Episode Transcript
Ashley Segura: All right, let’s kick things off, Julia. So when you’re not behind your desk and when you’re not creating content and you find yourself in the kitchen, what’s your go to dish to cook?
Julia McCoy: Oh, I love that question. I would say anything Mexican. I’m a really big fan of quesadillas, enchiladas, tacos.
So if there’s taco involved, I’m looking up the recipe and I’m making it.
Ashley Segura: This fully aligns with who you are and feeling like the tacos have been following you for sure.
Julia McCoy: That’s true. That’s a very good analogy. Good point.
Ashley Segura: Love it. Love it. Let’s talk about content and you’ve had an incredible journey with lots of great numbers to follow. So going back into your early days when you started with investing the 75 and then turn that into a 5 million business, what were the key principles that really guided that kind of growth?
Cause that is, that’s ginormous growth. That’s something that we can all aim for. Was there something in particular that Really led that? Or was it a combination of a lot of fails to get there? What did that journey look like?
Julia McCoy: Yes, I would say it was just following the path of what my customers needed and then just trying to build it better than the competition.
And that sounds so oversimplified, but it was really really hard to do tons of sleepless nights fires to put out. But just the pursuit of that alone to build what your customers actually want and to do it better than the competition. That was by far, if that was our compass, we always won.
And then it was just. Knowing that it took time. We didn’t hit our first seven figure year for seven years. It was like seventh year we hit seven figures in annual revenue. And I was like that took a long time, but the first four years, like I was a very immature business owner. I was 21 for Pete’s sakes, learning a lot.
Yes. Like just how to be a leader, how to go from single freelancer to business owner, which is a very different and under, I think we don’t talk about it enough, like that transition, there’s just so much more involved than let me just start a business. There’s so much more involved. Like you have to grow into a leader.
You have to grow into a really good marketer or find the people that can market, but usually you. You’re doing it with your own funding. So it’s gotta be you as the marketer for a long period of time. And so you have to wear all these hats and grow into all these skills that we don’t have by default. So it’s really easy to just beat ourselves up and go, Oh, I’m failing at this.
But the truth is it requires so many skills to be a good business owner and those skills just take time. And so not giving up was also the, I’d say the third piece of that. It’s like finding out what our customers wanted, always giving that to them, not letting the roadmap be a distraction of what I wanted to build, but always answering what they wanted.
And then knowing that we wanted to do it better than the competition. So we were like, what is the competition doing? But it wasn’t a matter of we fixated on the competition. It was more, we looked for holes that they weren’t doing at all. So we not only tried to be better than them. We tried to be a step ahead of them.
And so that always protected me from, like, when article spinners came out, or when general writing fell off the grid, and there was a need for specialized writing when YMYL and EAT became a thing. And that really helped us stay ahead of all the changes. And then just time You can’t build anything great overnight.
You can definitely be like the first to market and have speed. And then that can bring a much quicker revenue goal, but you can’t replace that road of it takes time to build something good. And so that journey can look so different than what we imagined in our heads or what’s portrayed to us. Like you open YouTube and I swear, the first ad is how you can have a 70 figure agency tomorrow.
Ashley Segura: Oh my gosh, it’s everywhere. It’s so bad. It’s on Instagram now too. Like every other day I’m getting another ad about, Oh, are you an agency owner? Don’t you want to make millions? And it’s yeah, but not through whatever you’re going to try and sell me. It’s not going to work. Not going to work on you.
No. Yeah. There’s a lot of resources out there for new business owners who are making that jump from freelancer to, all right, I’m going to make this a company. I want to create a bunch of content around it and develop marketing plans. Like I used to work with way back in the day, used to work with like my local score chapter.
And I know there’s scores all over. The states, but did you have any specific resources or was it a lot of just I’m trying this and it may fail, but I’m going to learn from it and then just keep adapting from that.
Julia McCoy: Yeah, that’s a great question. I didn’t have really any local resources when I, whenever I was starting this business, I was actually inside of a religious cult.
So I had less than resources. I had the opposite.
Ashley Segura: Oh yeah. That is definitely the opposite.
Julia McCoy: It’s like you don’t need resources to start. You can take my story as living proof of that. And literally when you said 75, like that was all I had. I went to my bank and I closed my bank account and I took that 75 and I invested it in an offshore web designer to help me get my first website up and running.
This was 2011. So like literally, no resources is where I started and I got out of that environment. I’d never looked back. I literally left that cult in the middle of the night, got out. And that was a huge catalyst because I think, you as a person building a business, you have to actually be in the right environment in a personal setting in order to succeed in a business setting.
You can’t have one without the other. If you’re in a toxic personal setting, there’s no way your business will succeed because that toxicity bleeds through. We’re humans and humanity always prevails. So getting out of that was like, The biggest resource builder ever. And so sometimes like when I’ve coached people in the past, I spent a year coaching after I sold my agency, I would ask them what life at home looked like and make sure like they were in a safe, healthy environment.
Cause that adds so much to you being able to produce and it’s very vastly underrated. So got out of that. And then got into just a very rural area where there wasn’t any resources once again, but what I did find were fellow entrepreneurs, not many, just a couple that were very wise and candid about.
What I should and should not do. And so these early people, some of them were early clients really spoke into my mind and helped me go past issues like charging way too low, undervaluing my work, which we tend to do. We don’t value ourselves where we should be. And I think that actually comes from a good place that comes from humility.
And so when we don’t, though, that creates the problem of we really, Under value, what we can make revenue wise. And so sometimes the best advice is like triple your prices tomorrow. Don’t even blink. Just do it. And you’ll be surprised the market will respond if you’re an expert. And so I kept doubling, tripling my prices because people were like, you just can’t be this cheap, Julia.
So thankfully I had some good advisors that were able to just keep it really real and tell me, okay, you need to grow. Oh, that blog you published. There’s. There’s 30 typos. Maybe you should make sure your writing looks really good so you can sell it better. Like very simple things that I needed to hear.
Cause sometimes I was just going too fast or I didn’t see, I didn’t stop to think. So having very candid advisors next to you is more help and more wisdom than I can even say that really helps me a lot. Going too fast. I feel like
Ashley Segura: is. Every marketer’s issue for forever and at all times, because we’re trying to do so many things at once and have so many boxes to check.
And then you throw the business hat on top of that. And it’s okay, how do I manage the business? How do I grow the business? How do I define the brand? And then also how do I bring it to market? How do I. Properly marketed and work with my marketing team to do have you ever come across like the perfect rhythm of, all right, for this part of the day, I’m going to wear my content hat.
This part, I’m going to do my like head of marketing hat. And then this part of the day, I’m going to do my business. Like, how do you manage that? So many different things, because I know a lot of our listeners, not all of them are business owners, but they’re in the thick of it doing a thousand different marketing tasks, or they are one man bands and their brand is just their brand.
So would love to hear your take on how do you balance the very different types of roles to play?
Julia McCoy: Yes. Yes. So it took me a long time to figure this particular one out. I did the whole time blocking day blocking, like very specific segmented times for tasks. So I try that and then I tried sprints and I tried seasonal work and I tried deep focus and I tried the Pomodoro timer.
So ultimately what I found, what worked the best was, and I still do this to this day was having two different. Buckets that were very general for all the things I do. So I would quantify those buckets as creative and then basically work. So like emails strategy, KPI meetings, team leadership, that’s all work to me.
And then creative, that’s all creating content, writing, ideation, strategy for big next steps. And so what I would do is I would take those two buckets. I would have like clear. Lists of what I’m doing in each like this quarter, I’m writing this book, or I’m going to create these three YouTube videos. So once I had like a good outline of the things I’m doing in each bucket, then I would, this is really wild, but this worked incredibly well for me.
I would feel out my week and I would wait for a day where I was super creative and excited. And then bam, minute, I felt that when I woke up, I waited to wake up till I felt it. I would pick that day to go film and everything got so much better whenever I did that because before then I was like, okay, Monday is my filming day and I would block it out.
It would be content from like morning to evening. And I just had so many problems, whether it was like, I didn’t prepare my battery the night before for my camera, or I just ran out of physical battery juice and you can see it on camera. And so the problems that I would run into bucketing a day where I wasn’t creative.
So I think the goal there that what I would boil that down to is really find your flow. And if there’s a day or even a week or a month where you’re like, this is when I’m at my highest productivity. This is when. The kids are out of the house or whatever makes you more productive. Choose that for your highest ROI tasks.
And usually that’s creative. Anything we do that’s creative can bring huge ROI. That’s content creation, writing, generating new ideas, and then the actual work, leave that for the days when you don’t feel creative. And that just has done so much for me. I
Ashley Segura: think that’s such amazing advice because there’s so many days where I’ll.
I’ll time block on my calendar. That’s I’ve done the Pomarado method. Like I’ve tried so many different things. I’ve got two whiteboards posted project management tools, like that person got it all. Definitely doing all the things, checking all those boxes. But some days where you’re for example, recording video, like you just wake up and you’re just not feeling it.
And then there’s the other days where I wake up and I’m like, I’m so inspired to create a bunch of copy right now and to start writing articles. And even when you have deadlines, you can still factor this in. If by Friday of next week, say you’re starting Monday by Friday of next week, you have to have X, Y, Z done for your content strategy.
That’s enough of a deadline, like locking yourself into, okay. Tuesday’s the day that I’m going to outline all of it and actually write it is not always realistic. So I love that you’re able to give yourself grace and that, and be able to be like, today was the day I was thinking of doing it, but I’m not feeling it as long as I do it before Friday, I’m still going to be on track with things and the stresses can dissolve a little bit and be present.
And. The moment that you’re actually inspired to create content, because that’s really when we create the best contents.
Julia McCoy: Oh, you are onto this already. That’s exactly right. Couldn’t have said it better.
Ashley Segura: Talking about scaling though okay we’re figuring out. How we can fit that content creation process into our strategy, whether we are those one man bands doing it, or we do have resources to outsource.
There’s still that like post production concept of this of like, all right, we have the content done. We think it’s pretty great. Now, how do we get it in front of the right? Eyeballs like where do you even start with that process when you start to think about the post production and you’re moving more towards the distribution part of the content creation?
Julia McCoy: Yes. Yes. It’s interesting because that part of it, we don’t really put a lot of KPI measuring on. What happens post production, we’ve really measure production itself just so heavily because a lot of times, like you put out a hundred blogs and it’s going to be like the top 10 percent actually make it to the top of Google and do really well, but it was supported by that background, that topic cluster.
So I think like we put. Sometimes it’s constant markers, way too much emphasis on, okay, will this one piece of content perform and we live there? Whereas if we just measured production and let’s say our goal was, a hundred thousand uniques on our site in the next six months we shouldn’t measure that.
My advice always is until the fifth or sixth month and until after you have at least 200 blogs on your site, because that’s when you actually give yourself a fighting chance to measure a goal like that. And volume really does equal the success of content, even though, quality is a part of that.
And that’s been a debate quality over quantity. No, it’s both. Sorry, you need both. So once you have both, then it’s a lot easier to stand back and measure it. Cause then you actually have, it’s like, if you put players in a game, you want those players eligible to win that game. Content is the same thing.
That eligibility is your quantity of content. And so that’s why, like when it comes to traffic or the KPIs we measure, We don’t measure until we actually have a quantity of content out to be able to measure our goals.
Ashley Segura: That makes sense. I really like that approach because I’ve been preaching for years now to focus on the quality of content because back in early, early days, like the 2010 to 2014, it was just mass produced, and then it became spammy and then it was all for link building and then Nothing was great content.
And so then it was like, everyone needs to stop doing that and focusing on the quality of it. Put out something really good and people will find you and develop that brand authority. Whereas in this, you’re saying a combination of that, where you need to have that quantity in order to develop your authority.
And not just from. Topical ranking perspective, but also for your users. And then when that quality piece comes out, you have enough of the supporting pieces to be like, yes, we do have the authority to talk about this. You can trust us on this and that’s why you’re going to really engage with this piece.
Is that about right?
Julia McCoy: Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah. That aligns with. Everything that we look at. Yeah. I think the danger is whenever you put out one piece of content and you just stress over that piece of content and you wait to see that piece of content hit. And there are things like an Instagram reel that could get 250, 000 impressions where one piece of content could matter more, but when it comes to like website traffic in particular and I did a study on this in 2022, I measured 400 reels that we made against.
I think it was 40 pieces of long form content and those long form pieces of content that did not get any traction. The blogs got no shares, no comments, nothing. They looked like they were done in the water, but the revenue generated from the long form content was, it’s like a hundred times greater than anything.
So in the impressions world, that is like such a misleading KPI that I can’t even stress it enough because what you want are conversions in the end and conversions don’t happen unless you have found a targeted visitor that specifically wants what you have to offer. And that’s why I’m such a big fan of SEO because it’s like one of the only great ways to really target that person searching.
Without serving them an ad, which there’s, you can do that, but that person is going to be, there’s going to be less buy in. There’s going to be less budget because of how our consumer market has shifted trust. If I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of trust, and if people don’t feel in charge of their own journey, they don’t actually trust that solution and the refund rate.
The buy in rate is so low. The refund rate is so high. So if you allow people to find you and you put out content, that’s content marketing, that’s inbound content, which is what you and I, and the people listening probably doing, that’s the kind of marketing that really wins, but that con that marketing, you can’t measure impressions.
If you do, you will definitely shoot yourself in the foot until you have that library of content. Like for example, we have. I think 500, 500 some blogs on our site now, and we’re hitting that half a million monthly uniques, but it took us that library of content to get there.
Ashley Segura: That’s amazing that you have that many pieces of content and you’re able to cover.
A specific niche with that many pieces of content. I feel like that’s where a lot of people struggle when they’re like, okay I’m ready to scale. I’ve, whether I got the resources or not, I’m ready. But how do I keep creating content about this specific niche or this product that I have or the service that I’m selling?
How do you come up with unique topic ideas that are so relevant and are going to attract the right people?
Julia McCoy: Have a little something called AI it’s crazy. Cause I love this piece of that whole conversation and it’s funny because I remember 10 years ago, I think my biggest burning question when I started my blog was, will I ever run out of topics?
And it’s funny now, because here we are, GPT 4 has 40 percent more parameters than GPT 3 did. And GPT 5, which is set to launch this year, will take us from 1. 5 trillion parameters up to 2 to 5 trillion parameters of data. That’s in a single LLM. The data that it has accessible to its Artificial intelligence brain is just infinitely more data than we will ever have as humans.
And so whenever I start in the topic journey, what should we write about? First of all, it’s a broad topic clustering that I’m making sure we stay within. So continent scale dot AI, obviously AI, anything related to AI and marketing AI and content, so that’s where we stay within, we don’t. Go too far outside that because we want to build that recognition for Google.
And so within that, then what we do is we just fire up our own AI, which does topic clustering, does the keyword analysis, all that’s built into rank while our SEO AI writer. And so I’ll start by building a cluster and I’ll just type in AI, go very broad. And then from there I get. I think the last time I did this, which was last month, we had 70 pages and 10 keywords each.
And so we just narrow down from there and we create clusters and we add it all to the content planner and that’s easily. 200 pieces of content to cover like the next three months. So AI has made that process infinitely more, I would say, enjoyable where it’s not you sitting down going, Huh, what are the next 10 topics?
And then it’s you’re using five tools or researching different. I would open up a Phazarus and try to find different ways to say one word. You don’t have to do any of that anymore. AI can really do it better.
Ashley Segura: I could see how for, especially for Content at Scale, like talking about content, talking about AI, going over those strategies, using AI for that is like perfection.
Totally makes sense. What about industries that are more, let’s say in the medical field or the legal field, the ones that. You have to be very careful what you say, and people are watching what you say. So when you’re trying to scale that kind of content and resources may be a little bit limited to where you may not have one person who can edit 70 posts every month or like double check it.
What would you recommend to do in those kinds of scenarios for those more niche industries that need to be very careful about what they produce in terms of content?
Julia McCoy: Yes. It’s interesting because we actually just finished a case study with next care and what they’ve done, the digital marketing manager, Richard Keech, there is in charge of their content marketing.
And what he’s done is basically, it’s crazy. He’s replaced like a lot of so writers, they relied on content agencies. And he’s instead of that, he’s put in place an AI process matched up to their Experts. So all these busy experts, like physicians, doctors that, those people are never going to have the time to write content.
They’re too busy taking care of real ailments. So tasking them with writing it’s, he’s allowing them to stay freed up and all they’re doing is reviewing the content generated by. They’re using continent scale. And the benefit of that over chat GPT is you get original content. And that’s something really important to those industries in particular.
When chat GPT generates content, it’s not real time. You’re going to have to add like a custom GPT plugin to make sure it is real time. So you’ve got to build your own tool stack to get there. And so with this one click. That’s what we call it, AI writer, then he gets content that’s original. And what he does is he has a process that content then goes to the experts that are reviewing it to make sure it meets YMYL and they’re getting out content just so much faster because the review process is so quick.
The content is so good, so we’re seeing that’s a really good factor. We have to think about, because I think in general, like a single LM. Can actually pose problems for those industries because it’s not crack based. It’s not accurate. And Oh boy, if you’re in the medical industry, it better be accurate.
So the benefit of Mightwell, the constant scale is that real time aspect where it’s pulling together an entire database of background material before it even generates content. And so that’s why something like that can be more of a trusted resource. And actually speed up a very high production process where that industry is.
It’s not generalized, it’s still expert, so we can still have wins. It’s just which tool are we using and what is the quality of the output? It’s something we really have to ask in those industries.
Ashley Segura: I feel like this is a similar conversation to what I’ve been having with a lot of people in the industry is that.
AI is a tool in your tool belt, like that’s definitely a tool. There’s still that human element needed. Are you concerned or where do you stand with the big scary AI is going to take all of our jobs? Do you see it as just this tool or do you see in Five, 10 years, that AI is going to scale content at a rate to where that human element isn’t going to be as needed because the language learning models are going to learn so well.
Julia McCoy: Yes. The question of the century. Seriously, you’ve got a crystal ball,
Ashley Segura: right?
Julia McCoy: I’d like to say I do, but I read a lot of books, so I hope that’s my crystal ball. We’ll see. No, I have been on a reading binge lately, AI experts and MIT researchers, computer scientists. I’ve just been eating up books by like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis really studying Because I used to think That AI would probably not affect as many jobs as we think, because when I used AI, I was very disappointed until like I found tool stacks that were better than a single LLM, but I changed my thinking when there was a report that came out this January, 2024, and this report was put together by 2700.
The actual number is 2778. So 2, 778 AI researchers from Berkeley, UK universities, like all over the globe. They got together and they predicted what AI would impact in terms of jobs. And they predicted the full automation over all human labor by, I think it was 2150. And the report was so data backed where it like looked at.
Jobs from driving a truck to publishing a New York times bestselling book. And it broke down why and how AI would be able to replicate humans, if not outperform them in all of those tasks, like down to writing a better book than a human could.
Speaker 6: And so when I saw
Julia McCoy: that, I was like this is 2, 700 smart people that are, have studied AI their whole life.
I can’t look the other way just because I’m afraid. And so I went down a complete rabbit hole and I learned about things like the singularity. Have you ever heard of that? Or studied that at all. No, that’s the idea of humans basically transcending their own biology due to AI. And so there’s a lot of things like I don’t fully agree with where the idea is we will have a better life if we upload our brains to the cloud and we have a robotic version of ourselves living in another.
I don’t, if that’s not what I want to get behind, there’s aspects to it, it’s like a little out there, but there’s also aspects to it that I think are a hundred percent true where we will be able to have longevity of life beyond imagination. We won’t even need hospitals anymore. Like AI will get to a point where.
it will replace areas of life that were very difficult to live because I will hit something called AGI. And then beyond AGI, that’s artificial general intelligence. Beyond that is artificial super intelligence, where it will be able to infiltrate anything autonomously. And that’s where it gets a little scary, right?
Because then it’s Oh, have we given up our power to the robots? And so I think knowing this is going to happen because of. All the breakthroughs I’ve looked at energy, quantum computing, studied like the history of that. Is it really going to happen? What CERN is doing to get us to be able to compute on atoms instead of transistors.
So there’s a lot of background info here that supports the hypothesis that I think all human labor will be replaced and it’s just a matter of time. So how do we prepare for that? I think it, we prepare by finding. Work that brings us meaning and thinking in terms like thinking less in revenue driven terms and thinking more in terms of innovation.
How do I add like a human stamp to the world? Cause that’s, what’s going to last. And people are going to go back to that in an age of, very synthesized AI age, we’re going to seek out human experiences. So you opened up a. A whole can of worms.
Ashley Segura: I know. I got goosebumps like halfway through everything you were saying.
I was like, Ooh, we’re okay. We’re okay. It’s terrifying. But also the year you said I was like, okay, will I be alive? No, I won’t be alive. But what will it look like? Started like doing my own little mini version of a rabbit hole. But no, it’s a conversation to definitely have and to continue having, because we don’t.
100 percent know what this is going to look like, and it reminds me a little bit of how much just us using the internet has changed in such a short period of time. And from before it used to be these really short queries and then. Really strange results, like way back in early internet days. And now it’s like really long queries.
Like I, myself am sometimes writing two sentences, trying to get like very specific and I’m finding the info, like I’m literally finding the info and it’s insane how like the content is being placed in. Search engines, understanding of what I’m trying to get at doesn’t always hit the mark, but it’s getting so much better at it.
So just the speed at which that has changed and the understanding of user intent, the kind of content that we’re producing, and now we have social that’s, Mixing everything up and all of that, like in this short period, so much has changed. So it’s, you can’t really go into something like this and be like, AI in another short period, isn’t going to drastically change our landscape and what things look like, because we’re already changing things on a daily basis with the technology that we currently have.
Yeah. Into like from, or a resource standpoint, like I could definitely see a lot of instances where it could be really difficult to continue to adapt to these technological changes because there’s so many different AI tools out there. Now, there’s also, like you mentioned, so many AI books and AI resources and AI is not going to be the only thing like Google’s launching core updates left and right about things.
And so it’s like, how do you Run your business. Keep on trap of the educational aspect of it and focus on scaling your content by constantly creating continuous content in every single content medium and for every single persona that you have. And then also keep track of the Setting aside time to test all these new tools or invest in the education on that have you found a good balance to do that?
Julia McCoy: Yes. Yeah. I think there could be a lot of time waste. So that’s a really good point. It’s like, where do we put our time? And I really try to bracket my time into production and then. Whatever brings me inspiration. So that inspiration bracket is it’s like 99 percent learning on my book stack. If you could see it right here, it’s all books on technology and then YouTube videos that I’m always watching interviews with futurists technologists.
So I’m trying to really upgrade my learning because I think like we’re at a place in history where. This doesn’t just touch our business. This touches like how we’re going to create content, how we’re going to read content, consume content, and then beyond that, like our own children and our legacy and our family, how they’re going to interact with their environment.
So I want to learn about that as much as I can. And it’s interesting cause I’ve started fully pivoting into that on my YouTube channel, where now like I went from being the constant marketer for 10 years to. We’re talking only about AI and we’re going to go into all the rabbit holes. And I can tell you I have had the most reach I’ve ever had in 10 years of creating video, starting to talk about these things, which is really cool.
So I think there’s a real need for us to grow our own knowledge and then share with others what we’re learning too, just like you’re doing on this podcast. So that’s something like. If you invest your time into learning and then production, you can’t go wrong. And then I would say for tool testing, there’s if you open up Sumo, I think there’s even a website called like an AI tool a day, there’s millions and thousands of those drop off every day.
They fail. And so I think it’s a pitfall to think, Oh, I have to try every new AI tool and what you should do is look at your goals. Is it to produce? X amount of shorts, is it to produce X amount of blogs and then look for the best AI tool for that goal output. And so for us, like for shorts, we’re using Opus clips.
Another good one is descript. And then for blogging, like the only AI writer I’ll use is continent scale. Surfer is like the only competitor and there’s a ton of new ones that pop up, but they’re just not, they don’t give you that original output. And so it would just be like a waste of my time to go test them.
Cause I already have one that’s. Proven to work and same thing for like audio and other formats of content. So just look for the best AI tool and don’t feel you need to test. All the thousands that are going to drop off the face of the earth anyway, because weren’t they really anything more than an API call?
Ashley Segura: Oh, I love your approach to this. It’s more of like, all right, look at your current workflow, look at your current resource standpoint, what holes you need to fill, or what things can be taken off of your task list or your team’s task list that there is a tool available to streamline this for. Then identify what are those tools that are literally just focus on those things and then test them, then put effort into trying them versus getting so overwhelmed because it’s really easy right now to be very overwhelmed by the amount of new AI tools coming out or new quote unquote resources that are coming out and it’s how do I have time to, I want to test them all, but.
Do I really need to test a graphic design AI tool right now when I have a great graphic design team in house? No, not necessarily. It’s more of I rather put those resources towards something that I, a seat that I really do need filled. Yes,
Julia McCoy: exactly.
Ashley Segura: As we wrap up, I would love to know what your secret sauce is right now.
You shared so much. It definitely sounds like it’s going to be within the AI and technology realm, maybe, but what is that strategy that you’re loving right now? A book, a tool, like where, what’s something that you’re just absolutely obsessed with right now and loving the results of?
Julia McCoy: Yeah I would say, so I know we went very existential.
I’m going to pull us back to very practical reality. So something I’ve been loving is the process. Of taking all this volume of content that we’ve published hundreds of blogs and looking at how can we get more sales and revenue from these content pieces. And that process I think it it will be automated one day, especially when like Google search console gets integrated with AI tools.
But for now it’s. I augmented humanly driven for us. So we’re looking at the KPIs in terms of traffic. And then where is that traffic going? Is it converting? And there’s just so many ways we found. We spent the last week on this. I’ve hosted some meetings and there’s so many different ways we found to actually optimize that traffic more than we didn’t even.
We weren’t even thinking of, so it’s is this CPA on the page? Does it go to the right funnel? Does it end in a sequence? Does that sequence nurture that lead into the next cycle? So that whole process is just, it’s really cool because of what you can get from it. And you can really take your leads from just website traffic all the way to somebody who’s purchased happy and then coming back for more.
And that. That’s the industry puts the term CRO. So conversion rate optimization on that, but that’s something that I’ve been definitely obsessed with is now that we have all this traffic, thanks to all the AI generated humanly optimized content on our site, how do we get that traffic to convert more?
And that is just something that’s really fun because you have a lot to play with. I would say that’s what I’ve been living in and really enjoying lately.
Ashley Segura: Are you using any tools to identify. What pieces of content they’re coming from and where they’re going from there. Like how are you optimizing the conversion process?
Julia McCoy: Yeah, we’re looking at Google search console Google analytics. Granted, it’s pretty difficult of a tool to work with, not the easiest.
So we built up, the tag manager, we built up like our own events and we have somebody on staff that’s learned how to do that and created these events. And so we’re tracking different events and looking at those events. But what we ultimately want to do is actually build an interface into the Google search console that feeds into continent scale. So that way we just open it and we see at a glance all the important numbers. So our solution is we have a tool. We use it. We don’t love it. So we’re building a replacement integration.
Ashley Segura: Nice. If you have the resources to be able to build your own tool set, that is always the win. Yes. Awesome. Julia, thank you so much for everything that you shared today. This has been a really exciting conversation.
Julia McCoy: Oh, thank you, Ashley. This is so much fun. You’re a great host. You pulled out so much, so many good questions.
I love that we went into the practical and we’re looking ahead at the future because I think you have to have both, especially when it comes to AI.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. Look at your career journey alone. Like that just goes to scream how much looking ahead really makes a difference and allows you to pivot when you really need it.
Julia McCoy: Yeah. True story. Awesome. Thank you.
