Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to “The Doug Show.” I’m Doug Cunnington, and today I’ll give you a few updates on what is going on with me and a little bit of a sneak peek for a couple episodes that are coming up, and, uh, maybe just some random stuff. So one cool thing, I’ll give you the updates on new episodes that’ll be coming out soon.
So I realize that people are interested in AI. To some extent, I am too. I’ve been sort of resisting the urge to create projects that I know I’ll only have a small amount of interest in for a short time. So quick example, and I’ve learned this the hard way. Quick example is, I think it was maybe 2024 when people were really thinking and talking more about prompt engineering.
Maybe they still are, but I stopped paying attention. But I think the conversation has shifted. But I was like, “Oh, prompt engineering, like this sounds like something I could be interested in.” I bought some URL related to prompt engineering, and I was learning and testing, and I think even a few of my videos were like doing well talking about prompt engineering, and some people let me know, like, “Hey, I had got an idea from you about prompt engineering.”
So I lost interest after a couple months and I was like, “Ah, you know what? I’m, I’m just gonna quit this,” which I’ve become much better at these days. I don’t, I don’t stick around with it if I’m not interested. So I, I quit doing that. I let the URL go, and I do realize, like I really have to be obsessed with something to get, you know, deep into it.
All that to say, I’ve tried to line up a few interviews with people doing things, interesting things with AI. So I talked to Elliot Zilinskas, who was on the channel and on the podcast, uh, several months ago, and he Started dabbling with AI several years ago and built some tools, um, started selling tools.
He actually shared some of the, um, or at least one of the projects that he’s making some money, uh, selling. It’s a consumer-facing product, um, for teachers, and basically it’s, um, you know, kind of a proven idea, proven model. Keyword research for teachers that are selling on a specific platform. So nothing brand new.
It was just taking an existing idea in many markets and applying it specifically to an area that, you know, had that problem that wasn’t being solved by anyone else. So kinda standard. So that’s a fun update. That episode should be coming out, um, in the next few weeks. And then he and I also talked about personal finance, which we both have a lot of interest in, and that’ll be some other episode.
So cool AI stuff coming our way. The other person I talked to is Chris Panteli, and he’s over at Linkify, and he has built several sort of in-house tools. He or his team has built in-house tools that they are specifically using for their agency. So it’s a, you know, PR/ links are built, but it wasn’t oriented around, like, link building.
It’s just a, a PR-type agency. And, you know, I think at some point in time I was like, “Ah, SEO has shifted so much,” but one thing that hasn’t shifted is that people are interested in getting PR, and one thing that works for SEO and for AI in general, if, if you are interested in being featured in either one, getting PR, being on podcasts, being on YouTube, being on the news, having your name mentioned and your brand mentioned, those are all good things that is kind of universally true, and it helps these, you know, whether it’s search or AI, having your brand mentioned is a good thing
The cool thing is talking to those guys got me pumped and enthusiastic, I would say, about, you know, trying stuff with AI. Now, one thing I, you know, it was very obvious when I was chatting with them, both of them are using Claude Code, and they, they’re like, “Ah, you know, I might check something with ChatGPT.
Maybe I’ll verify something with Gemini,” but largely they’re using Claude Code. And hands down, like, when I’ve talked to anyone, they’re like, “Yeah, Claude Code is, like, that, that is the thing to, you know, check out just generally,” especially if you’re, you know, looking at a coding solution and you’re trying to figure out a software thing.
And fewer people, um, have mentioned Gemini, and when I’ve used Gemini, a lot of times it’s for… It’s more, like, research, more of, like, content, um, preparation, content research, and if it’s something where there’s a not, where there’s not much data, then it just kind of makes shit up. And I think that might be universally true.
Like, if there’s not, um, information, then it’s not gonna be… Like, no AI tool is gonna be able to come up with anything unique on its own, as far as I could tell. And the, and I’ve given the example a couple times and, I mean, I’ll look up something very specific about, um, an amplifier or a speaker, which I’m pointing behind me because I, I have amplifiers and speakers behind me, and there’s virtually, like, no information about a particular speaker that I just got, and there’s, like, a couple reviews on Sweetwater, and the actual manufacturer doesn’t have any information.
Oh, you know what? Let me correct myself. There’s no reviews on Sweetwater, and, you know, imagine these as, like, sort of short Amazon reviews. Like, there may or may not be a lot of information. Someone might just say, “Great speaker. It’s pretty loud. It worked.” Or someone m- might complain about the shipping and, “Although Sweetwater is fantastic,” but someone might be like, “UPS dropped it down the stairs.
One star.” It’s just like, well, that is not really a review of the product. That’s a review of the delivery company, and no offense to UPS people. But overall, th- the idea is if there’s a speaker or something without much information, and in fact, the manufacturer data sheet has, like, a data sheet table, but there’s no actual information about this speaker- And the manufacturer doesn’t even have a very good, um, description or recommendation.
It’s like three lines. So when I tried to find information, there was basically nothing except a couple people that were talking on a forum, only one of which had the speaker and was testing it, and other people were just popping in and saying what they thought about the person’s demo, what they thought about the person’s review.
So there’s v- like, it– the whole thing was like not helpful except for the one person who had the fucking speaker who was saying, “Hey, I recommend this. Here are my observations. This is just my opinion.” So hardly a, you know, scientifically proven thing. Whereas if you, whatever, you look up, um, information about Maybe an actual medical product, so say insulin.
Someone’s like, “Oh, I’m trying to get information about insulin.” There’s many thousands of study. There’s tons of data. Like, there’s actual information that’s been peer-reviewed by professionals that have a lot of, um, experience, knowledge, certifications that validate their actual knowledge. So all that to say, sometimes this shit can work okay, and other times, like, AI is just guessing, and it’s repeating what it read over on Reddit or a Facebook group, which is hardly the place to get scientifically, uh, you know, proven information.
So these guys, these guys got me enthusiastic, and I do have a specific problem that I do need solved, and it’s somewhat time-sensitive. Um, and you know, it’s, it’s all relative, so often my time sensitivity is in the span of, like, months or longer, and that’s about how long this is. Now, this is something that may actually be interesting to feature on the YouTube channel as a, you know, a couple video series.
It may be… I, I might be overblowing it, and it might be much easier. So one thing I still have is a few WordPress installs. Now, I have one premium theme that I still pay for. I think it’s only about 100 bucks a year. So I don’t publish, um, too often. In fact, you know, as I think about it, I’m like, “Ah, you know, one of these pages, just dougcunnington.com,” I’m like, “I could put that on, like, one or two pages.”
There’s basically nothing on there. It’s meant to be, like, a set of links so people can go to other stuff. The other one is a niche site project, which at this point I haven’t published anything new in years. It’s more of a historical repository of what used to be. There’s no real, in my opinion, like, useful, relevant information.
I would doubt people are going there, um, for, like, any reason. Like, I, I can’t imagine. I mean, it was mostly oriented around, like, Amazon affiliate and SEO, which some things might be lightly, um, relevant from a high level. But I mean, a lot of the shit that I wrote was between, like, 2013 and, say, 2017 or so, 2018.
So that timeframe, that was a long time ago. Not really relevant, and I’m almost… You know, I’m at a point, I’m like, “Should I just take the whole thing down and, like, just not publish it anywhere?” Maybe. So the hosting, it doesn’t cost me too much. I also have, like, a couple podcasts, um, that have their own WordPress installs, which, uh, I think all, all of this WordPress stuff that I have, I might be able to move away from it.
Now, it gets– it makes me nervous as a former software person, um, to migrate. I know there’s always more, um, cost. Everything’s more complicated, even if it’s not, um, like, costing more money. Um, there’s usually some issues with the migration. It takes you longer than you think I maybe would run into an issue where I have to buy a different tool to help migrate and blah blah blah, and the fact is I didn’t wanna move down the road until I was, like, ready.
So I wasn’t even, like, going to Gemini in this case to, like, ask, like, “I wanna migrate. What steps might I take? What options do I have?” Now luckily, Chris Panteli has done, uh, something lightly similar. I mean, he moved off of WordPress to something else and actually spent a decent amount of time just asking questions, and he knew his shit.
I mean, he was like, “I’ve done this. Let me tell you what I’ve done and what I might recommend.” So he gave me good recommendations, and then r-right when we finished, I was like, “You know what? I am gonna check with Gemini.” So I do actually have, like, a light, um, a preliminary path forward where I could probably m- like, move off of WordPress.
I’m primarily interested in some sort of a flat file system or straight HTML. I don’t need any actual functionality, again, for Niche Site Project. I mean, I don’t even know if people are going there. I maybe would wanna have, like, a mechanism so people could sign up for an email list, but I’ll tell you, half the time when I go to Niche Site Project, the little form is not loading, and I pop over to my WordPress dashboard, and maybe I have to update something.
Sometimes I don’t even update any plugins or anything, and all I have to do is go and log in, and then when I hit refresh on my phone, I see that the email form is there. So all that to say, like, there’s, there’s something going on, and I have very low interest in, like, messing around with the WordPress ecosystem, which now that I’ve stepped back and I have actually l- like, looked at some of the solutions for a flat HTML system CMS, in this case, there’s many options.
They’re pretty much free, and there’s places that you could host those flat HTML, um, websites for free. So, I mean, I could pay of course. I could keep my sort of hosting, and instead of having WordPress installed, I can look at Grav, I think is w- was one of them. And then I’ve actually, you know, learned that there’s easier solutions.
I think one is called Hugo. I think that’s the one I’m gonna do is Hugo, and it looks like it might be a thing that I could do in an afternoon. And in my head, I was thinking, “Oh, this could take- This is probably gonna take me a week if I work on it each day, and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna end up going down some rabbit hole.
But overall, it actually looked like it was fairly straightforward. And back in the day when I was, you know, w- working much harder, when I had affiliate websites that were, you know, earning money, I had great cash flow. And I was thinking, “Oh, I’ll have, you know, all these domain names. I can have several hosting, uh, packages.
I can have, you know, a web host over here, another one over here. It’s no big deal.” And easily would spend, whatever, 500 to $1,000 per month on hosting and, like, little software things and here and there. Again, the cash flow is fine. I was running a profitable business, so it was no big deal. But as I’m doing this as a hobby now The $100 per year for my premium WordPress theme is something.
I could do anything else with that $100. $100 isn’t huge, but I wouldn’t just, like, light it on fire, right? So if I’m just wasting it, I could figure out a, a better solution. So I might be able to just do this for free. Like, you know, there’s not much traffic. There’s no functionality. It’s a historical kind of footnote and repository for information.
Then as far as the WordPress installs for the podcast that I host, I was doing that to have things on my platform, so I could publish other things on there easily. But the fact is, people primarily listen to the podcast on their player. People are not going to the site. And I believe almost universally, a podcast host will just allow you to upload directly to their system, and it, you know, the file will be hosted there.
And in fact, it’s pretty much automated with many systems where you could publish, you know, that MP3 directly to the host. But the way I set it up for, you know, reasons that were relevant in 2019, I had, you know, WordPress. I have my premium theme. I believe I got nice analytics on my WordPress dashboard, plus a couple other pieces of functionality, which again, were relevant in 2019 when I set up the, you know, the first WordPress install for the podcast, and it made it, you know, fairly straightforward to manage everything over on WordPress.
Well, now I’m like, if I don’t need that hosting package at all, then– and I don’t need WordPress, then I can just shut all that down, and I’m already paying for the podcast hosting, so I can just h- put everything there. And if I actually need, you know, uh, any kind of blog functionality or anything else, well, I could publish it somewhere else or within potentially, um, maybe some pages on the podcast host.
I wouldn’t be publishing, like, blog posts all the time or anything like that And the whole other set of people, well, they’re just over on YouTube, which is great. That’s its whole ecosystem. But overall, I’m looking at it and thinking, “Well, I don’t need WordPress anymore.” And at the time when we were building all these websites, it made a lot of sense.
There’s tons of functionality that you have with WordPress, the whole ecosystem of plugins and themes, and you could do anything. You could run giant content websites, membership sites, whatever you want. It’s extendable, and there’s some solution out there. I’m not doing any of those things, and when you step back and look how complicated and convoluted WordPress is, it’s a total fucking mess.
Like I said, half the time I go to my niche site project site and, like, the email form is not loading for some reason. 99% chance it’s, like, some error that I made, but I don’t know what it is and I don’t care about fixing it, and it would be easier just to link to, uh, whatever Kit email landing page. Like, just send people there and, like, it’ll be fine, right?
There’s no need to make it more complicated. Slightly related to the AI thing… Oh, oh, so to, to wrap that into bow before we move on, um I believe I have good enough instructions from Gemini to move forward. When I thought about, you know, checking out Claude Code a little bit more, again, that’s what everyone was referencing.
I did ask those guys, or at least Chris specifically, because we were talking about this migration project. I was like, “I mean, do you think I could use Gemini in some capacity? Like, do I need to use Claude Code?” And he was like, “You should be fine with Gemini. I mean, it’s, um, it’s fine.” Usually, um, these other guys, like, they already have, um, a subscription to Claude Code.
They’re comfortable with it. They have things set up. It makes sense for them to move forward with that. It does seem superior from a coding standpoint. I don’t think I’ll actually need to code anything. It seems like everything is, you know, m-migration ready based on the tools that are out there, which are not necessarily related to writing any kind of code, and that’s what I need to potentially…
Not need to, but I might potentially document that on the YouTube channel since it’s actually, like, kind of a tutorial where I’m like, “I have this problem. I wanna get off WordPress,” and potentially, I think all said and done, I might be able to save, like, four to $500 a year just thinking of, like, hosting packages and other stuff.
And then I would just have, like, essentially a free, I don’t know what, um, these other hosting services are. There are like three or four that look like they could host you for free, one of which is, um, Cloudflare, which a lot of people would have an account there anyway, and it’s just tiny amount of ba-bandwidth that I would use anyway.
If you have a huge website or something that’s like a lot of bandwidth, that would be different. But in my case, again, these are almost like landing pages with just a little bit of information, and there’s hardly anyone going there. So, the other part that I wanna have a call to action for you out there, if you are doing things, if you’re earning money on the Amazon Influencer program, I’m interested to, you know, hear your story a little bit.
I checked out the Niche Pursuits podcast in the last couple weeks, and there was someone on there that was making like 25 to 30,000 per month on the Amazon Influencer program. And essentially, you know, I was like, “This is exactly the kind of stuff that we were doing back in the day.” It, it was Still Amazon affiliate, but the thing is everything is different.
Everything’s very different than what we were doing with, like, posting a review on a blog. But it was all exactly the same. It was very interesting. I mean, to the point where the type of research this guy was doing was, you know, looking at the other video reviews out there on a specific product to see if they were good or not.
He would evaluate like, “Hey, I could do a, a better job reviewing this product.” He would check to see how many products were being sold or, you know, anything to give him an idea of the volume to let him know if it was a good idea to, like, look at that. There’s a few tools out there that give you more insights, but basically the same kind of idea, um, that we had when we would think about what niches to go after, what products to feature.
The price of the product obviously matters, and then there’s the whole aspect of, like, partnering with the brands, which I guess in In Amazon, there’s some ecosystem where you’re able… Uh, is it– I don’t even know the name of it. It’s like Amazon Connect or something like that. So it’s like influencers get connected with the brands, so you can potentially, um, get the products and review them and blah, blah, blah.
So everything has changed dramatically, yet everything is almost exactly the same, to the point where, like, the dude said Amazon changed the commission rates a few months ago, and I was like, “Oh, that, that’s literally what happened in, whatever, 2020, 2017, um, probably a few years before that too.” So everything is so different, and it’s exactly the same.
So if you’re doing some stuff on Amazon Influencer, interested to hear your story, especially if you’ve started more recently. Pretty sure the dude that I listened to, uh, sorry, I forget his name, but if you check out Niche Pursuits podcast, you should be able to find it pretty easily. I think he started in, like, 2023, so it’s been a few years.
Not a super long time, but it’s been a few years. And, um, I mean, I remember hearing about it early on, and, you know, friends were like, “Ah, I started to do it. It’s doing really awesome. Making, like, 5,000 a month.” This is, like, maybe 2020, 2021, something like that. And it’s so funny. It’s like I, I was thinking, “Ah, it seems, like, a little late to get started.”
And the funny thing in the interview with Jared, the guy was like, “Oh yeah, it’s like the best, the best time to get started.” It’s so funny, like, no matter where you’re at, um, some people are like, “Ah, it seems a little saturated. It seems, like, late to get started.” And then other people are like, “It is the best time.
It’s literally the best time to get started.” So it’s all perspective and, you know, how you evaluate things. As I wrap it up here, I got an email from A listener, uh, of the show, and basically I think I’ve, I’ve gotten emails from, you know, this person or someone like this person in the past, and the question from this person was around, um, I guess it’s AI video software to essentially spam YouTube.
And I mean, it all depends on the stuff that you’re watching, right? So the stuff that I end up watching, a lot of it is like slightly, um, anti-AI. It’s more on the creator side, especially like the creative arts. So a lot of musicians, maybe it’s visual artists of some kind, maybe it’s, um, writers or, or screenwriters or something like that.
So these are like, these are creators and I def- like I came from an engineering background. I’m good at math and science and shit like that. But as I was, you know, thinking about this topic while I was walking today, I was like, “Oh, I’m definitely, I’m like on the creator side on this.” And I’m, I’m like, you know what?
I don’t really wanna see like AI thumbnails I’m in a Facebook group, it’s like Colorado Musicians Facebook group, and, you know, people post about gigs or if they’re looking for a band or whatever. It’s just musicians. And people were posting flyers, AI-created flyers in the group, and it generated, like, so much backlash and discussion.
And I think they… I, I don’t even remember the conclusion, but I’m pretty sure they, they banned, um, the AI posters ’cause people were just like, “Fuck this. I don’t wanna see AI.” Again, I’m totally sided on the, on the creative side. But it depends on what you’re consuming. So you might be watching other stuff, especial- I think this is pervasive on YouTube.
So you might be watching things, um, that it’s all pro-AI. Like, “Hey,” like, “here’s how you can create these graphics and this other stuff.” While there’s a whole other group of people … There’s a guitarist on YouTube that I like, uh, Rhett Shull, and he’s basically, he’s so anti-AI. He’s like, “If I see a thumbnail that is an AI thumbnail, like, I’ll mark the channel to, like, never recommend this channel again.”
So he’s, like, pretty hardcore, which I’m not. Um, you know, it could be fine. But when I do see some of this AI stuff, thumbnails not so much, but videos I hate. So I actually saw, I saw a video pop up in my feed. It was something, like, economics-related. So I was like, “Oh, cool.” You know, I’m a light fan of macro, or all, all economics, right?
So I was like, “Oh, I’m kinda interested.” Click on it. Of course, within, like, 30 fucking seconds… I don’t mind a video essay, by the way. But within 30 seconds, I’m like, “Oh, this is obviously AI.” The voices are really good these days, but I was like, “This is obviously AI.” You can tell by the way it’s written. You can kind of tell with the cadence of the, you know, the, the narration.
And the video was just kinda shitty. Like, it was passable. Thing is, stupid video gets a decent number of views. It does look like there were actually people commenting on there, but those could be bullshit also. But back to this person that emailed me. It’s just– It’s, it’s a little bit disappointing because this is someone that I, like, recognized the email address and I was like, “Oh, yeah, this person, they’ve always asked about…”
What it boils down to is shortcuts. So it’s like, it’s all get rich quick shit. And it’s been a decade, right? I’m like, “Fuck.” I feel bad for the person because they are still searching for the get rich quick thing, and they’re like, “Oh, I saw this,” um… I mean, I can’t even believe like the Warrior Forum or WarriorPlus or whatever is still out there, or JVZoo, like blows my mind.
Blows my mind that it’s still out there, and that I even like, you know, partnered with some people on JVZoo. I mean, there were some more legitimate products out there, software products and stuff like that, that were okay. But I’m just like, man, are people still hawking bullshit out there? And apparently they are.
So the person was like, “Uh, you know, do you know of like any good faceless kind of, you know, AI video, all automated kinda stuff that are effective that will help me earn money on YouTube?” And I was like, “No, I, I don’t, and you should probably like find something else.” Anything on there is prob- anything on like, uh, Warrior Forum or, uh, JVZoo, like a- any of those things, if it’s like a get rich quick thing, it’s not gonna work.
I can tell you right now, it’s not gonna fucking work. And like I said, I’ve gotten emails from this person for like a decade You could have taken like the slowest route and taken five, six, seven, 10 years to do something, and you’d be better off than the, you know, 35 things that, you know, you’ve tried to get rich quick.
And I have a, a friend, he started a blog, old school blogger. He may have started it, like, in 2003 or something like that, but I feel like it could’ve been a little, a couple years later. Get Rich Slowly, getrichslowly.org. I, I think he may have sold it a couple times at this point, but that is, uh, that’s the secret.
I mean, like, something slower, obviously more sustainable, little bit less competition. And I think… I mean, that’s the issue. Even if one of these videos or one of the channels, if someone has a system where they’re doing, you know, AI videos, and they’re getting views and they’re earning some money, I think largely people don’t like it, don’t like it.
There’s a significant backlash against AI depending on who you’re talking to, but there’s a significant backlash. And from a, you know, creative standpoint, it definitely seems like anything authentic is going to work much better. And yeah, so basically the conclusion is I told the person, “I should probably find something else.”
If you’re searching around in any of the places that you’re lurking and have been lurking, you’re gonna find, uh, bad ideas and people that are trying to take advantage of you So that’s a weird note to end on, but, uh, we’ll round it up, and if you do have, um, experience on the Amazon influencer side, shoot me an email.
Just curious of the story. Doesn’t mean, like, I would interview you for the show, just curious of the people that are out there, whether you’re doing it, um, just as a little test, and you’ve dabbled a little bit, and then you stopped doing it. I know some people did a lot more of it a few years ago, and people migrate to different areas versus, like, doubling and tripling down.
Or if you’re still doing, like, Amazon affiliate stuff in some capacity, I mean, there’s certainly a route if you, whatever, do reviews on, uh, YouTube, and then maybe you have an email list, and maybe you upload some of those reviews as an influencer, and you’re, you know, multipurposing this content in different formats for different audiences.
That seems like a totally viable route, even with, like, lower commission rates and stuff like that. But I mean, if you’re able to, like, create good reviews on YouTube, brands will wanna partner with you. I mean, that’s, that’s a thing that you can do, and it’s a no-brainer to, like, repurpose, uh, the content, even if it’s, you know, essentially the stuff that we were doing before, it’s just shifted into a different format and a different way to present the information.
Shoot me an email, feedback@doug.show, and thanks for checking this one out. Look forward to the interviews coming up with Elliot and Chris, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.