Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today it’ll be sort of a random catch up episode. I have a handful of notes that I’ve handwritten on just scrap paper that I have laying around here. There’s a couple kind of relevant things to you, the audience, that you might care about.
One, which I’ll, I’ll put Pretty much in the front of the episode here is I was featured sort of in a Forbes article, Forbes. com. So I’ll, I’ll explain that. I actually got a link to a specific. Area, which I’ll tell you about. And a couple other things that I’m a bit of a journaler, but not always. So I’ll explain that a little bit, but I have a new journal that I, I broke the seal on it and I’m going to be using it and I’ll explain what I’m going to be doing with a specific journal.
I will talk a little bit, not too much, but just a little bit about Google. And it’ll be kind of a tight episode. Hope everybody’s doing well out there. I’ve had, I think, quite a few interviews in the last several weeks here. And I was doing pretty good with the scheduling. And then I was meeting with my VA, my virtual assistant, Callie, who will be seeing this later.
And she was like, Hey, what about the next episode coming up? And I, I looked on the Trello board and I realized, oh shit, yeah, that’s right. There’s no, there’s no other episode. Luckily, we, we have over a week, I think we had over 10 days by the time she realized it. And I, I mean, I, I knew that was the fact as well, but anyway, I had several ideas and I pieced together a handful for this episode.
So number one. This is a new thing. So I, I mean, I write stuff down on Post it notes all the time. And I have a little notebook that I carry around with me pretty often. And I just have like lists of ideas in various places. So it’s not consolidated. Although occasionally I do consolidate them. Sometimes it’s in the said journal that I mentioned and I just write it down and then I kind of transferred around and I maybe have a sheet or two, maybe a spread where I have like just 20 different ideas, but a lot of times.
I just forget about them and they’re listed and then I’ll find them a little bit later. I’ll look in the index and be like, Oh yeah, that’s where it was anyway. So the Forbes article is kind of cool. So like many people that work online and maybe folks that don’t work offline online and they just have their, their normal life going on.
I have a Google alert set up for my name so I can see if I’m mentioned somewhere and I could follow up. Honestly, most of the alerts these days are for courses that people have stolen and it’s listed on some bullshit site. Folks don’t buy courses from those areas. All the courses that they are listing are out of date and I don’t even sell them anymore.
So I keep getting those alerts. But occasionally one. Interesting one will come through and I got one on Saturday and I was like, Oh, it says I was listed in Forbes and Google alerts have a little snippet. Of what is covered in there. So I, I read it and I was like, this seems legit. They mentioned me in this article related to AI and I’ll link up to it in the show notes, the title really rolls off the tongue.
It sounds like I titled it, but three chat GPT prompts that helped a parent transform his child’s future. This was written by Dan Fitzpatrick, which I’ll probably reach out because He linked to my video. So in this article, a gentleman named Phil Birchenall, a business consultant from Manchester in the UK, saw one of my videos.
And he in fact mentioned exactly which video it was and why it inspired him. So I think his daughter had some, I don’t know, some educational difficulties in some capacity. And basically. Watch one of my videos and got an idea to help his daughter and help him help his daughter out. So basically They linked to my video, which was cool.
They mentioned me by name, which I thought was kind of surprising. And they linked to the video, which is pretty cool. The interesting thing and the thing that I could report here, I’ll probably do like a, a specific dedicated video to this topic, but I got a link from this big publication, just from a.
Vanity standpoint, it’s kind of cool. I can now say I was mentioned or featured or whatever in Forbes. And I didn’t do anything with it. I just put out my videos like I normally do. So I’m going to tell you how many views I got. Based on that link, we’ll subtract out the couple of views that I did. Cause I was following the link and I was like, Oh wow, this is cool.
I was surprised by it. So surprised that I told my wife, I was like, I think I got a link from Forbes on one of my dumb videos. And she was like, yeah, they are dumb videos, but that’s still cool. So 178, it looks like the story came out on May the 18th, and then roughly 70 views on that day, roughly a hundred.
The next day on the 19th and the day that I’m recording this, May 20th, Monday, May 20th, about a week early before it comes out, I have 181. Or so views. So nothing super huge, I think from. Algorithm standpoint over on YouTube, having all this external or direct traffic is probably a really good thing.
And it looks like roughly 90 percent of the recent views are from those external or direct or unknown sources. Traffic sources as reported on YouTube studio analytics. So pretty cool. And again, kind of a vanity thing. It’s not really moving the needle. However, it does give me two opportunities, which I was like, I should reach out to the person that was featured in the story because that’s pretty cool.
And he actually talked to a reporter somehow he’s getting. featured there, somehow he had a connection. So I’ll probably reach out to him and see if he wants to share a little bit more of the story or anything more specific about how he’s using chat GPT or AI. Otherwise, the other thing is the journalist talked to that person, got some information, found that my video was in, Pretty important part, a primary source of inspiration and link to it.
So they checked it out and they were like, Doug’s not full of shit. We’ll link to his video. We feel confident enough with that, which is cool. So I’m going to reach out probably to both of those folks and just see like, Hey, do you want to, Do you want to collaborate in some way? I have no agenda other than, Hey, maybe we have similar interests.
Maybe we can help each other out and maybe I can learn something, especially from the person who watched the video and got something out of it. So pretty cool. I’ll keep y’all posted. I probably will publish a short YouTube video where it just goes straight to the point. And it will probably be five minutes long.
I was featured on Forbes. Here are the results and just share the facts. It should only take like five minutes to do that or so. Okay. The other thing I mentioned journaling and again, a little teaser. I’ll probably do a video on journaling because I am slowly realizing how powerful it is. Even though I’m not like a daily journaler, I will do it for maybe.
Whatever, six months, six weeks, a few years all in a row and do it pretty diligently and journal while I’m traveling, journal while I’m working, journal just for fun, journal to get out of my head and stop worrying about stuff. And I started to look back at a few of them and You know, put some tape on the, on the binding.
So it’s like a book. So I could see like what year I wrote in there and maybe the topics that are in there a little bit, but at least the year. So I kind of have an idea of what’s going on. I’ll probably dive into just like my sort of scattered practices. And I was chatting with a friend of mine last week.
We were hiking. Her name’s Rachel Richards. I’ve interviewed her on the channel and my other show mile high five. But she mentioned that she has like sort of a similar journaling practice where it’s not consistent all the time, but over a long span of time, like she does journal. And, you know, she’ll go back and read some stuff too, but we have a lot of similarities and the way we journal.
I opened up a new journal and decided that I was going to start tracking my workouts. So, Basically been a bit of a gym rat since I was a kid, probably like 11 or 12, maybe even a tad younger, we joined the YMCA and I would go there all through middle school, all through high school, college, and some actually when I got it.
Out of school. And I had like a full time job. There was actually like a YMCA that was roughly on my commute. So I would go there. And then later on, I went to like an LA fitness or whatever was around anytime fitness. There’s, there’s a handful of chains and some local smaller ones, but over the years I’ve always gone to a gym and pretty much always had a membership or access to a gym and an apartment complex or whatever I’ve never, I’ve never Tracked my workouts and you’re supposed to, it’s like one of the most basic things if you’re training for anything, whether it’s, you know, something physical, whether it’s a team sport, whether it’s an instrument, like recording what you’re doing and tracking your progress is important for the last.
I would say six months I’ve been focusing on making sure I’m getting enough protein, making sure I’m getting enough rest, and it’s made a huge difference. I counted macros, counted my calories pretty diligently. very diligently for about two months, roughly September, October of 2023, just to dial it in, to see where I was at, to see my maintenance calories.
And once I got a handle on it, I stopped tracking so much because It’s kind of a pain in the ass and I did my best whenever I would eat out, I would try to estimate how much was in there and I wasn’t trying to like underestimate, I was trying to do the best I can and it’s tough if you go to like a wedding and there’s a buffet, right?
So you can scoop it out, but it’s hard to judge like how much a normal portion is and blah, blah, blah. One observation that I had is I was probably overtraining and not resting enough and then not eating enough calories for the last 15 to 20 years like I think it was a really bad job at that portion of it and I just I just wasn’t exposed to the right information and there’s various trends and fitness and diet and Culture all through the years.
So wherever I was getting my information probably wasn’t quite right Now I’ve dialed in some of the calorie issues that I was having before and now I’m eating more and getting plenty of protein. And I decided that even though I’m doing those things, I finally need to start keeping track. of what exercises I’m doing, how many sets, the weight, and how many reps so that many of you have heard this, I could progressively overload in a systematic way where I can see like, Oh, over the last two weeks, I could see the workouts.
I could see. Maybe I can’t go up in weight, but maybe I can do a few more reps for each set, or I can do an additional set to get more volume and just work a little harder, progressively overload my muscles. Anyway, I’m only like one day in, I’m gonna go work out as soon as I finish recording this, so I’ll be able to, you know, keep the trend going, and it’s very simple, very straightforward, it only takes a page or two, depending on what the workout is.
The additional thing is actually looked up. specific programming. I was doing most of the stuff right and hitting muscles and muscle groups and giving some time to rest, but now I’m trying to do it a little more methodically. One observation is that the workout that I found, I just looked some stuff up online.
There’s programs that you could purchase courses and, and, you know, Like it all mapped out, but I went to there’s like a million of them. I can’t even remember. It’s like muscle and fitness or something like that. I could tell you in a second here, but basically they have a lot of different workout routines that can fit anyone beginners advanced.
If you only have elastic exercise bands or like the rubber. Bands, or you only have dumbbells or you have access to a full gym or it’s only machines or it’s only like you can get exactly what you need. And I think there might be, there’s more in there than what I need. So I may take out a couple exercises and focus more on like the simplicity versus like five exercises for a specific goal.
body part. I’m exaggerating. It might be like three where there’s like a big compound lift. And then there are several isolation type things for like your biceps or triceps or whatever. And I may just focus on like the big muscle groups and maybe ease back unless I just have more energy or whatever to train a little bit harder.
So I’ll, I’ll see how it goes. The big thing is though, I’m writing the shit in the journal so I can make sure that I’m progressing on a workout per workout or week on week basis. I think it’ll be very effective and it’s nice to, to write this stuff down. Next, we haven’t mentioned Google yet, but I’ll go ahead and mention it here.
A couple areas last week or a couple of weeks ago, by the time this comes out, they announced, Google announced, they’re going to have a lot more AI search results. They’re going to have SGE rolled out on a grander scale. So that’ll be very interesting. I’ve been slowly saying negative stuff about Google where it’s just like, these results are worse.
People don’t want Reddit results, but some people do. There are a lot of people on a live stream a few weeks back and they were like, actually, I love Reddit. And it blew me away because most people that I talked to don’t love Reddit. It’s not the place they go for information and it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out here.
As a result, as I was not happy with the Google results I was getting in somewhat of a, it’s all I could do. I switched to DuckDuckGo. So I switched to DuckDuckGo and I switched to Safari. So I’m not using Chrome primarily. There are a couple of little adjustments. I mean, the thing is, I know that. Using Google products on Chrome will most likely be the best user experience and the fewest bugs.
So I’m still trying to figure out if I’m going to use Chrome for Google products or. Just stick to Safari and it should be good enough. Safari does seem to be handling Google drive, YouTube studio. Everything’s fine with Google calendar and Google Gmail. Those were fine too. But one thing I did on my primary machine here is I actually switched to the native mail app for Safari.
A Mac and the native calendar app on the Mac. And you just link them up, you just log in and then it pulls the, you know, roughly generic feed that, you know, we, we get for these universal applications. Right. So the mail app seems fine. A couple of little things to adjust calendar app seems fine. And I am not sure if I’m going to put it on my laptop.
So I have like a newer Mac air, which is good. That’s the one I travel with. It’s lighter, great battery life. I think it has the M1 battery. processor. Yeah. So it has the M one processor. And then I have an old like 10 year old Mac book pro, which I still have laying around and I’ll just answer email or do a couple of things.
It’s like in an extra room. And if I’m like playing guitar, I could pull up the tab or, you know, whatever YouTube Less than I’m watching for a specific song. So slowly, and I encourage y’all to do it too. If you’re not happy with the Google results that you’re getting switch over to duck, duck, go, or Bing or whatever.
I know it’s not going to make a difference as a single person. Me not using Google is not really going to make a difference. Luckily I have this platform so I can tell other people. And when my neighbors say, Hey, I tried to use Google and I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I could say, use duck, duck, go.
They’re not stealing all your data or obtaining all your data as you’re using the tool. So if you are compelled to not support Google, then I encourage you to go ahead and just stop using Google for search and use duck, duck, go, or something. that you like. I’m sure there’s some other search engines out there that do a great job.
I’ll do a quick ad here, but it’s not really an ad. It’s just me promoting my other podcast, Ranking Revolution. It’s focused on SEO and marketing a bit more on the advanced side. And I have some, some great guests from all over the SEO industry, SEO, Jesus. There’s going to be a Kyle roof interview coming out pretty soon.
Actually, I’m talking to him tomorrow, but I have a quite a loaded schedule. So it’s great. I’ve worked pretty far ahead and we got some great interviews coming out. And also people from sort of the niche site industry, although. I don’t think we’re, I don’t know if we’re calling it that anymore. Exactly.
But, uh, Spencer Hawes, one of the most popular episodes and then Ricky Kessler from income school, super popular. So we’ll link up so you can check it out. The YouTube channel is growing great. And actually, if y’all are interested in hearing about how I’m growing on that side of the house, let me know on the audio side, it’s.
Not as fast as I was hoping or expected, but the thing is very interesting to see how podcasts in different niches may have a heavier following over on the YouTube side versus the audio side, so. A lot of YouTube traction, but there’s a lot of discoverability. And I, I think that’s, you know, part of the, part of the allure of publishing a podcast on YouTube, hell, I got the whole studio set up and everything, but there’s a great deal of benefit just having it on a platform like YouTube, where there’s discoverability, where someone who is not aware of me at all can potentially.
See the title and thumbnail and the video is suggested, which is pretty cool. So check out ranking revolution, subscribe, download all the episodes. I have interviews. They’re mostly interviews currently, but there’s a few solo episodes too, that are a little bit shorter. The interviews are typically split up into two episodes.
So it’s a little bit of a shorter format. Some of them are over 30 minutes for those part one and part two of those interviews, but I’m hoping to kind of keep it tight and make sure that it’s more like 20 to 30 minutes. It’s tough. Cause I like to go a little bit deeper and I feel like the details of those questions and if there’s a little tangent, I usually feel like those are pretty interesting, but from an editing standpoint and like getting people.
Engaged in watching. Like I know it’s a little bit tighter if it’s like the short, the shortest it could possibly be. Like those usually are better and more punchy, but I like the conversations. I don’t know. It’s how I listen to shows, I guess. All right. The other thing that I’ll mention, I’m so curious about how.
How Google and search is going to shape up. And like, if they are right and they’re moving in the right direction of like what people actually want in search and search engines, I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, they’re very smart there and it’s one of those. It makes me think of that Henry Ford quote, which I’m going to mess it up because I didn’t look it up ahead of time, but.
He said something like, if we ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, but he built cars, right? So if you ask us what we want, we may say, Oh, everything was going great, but really there’s a better solution. Now, the thing is, I don’t know how the AI is going to get information. If There’s no, there’s no bloggers for them to steal the information from.
If there, if people are just like, you know what, I’m not going to do that. Then I don’t know what they’re going to do. That said, maybe they just go to Reddit to pull the information. Of course they have a relationship there, but. If there are a lot of people that are like me and they don’t want it, they don’t want the bullshit from Reddit.
I don’t know, maybe I’m using it wrong or something like that, but it just seems like it’s the same quality as I would expect from a forum where people are arguing or. Maybe like a Facebook group where like, you don’t know how qualified the person is. And it could be like someone who has zero experience also giving some opinions with someone who has, uh, you know, Decades long experience in the topic area.
And it’s really hard to tell those apart and you can’t really go and verify it. So I’m unsure how that’s going to go. All that to say one interesting thing I’ve been getting several emails and actually a couple phone calls from the Google ads department are like, Hey, we really want to help you run ads.
And I asked a couple of questions. They’re like, Hey, let’s hop on a call. You could schedule it. They seem very helpful, right? But they’re like, Hey, come spend money on our ad platform. When I reply back, I’m like, Hey, what’s the agenda of this meeting? They make it sound like they fucking know what they’re talking about, right?
To my knowledge, they don’t. They’re just like fucking run the ads. They make it sound like they were looking at my account and they have some grand insight, but they don’t, they seem like they’re entry level salespeople that just got training. And they’re like, we send out these templates. We call up, we say the script.
And the thing is. The reason why I’m confident in that is when they said, Oh, I observed some things in your account. I have some great strategies. So we can get more over to your website, niche site project. And when I asked for more details, they just gave like boiler plate template type answers. And the thing is I’ve never run ads to niche site project.
I was running ads for YouTube, which I’ve stopped doing cause they didn’t convert well. So when they said that I knew number one, they didn’t look at my account too. They had no clue what my goals were. And three, it was going to be unhelpful because they just had a boilerplate set of answers and they had no agenda.
I’m not going to set up a fucking meeting with a salesperson with no agenda. That’s just like a huge waste of time for something I’m not interested in doing. And the other thing is I know from trying to set up these ads in the past, it was just nonsense to set them up. Most of the time I would have to redo them for some unexplicable reason.
Cause if I. If I would have figured it out, I would not make the mistake again, but I don’t know. It was like every other time, some, some weird set. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. Right. Otherwise I would fix it. The ads, by the way, over on YouTube, the content tab promotions, those are super easy to set up.
I don’t know if they’re very effective at like getting engaged. Subscribers, but that’s something that I could talk about further. Cause I have been testing that pretty extensively after Alex Cooper from WP Eagle mentioned that maybe I should check it out. It took me, I don’t know, four months before I actually did, but he did mention it to me in.
They worked out some bugs and it’s effective to some extent, but it depends on what your goals are. So anyway, the observation is Google’s out there searching for money because they’re calling me and I haven’t run ads in forever and they weren’t emailing me and they weren’t calling me for a very long time.
But in the last two weeks, I’ve gotten a lot of correspondence and a lot of reminder emails about, Hey, just get to my calendar and set it up. I just, I don’t reply back. Cause those are, um, Those are just sales emails. So I can, I can see right past it. They’re not, they’re not really trying to help me.
They just want to run ads. Pretty cynical, I know, but I don’t know. That’s how salespeople are. Okay. We’ll check out Ranking Revolution. Really appreciate the support out there. And if you feel really generous, If you feel really generous, then you can leave a review out there. It’ll be really helpful. Tell your friends and tell your enemies, whoever will listen check out that episode and tell them about this show too, if you’d like it, so I’ll catch you next week and be sure to tune in for live streams that I may be doing over on the YouTube side.
I very regularly. Do them. It was pretty much weekly, like, you know, every Tuesday, same time. Then went on some trips and there was a hike and some other thing, and I needed to be out of town or I got a hundred excuses, but, but basically make sure you’re on the email list, make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube.
Those give you the best chances to have like some notification on when I’m going live, especially the email. So we’ll catch on the next episode and that’s it. I’m going to go work out.