw Jason's face. I was like, what happened? He was like, you had an explosion, bud.
[00:04:29] Jason: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all think, you know, there's a lot of little nuances, too, to, like, the dough coming together and what it looks like and knowing what to do next. How long do you need the dough for? What should it actually feel like? Like, those are things that if you don't have someone with you and you just are like, I don't know, but I'm just saying.
[00:04:45] Caroline: I know. I'm just, I want to just give myself credit here. I kind of phoned a friend a couple times, but not too many times, and I was just sort of you... and then your tendency is to, like, come in and, like, do it for me. And I was like, hey, hey.
[00:04:56] Jason: Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:56] Caroline: Well, let me. Let me just go.
[00:04:58] Jason: As a professional mediocre baker.
[00:04:59] Caroline: I know. You did a good job of kind of, like, resisting. And the final product was absolutely beautiful. Delicious.
[00:05:06] Jason: Yeah. The final product, I was... I was shocked at how good it came out.
[00:05:09] Caroline: So we're gonna make it again. We, being me. I'm gonna make it again on Sunday, but we're gonna do a sweet version, not a savory version. So instead of garlic and parsley, it's gonna be cinnamon sugar and kind of like a cinnamon roll vibe.
[00:05:20] Jason: It's basically a pull apart cinnamon pigment, but in this bread form.
[00:05:23] Caroline: Yep. So I'm gonna do that. And so the real test is the second time. The second pancake is the real
[00:05:28] Jason: test.
It really is. Uh, and we'll see how it goes. We'll... We'll keep you posted on Carol's baking adventures here on the Growing Steady podcast.
[00:05:34] Caroline: But what did I say that we are now?
[00:05:36] Jason: Uh, we are a flour couple. Different than a power couple. We are a flour couple.
[00:05:42] Caroline: Like, that has to exist, right? Somebody has branded flour couple?
[00:05:45] Jason: Absolutely.
[00:05:46] Caroline: Because that's... that's cute.
[00:05:47] Jason: There's no chance that it has that.
[00:05:48] Caroline: That's cute.
[00:05:48] Jason: Yeah. Uh, there could be a YouTube channel in the works. I'm just kidding. There's not gonna be a YouTube channel in the works.
[00:05:53] Caroline: No chance.
[00:05:53] Jason: We don't have time for those things because we are just on a content creation journey.
[00:05:57] Caroline: Great segue.
[00:05:59] Jason: Thank you. So the five week content creation extravaganza continues. I will be totally honest with you. We've lost a little bit of the plot on, like, the five weeks. What exactly are we focusing on?
[00:06:10] Caroline: I have to tell everyone.
[00:06:11] Jason: Sure, sure.
[00:06:11] Caroline: Not only... First of all, we have two different schedules going.
[00:06:15] Jason: Yes.
[00:06:15] Caroline: On... on the podcast here. We told you at the top, we're going to do three weeks of Teachery content, two weeks of WAIM content. I think it was Teachery shorts. Teachery longs, Teachery articles, then WAIM articles, WAIM, shorts. That was kind of like the schedule on the podcast.
[00:06:28] Jason: Right.
[00:06:28] Caroline: Okay, then Jason got a burn in his butt, decided he wanted to document this whole thing on the YouTube. But he was like, I don't...
[00:06:33] Jason: Want on the YouTube.
[00:06:35] Caroline: I meant to say the YouTube channel and channel just didn't come out of my mouth. On our YouTube channel, youtube.com/wanderingaimfully. And he got a burn his butt to do that. And then he was like, I think it'd be confusing to do Teachery and WAIM. So I'll do just Teachery. And I'll still make it a five week thing, though.
[00:06:51] Jason: Yeah.
[00:06:52] Caroline: And week one will be planning, and week five will be like the ongoing schedule. So then we have a full other... it's the same but different over there. And then what happened is halfway in between the five weeks, Jason had a birthday and we went to Lisbon. So then we got off schedule, and now we've lost the plot.
[00:07:07] Jason: We've lost the plot, everybody. But here we are to bring it back together for you. So on the podcast today, we are going to give you our recap on how the Teachery article week went.
[00:07:17] Caroline: Yes.
[00:07:17] Jason: What we talked about last week, like, is SEO even still relevant? What are we doing? And then, you know, what are all the things we did? We're going to share that with you. As we move forward in the podcast next week, we will be talking to you about the WAIM article plan. So we will continue on our original goal of next we move on to WAIM and talk about our content there and how it's differing from Teachery.
[00:07:37] Caroline: Exactly. So I think it'll be kind of interesting to have the Teachery article back to back with the WAIM articles kind of strategy because I still think if, even if you don't have a software business listening to this episode, you will get certain ideas that will be different than when we talk about the WAIM articles. And really what we've realized is the WAIM articles strategy has sort of morphed into a shift in just our audience strategy and the topics that we plan to talk about.
[00:08:04] Jason: But more on that next week. Let's focus on this. And then also, if you're looking at the Wandering Aimfully YouTube channel, just know that five week journey is just a Teachery, you know, diary that's already on there. So it'll be kind of similar to the video that's already on our channel to this episode. But hey, there's not necessarily a lot of overlap between podcast listeners and YouTube viewers. There's a whole different audience.
[00:08:23] Caroline: Can I go to side quest real quick?
[00:08:24] Jason: Oh, yeah, sure. I was about to get into it but...
[00:08:26] Caroline: I know you were. I just as you were describing that, I have had a mini revelation lately, just because I'm hearing you describe that, and I'm like, man, as a solopreneur, like, you always kind of feel like you're in the mix of, like, things are shifting, right? And you're like, okay, so now my strategy is changing to this. And I thought maybe I was going to focus on that, but then I got in there and something happened, and I realized my audience wanted this or whatever. And I think this thing happens where as a business owner, you think sometimes, like, oh, I'm constantly just on a journey to figure it out, and you think that you're going to...
[00:09:00] Jason: Figure it out.
[00:09:01] Caroline: Figure it out. And I am just being reminded lately that, like, the figuring, the ing of figuring it out is the fun part, and it is the thing that is perpetual and ongoing because the media landscape is always changing. Your desires are always changing. You as a person are always growing. So you're trying to match your business to your new personal goals. Like, everything is always changing. And sometimes I think as business owners, we get in our heads to be like, what? I thought I figured this out. I have to go figure this out again. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the game. It is perpetual. Like, if you're gonna do this, you are signing up for always figuring it out. Even if you do like we did, I would say we went through a stretch there, especially when we were traveling in 2022 where we had figured it out. We were like, this is working. This is predictable. Everything is repeatable, but it all changes again. And so my little side quest is just a reminder to everyone that if you feel like you're scrambling right now or you, you know, two weeks ago, you thought your audience was gonna be this, but now you have an idea that you think it should be this. You're not doing it wrong. You're doing it right.
[00:10:06] Jason: Yeah, it's part of the process. Listen, if you want a predictable business, open a laundromat. You're not gonna experiment with like, okay, now we're not washing our clothes in machines. We're washing them in jars. Put one piece of clothing in every jar and shake it and then come back.
[00:10:18] Caroline: You're never doing that.
[00:10:19] Jason: That's not going to happen. You know how it works. So, yeah, I think that's a good point. And it is something that we always have to remember, too, is you kind of like, you get into, especially like a content journey like we're on right now. You're just like, so much has changed. There's so many new apps, there's so many new ways to do things. People's behaviors are so different. And it's like, yeah, that, that's just how this works. That's how this works.
[00:10:36] Caroline: Yeah. And you can find predictability and systems within that, which is what because that is always such a chaotic environment, I think that's why the need for a calm business exists, because Jason and I do believe have found ways to find predictability among that, to find processes within that. But it's just always a reminder that those things don't last forever and you have to adapt and evolve. And so again, if you're figuring it out, you're doing it right.
[00:11:00] Jason: Great. All right, so just as a reminder, we are working on Teachery. That is our software application. And we hope that in this episode, what we share with you and our kind of our findings in this week of working on Teachery articles and pages, they're specifically focused on trying to get organic traffic in Google search results, that if you have a solo, solopreneur creative business, you can walk away from this with a couple different ideas. You can think like, oh, maybe I could do that with my articles, or maybe there's some pages I could create. So, you know, we do have a software product that we're talking about, but we hope it's a little bit applicable and inspirational to what you're working on.
[00:11:34] Caroline: Definitely.
[00:11:35] Jason: Let's just start off the top with how did we feel about this last week? We wrote articles, which is, honestly, we've realized we haven't been doing much of that in quite a long time.
[00:11:45] Caroline: Yes.
[00:11:45] Jason: They're also like instructive articles as opposed to what we used to write, the majority of which were kind of like story thought opinion articles.
[00:11:53] Caroline: Yeah. To me, it's a very slight change, but it's the difference between a blog post and an article.
[00:11:58] Jason: Yeah.
[00:11:59] Caroline: Do you know what I mean? Like...
[00:11:59] Jason: For sure.
[00:12:00] Caroline: When you and I came up in like, the 20, early 20 teens, like, 2014 era, like, blog posts were a thing so you could write a blog post about, here's what I'm doing in my business. And you always wanted to make it helpful, but it was very much more narrative driven. Then there was this shift to like, from that to articles, which is someone is searching on Google. They are trying to find the instruction manual to whatever their problem is, and just to be totally honest, like, I know that with my brain. But then engaging in all of this where we're writing the instruction manuals, I just realized, like, how much I don't like writing articles.
[00:12:33] Jason: Yeah. And I think this is...
[00:12:34] Caroline: Like all the personality has been stripped out of written content.
[00:12:38] Jason: Yeah. And I really do think we've talked about this for a long time. Articles serve as the instruction manual. So when someone gets to your, even if you're a solopreneur and you have a business about teaching people how to use Notion, you have articles that you write because inevitably people do want to read, how do I do this thing? And it is one of the best mediums to accomplish that thing. And so for us, it's a little bit of like, it kind of, it kind of isn't fun at all to do this work, but it's also one of those things that's like, you want to check the box and you want it to be done so that it's done because you don't have to keep doing it forever.
[00:13:11] Caroline: Totally. And I wrote down here, part of the reason why I do think it is still important is because, you know, you, you can do your best efforts to hire an SEO strategist, which we did, which we'll share with you what they said in this podcast episode. But nobody really knows.
[00:13:28] Jason: Yeah.
[00:13:29] Caroline: If it's gonna hit. Nobody really knows if you're going to pick up some organic search. Right. So you're kind of just like taking a gamble almost. But I do think it is a gamble that is always worth taking, because if it does work, you get something that is unmatched in the online business world, which is a steady stream of organic traffic. And there's no match for a steady stream of organic traffic coming to your website because you can do anything. You can put up a lead magnet. You can get people to your email list. You can sell a product. If you have traffic, you have people's attention. And if you have people's attention, like, you can do whatever you want. Right. And so I think the payoff is so worth it that it's worth even in 2024 where we're all kind of like, what's going to happen to search? You and I both sat down. We were like, okay, it's worth at least on the one hand, it's worth at least taking the gamble on, could we get some more traffic coming to Teachery's website? But then I view it on the other hand of, like, even if we didn't hit the front page of Google for any of the words that we're trying to or phrases that we're trying to rank for. At the end of the day, I still do believe that it adds to credibility in someone's mind. If they do find their way to your website and they see that you have well written articles that you've put time into, I do think in the, somewhere in the back of their mind they go, this feels legit. This person knows what they're talking about.
[00:14:47] Jason: Yeah. I think one of the big things that we went into this project with was the question, is SEO even relevant in our AI revolution that we're living through?
[00:14:56] Caroline: Right.
[00:14:56] Jason: And I don't think anybody has the answer to that question, and I don't think we will know the answer to that question, you know, for probably years. But I think, like, we both agreed, it's just this is a thing that we know helps in two different possible ways. One trying to, you know, rank in for Google keywords, which has worked for ten plus years, and the other is just that building of trust, like you said. So I think whether AI is a revolution right now and people are going there to ask questions, maybe they're not going to Google as much or whatever.
[00:15:24] Caroline: But, but see, I don't think it's just about like ChatGPT or some of the other chats, like AI chats replacing search. I think it's also about Google adapting because now they have their little AI search results or whatever.
[00:15:39] Jason: Which is going to continue to change even further.
[00:15:40] Caroline: Right. And that's always changing. So I think there's no question that search is changing in a very big way. There's no question about that. The question, though, is at what rate? And is there still going to be this window of time where it makes sense to still invest in trying to get some of that organic traffic and figure it out. Because to me it's like, it's one thing to try to predict where it's all going to be in five years, but it's like, I'm trying to do stuff right now to improve my business right now.
[00:16:08] Jason: And I think a really important thing to remember is like, whenever you get into a project and you have like, a certain thing that you're doing. So, like, for example, we're in this content creation project and the specific thing we're doing is writing articles and a couple other things this week, which we'll talk about. You're not doing that thing forever. So for us it's like we just want to get these like 20 to 30 articles that we have identified, done. That doesn't mean they're going to be done like a week. It means, like, in this week, we'll talk to you about how we got six of them done, which actually was hitting our goal for once, but it's really about, you know, for the next... I see it as like the next couple weeks now that we have a system in place.
[00:16:43] Caroline: Yep.
[00:16:43] Jason: I can finish all of these articles based on this system, which I'll talk to you about how we kind of figured that out and they will be done in about a month and we won't have to create new articles, which is the thing we have identified in this process of short form videos, long form videos and articles. Of those three things, articles is the least favorite, which is kind of surprising because the thing that we've done for the longest, but it's just in the way that those have to kind of be written to satisfy the keyword things and to actually help a person when they're reading them. It's just not worth the time and energy. And we know everyone's attention is on all the social platforms, so don't keep spending a bunch of time. It's like, check that thing off the list and be done with it and be okay with it.
[00:17:20] Caroline: Yeah, for sure. And, um, it's kind of funny because you hearing you say that and you were saying like, well, we figured out a process, and it's funny how that has been the main takeaway of this whole five week thing that we've been doing is it's been a permission slip for us to get our hands dirty in trying to create whatever the medium is that we're trying to create and to try to get some little repeatable process that we can then do going forward, that's not daunting.
[00:17:46] Jason: Exactly.
[00:17:46] Caroline: And to anyone listening right now, if you feel like you've been out of the content game, or if you feel like you've never even started the content game, because it's intimidating. I hear you. And that is how we felt even starting all this. And we've been doing this for ten years, but you get rusty and the world moves on without you and you feel like I got left behind. And this is just a piece of encouragement to say, you're not left behind. You can always start, start now and give yourself permission to not have it be perfect right out of the gate or even have it be efficient right out of the gate. Just set the bar at let me get in the water, let me get clay on the table so that I can then find out what my process is. What do I like doing? How can I use the tools at my disposal to create faster and better and of higher quality? And you don't figure those things out until you engage in the process.
[00:18:36] Jason: Yeah. Cool. So just to recap, because we said, we mentioned it last week's episode, we kind of went through the full strategy that we paid an SEO expert to give us for Teachery. So I'm just going to give a brief overview and if you want to listen to the full thing, you can go to last week's episode. But essentially their strategy was, and don't focus on the keyword online course because it's very saturated. Go with the keyword digital products and we write articles. All of our articles should be around that keyword of digital product. So that's like, what are ideas to create digital products about in 2024? How do you sell a digital product? What's the best way to design a Notion template digital product like, things like that. So that was kind of the first thing that they gave us. The second thing was to create comparison pages. So these are specifically comparing Teachery versus Teachable, Teachery versus Kajabi, those types of things. So those are pages that we create. We own our opinions of how those comparisons go and we publish those. The other kind of like subcategory within that second one was to create comparison pages of two other platforms. And we're not in the conversation. So it's us writing an opinion on Teachable versus Kajabi. Teachery is literally not even listed in the article. It's so wild to, like, think about this. It still blows my mind every time we talk about it because I'm just like, what? But this apparently does work very well because I think Google sees this as kind of like a third party recommendation of the thing. And then the last strategy that we hadn't even been considering because we were considering the first two even before we paid the expert. But it was great to confirm those and is user generated content so specifically written articles on Teachery's blog by other people around our keyword, success that they've had, stories they've had that then they would go on and share because their face and voice is being portrayed on our site, which they see as a credible place. And then we get backlinks, we get traffic, all those types of things. That is the overall strategy. So that is what we were given. And so for the past week, what we focused most of our time on was the article piece because that was really the heavy lifting. So pretty easy just to, like in a doc say, all right, we want to write articles around digital product. Where do we start? And so we started with categories. And so the categories that we identified were planning your digital product, creating your digital product, designing your digital product, selling your digital product, and then customer experience around your digital product.
[00:20:58] Caroline: And I think this is a natural place to start if you're trying to come up with kind of content categories, is think about the ultimate outcome that somebody wants using your business, and then think about what are, what are the steps, what are the process to get to that ultimate outcome. And I think that can help you kind of silo content in your mind. So that's why it kind of reads like a process. Right? Like planning, creating, designing, selling, et cetera. And I think that's a natural place to start.
[00:21:23] Jason: Yeah. And so just to give you an idea of, like, where we went from there, so we had those categories. Then essentially it just was us using our human brains, knowing how our business works and how our customers operate within our business, to come up with article ideas under those categories. So I'm just going to rattle off a couple of them. It doesn't mean we're going to use these, but just to give you an idea. So, like, how to come up with your next digital product idea. Three ways to validate your digital product idea. Using Canva to create your digital product video slides. How to create a compelling sales page for your digital products.
[00:21:55] Caroline: Sorry, are you reading off from the original thing? Okay.
[00:21:57] Jason: Yeah.
[00:21:57] Caroline: So here's kind of an insight that I...
[00:21:59] Jason: Again, I'm just saying, like, the next step from there with the other categories was just a brainstorm.
[00:22:03] Caroline: Yeah. And so that's what we did. So we, we brainstormed that list of articles underneath each category. But my big learning, and I was trying to bring it up on my iPad here. The list of articles, you probably have it on your laptop.
[00:22:15] Jason: Oh, yeah.
[00:22:15] Caroline: But a main takeaway for me that I realized is because I was brainstorming all of those and it made sense to me, right, of like, oh, here are the things that I want to talk about. But what I didn't realize is a lot of these ideas needed to be molded using two things. Number one, what is your customer actually looking for in that article? And number two, what are they searching for to find it? And so then what our process became, because I just thought, we'll just write those articles, right? But I just realized those are very much coming from a brainstorm place of what we want to like, what we think is helpful. But when I took a step back, and I thought to myself, like, wait, what is someone actually searching for? I would go into our keyword tool, which we use Ubersuggest. You can use a bunch of different things. But I was like, okay, let me go and see. Is someone actually searching for digital product planning? And I go in there, and no one's writing that, right? No one's searching that. It has a search volume of zero. And I'm like, okay, interesting. So someone's not searching that. So what are they searching? Like, what might they be searching for that's in the planning process? Or validation is a perfect example. I think it was like, three ways to validate your product, your digital product idea. People are typically not searching how to validate my digital product. That's not the words that they're using, but that's words we use all the time about to describe what to do. So it's words that we would use to describe the solution, but not the problem. So what's the problem? Right. Someone wants to know, is my digital product idea gonna make me money?
[00:23:48] Jason: Yeah.
[00:23:48] Caroline: And so how can you write the article going, okay, what's someone searching for? Like, digital product ideas?
[00:23:53] Jason: Right.
[00:23:54] Caroline: But then can I write the article that's like, you know, three ways to know if your digital product idea will make you money?
[00:23:59] Jason: Exactly.
[00:24:00] Caroline: That's the difference between that article and how to validate your digital product idea. So I just wanted to share that process because I thought this was gonna be so easy. We made that brainstorm list. We're just going to write those articles. And we started to write one of them, and I was like, wait a second. We're actually actively working against ourselves if we're doing all of this work to do these SEO friendly articles, and we're not even thinking to ourselves, is this something someone's even searching for?
[00:24:25] Jason: Yeah, and I think the, like, again, this is like the black box of SEO that no one has the answer to. It's just impossible to know the perfect article title. It's impossible to know the perfect topic. But I think to Caroline's point, like, the thing you have to ask yourself when you're sitting down to write these articles is just like, do the basic keyword research through any tool that you can find that does keyword research. Make sure that someone is searching for some version of the keyword so you're not just making something up that no one's searching for, which we have done so much of in the past, and then do your best to be like, okay, but, like, what ultimately are they trying to answer with this article?
[00:25:00] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:25:00] Jason: And then create that. So I'm going to very quickly talk through the process that we created for writing these articles because listening to that on a podcast is not that helpful. You can go back to our YouTube channel and you can actually see some visuals because I think the visuals might help you see this process in a little bit more streamlined fashion. So what we did is we had a Google sheet where we wrote out the actual article title based on that after the brainstorm brainstorm. We had the focus keyword of the article. And then you used ChatGPT to create H2 and H3 headings. So the, the title is going to be the H1. These are just the like stupid things that you do in an article that Google reads these headings and scans them for SEO relevance. So we have the headings, we have the title, and we have the keyword. The SEO expert that we hired introduced me to a tool called Frase. That's with an F, Frase.io. I'll put a link in the description.
[00:25:50] Caroline: Just getting that tool alone was probably worth hiring the person.
[00:25:53] Jason: And the tool's $50 a month. And that sounds expensive. We're literally going to use it for two months.
[00:25:58] Caroline: Yep.
[00:25:58] Jason: And then we're going to be done with it. So it's like $100 to use this tool to crank out a ton of articles. So what I would do is I then took the title of the article and I use our little AI wizard in this Frase tool. And so I gave it the title, I gave it the keyword, I gave it our headings, and then I said, write the article. Now, you could have ChatGPT do this as well. But I wanted to use this tool because they have a built in optimize feature that pulls in all the relevant keywords and topics that Google is looking for related to your keywords. ChatGPT is not really going to be able to do, even though we love ChatGPT, it does a great job. So Frase then wrote this article for me and it's, they're always 4000 words. They're just too long. So this is when I go back to ChatGPT, and I say, hey buddy, I have a 4000 word article. It's way too long. Please cut it down to 1500 words. Three tries later, he does it, she does it, they do it, and I copy the article that they give me back into Frase. I replaced the 4000 word one and then it gives me a shortened article and then it tells me what percentage of optimization I have based on keywords, then the last step, and I know this sounds like a lot, but I'm going to give you the hour breakdown, which I think is going to be very surprising. The last step is I go through with my human brain and I rewrite pretty much every sentence of the article to sound like a human.
[00:27:08] Caroline: That is very important step.
[00:27:09] Jason: And that is an incredibly important part of this, because just having an AI written article, when you read it back through it, doesn't read like a human wants to read it.
[00:27:16] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:27:17] Jason: So this sounds like a lot, but in actuality, from start to finish, it would take me one and a half hours to have a completed article. In previous years, because I was usually the one who was writing all of our articles like this, it would take 10 hours.
[00:27:31] Caroline: Easily.
[00:27:32] Jason: To write an article. And that's because I'm doing research. I'm looking things up, I'm grabbing keywords.
[00:27:36] Caroline: I'm having to think. How do I use keywords?
[00:27:38] Jason: Exactly. And so 10 hours versus one and a half hours of some copying and pasting and...
[00:27:44] Caroline: Is wild.
[00:27:44] Jason: Redoing some things is absolutely fantastic. Now, will these articles rank for these keywords? It is absolutely impossible to know this time. We will eventually do a recap episode to kind of come back a few months from now.
[00:27:55] Caroline: Yeah. And we'll just tell you the truth because, you know, it's like we just want to learn alongside you. A lot of us out here who are trying to run solo businesses, and we consider it a solo business even though we're married, but, you know, not run a big team, not try to grow an online empire. I think that a lot of us are experimenting, and that's the only way to do it. And so we're just always trying to learn. We're kind of more generalists. Right. It's like, I don't have the time to become an SEO expert because I'm trying to do twelve different things. So a lot of it is going to be experimentation, and we're committed to just being transparent and sharing with you what works and what didn't work. And part of the reason of wanting to hire a person this time was if you all remember, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, we did the calm business encyclopedia.
[00:28:46] Jason: Last fall.
[00:28:46] Caroline: In the fall of last year, and if you remember the three pronged approach, that project was very successful in creating lead up content to our launch, which, you know, was the best launch we had ever had. But we had hopes that maybe it would do kind of like a double dipping thing where it would like, be great lead up content. But then some of these articles would get some SEO traffic and really none of them did.
[00:29:10] Jason: No, they haven't. And I don't know if that's a time thing. Like, we have articles that are ranking on the first page for keywords on, especially well, Wandering Aimfully because Teachery has no articles, but those articles are like four years old. They didn't hit the first page of Google for four years.
[00:29:25] Caroline: Well, I think we know now because we hired someone. I think it's a few things. It's number one, our structure of our website is actively working against us with the search engine. So we now know that we didn't know that before. The second thing is we, we've done more keyword tool research in the past two months than we ever did with those articles. We were just sort of going off of our gut instinct of like what we know about what people are searching for, but really supporting with data now, I think is important. And so I'm just sharing all of that to say that we don't know what this is going to do, but we believe it's worth trying and we're going to give it our best shot.
[00:30:02] Jason: Yeah. And again, going back to the point of like, you do this, the task is done and then it's there and you don't have to keep doing it forever. All right, so let's get to number two in this, this process, these steps. Number two is comparison pages. So this is actually pretty straightforward, especially for a software company. We know who our competitors are. It's Kajabi, it's Thinkific, it's Kartra, it's Teachable. Blah blah blah.
[00:30:24] Caroline: The big boys.
[00:30:25] Jason: Our goal is to just write a page and kind of like the, I guess, interesting part of this, at least to me, was this is where Framer came in really handy. That's the tool that we're using to build our front facing website now. We moved away from Webflow and we're going to move Wandering Aimfully also to Framer because it's just amazing. But you create a template page, you design a template for the comparison page, and then using their CMS feature, we can basically just say, okay, here's a Thinkific version, here's a Kajabi version, and you just slot in different text areas and you just replace the text. Same layout, same look and feel. And you see this kind of on all software product competitor pages, they look exactly the same and you're just swapping out text. And this works really well for other people. So we just figured let's just not reinvent the wheel. Let's use this. And the SEO expert said, you definitely need to do these. So four of those are done. We wanted to get eight done, but we got four, which is going to be fine for now. We'll publish those and then we will figure out when to work on the next four. And then also the side quest of doing the comparison of the other platforms together. I don't know where we're going to do those, but that's kind of like, yeah, that's fine to do at some point. It's not really like high up on our list. Anything else you want to share with the comparison pages? Pretty straightforward.
[00:31:36] Caroline: Pretty straightforward. Yeah, it was fun to design those. I had to figure out quite a few things of like variants in Framer. That felt good.
[00:31:44] Jason: But you did. I mean, it's very impressive and they're very easy to update.
[00:31:47] Caroline: Thanks.
[00:31:48] Jason: Okay, so that's pretty quick there. And then the user generated content is going to be even quicker because...
[00:31:53] Caroline: We're not going to do it.
[00:31:54] Jason: We're not going to do it. And we said that in last week's episode as well that this is going to be like, let's wait a couple months. For two reasons. Number one, we have too much work on our plate and we can't add this in right now. And number two, what we don't want to do is throw every single SEO ball of spaghetti at the wall and then not know what actually is working. We'd rather post the articles, publish the competitor pages, see what that looks like for a couple months if that generates any organic traffic, then add in user generated content.
[00:32:21] Caroline: Well, because something could happen where it's like it actually does hit and then we don't even need the user generated content because...
[00:32:26] Jason: Very true.
[00:32:27] Caroline: We're always talking about this like if you, again, if you give all your secret weapons right out of the gate.
[00:32:34] Jason: Yeah.
[00:32:34] Caroline: You... okay, I don't know, but what I'm trying to say is, again, you have to be very smart about the way you use your resources. And similar to how we, you know, our last launch, we wanted to do the bare minimum kind of for a baseline. We're always trying to do that with our strategies is like where does the baseline get us? Because that could be, buzzword incoming, enough.
[00:32:53] Jason: Yeah.
[00:32:54] Caroline: That could be enough.
[00:32:55] Jason: Yeah.
[00:32:55] Caroline: And we're always looking for enough.
[00:32:57] Jason: Oh, I did just have a little throwback question to step number two.
[00:33:00] Caroline: Okay.
[00:33:01] Jason: Do you think as a solopreneur they should write...? And we could talk about this for Wandering Aimfully, too. Comparison pages. Like if you know you have a competitor who sells a similar product, like, let's say just our friend Marie Poulin, who is a WAIMer, who has her Notion course, and then you have August Bradley, who is also a Notion expert, who has a Notion course, then you have Thomas Frank, who is a Notion expert. My question there is, would it be worthwhile as a strategy? And again, we're not experts. So I'm just throwing this out there to us two dum dums to answer. Should, should you, if you own a Notion course, like compare yours to those people or even compare theirs and do a review?
[00:33:41] Caroline: Here's where I think this gets tricky for, like, creators and solopreneurs that is different than software businesses is, in the creator world, there's so much more collaboration than in the software world. Like, in the software world, like, you're not really going to see Kajabi and Teachable team up to do whatever. So they have no, we have no qualms about being like, yeah, like how our product is different or better than Kajabi if you're looking for these things, right?
[00:34:05] Jason: Right.
[00:34:05] Caroline: But to use your example, like, Marie Poulin has collaborated with August Bradley and Thomas. Like, they're in the same circles. Like, and they all, it's like a rising tide lifts all boats. Like they're wanting to do things together to kind of like build... all build their audiences at the same time. And I don't know that I would recommend to someone be like, but, you know, how...
[00:34:26] Jason: If you have a Notion course to be writing those comparison articles together.
[00:34:32] Caroline: Yeah. I mean, if you're asking do I think that people are searching for that, yes, I do.
[00:34:38] Jason: Right.
[00:34:38] Caroline: I do think people are searching for, like, which Notion, you know, template system is the best.
[00:34:44] Jason: Right.
[00:34:45] Caroline: I do think that and may, so maybe there is a way to do it where if you did have one of those, you could be like, I think it matters the way that you do it. So it would be like, here's the best reason to do August Bradley system. Here's the best reason to use Thomas Frank system. Like, it's best suited for, you know, if you're a creator, use J Klaus's. You know what I mean? Like, I think there's a way to do it maybe that is not competing, but more of like, if you're this person, it's best for you in this way.
[00:35:09] Jason: I think there's something interesting there. Like I, you know, I just, I think as a smart business owner, we're always looking for interesting ways to market and promote our stuff, especially if it can create organic traffic. So I would just noodle on that. As someone listening to this, like, you know, your competitors probably, you know, the differences between your products. Is there some type of comparison page strategy that you could take from the software world to use for you? And then aside from that, I would say, if you're listening to this and you're like, huh, I wonder if I wanted to create like, an affiliate marketing site where, like, I talk about all the Notion courses and I compare them to each other. That's a whole business model in itself, right? It's just like having affiliate links to these courses, talking about them, trying to get pages to rank. People have been doing that forever.
[00:35:50] Caroline: Here's an idea I just had where even for us, I could see a world. Again, I'm not saying we're going to do this, but I'm just spitballing here. Going back to what you were saying about the strategy of not the Teachery versus Kajabi, but the Kajabi versus Thinkific thing. I'm just gonna use these two examples. Imagine a general online business course, like, you know, Marie Forleo's B School versus like, Amy Porterfield's I don't know what her main course is called, Marketing Made Simple or something like that. I'm sorry, Amy. I don't know what the main, but I know she's got one. I know she's got one. And so let's imagine, I could see the article that I know people are searching for is, should I do B School or should I do Marketing Made Simple, right? And so, and definitely use their names as well. Should I do Marie Forleo's B School or should I do Marketing Made Simple? Knowing that you're like, knowing that WAIM Unlimited is sort of solving the same problem. And so then you just have a little call out at the bottom that's like, hey, and if either one of these is not what you're looking for, like, here are reasons to do WAIM Unlimited, but really you're actually providing value and note... and noting the differences between the two programs. Right? Like, I could see that strategy being effective because you know that people who are your target audience are searching for those big notable programs. They may not know about WAIM Unlimited yet because we're operating in such a smaller pond. And so you can kind of ride the SEO juice of the bigger search terms of whatever the big products are in your niche. And then imagine that tactic. You know, if you have even imagine the things that you could write about of the price comparisons there, too, of like, oh, I have this like smaller program that's basically like the same essential. Of course, you're not saying like, like, that's no shade to their programs or whatever, but like, if you're looking...
[00:37:39] Jason: I think the idea's...
[00:37:40] Caroline: If you're looking for these outcomes and you only have the budget for $300, like, here's my program kind of thing. I don't know, something interesting there.
[00:37:47] Jason: Cool. All right. Yeah, I think that's a fun little side quest there that might, might help somebody just get some ideas. Again, that's what we're trying to do in this little sharing behind the scenes of our content creation. Just to wrap up the user generated content.
[00:38:00] Caroline: Digital product academy. I'm still, my brain is still searching for the name.
[00:38:04] Jason: Just to wrap up the user generated content part of this, I think the other thing, just to share because just worth kind of like putting a pin in it. This is also an example of something where it puts the control out of our hands. So we have to rely on other people to submit this content. We have to rely on them to be decent writers. We have to rely on them to give us resources. I think that's also why we're like, this is kind of like the, we might do this one because it's just one of those things that it removes the ability for us just to hammer through this as something we could do this week. You have to relate, you have to wait for people. You have to give them deadlines. You have to hope that they write back something good, if you need to edit it. It's just like, there's a lot of, like, expectations to manage. And so I'm just sharing that as, you know, there's a little bit of something in that, that project that I'm not too excited about. And I think it's because it removes the control from us.
[00:38:53] Caroline: Totally. And I just told you this morning, which I think we'll record an entire podcast about this. But lately I've been really paying attention to the small voice inside me that says, I just like doing stuff ourselves. And there was a time period where I was like, maybe that's a limit on our ability, because obviously if you're doing everything yourself, you're limited by your own capacity. And I was like, this is a limiting belief. This is the thing that's going to keep us, whatever. I need to learn how to manage people better. I need to learn to be a leader. That's a lot of the messaging online, but I'm like, where's that messaging coming from? It's coming from people who grow big teams and empires, and they're convincing you that that's what you need to do, too, because they want to teach you how to do it. And just lately, I've been opening myself up to this idea of, like, yeah, what if I don't? What if I don't like logistics? What if I don't like managing people? Like, is there a world where, I don't know, it's that hard thing as a business owner, where it's like, do I push this about myself to try to grow, or do I accept this about myself because it's what I want and what makes me happy? And that's always the question you're asking yourself.
[00:39:58] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is something we will explore more on a future episode. All right, I want to wrap this up with one final question to the two of us.
[00:40:07] Caroline: Okay.
[00:40:08] Jason: Of the three weeks of the five week content extravaganza that we have done so far, where do you rank them in enjoyment?
[00:40:16] Caroline: Oh.
[00:40:16] Jason: So short form video, long form video for YouTube or this articles week.
[00:40:20] Caroline: Short form video by a long shot.
[00:40:23] Jason: Wow.
[00:40:24] Caroline: By a mile.
[00:40:25] Jason: And why?
[00:40:26] Caroline: I... oh, so many reasons. I love. I love learning a new thing. I think the format, the bite size format gives you such a constraint on ways to be creative, which I love. I think it's so gratifying that the process from start to finish, like, you can finish one fairly quickly and be like, oh, I completed it. You know, that's why it wins out over long form video, because long form video, you're, like, in the trenches and it takes so long to kind of get that first, like, you know, dopamine hit of I completed a thing. But also just lately, the more my brain's very much like this. I wasn't even thinking of content ideas for, like, the two years that we weren't creating content. I was just sort of, like, living our lives and using all of my good ideas for our coaching sessions.
[00:41:13] Jason: Yeah.
[00:41:13] Caroline: Now that we're getting back into the content world, all I can think of are ideas. I am an idea machine. I have so many things that I want to talk about, so many interesting ideas for videos, and so I love that with, by, you know, with short form video, like, you can just create more.
[00:41:29] Jason: Yeah, I think long form is still my number one.
[00:41:31] Caroline: Yeah, I think so, too.
[00:41:32] Jason: And I think it's also just because, like, I just genuinely don't enjoy making short form content. Like, I don't know what it, like. I don't consume it that much. I don't like the creation process. I totally get the, like, it only takes an hour or two, and you have a thing, whereas, like, a long form video takes multiple hours. But I think it's just because I consume so much more and long form I'm saying, like, ten minute videos.
[00:41:53] Caroline: And I definitely consume more long form. I do enjoy long form a lot. I think for you, it's probably, like, I wonder if it's also you have so much muscle memory around long form video that it feels good to be competent.
[00:42:08] Jason: Probably.
[00:42:08] Caroline: And with short form video, it's new, and you do not, like not feeling good at something. This is how we're different. When I feel immediately like I'm out of my depth, it's uncomfortable. But I love learning, and so I... I can hang around until that first learning curve is so steep, because it's like you spend 1 hour on something versus 20 hours on something, and by hour 20, you feel like a superhero. You're like, what I learned from hour one to hour 20 is incredible. And I get high off of that feeling of getting better at something between hour one and hour 20. For you, hour one is like, I'm not good at this yet. This is hard. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to be fast. I think that's a big thing for you. I don't. I have to go slow. And so you won't hang around till hour 20 because you'll just be like, I'll go back to the thing that, like, I can feel fast and good right out of the gate.
[00:42:56] Jason: I think it's also too the, like, the, the waving inflatable...
[00:43:02] Caroline: Arm of it all?
[00:43:03] Jason: Arm of it all with short form video, it's like, you've got to be more attention grabby. You got to be moving a lot more.
[00:43:08] Caroline: And I do hate that about it.
[00:43:10] Jason: I, with long form, I feel like you get the permission just to sit still. You know, everyone could just, like, take a break.
[00:43:15] Caroline: I agree.
[00:43:16] Jason: And I think that, like, obviously, that's a limiting belief of my own that, like, you couldn't make short form video that's just not as, like, quick cuts and, like, all the things, but...
[00:43:25] Caroline: Yeah, and there are people doing that. There are people definitely having a slower pace, whatever. But you're right. Like, and it's some... it's like I have a love hate relationship with it because on the one hand, I really dislike this... the way that you have to approach short form is, what is your angle? What is your...? What is, what is fascinating to someone? What is curiosity? What is the hook?
[00:43:44] Jason: Literally gotta throw a metal barb through someone's face.
[00:43:46] Caroline: I really don't like that. But the other part of it is I like the challenge of figuring that out.
[00:43:52] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And I do think that, like, that is where people's attention is going. So we have to recognize that. All right, let's wrap this up. That is our recap of Teachery article week, SEO content things that we are working on. We just had a doorbell, so it's the perfect time to say goodbye. All right, that's it.
[00:44:08] Caroline: Enjoy your week.
[00:44:09] Jason: Goodbye.
[00:44:09] Caroline: Goodbye.