068: Amplifying AI: Crafting Compelling Content and Superior SEO Strategies with Julia McCoy

 

Danny Gavin Host

00:05

Hello, I’m Danny Gavin, founder of Optige, marketing Professor and the host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. Now get ready to get human. Building that business, which grew to over 100 employees. Today, she partners with Content at Scale, a company that helps agencies and marketers navigate the new world of AI-assisted content while maintaining their focus and integrity. Julia has been named one of the top 30 experts in content marketing worldwide and is the author of eight books, with three more in the works. She’s also hosted several blogs, including the Writer podcast, and has her own YouTube channel. Today, we’re going to talk about AI, seo, content marketing and, of course, mentorship. Julia, how are you?

Julia McCoy Guest

01:09

Hey, Danny, I am glad. Glad to be here with you.

Danny Gavin Host

01:13

Yes, me as well, and I love your ambiance, kind of studio, kind of like the light. I like that.

Julia McCoy Guest

01:20

Thank you. Lots of dark futuristic vibes.

Danny Gavin Host

01:24

Yeah, most people have boring backgrounds like me, but I like your setup. That’s cool.

Julia McCoy Guest

01:28

I do a lot of YouTube, so what can I say?

Danny Gavin Host

01:32

You’re going to have to teach me how to upgrade my space.

Julia McCoy Guest

01:34

Gladly.

Danny Gavin Host

01:36

So, like we were talking about before we started, it’s crazy, I don’t know why, but a lot of our guests on the Marketing Mentor are people who’ve gone to university and I know when we’re doing research and going to your LinkedIn, we’re like, oh, there’s no university there. So we’d love to know about your background and you could touch upon the point of not going to university or ever contemplating it. But yeah, we’d love to just have a background.

Julia McCoy Guest

02:01

I initially did go to college for what I thought was something I wanted to do, which was nursing. So I got halfway through getting an RN degree and halfway through I was like, oh you know what, I’d be terrible at this. I can’t imagine being responsible for decisions that literally affect people’s lives every second, which I was seeing firsthand in the ER and all the different places I was at when I was in clinics and nursing school. So I was like this is terrible. I would be a terrible nurse. I can’t do this. I am a thoughtful person that likes to think behind the scenes, and so I asked myself well, what would I like to do for the rest of my life? And the answer to me was just writing. I’ve got to figure out how to make money writing. So I did a Google search I was still in college in nursing Whenever I did the search and I just researched writing jobs and I came across back then Odesk was, or Upwork was Odesk, and it had at the time this was 2011, it had 20, like 19,000 writing gigs and I was like whoa, there’s a market here.

03:03

Each of these gigs is paying real money. Now, of course, the money was like sometimes a dollar per article, but it was something. And so I was like, okay, let me just see if I can do this. And I signed up like that day, created a freelancer profile and just got my hands really dirty in all of it and started pitching, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing. And within three months I had to make a choice either quit college, do this full time or quit it and go to college. And I knew I just knew I love to write. I’d much rather do this. So I quit college, completely dropped out of nursing school, and I didn’t look back and within those three months I was able to build a monthly income that was extraordinary and I was 19,. This was 2011. So it was like 3000 a month, but to me that was just unbelievable.

03:52

I’ve been working part-time jobs. I was already starting to get in debt with nursing school, and so I was like this is amazing. So I just kept at it and learned everything that I needed to learn as I labored. And I have this framework. I now teach in a book I wrote called Skip the Degree, where if you learn what you love to do and then you just work hard at it the labor aspect and then you level up. That’s almost anything. That’s a framework for approaching almost any industry with a lot of success. And it’s interesting because now we’re going to talk about AI and we’re living in this future where we have the opportunity to do work in this field of artificial intelligence, where we’re seeing a 10x increase every six months, which has literally, like Moore’s law, has been broken by this incredible industry that is exploding more than any industry in the history of humanity.

04:49

And we talked to an electrical engineer yesterday on my podcast, humanity Unchained, and he was saying a lot of the work he’s learned how to do. He’s building the chip fabs. He learned not from college, he learned just from on the job. So even in AI right now, I think, the adaptability even if you did go to college, you use that degree is great, good for you. But if you didn’t and you’re like well, do I need a degree to do work in this new future, the answer is like you truly don’t. You can learn everything you need to learn just by application. So that’s what I did, that’s the story of my life, and within 10 years I was able to build a business with 100 people before the age of 30. And I sold that for multiple seven figures as GPT was coming on the horizon. So crazy times.

Danny Gavin Host

05:36

It’s good timing.

Julia McCoy Guest

05:38

Yeah, talk about good timing, exactly.

Danny Gavin Host

05:41

So there’s something about nurses and marketing, because we actually have an amazing intern right now at our agency. She decided to leave nursing, but my marketing director, she was like a doctor of therapy, and then I remember I had a couple nurses at my class at University of Houston as well who decided to give it up for marketing. So there’s something, some sort of connection there.

Julia McCoy Guest

06:03

Yes, there is. It’s like. For me, it was like, oh, I want to help people, and I translated that to nursing. But whenever I got into marketing and for me, specifically, content marketing was an industry I was able to really come in and do some things that people hadn’t done create books, concepts that hadn’t been created and so I found out that I was able to help people on a mass scale through the internet and specifically in constant marketing, seo and so I was like, wow, I’m doing the same thing I wanted to do back in nursing school, but I’m doing it in a way that benefits more people in a totally different way than actually saving their life on the ER floor. So it’s completely different, but in some ways it’s also the same helping people Totally. I love how that thread goes all the ER floor. So it’s completely different, but in some ways, it’s also the same helping people.

Danny Gavin Host

06:46

Totally. I love how that thread goes all the way through yeah. So, Julia, how would you define a mentor?

Julia McCoy Guest

06:53

Are we thinking about that term in the sense of, like I’m going to seek out somebody to help guide me in, like the true sense of that term?

Danny Gavin Host

07:01

You know what. We’ve had so many definitions on the show. I want to know, when you hear that word, what does it mean to you?

Julia McCoy Guest

07:08

Just thinking through my life and the mentors that have touched me, helped me, really been catalysts for me, and some truly have. You know, I think of a mentor as somebody who’s really great at what they do. Maybe they lead some aspect of an industry or the vocation they’re in. They are incredible and they’re willing to be generous enough with their time to help the people around them in substantial ways, and it could just look like genuine words of encouragement at that time when that person really needs it the most. So to me, that is a mentor, somebody that is great at what they do and they’re willing to share that without any strings attached, or willing to just pour into other people and kind of give back from what they’ve been given.

Danny Gavin Host

07:52

Let’s jump into some of your most influential mentors. Let’s first talk about Justin McGill.

Julia McCoy Guest

07:57

Yeah, he would laugh. I love you.

Danny Gavin Host

08:01

He’s like what? Why are you calling me that?

Julia McCoy Guest

08:05

I’ve been calling out what that’s funny yeah, it’s, you know. First of all, I would say he’s a very unlikely mentor. Like I have had people in the last 10 years that have, you know, sold businesses for 30, 50 million plus, spoken on some of the biggest stages and those people I was like, oh my gosh, this person’s my mentor and I would name them. You know, Justin is like this super unlikely hero, and he seems like a super regular guy. You know, just somebody that enjoys sports, like just a very regular person. But really he’s a genius and it has been incredible to get to work with somebody like him. And the reason I consider him a mentor is he was the first person in my entire career.

08:58

I kind of decided to give up solo entrepreneurship and partner with somebody and he was that person I decided to partner with and it’s hilarious for me to call him mentor. It’s so funny because I work with him every single day, like eight hours a day, so I just can’t get how funny that picture is out of my head. But the reason I would call him that is because he’s had attributes that I haven’t had, because I haven’t been that mature enough of an entrepreneur yet, and he’s had those attributes. So I’ve been able to see somebody that’s going through the ups and downs, going through incredible difficulties, challenges, having to build a new product in a brand new industry and beat companies like Google and Microsoft, which is what we’re up against right now and the way he does it with so much logic, confidence, capability and just a lot of maturity, has been such a standard for me to learn from, and that’s why I would consider him a mentor.

Danny Gavin Host

09:59

I love that, and I think because you guys work together, I’m sure you’re a mentor to him as well. If I were to ask him, hey, how does Julia mentor me? What would you say?

Julia McCoy Guest

10:08

I would want him to be able to say you know, she’s brought a lot of new ideas and innovation and standards of leadership to my company that I wouldn’t have had without her. Like that would be my goal because one thing I love doing is just being a standard for other people myself, like being a mentor, not necessarily doing what he’s done because he has skills I don’t have, but being in a position where I can empower, inspire people to get on the same page and crush it. That’s one of my favorite things, besides doing great things myself. So I would think that’s something he would say that he’s been able to see me do and inspire his team towards.

Danny Gavin Host

10:49

I believe you were hiding and writing for seven years, and then came this individual, Joe Polizzi. I think that’s how you pronounce his name: Joe Polizzi. He came and ripped you out of that hiding and got you to speak on stage. So I’d love to know the story.

Julia McCoy Guest

11:07

Oh, that’s a good one. Yeah. So seven years into my career, I had had, I think, three books out at that point, maybe at the 3,000 client mark, had just hit a million plus in revenue a year. So it’s a pretty great, pretty great highlight. But the thing I hadn’t done was basically share my voice. Like, I hadn’t done that at all, like vocally. I’ve done it in writing and a lot of written communication, but I hadn’t actually stepped on stage or even a podcast at that point. And so I went to Content Marketing World, which is a Joe Plitzi event. He’s kind of like the godfather of the industry I was in. I’m now in AI full-time, but in content marketing he kind of accidentally started it back in 2011. And he’s been known as the godfather, and that’s a $600 billion industry.

11:58

So, I went to his event, Content Marketing World. 4,000 content marketers were there. It was crazy. I mean, you talk about a celebrity like Joe who couldn’t walk down the hallway, he’d get swarmed with people. I was like this is my mentor, this is a celebrity. You’re so fangirl, anyway, but he’s so much more down to earth. You know how it’s funny, Like I’ve been to his event. He sold multiple businesses now and he runs the Creator Ex expo, creator, uh, creator economy expo in Cleveland, Ohio, and we’re a lot more. We have this friendship. That’s pretty cool. Now that’s evolved from that.

12:35

But yeah, seven years into my career, this was 2018 when I went to his event, and I met him at the opening night at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He’s like, I went up to him like, you know, I’m really excited to be here, and he looked at me, and he’s like Julia, why aren’t you speaking? I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, well, you write for us, you write for Content Marketing Institute. You’ve read books. I know what you’re capable of. Why aren’t you speaking? I’m like, well, I don’t want to. I consider myself a writer.

13:01

And he looks at me and Joe says writing and speaking are just two forms of communication. Speaking is the same thing as writing. And I was like, well, that sounds crazy, but that actually made me think differently. And so I took that and I began to think differently and I thought what, if, what if? Speaking could actually be writing? And that totally began to change my mindset.

13:31

And then, within two years, I spoke at his event and actually had people fly in from all around the world. People came from Belgium. They had my book under their arm. It was an incredible moment, and whenever I get up to speak, the room is so packed out, there’s a line out the door, there’s a fire hazard, and I got through the 45 minutes, and I didn’t die at all, and I ended up being rated one of the highest rated new speakers there that year, and so I was like, wow, this really is a way of impacting people that I don’t think I ever would have done without Joe’s nudge, but I can actually do pretty dang good at this, and so that jump-started what has now turned into. You know, I’ve done over 200 speaking gigs and I’m really enjoying them now, so that was really, in part, thanks to Joe.

Danny Gavin Host

14:24

Wow, that’s amazing. Do you still get nervous before speaking? Or is it like after 200, no biggie?

Julia McCoy Guest

14:30

You know, before I spoke at Content Marketing World in 20, I think it was 19. The night before, I went around, and I found all of my favorite speakers, Anne Hanley, the founder of Top Rank Marketing, the founder of ClearScope, and a bunch of people, I went to them and I said can I ask you a question before you speak tomorrow? They’re sure it was like karaoke night. Some of them were drunk, and I was like, are you still nervous? Like, does it ever go away? And Lee Oden, the founder of Top Rank Marketing, looked at me, and he said this guy had like 20 years doing this. He looked at me, and he said you know, it never goes away.

15:11

I’m always nervous. Anne Hanley told me it’s my 250th speaking gig. I put myself in my hotel room—I don’t allow anyone in the day before—and paced my floor, practicing talking because I was so nervous. That’s the only thing that settles my nerves. And I was like, oh man if they’re that nervous.

15:30

Still, I feel a lot better, and what I’ve learned since is that, even though I’ve done so many speaking gigs, there’s like a new level of nerves that comes each time, especially if it’s like a new talk, If I have a lot of comforts and I’ve practiced one for a while. There’s less of that, but I’ve learned to channel that nervousness into excitement, which is a. You know, that’s a technique like Tony Robbins taught, um. So there are ways you can actually tell your mind to look at the nerves as adrenaline and excitement, and your mind will register that nervousness in a different way. So you can, like we are in charge of our own reaction to that event, whether it’s like nervousness before I speak, whatever’s going on, and that, to me, was also a huge game changer. Just to learn, wait, I can tell my mind something and my mind will believe that thing, and now I’m no longer tied to the nerves. So it was pretty amazing to learn that.

Danny Gavin Host

16:27

Yeah, that’s so cool. I’m gonna have to try that.

Julia McCoy Guest

16:29

Yes, it works.

Danny Gavin Host

16:31

So, jumping into your area of expertise, AI and content, what are some of your favorite parts of working in the AI content marketing industry?

Julia McCoy Guest

16:41

First of all, I used to hire hundreds of writers just to see the intersection of true productivity. We would do campaigns for some of the biggest websites in the world, and then we’d do campaigns for brand-new businesses, and it was a ton of content. That’s what it boiled down to. If you want to get found, you have to have a ton of content, and creating that content would really create so much burnout to the point where, you know, I saw some amazing writers. Just they had to quit. There was no point in time in which that paycheck from writing actually offered them a break for their creativity.

17:18

And you would think, well, if a writer gets to write every day, isn’t that a good thing? But the truth was content. It’s like content creation is such a monster. It just creates constant burnout for the writer, and it’s unhealthy. And so you go from 10 years of that to now working full-time for an AI writer that is taking all the steps I used to do as a human and it’s automating that down to minutes.

17:42

That’s why content and skills rank well. And it’s automating that down to minutes. That’s content and skills RankWell. And to see that plugged into people’s businesses, writers’ workflows, content departments, is pretty incredible the productivity gains and just, I think, for me, the biggest, the reason why I love being a part of this, the biggest one is just to see burnout go down tremendously, to the point where I’ve had freelancers that have adapted to Rankwell and AI in their process, and they reach out to me, and they’re like I can’t believe this. I went from writing for eight to 10 hours a day to making that paycheck and getting those clients their content weekly. I’m stepping away at noon because my content’s all done and so just to see that for some very, very creative people is so heartwarming to me. That’s the biggest reason I love AI because we can truly have so many productivity gains and get back to being a human instead of just being a human that’s inundated with a number of tasks. That kind of wipes out our creativity and our thought process.

Danny Gavin Host

18:50

I love it. It’s kind of like changing perspective, right? People naturally think AI is going to take away that creativity, and you’re actually saying that by using AI, you’re actually increasing that creativity.

Julia McCoy Guest

19:01

Exactly.

Danny Gavin Host

19:02

So, what are some things AI doesn’t do well or needs to improve regarding content writing?

Julia McCoy Guest

19:06

There are so many things it can do now that we thought were impossible, especially me, coming from this content industry, that we now see the next iteration of GPT improve on that so much. Or it’s the tool stack that an entrepreneur built and built together all these processes and workflows in one place, and that is the next breakthrough as well. So I think it’s like today where it fails is still that human experience. But there are even ways you can automate by training the AI. Like this is my story, this is the experience I bring. These are the past talks I’ve given. This is like who I am.

19:50

Online, you can train the AI to even kind of download your own personal experience. So that used to be a barrier and it’s not anymore. So I think it’s just the best way to approach AI, especially now, like we’re talking 2024, going into 2029, 2030, we’re going to have computer breakthroughs that will allow us to run these super levels of AI. The right thing to think about is how can I continue to replace myself with AI, so that I don’t get replaced by AI, versus like what are the limits? Because that limit that the AI may have today might be gone tomorrow. That’s the era we’re living in, so that’s kind of the lane I try to live in.

Danny Gavin Host

20:41

So it’s interesting. I’ve got an SEO on my team, and I just found this really really cool piece of AI software that helps with metadata writing at its scale. And when I sent it to the team right away she’s like you know, Dani, the machine doesn’t do it as well as me. I don’t want to do it. And then I’m like, yeah, but if everyone’s using the AI, one day you’re not going to be able to do it manually anymore. So what would you say to her? Like someone in her mind is like I can do this better manually. I don’t even want to touch it, but kind of educating them that times are changing and you kind of need to learn how to adapt. How would you approach that?

Julia McCoy Guest

21:16

I think, first of all, you know where that feeling comes from? Sometimes it comes from fear. Well, you know, if AI is better than me, then what am I good for? And that fear is tied to this incorrect, I want to say it’s kind of been trained in us. It’s an inaccurate, institutionalized trait that came from the Industrial Revolution that basically produced people in this. We produced people in this era who were taught their value is tied to their productivity. But we have to disattach that even to be ready to enter the age of AI, which began in 2022.

21:52

So, to enter this appropriately, you know, first of all, we have to think about, well, where’s that coming from? And that would be a question I would have her think through is where is that stemming from the resistance to AI? Is it? You know, you’re afraid of this becoming something more capable than you. Well, the way to get over that fear is simply education. Learn about AI, learn about the computer power, learn about where this is headed. That’s one reason I started my YouTube channel as I only found one YouTube channel I could personally learn from, and I was reading so many books, so I wanted to share that knowledge and help people who were living in the same exact place she is, which really comes from just a simple and very natural fear of well, what if this is better than me one day? What should I do? Well, I have to prove myself right now. I got to say I’m better, and so we got to kind of break down the systemic thinking and the root of that, and then the next step would be you know, I think one thing that you’re doing so well on your podcast, Danny, is positioning this idea of mentors and who could like sit with her and kind of guide her through this, whether it’s like a YouTube, even a YouTube video tutorial, or you pick out the tool for her and you say, hey, this tool does amazing things for this goal, this outcome. I want you to try it. Here’s a login to it and here’s a tutorial. And then you’re empowering her to actually go use a specific tool with a specific process, because sometimes that’s the other reason for a lack of adaptation is there’s just so many AI tools and so many options that we just get so confused. It’s like walking into a grocery store for the first time. I don’t know what to buy, there’s too many things, and so just empowering her with that mentorship, like, hey, here’s where you should start. Here’s a tool that produces genuine original content that you don’t have to be afraid of.

23:44

Because it is a wild west out there and opening up ChatGPT can’t feel really intimidating, it makes you feel like you have to be a prompt engineer and you don’t know how to prompt that thing, especially if you’re just starting. So sometimes thinking about breaking it down with okay, what’s your goal? Well, let’s look for a tool that meets that goal. Like for us, it’s SEO content. Well, we have completely removed the hassle of a million prompts, of having to edit that content. You just put in a keyword. So if it’s a goal of SEO content, you have raincoil. Or if it’s the goal of email headlines, let’s use this specific prompt and chat to be a team. Just having that approach of how can we help people like her kind of, mentor them through that hurdle, and then, before you know it, these people are wizards with AI.

Danny Gavin Host

24:31

I know this is kind of coming out of left field, but with some of the algorithm changes with SEO and Google, where a lot of sites that had a lot of AI content got penalized and kind of fell to the rankings, specifically with your company, have you done a study on content that was produced by your tool? How affected or not affected was it by, let’s say, recent algorithm changes?

Julia McCoy Guest

24:56

The place we always start at. I talk to customers all the time. I’m emailing people that I’ve done case studies on all the time. How are your rankings? How’s it going? But the place we start is actually our own site. So contentt scale gets anywhere from 400 to 600,000 hits a month. That’s all from organic search and so we are the case study of our own tool. We’ve been that from the beginning. So we have one writer responsible for almost 80 to 100 pieces of content a month and then we look at how our traffic is growing from that.

25:33

So that’s something we looked at over the last few months like Google’s AI overviews and search, the helpful content update, the spam update, or 40% of spam was hit with this penalization and a lot of sites went down. That was a few months ago. Through all of those months, our rankings have steadily increased across the blog traffic. So we’ve never lost anything, and the primary content we’re publishing is Rankwell, our undetectable AI writer. So that is kind of something we live on is being able to say and show people hey, these are our own analytics.

26:09

You know, this is proof that this content is satisfying Google’s intent in search, which is original, helpful content that features expertise, authoritativeness and builds trust. You know, when you boil it all down like it really does come down to good content and good links. You need really great links to your content and you need really great content, and that’s something that we’re trying to solve. Both of those points with RankWell and just seeing our own content consistently succeed and grow is, you know, our test ground. Well, if this works for us and our site’s proven to not tank and our own AI writer is helping us grow, it’s a very easy sell.

Danny Gavin Host

26:52

Yeah, that’s awesome. So your YouTube videos often mention this acronym you developed called CRAFT for AI writers. Can you explain what that means?

Julia McCoy Guest

27:00

January of 2023 was when I joined Content at Scale and I basically found to me it was like the holy grail of AI for SEO content, because our founder, Justin, truly did build a software that took all the human steps in the SEO content process and automated each one.

27:22

And there’s like 40 different individual little micro steps. If you count them all, it’s crazy. So this tool automated all of them, which meant very original, genuine output that satisfied what Google looked for. In other words, you know, not crappy content, very good content. Knowing that we were able to do that and I found this tool, one of the first questions I asked was, you know, I had, like, my following back then was 50,000, maybe across all platforms. So I knew I had a lot of freelance writers, freelance agency owners looking at me and they’re like which AI is Julia going to recommend? Because I had not recommended any for about eight months. I was like don’t adapt, these tools are crap. So one of the first things I did was work with the founder to think about how I can help the entire content writing industry kind of adapt and know what to do, because the biggest hurdle for them was well, what is my new role, what are the steps I should take? And that was a huge question, because nobody was really teaching anything there. It’s just like oh, open, chat, gpt and prompt it with this. Well, that doesn’t really work across specific use cases. So I came up with this acronym called CRAFT to help writers. Number one, remember they have a new CRAFT.

28:41

The art of writing has substantially changed. If you’re sitting writing a blank draft on a Word doc, you are in the stone age. You know. Start with AI. It’s kind of like the calculator now. It’s your new place of starting from. But what do you do? What do you do with that output from the AI?

28:58

So the series of steps I taught in craft was cutting the fluff, reviewing your content, making it better, adding images, visuals, media fact-checking. That’s a big one. And then trust building. And what’s interesting is January, when I joined Content at Scale, our founder, Justin, told me he’s like Julia, we’re going to automate craft one day. And I was like good luck, that is a humanly run process. But here we are, a year later and a couple months ago, like this, I want to say it was this March, whenever we launched something called Deep Research, I published a new framework called TAP and essentially I said we’d automated craft. Like we’ve done it.

29:39

Our tool now cuts the fluff. It reviews everything, it adds images, charts, visuals you still need to go find like screenshots and data, and that was my new acronym. But it also now fact checks at a very deep level. The facts are accurate and trust builds. And so the new acronym that I taught a couple months ago that is replacing craft, is TAP, where you take a look at the content, you add anything that’s missing and then you publish. And it was a new way to adapt as well, because we have to remember that AI is a self-iterating process right now, which means the entire industry is going to get better and better, and so this one point in time where we have a solution, the next point in time could offer a solution that’s just 10 times better, because AI has self-iterated and made that solution way better. So it’s funny when you ask Kraft, I’m like, oh, that’s obsolete. I better explain that it’s now TAP.

Danny Gavin Host

30:40

So you’re always at the forefront of different AI content marketing tools, but one that piqued my interest was content at scale’s unique voice feature. Yeah, can you explain to our listeners what it does?

Julia McCoy Guest

30:49

So that was a feature we launched in March of 2023. You know, it was an answer to a lot of users that we had that were like, well, I have this specific brand style, I have a specific style of writing, it is specific only to me and it really makes my brand stand apart. And so, you know, in 10 years of content creation, I saw that associated with clients as a big deal. You know, your brand style is more important than you even realize. It just creates this identity where people remember and they click and they read because they’re like, oh, it’s Danny, I know how he speaks and writes, I’m familiar with that, and that familiarity creates relatability. So the unique voice was an answer to how do we get this AI, this amazing undetectable AI writer, Justin Bill, how do we make this reflect the voice of Danny? And such a unique voice allowed you to actually train our undetectable writer with your own content and set that as a tone of voice. And you could, like, literally go into project settings, go to custom tone of voice, load it with your content from your voice and hit save and name it Danny Gavin  and then you would have this preset tone of voice that mimicked you and how you wrote on the internet trained from blogs, articles, things like that and so we launched that and it was a big hit. To where I was talking with different publishers and they were like you know it, like that.

32:12

And so we launched that and it was a big hit. To where I was talking with different publishers and they were like you know, it’s incredible. We had a couple that ran a travel blog so very specific, unique style about you know their writing and how they travel Hawaii and they were like you know, we use the unique voice and we were able to train it on how John writes to a point where our friends didn’t know that that was an AI at all. They thought it was John. And so it works so well. Because what we did is we allowed our users to train our AI on their voice, but they weren’t just training ChatGPT, they were actually training our unique LLM stack of undetectable human-like content. So when you take something that good and you train it on your voice, you get output that truly mimics you, and so that has been a pretty big feature still to this day.

Danny Gavin Host

33:04

You’re alsoCan you elaborate on this?  passionate about a concept I’ve not considered, integrity within AI content marketing. 

Julia McCoy Guest

33:15

So that kind of came from just spending 10 years in content marketing, getting to see the inside of companies with you know, sometimes their weekly budget was $100,000 for content, and it was insane to see how literally some of the biggest companies on the web were built through content. And so what I got to see was that those were some of the toughest clients we had because of the emphasis put on fact-checking these companies. Their reputation was made or broken based on the integrity of their facts. And these were, you know, these were cited companies that were often linked to by tens of thousands of other publishers, and so these other publishers relied on these websites to publish accurate content. And that I’ll tell you. That is the reason why I did not adapt to AI for about eight months, because I saw ChatGPT and I was like, ooh, this would ruin the reputation of all of my clients, Because even OpenAI they’re pretty up front. They said when they launched chat GPT there is no source of truth in this ai. It literally just predicts, detects, generates. It’s not checking for facts. So at least they’re honest. You know, they said that from the beginning there’s no source of truth, but when I saw that I was just like oh, I cannot use this, I cannot recommend it, you’re better off doing it humanly.

34:35

Whenever I did adapt, it was because one of the main features in RankWell and continent scale was fact checking. And this feature has even gotten better to a point where RankWell builds a database of thousands of individual pages and it’s looking through all of those pages to find the most accurate like sometimes it’s just like one or two or three facts to put into that article and then that gives you this incredibly data rich, also accurate article to publish. But you’ve used AI to save, you know, seven to eight hours, so you’re saving time. But you’re also publishing integrity based content, which is fact based content. You can’t really have integrity as a publisher without accuracy of facts.

35:22

So that idea that I’m able to be a proponent of is a pretty big one. And it’s interesting because late last year I was at a conference with some huge companies: Deloitte, Dell, Microsoft. Their communications teams were all in that room in Austin, Texas, and they were emphasizing the importance of accuracy and data security and privacy. Those things are important too, and that’s all as well in the company I work with. If you upload any data in your project that doesn’t actually get shared out into any other customer project or even the LLM. So it’s really great to be able to be on the side of the scary industry of AI but still be able to recommend something that is integrity-based.

Danny Gavin Host

36:09

While using RankWell as part of content at scale? How necessary is it to have a writer to actually manage the tool, or could just a regular SEO analyst do it?

Julia McCoy Guest

36:20

We just launched something called the Unified Editor, where you’re inside this editor that’s so simple and easy to understand. You even get a checklist of the things you’re missing to add into the article. You could definitely have, whether it’s even an intern or a marketing assistant or all the way up to a founder that wants to run it themselves, but they’ve never gotten familiar with SEO. What we’ve done is we’ve really removed that barrier to entry, making it easy for anyone to open RankWell, and I love that because you know, content was never easy. The world I came from, like you, just had to have years of experience before you knew what content should look like, how to write it, how to publish it, and how to analyze it. So I love that. The tool is this user-level, agnostic, where you can really jump in at any point and get straight into using it.

Danny Gavin Host

37:14

Do you recommend agencies who use RankWell to be very transparent with their clients and be like, hey, we are using AI, or do you feel like it’s so good that it’s like what’s the point?

Julia McCoy Guest

37:23

I spoke about this at an SEO conference and it was Brighton SEO’s first stateside conference and I’ve written about it on Search Engine Land. There’s a lot of opinions in SEO and the opinions usually favor you need to attribute the AI. I am on the contrary side. I came from 10 years of doing content with over 100 writers and those writers never got attributed. They basically forfeited their copyright. They were like okay, you’ll pay me a check. Okay, I forfeit all rights to copyright. That was how that worked. And so now I’m like hmm, are we going to give the AI credit when we never gave the human writer? So just if your content is humanly checked and it’s good content, I don’t think you should attribute the AI. That’s where I’m at with it.

Danny Gavin Host

38:09

Very interesting.

Julia McCoy Guest

38:10

Yes.

Danny Gavin Host

38:14

So this term might be new to some of our listeners, but what is AIO and do you think this will eliminate SEO?

Julia McCoy Guest

38:19

So, first of all, I don’t think it will eliminate SEO, but I do think it will change SEO forever. I coined this back with our founder in January 2023. And it was just tied to the idea we need to give writers a new series of steps, and so AIO was like the new career, the new job role, and it’s since been in hundreds of job listings and I even see copywriters using it in their LinkedIn headlines and it’s this idea of artificial intelligence optimization and you basically step into the role of the optimizer of the AI machine, and that role is incredibly valuable. It’s going to get more valuable as time goes on and I think the roles there will look different. We’re seeing AI officers, and now Google even has AI overviews as part of search. They’ve hijacked AIO.

39:10

I like to say I came up with it first, but anyway, that’s a side point, but it’s definitely helping writers see we need to get in the seat of governing the AI and optimize that content versus SEO content is me opening a Word doc and writing from scratch, taking that into a set of tools, optimizing it, which is a completely backwards, time-wasting process. Now, when you have a process like AIO because of artificial intelligence, I’ve also heard you use the word future-proofing SEO.

39:45

What does this mean? Is AIO the future-proof version of SEO? I would say think about future-proofing SEO. A few months ago, my answer would have looked different, but since we’ve seen the AI overviews have such turbulence, you know they scaled back the AI overviews completely, so there’s like a huge percentage now that won’t show up in search, because you know we were getting very unsafe answers on things related to situations that touched your life medical finance, so Google’s like uh-oh, we’re going to be in trouble here. So I scaled that back.

40:18

So I think that this idea of using AI and optimizing the content output and putting yourself in the driver’s seat will last, no matter what Google looks like. But what we need to remember is that Google itself is in this place of so much volatility and the best thing you could do is use the AIO approach, get in the driver’s seat of AI, save tons of time, get way more efficient at content, but really build a brand. Think about a volume of content links to all your content and really build that up, because that is what will last. Versus oh, how do I get ahead of all the Google changes, which is going to be a game. The rules of that game are always changing, thanks Google. So that’s how I would approach that.

Danny Gavin Host

41:08

So, before we wrap up, I’d love to dive into your life in Arizona. You’ve mentioned that you like to hike, play the harp, and write books. I’d love to know a little bit about living with Julia in Arizona.

Julia McCoy Guest

41:21

Well, I moved here from Texas in January of this year, so it’s been a big, big change to go from Texas to Arizona, and I’ve really enjoyed it. Something unexpected was I ended up living pretty much in the mountain foothills where we moved to. So it’s a wonderful country so I’m always out there, I mean, unless it’s past 100. I’ve actually scaled back some of this because I’m just like it’s way too hot, and I’d rather just sit and read in a shaded corner because it’s that hot in Arizona. But I came from Texas and there was humidity with the heat. So the heat here is a little bit. It’s different. I would say it’s a bit more bearable because you don’t end up with a sticky, wet t-shirt in two seconds, which you end up with in Texas because of the humidity. So you don’t have that here.

42:11

So I really enjoy the mountains and the scenery that I get here and the desert. You know it’s very different. I feel like if you’re used to seeing green, you might miss the green because there’s more brown, but the desert itself and the mountains and the sunsets really make up for that, um, and it being more of a desert experience. So I love it here. It’s been a great, great shift. I’m outside more, enjoying it more than I did Texas mountain biking. I never used to do that in Texas, doing that like once a week here and you mentioned I play the harp. That is a hobby that I have. I have a 22-string Celtic harp, and it’s just a great way to connect with nature. I play it outside and just kind of take my mind off of, oh, this crazy world of AI. Even though I love this crazy world, I’m in, and I wouldn’t change a second of it. It’s amazing to be a part of it.

Danny Gavin Host

43:08

So, Julia, where can listeners learn more about you and your business?

Julia McCoy Guest

43:10

So to learn more about Consonant Scales, rankwell, go to continent scale. That will guide you through what we do. You can jump into a seven-day experience and kind of test out the platform. To learn more about me, Julia McCoy, you can find me on YouTube. Definitely check that out if you’re interested in the future of all this. Where it’s going. I try to predict a little. We’ll see if I’m correct. You can tell me in a year or two if the content ages. Well, we’ll find out. And then you can find all my books on Amazon under my name as well, and I’m on X. That’s a good place to follow me, as well as LinkedIn.

Danny Gavin Host

43:46

I always joke about wearing these headphones in the recordings because I can just imagine that five or ten years from now, it’s going to be like, what the heck were you wearing? So I’m sure it’s the same, with certain predictions, but that’s really cool.

Julia McCoy Guest

43:58

Thank you. It was great to be here, Danny. I really appreciate getting the chance to talk with you about all this good stuff.

Danny Gavin Host

44:04

Thank you for joining us, and thank you, listeners, for tuning into the Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll talk with you next time.