In this episode, Michelle Frechette and Corey Maass discuss their ongoing project focused on website and product development. They reflect on their progress, addressing the challenges of balancing time and managing tech debt. The conversation highlights their experiences working with a designer, emphasizing the importance of effective communication and feedback. They also touch on the significance of collaboration, and share personal anecdotes about organizing their workspaces. As they prepare for Black Friday, they discuss promotional strategies and the impact of seasonal changes on their work schedule.
Top Takeaways:
- Steady Progress Amid Prioritization Challenges: Both Corey and Michelle recognize the challenges of juggling tasks across IPAWP and OMGIMG. While there’s excitement about big-picture ideas (e.g., Meetups, collective empowerment, SEO experiments), they understand the importance of incremental progress.
- AI and Designer Collaboration for Website Improvements: Corey utilized AI-generated content alongside a designer’s expertise to rework their website. While the AI helped quickly produce a series of articles for SEO experimentation, a designer was brought in to enhance the visual appeal and user experience. This blend of automation and human creativity reflects a strategic approach to balancing efficiency with quality.
- Cross-Platform Engagement is Essential: Michelle’s experience with followers migrating to Bluesky reinforces the need to maintain a presence across multiple platforms. Both agree that while Twitter remains valuable for now, having an established Bluesky presence ensures they’re ready if a platform shift occurs.
- Black Friday and Marketing Planning: Michelle and Corey are focusing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. Michelle plans to queue social media posts, while Corey wants to analyze current traffic bumps to inform their approach.
Mentioned In The Show:
- Elgato Key Light
- Fiverr
- Upwork
- Claude
- Luke Netti
- Cory Miller
- We Work
- Text Expander
- Josh Pigford
- Bluesky
- Nathan Wrigley
- Cuppa
- Beaver Builder
- ThumbPress
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🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:
- Corey Maass
- Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
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Transcript:
Michelle Frechette 00:00:34 How is that for drama?
Corey Maass 00:00:36 That was so cool.
Michelle Frechette 00:00:39 I thought that’d be kind of fun. You know.
Corey Maass 00:00:44 We are professionals. We totally know what we’re doing.
Michelle Frechette 00:00:48 I probably didn’t even need to take us off stage. I probably would have overplayed and then brought us right back on. So we’ll play with that next week and see how that nice. So good to see you. We had a week off last week. We’re back this week and I don’t know how are we doing? I guess we can next week, unless you’re traveling. I’m. I’m still here. Even though it’s Thanksgiving.
Corey Maass 00:01:06 I’m still. I’ll be here and probably available. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: Okay.
Corey Maass: Certainly. Tuesday. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:14 That’ll be the plan anyway.
Corey Maass 00:01:15 Usually Wednesday ends up being a day off. But yeah.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:21 Yeah. Sounds good. I actually just realized that I don’t have my lights on. Let’s see how this, how this works. Well this.
Corey Maass 00:01:28 Yeah. You look you know so casual today. Wow. Those are really nice lights.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:32 I spent a lot of money on these lights. I might as well use them. Right.
Corey Maass 00:01:37 And my I mean let’s see. So. So this is light on. Yeah. Let’s see. Light off. Light on. That’s a $20 Amazon ring light. I’ll get you. Yours looks a lot better than mine.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:54 I spent too much money on these. But considering how much time I spend on camera.
Corey Maass 00:01:59 Right.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:00 It made sense, and I’ve been using them like crazy. They’re Elgato, their key lights. And instead of getting one, I have two. So they’re this way, which, of course, you could see in my glasses.
Corey Maass 00:02:09 The way they’re supposed.To be. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:12 And somebody tried to get me to, like, reposition them so that they don’t show up in my glasses. I’m like, they could be on the ceiling and they’re going to show up in my glasses. That is just a light reflection works. So.
Corey Maass 00:02:23 I need diffusers, you know.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:25 There you go.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:26 Right there.
Corey Maass 00:02:26 There you go.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:29 Anyway. But yeah.
Corey Maass 00:02:31 I mean, if you’re, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound, like, get the diffusers and then.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:38 They already have diffusers. I know there’s just. I’ll take a picture of my setup for you later. You can see like they are diffused lights. That’s the thing. You know, like they’re good lights. They just glass reflects even if it’s plastic. So I know, go figure.
Corey Maass 00:02:51 Damn you. Chemistry. Chemistry. It’s not physics. Chemistry.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:55 No, it is chemistry. It is physics, isn’t it? Light refraction?
Corey Maass 00:02:58 I mean, everything is. Everything is physics, but.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:00 I mean, we’re just going to blame it on physics anyway. Hello.
Corey Maass: Hi.
Michelle Frechette: Oh, so we’re just scrolling along. I thought, you know, when you. And when you asked me back in the beginning of this year. Hey, doing part of this, I thought we’re just gonna get this thing by July.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:20 It’s going to be like making money. And I’m like, there’s a bandwidth issue with my brain and your time and my time and your brain and. Yeah, but, things don’t happen as quickly as you’d like them to all the time. And I have been enjoying the ride anyway. So how’s that for.
Corey Maass: Right.
Michelle Frechette: You know. Yeah, I mean, it’s I still am very happy with the way things are going, and I think we have lots of opportunities to make things better, which is what we’re gonna talk about a little bit today. We’ve talked a lot in the past about how the website was good? But could be better. Yeah, okay. Thumbs down. You didn’t get the thumbs down. Did I get it there? Okay.
Corey Maass 00:04:03 I turned my I turned my reactions off.
Michelle Frechette 00:04:05 Oh I don’t know how to do that. And I kind of like when they randomly just do things anyway. Come on. There we go. We got hearts. I don’t know, anyway.
Michelle Frechette 00:04:16 Yeah, you’re supposed to get, like, lasers or something, I don’t know. Anyway. Yeah. So it’s 4:00, but the clocks changed a couple of weeks ago. It’s almost dark outside right now. And it could be ten for as much as my brain thinks it is. So.
Corey Maass 00:04:34 Yeah. It’s the dark early thing is not okay.
Michelle Frechette 00:04:37 I’m a little loopy. What am I what are you going to say? But, But. Yeah. So you’ve been working with a designer. Is it on Fiverr? Who are you working with? I can’t remember.
Corey Maass 00:04:45 A referral of a referral, so I, I did put, it it’s such a good exercise to write up a brief and put it on Upwork, or at least write a brief to put up on a put on Upwork, even if you don’t end up hiring somebody, which is what I wound up doing. So posted a job which forced me to write a brief, and it also forced me to finally take a day and partnered with Claude.
Corey Maass 00:05:26 Wrote rewrote all of the copy for the home page. So I found a couple of different frameworks for writing everything you should have on a home page. And so kind of, you know, pick piece picked, grabbed the, the sections that made sense to me and the flow that made sense to me. And that resonated with me and other sites that I was looking at for influence. And then, dropped in all the copy from our site and transcripts and basically just primed the pump of, you know, here are all the words and here are the talks that I’ve given and here are transcripts and here’s blah, blah, blah, and worked with Claude to come up with all of the different sections and, and the actual sentences and like what should be on the page. And then, and it was it took most of a day, maybe that’s not maybe less, a good, good part of a day. And it was one of those like, it’s just it’s an exercise that you, you know, you need to do.
Corey Maass 00:06:44 But it’s tough to make yourself do. And, and if you’re doing it by yourself, it’s really, really and and have ADHD, it’s really, really tough to make yourself do. And so it was actually awesome to have somebody else in the room essentially. And and we worked on it together and we refined it. And then I put it on the page in just in with no design, literally just section, section, section, to try to sort of get a feel for scrolling through the whole thing and then made some tweaks. And of course, Claude was not always 100% accurate. Watching the ghost behind me, it’s. The door opens and closes.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:31 I saw the tail.Your ghost has a dog tail.
Corey Maass 00:07:33 Hi Ohso. Hi. Oh. Come on, be cute on camera.
Michelle Frechette: Aaww.
Corey Maass: We recently got a haircut, so we’re looking.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:44 I can see that. So cute.
Corey Maass 00:07:45 Less fuzzy than usual. This is Ohso.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:49 Ohso’s like just put me down.
Corey Maass 00:07:50 Yeah, exactly. It’s like, I love this and hate this. I love this and I hate this.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:55 Exactly. Dichotomy.
Corey Maass 00:07:58 Stay. Stay and be quiet. All right. So I then would highlight the whole page. And paste it back into Claude. Because there was, there was it was also interesting to. So there’s bullet points, there’s paragraphs, there’s taglines. You know, there’s all these different sort of ways to restate problems and solutions and features and stuff like that. and then oh. And, and then I showed it to, I worked with, you familiar with Luke Netti?
Michelle Frechette 00:08:37 Sounds familiar, but I can’t bring a face to it.
Corey Maass 00:08:39 So a Twitter acquaintance, trying to look, lukenetti.com. Is kind of a wording pro, and so he worked with me for an hour to sort of just uzhuzh ideas and, you know, like how, you know, fresh eyes kind of thing. and then also, grabbed Cory Miller and had him and walked him through all of it.
Corey Maass 00:09:08 And he’s like, right, but what about this? And what about this? And so again, would like I’d grab the all of the copy. And this is so cool because I’m like, okay, Claude, you know, basically go back through and infuse, take this other new concept that I forgot to mention or I want to emphasize and like sprinkle it over all of this where appropriate. And so it would make little changes here or there. And it just, you know, again hours, hours saved and and it helped. And, and I actually did the damn thing like I don’t I probably it would have been twice the struggle to get through it if I would have gotten through it at all. And this is like I miss working. I used to work in a We Work with a bunch of colleagues and friends, all of whom were also working on their own startups, and so we were alone together. But you could always grab somebody and be like, hey, I, you know, can I talk at you for a minute or would you mind reviewing this with me for an hour? Because inevitably they would do the same thing to you at some point. And it was so valuable.
Michelle Frechette 00:10:17 It is. It’s really nice to have somebody to bounce those ideas off.
Corey Maass 00:10:22 Well, I do have now have rubber ducks on my desk. Thank you. Michelle.
Michelle Frechette: You’re welcome.
Corey Maass: They don’t always, solve the problem. But anyway, so it was it was cool because all of this, all this to say, I wound up with a page that was just the words which should be more important than the design. And then, depending on who your customer is. And then wrote a brief pointing at that page going here, all the sections that I need here are the words. So you have some sense of, you know, am I writing? Is this a letter style? Is this bullet point style? Is this, and and then wound up again handing it to putting it on Upwork. A few people piqued my interest, but I was like, I don’t there’s it’s Upwork like you even even when you look at, people’s portfolios, like everything, everything smells like, I hate to say it, and I’ve had really good experiences on Upwork.
Corey Maass 00:11:28 I’ve also had bad experiences on Upwork. But everything feels suspect or sus, as the kids say these days, which is actually a term that they stole from the 60’s.
Michelle Frechette: Okay.
Corey Maass: 60’s or 70’s. Everything comes back around.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Sure does.
Corey Maass: So a yeah, referral of a referral and wound up working with a guy, who’s been great. Like, gave gave me a bunch of stuff very quickly. Like the perfect experience. And so assuming everything goes well, like, I want to keep working with him and I will make lots and lots of referrals for work for him because he’s been fabulous.
Michelle Frechette: That’s great.
Corey Maass: And yeah, so quick, quick to get me designs and and said right up front like let’s get you, let’s get you some pieces. And then if you like it then you’ll pay me half and then we’ll rip through the rest of it. And me being me twice already, I’ve totally derailed us and been like, okay, well, you know, this, the the way we’re working isn’t working like, let’s because so, like, we were designing section by section because I kind of wanted to verify, you know, the hero’s arguably the most important and design wise is like, we don’t we think of a web page and it’s static, but you’re scrolling.
Corey Maass 00:12:46 So it is actually a like scene by scene by scene approach, and so the design at the end can’t not match the design at the beginning unless there’s some sort of flow to it. So I had had us doing section by section, and then I was like, I started to actually implement it. Because I’m like, we need to get moving already. And, and I was like, this isn’t like I’m struggling. It’s going to get harder and harder. He’s like, yeah, dude, we can’t do section by section. Like, now that we have some sense of it, like, I need to do the whole thing so it’s coherent. And I said, absolutely, do your thing and I and again, like, he was totally good with me derailing what we had been doing or the way we had been doing it and was like, I’ll get you something within two days and came back in a day like and great. and I’m, we’re really close. Like, I’m really happy with pieces of a couple of different things.
Corey Maass 00:13:39 And if we put it all together, I think we’ve got a design. So we’ve got the words, we’ve got the design. I’ve started to implement it. I’m hoping that it only takes a couple of days to implement, because we obviously wanted to have a new, at least new homepage with new messaging.
Michelle Frechette 00:13:58 Especially with especially because we’re hopefully driving some traffic for Black Friday too, which would be nice.
Corey Maass 00:14:05 Yeah. So that’s the new design. And I’m the just, well, we can talk about. I’m, I’m starting to essentially rewrite the product, as well with we’ve got, I’ve taken a, like again because we’re shifting as we’ve been talking about for months, but we’re, you know, I’ve, I’ve lipstick on on a pig kind of made changes to the existing product to try to emphasize more the auto generation or the quick generation from templates kind of functionality. But I still like the, the actual designer, you know, is good enough. Like, there’s a lot of things that are good enough, but it’s getting more and more difficult to add new features or to make updates because, I mean, that’s how things go, with, with tech debt and with first versions, because there’s a lot of stuff that I built and was like, okay, I’ll come back to that, you know, but at like we got to, we got to the point where we could launch like that was what was important.
Corey Maass 00:15:11 So, so making updates. So I’ve been chipping away at that in the background, but it’s been nice to like, go, okay, let me work on the website for a bit. Okay. Let me work on the product for a bit and kind of, not burnout on either, because a lot of the in order to solve some of the tech debt is like silly actual math. Like, I spent all Friday. I spent the entire day figuring how how to tweak essentially like a handful of pixels. Like there’s it’s not not just moving it on the a page like it’s programmatic and the way it’s aligned and, and, you know, built into various things. But like it took the better part of the day to like, figure out how to make it so that, things make things work the way you’d expect and are and are more bulletproof. So.
Michelle Frechette 00:16:03 Yeah. Was I telling you you said pixels made me think this was I telling you about when Google moved, like, changed their their, what’s the word, their logo by just a couple of pixels.
Michelle Frechette 00:16:14 They moved like the second ‘L’ like up and over time, like, literally like one pixel up and one pixel over. And people are like, they change the logo!
Corey Maass 00:16:25 Isn’t that amazing? People notice this stuff.
Michelle Frechette 00:16:28 I’m like, they do, which is just insane in some ways. But like, also like kind of cool, right?
Corey Maass 00:16:35 I mean, how nice for that. People are paying that much attention. But but you’re also, you know, it’s crazy because it’s as a brand. We don’t think about this much. We think about all the services and all the things that they offer. But right now, the vast majority of the internet goes to one page and sees the same thing and then types into an input. You know, like I, I’m in Chrome, so I type into the bar at the top. I never go to google.com proper or rarely.
Michelle Frechette 00:17:08 Yeah, same. I except on my phone because it like defaults to that for some reason on my phone. Right. But and I just want to say I do recognize we are not Google like people are going to notice those pixels yet. Yet.
Corey Maass 00:17:22 Well, and this is again this is this is functionality. Not so it’s this.
Michelle Frechette 00:17:26 No I understand.
Corey Maass 00:17:27 In the image builder. So it’s it’s actually kind of a fun mental brainteaser is you’ve got if you’re, if you’re generating an image, an open graph image 1200 by 630 pixels. Right. But if you’re viewing it in the editor. Your screen might only be this wide, so it’s shrunk down, right? So it’s it’s 100% which represents 1200 pixels. And then if you’ve got two columns, you’ve got 50% representing 600 by 600. But they not might not be 600 by 600 on the screen. And so there’s a little handle in there so that you can slide it to be, you know, 20/80 or 60/40 or whatever. Right. But that’s again, it’s you can’t use 600 or 400 or 300 because your image, the representation of it is is not 1200. It might be 486, you know. And so it was that kind of stupid math that I end up like drawing on a stupid piece of stupid paper with a stupid purple.
Corey Maass 00:18:36 Well, the purple marker is not not stupid. The purple marker is awesome.
Michelle Frechette 00:18:41 But the paper is stupid.
Corey Maass 00:18:44 The paper is stupid and the math is stupid. I started doing this years ago. Honestly, like it’s therapeutic. Like to write really fast with big letters. Feels really good. And then. I hate to say it, but as I get a little older, I can’t write as small as I used to. Like my notebooks used to be. This big, like I had one. I won’t go find it now, but like the The notebook I used to always have in my backpack that I’d carry at conferences. You know, I just don’t. Now I type into my phone, but if I’m writing, it’s it’s this big now.
Michelle Frechette 00:19:21 Yeah. No, I know I used to have like I do still sometimes for quick notes do this, but more often than not I have this.
Corey Maass 00:19:28 Yep, yeah. If it’s just a to do list like it’s, it’s small size but always with a red pen.
Corey Maass 00:19:35 I don’t know why. And these are, these are I’ve, I promote this all the time on Twitter. These are reusable.
Michelle Frechette: Oh yes.
Corey Maass: So I have, I have and I actually went on Etsy and like paid too much money for a little box that that like so again ADHD so I can’t not see this. Right. And there’s nothing in front of it. I can’t use it to do app because I’ll open another window and then these things no longer exist. I am a baby going peekaboo. And if you do this, you have literally disappeared to me, right? So this has to be physical and on my desk and aimed at me. But each day it goes in the box and I pull out a blank one from underneath. I illustrate this on camera and I copy anything that hasn’t I haven’t done from the day before, and then that goes in the box. And then when all of these get filled, I take a wet paper towel and just wipe them all off and start over because I felt bad that I was like, filling up notebooks and then throwing them away.
Corey Maass 00:20:39 Yeah. So, but these. So these are erasable pens. But they have to be red. So that took a little work to find. Erasable pens.
Michelle Frechette 00:20:50 Spent a whole day just getting into my organizing organizing system.
Corey Maass 00:20:54 I know what was so years ago. There’s a the, really nice the bic clickable. I have them up there, but I somehow I found a red pen and that stayed in my bag for ages. Like it was one of those pens that, you know, the every once in a while you get a pen that just seems to last for years. And so I got so used to writing with a red pen that when I switched back to black or blue, I was like, this will not stand. This is not acceptable. And so ever since then, I buy literally boxes of red pens and then now red erasable pens. But not to be confused with in high school I. I actually started writing in a big notebook with a purple marker. And so this is a terrible thing.
Corey Maass 00:21:40 Although my the kids in the neighborhood benefit is I go to the dollar store and I buy the packs of magic markers and I take out only the purple one.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:51 Give away the rest.
Corey Maass 00:21:53 And so then I have these boxes of of markers that just that don’t have purple, purple. But I’m not going to use them for anything. So I of course, I’m not going to throw them away. But so like, there’s a little girl named Olivia across the street and from age five through now, she’s nine. I, I have given her at least a couple of these packs of markers. And before her, it was the neighbors in Nashville. And before them, it was the the kids on the street in New York City.
Michelle Frechette 00:22:22 All these kids everywhere going. And mom says, which one’s purple? And she goes, what’s purple?
Corey Maass 00:22:33 Or why, you know, why is the world depriving us of purple?
Michelle Frechette 00:22:35 But exactly, exactly. Oh, funny. Yeah, I think it’s important. I still haven’t figured out what the right organization’s organizing system is for me yet.
Michelle Frechette 00:22:45 I’ve tried everything, and I’m still I. I’m just so grateful that y’all can’t see the piles of my desk that are not in in camera. And that is my goal this week is to start to sort and and work through. Because when I’m in a cluttered space, I feel like I have a cluttered mind. And so I don’t I need to have a little more organizations that I’m not going crazy. But yeah, anyway.
Corey Maass 00:23:09 It’s so hard to take the time. So we, we have the we actually let we we have a house cleaner. Occasionally I wash regularly. But we don’t. We had not previously let her into this room, my office, because there was plenty of. We live in a small house, but somehow there’s still plenty for her to do.
Michelle Frechette 00:23:34 I understand.
Corey Maass 00:23:34 But this is also the guest room. And so we finally said, okay, you know. Time for the once in a while cleaning. And that meant me actually getting everything off of my desk. So, you know, it’s like you want them to have you want a cleaning person to have surfaces to clean.
Corey Maass 00:23:49 So I actually was forced to clear off the, my desk and and thankfully it hasn’t crawled back yet to being the piles that it normally is.
Michelle Frechette 00:24:01 I understand, I understand for sure. That’s too funny though. Okay.
Corey Maass 00:24:09 But anyway, it it is. It is Black Friday. Our Black Friday sale started. I only wound up submitting to about half the directories that, I made a list of.
Michelle Frechette 00:24:22 There’s so many of them.
Corey Maass 00:24:23 Yeah. And so, I mean, I still feel good about it. Like we assuming everybody put us on these lists. We’re still submitted to, like, a dozen places or something. And so I kind of got to the point where I was like, it’s just exhausting and boring. And even with text Expander and the the image is like on hand, so you can just you can go fast, but you’re just like, talking about again, my brain just starts screaming like, this is so annoying. So I went with the 12 that basically I recognized off the top.
Corey Maass 00:25:01 So I’m like, if they have brand recognition with me, maybe that means something I don’t know. And so we’re listed in a dozen places and put the banners on the site and added the discount. But I, I’m conflicted about. So we had said a few sessions ago that we would email our list, but our list, I looked is still primarily customers. And so I feel a little bad, like we don’t have a separate promotion.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah so we shouldn’t.
Corey Maass: So I don’t yeah, I didn’t feel okay about that.
Michelle Frechette: I agree.
Corey Maass: Which yeah, it’s it feels weird because it’s like everything, everything you talk about and everything you read is, is all about you build up a mailing list because you own the mailing list, and then you can market to the mailing list, and that’s fine. But I imagine that a fair number of people will end up in the same situation. And I, I could obviously take and maybe I’ll do this, I could take the email addresses from our customers and remove it, you know, flag them in our newsletter and then send it to the rest of the people. So maybe I’ll maybe I’ll do that work tomorrow.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:13 If it doesn’t take too long. Yeah.
Corey Maass 00:26:16 And then and then Twitter.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:18 If it takes ridiculous time then not.
Corey Maass 00:26:19 Right. Right. Twitter we have the Facebook group. But again I think that’s mostly customers. And so.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:30 We’ll put it out on socials for sure.
Corey Maass 00:26:32 Yeah. But so I’m kind of at that like now what do I do? Right. Like yeah I don’t I don’t I don’t feel set up to take out ads. I’m sure I know every newsletter is booked because right now everybody is going to be promoting, you know, every classified. Hopefully. I’m hoping for the newsletter sake of the newsletters that every classified is sold out. Because I’m sure most people are going to want classifieds, especially over the next couple of weeks, to promote their Black Friday. And so this has kind of been it brings us back to the conundrum we’ve had all along where some of our audience is on socials. I actually went through and did this crazy thing where, you can’t I couldn’t find a way.
Corey Maass 00:27:22 There’s got to be a way or an app or something, but a way to export all of your Twitter followers. So as best as I could, I scraped all of my @CoreyMaass followers, I think followers, and then dumped them into a CSV and then used PHP to generate a page that has 500 links on it. And every day, because you can’t mass follow because you’ll get flagged. But so every day when I notice it, I go and I click on ten of them, and then I follow ten people. So little by little, OMG is at least starting to follow a lot more people which means where at least once landing in everybody’s inbox to say OMG followed you.
Michelle Frechette: That’s good.
Corey Maass: And trying to slowly start building that up. The other thing I did was I’d read, I think it’s Josh Pigford on Twitter. I think it was another, another founder that I follow like entrepreneur I should say. Yeah. Josh Pigford, I’m pretty sure it was him. I think I think, anyway, But he was like.
Corey Maass 00:28:42 He’s he he’s of the the mind where, like, SEO is like, there’s human SEO and there’s programmatic SEO. And so, I’m sorry if it wasn’t him, but he or somebody tweeted, like, okay, I just published. Sorry. Dogs barking. Anyway, he he published here, he he tweeted like, okay, I just published 100,000 articles. Let’s see what happens with SEO. And I was like, you know what? Let’s just do it. And so I didn’t publish 100,000 articles. Hold on. Let me go yell out a dog.
Michelle Frechette: Okay.
Corey Maass: Talk amongst yourself.
Michelle Frechette 00:29:31 What shall I say to myself? Well, let’s see, I did notice and I think he’s got headphones and he could still hear me, but, that we have our Bluesky. yeah, we have our Bluesky account set up now too. So one of the things I’ve been noticing over the last week is this I don’t want to say mass exodus, but it’s really been a lot of people who have been either adding Bluesky to their media kits or just migrating and closing down their Twitter/X account.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:01 All my number. My followers on Twitter literally went down this week and I had, you know, over, I don’t know, over 18,000, something like that. But my Bluesky went from like three followers to almost 600 now. So in just the space of less than a week, really. And so I was one of the things I had written down was, oh, check Blue sky to make sure we had claimed that. And sure enough, you are on the ball. We already have that.
Corey Maass 00:30:29 So I was talking to.
Michelle Frechette: I just followed us.
Corey Maass: Nice. I was talking to Nathan?
Michelle Frechette 00:30:37 Nathan Wrigley? Nathan Ingram?
Corey Maass 00:30:40 Yeah. Wrigley. This morning. Because he was suggesting that he’s like, you know, I’m I’m. I don’t know if you’ve moved yet, and I’m like, no, I, I tend to I try to go with the winner. Twitter is still the winner. I would love everybody to actually abandon Twitter. But they’re not gonna.
Michelle Frechette: No,
Corey Maass: I, I don’t believe it.
Michelle Frechette 00:31:01 I will be in all the places.
Corey Maass 00:31:04 Yeah. And that’s what it’s like I, I just can’t like I have success on Twitter meeting people and interacting and like the algorithm is finely tuned for me. It actually works great.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Likewise.
Corey Maass: And and so, you know, the fact that everybody, almost everybody is doing both tells me that they’re, they’re too afraid to actually make the jump. I have watched a couple of people export their data and delete their account.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah, same.
Corey Maass: Good for them. Great. But the fact that the vast majority of people are not leaving tells me that they’re never going to leave unless something truly happens, in which case, great. We actually. Exodus. Fine. You know. and then we watch Bluesky turn into the next Twitter. but. Yeah. but anyway, so, yeah, I was saying that, we we’ve talked about this before. We signed up for ages ago, a service called Cuppa, which I really like the outcome of their, the content they generate.
Corey Maass 00:32:11 And so I had it produce, like 50 articles and then put about half of them, just publish them to the blog and then scheduled the rest to go like one a day, on a series of topics. And the content is fine. Like, I, I do feel guilty, Like I don’t want to do this. but I if it if it helps people find the site or it helps. You know, Google give us authority, then of course, I’m going to play the game like. And it’s.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah, for sure.
Corey Maass: It’s too bad that that’s where we’re at, but I’m willing to do the experiment essentially.
Michelle Frechette 00:32:51 Sure. Absolutely. So and if you and I had unlimited time and resources, that would be a different story. But.
Corey Maass 00:32:57 I’d be hiring people left and right, to actually write articles on topics and stuff like that. But, you know, hopefully. And the truth is, like, since we’re honest on this podcast and I assume that most of our eventual customers will not end up watching this kind of thing is like, not that I’m a I’m, we’re doing anything wrong or immoral or illegal or anything like that, but it’s like, I hope that all of the generated content lights the SEO fire, but then eventually, like, floats to the bottom.
Michelle Frechette 00:33:30 Yeah, exactly.
Corey Maass 00:33:31 So eventually gets replaced by better content, human content, whatever. Or it gets removed. Like, if nobody’s looking at it, fine. You know?
Michelle Frechette 00:33:39 Yeah, exactly. So switching gears for a second. IPAWP.
Corey Maass 00:33:51 IPA. The great idea.
Michelle Frechette 00:33:53 A great idea. And it still is a great idea. One thing I noticed, I asked you if we could put the directory in the in the navigation, and it is, but only if you’re logged in.
Corey Maass 00:34:05 Oh really? Oosp.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:06 And I don’t know how to add it because I was just going to add it and I was like, I don’t know what magic you created because I can’t find how to do that. I don’t know if you want to do it now. Share your screen and show me, like, what did you do to create that? No, I’m in the nav.
Corey Maass 00:34:24 I’m smiling because I pulled up our analytics and we actually, like, we have a bump in traffic at the moment.
Michelle Frechette: Nice.
Corey Maass 00:34:32 so I’m curious. Interesting.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:34 But I want to make it useful for the people who find it, who are members to be able to be found.
Corey Maass 00:34:39 So. So there’s a couple of things that are hurting us right now that hurt my feelings. I’m sharing my screen, which is IPA. Allow. Share. Do do do. Get to be the right size. There you go. everybody copy my password.
Michelle Frechette 00:35:06 I know you always tell me you’re sharing your screen, and then after that, I’m like, oh, no.
Corey Maass 00:35:10 That’s okay. I mean, that’s the I know it looks like that. My password is dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot.
Michelle Frechette 00:35:16 Oh my gosh. Now we all know.
Corey Maass 00:35:20 So yeah. Dashboard. So, using Beaver Builder. Oh tisk tisk ThumbPress. Bad form, Beaver Builder layouts, so. Nope, that’s not it. Appearance menus. So I do a, logged in and logged out.
Michelle Frechette 00:35:43 Yes.
Corey Maass 00:35:44 So logged in has dashboard product directory as opposed to archive. So then. Product directory.
Michelle Frechette 00:36:00 Oh and see like when I logged in I don’t have access to all the things that just showed up on yours. So that was why I couldn’t find it. Gotcha.
Corey Maass 00:36:09 Oops. I click the wrong button. Products archive. God, this interface is so dated, so dated.
Michelle Frechete: So dated.
Corey Maass: We call it product archive. No products directory.
Michelle Frechette 00:36:25 Yeah. What did we call it? Hold on.We called it. Ta da! I gotta switch over. Product directory. You got it.
Corey Maass 00:36:39 So it’s so the product directory and this is, this is the problem with side projects. Right? Is finding the time and prioritizing. And so I feel a little bad that like this looks just okay. It definitely needs a lot of love. And then so the we have a plug in now. Apologies to everybody who got fake emails or spam. It’s not really spam, but like test emails. Well, we were, we had a developer building a plug in.
Michelle Frechette:Yeah.
Corey Maass: Which will do what we had talked about where it will pair people up for essentially marketing exercises.
Corey Maass 00:37:28 But I was like, oh, right. If you receive if Michelle receives an email that says, hey, go interact with Corey, like there needs to be a link to Corey’s website and or Corey needs a profile on here IPA. And so we introduced, what did I call it? Company? Yeah. So the start of like, OMG is the name of the company links to whatever socials and then whatever products I list. The funny thing is, oops. If I, if I log out, I need to fix this. So, like, this page looks very broken. Wonk. I don’t actually know why it’s doing this, but I’ll figure it out. I’m a smart kid. But we need, like, we need these. We need a basic profile like. That will be public. And so we I need to like, flush this out. And then we need to get everybody to fill this out, even bare minimum in order to then do the exercises that we’re talking about.
Michelle Frechette 00:38:49 Uh oh. Where’d you go?
Corey Maass 00:38:57 So there’s just this one. As ever professionalism. So anyway, so it’s like there’s there’s always all these steps that we have to take to get things out. And then again, as we’ve talked about, these concepts are great when I’m sitting watching TV and my brain spinning, I’m like, yes, IPA, do all this. But then when I sit down, I’m like, I need to redo the website, I need to redo the product. I need to set up the Black Friday, deals. I need to, you know what I mean?
Michelle Frechette 00:39:32 Yeah I know.
Corey Maass 00:39:33 It’’s so hard to. So yeah, we we had hoped to have this long ago, and at this point we’ve got some of the functionality, which is great. So we’re getting closer. And so I like I think the last time you and I spoke, we said, okay, so let’s let’s be realistic. I do want to email all of the IPA members and just say, hey, life gets in the way.
Corey Maass 00:39:55 Thanks for, thanks for your patience. and we’re going to aim for first of the year, again, doing something to just give ourselves a break, which I think is very reasonable.
Michelle Frechette 00:40:06 Reasonable. Absolutely. I agree 100%.
Corey Maass 00:40:11 Thank you. But I’m liking the. Yeah, I again the the idea feels good and even the like, as we’ve said a few times or at least I’ve, I’ve certainly emphasized, like there’s something here and I like that we’re pushing forward and and we’ve got a group of people and a way to email everybody and sort of connect. But there’s like, I want, I want to empower us as a group of people to do something like, again, I keep thinking of us as, as, like a union where we’ve got collective bargaining, whatever that means. Like it’s not us against anybody, necessarily us against the world.
Michelle Frechette 00:40:50 Maybe it’s us against the world. That’s right. We’re not going to cancel none of that kind of thing.
Corey Maass 00:40:56 Right. But like, you know, starting to think about, like, what if what if we had like, I want to see more Meetups.
Corey Maass 00:41:01 And so I’m starting to think about like an IPA Meetup or an IPA conference or something where we’ve got because we’ve got a bunch of like minded people presumably facing the same struggles, you know, how do we, again, as a collective, do as an alliance, help each other out and all boats go up together kind of thing.
Michelle Frechette 00:41:25 Yep, yep, yep exactly. I agree 100%.
Corey Maass 00:41:29 But we got to find time and place to do it.
Michelle Frechette 00:41:33 That is that is the challenge. That’s a good word challenge. That is the hurdle. That is yeah. All of the above. Yep 100%.
Corey Maass 00:41:50 What are you clicking on really.
Michelle Frechette 00:41:53 No I was just I got a direct message. I thought it was from you telling me something. It wasn’t,
Corey Maass 00:41:59 Explaining why I disappeared for a moment. Yeah, I had to go fix my hair. I’m sorry.
Michelle Frechette 00:42:04 There you go. Perfect. Well, I don’t have anything else this week. I don’t know about you. I’m. I’m. I’m happy to call it at 42 minutes instead of an hour if you are, and then, you know, there’s I think we do have quite a few things that are in play.
Michelle Frechette 00:42:22 I can start working on some social media for Black Friday.
Corey Maass: That’d be great.
Michelle Frechette: And Cyber Monday and getting those queued up so that those will start to go out with, with our, within our dates. I can’t remember what our what our dates are, but I know they’re on our website in there and everything else I have, I just don’t have them off the top of my head. So, I.
Corey Maass 00:42:40 They went live yesterday through the 9th of December, so.
Michelle Frechette 00:42:44 All right. Well, I will start queuing those up.
Corey Maass 00:42:45 Doing this a week after kind of thing.
Michelle Frechette 00:42:47 Gotcha. I’ll keep those up then and get those out there. So people are, who might be interested, will learn more about it. And, you keep working on the stuff you’re working on and hopefully we’ll hear some teachings with some, some sales in the next week or two, for sure.
Corey Maass 00:43:01 I love that I, I, I need to go investigate why our why? We’ve actually got a little bump in traffic right now, which is pretty satisfying.
Michelle Frechette 00:43:08 It is nice. I like it. Sounds good.
Corey Maass: All right,
Michelle Frechette: All right.
Corey Maass: Have a good night.
Michelle Frechette: So, yeah. You too. We’ll see everybody next week. Bye.
Corey Maass 00:43:15 Roll the credits. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Bum bum bum bum bum bum.
