Latest / Content, Briefly / Ahrefs: Ryan Law on generative AI, events, and scratching the creator itch

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Ahrefs: Ryan Law on generative AI, events, and scratching the creator itch · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  There are companies investing a lot of money into, like, building out custom fine-tuned models that actually does create pretty good content.
• 0:06
  But this was basically like almost like search and replace, you know, replace this product name with this product name. Yeah. Like, things that would have sounded a bad idea like, yeah, ten years ago.
• 0:18
  And there were so many people in the audience, like, taking notes, taking pictures of it. [laughs] And I just know they probably went away and tried to do that for themselves.
• 0:25
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. I've got a real treat for you today, talking to my old friend, Ryan Law.
• 0:35
  We had the privilege of working together back in our Animalz days in twenty eighteen, nineteen, and twenty twenty. I came to think of Ryan as one of the smartest, most innovative minds in content marketing.
• 0:47
  All of that is public. You can see a ton of stuff that Ryan has written on the Animalz blog, now the Ahrefs blog. He posts a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter. His knowledge is all out there. He's incredibly smart.
• 0:57
  He's a great thinker and a prolific writer too. We talked all about his transition to becoming the director of content at Ahrefs, which was very interesting to hear about.
• 1:06
  I actually really didn't know much about the inner workings of the company, so we talked all about that, their editorial process, and then of course, we talked about Ryan and Ahrefs take on generative AI, kind of where we are right now, things Ryan's seeing.
• 1:18
  He was also just at the Brighton SEO Conference, so he had some insight from chatting with people there too. I thought this was kind of a helpful level setting for where we are with AI right now.
• 1:27
  I feel like there's pressure to use it, but not a lot of obvious use cases, and so that was kind of the theme of that conversation.
• 1:33
  And then of course, we talked about some of Ryan's side projects, which include learning to code, creating courses, writing post-apocalyptic novels.
• 1:40
  He has a lot going on, and as part of his continual itch to keep learning and keep creating. So anyways, it was a great conversation as always. I really enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. Hey, everybody.
• 1:52
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with my old friend, Ryan Law, director of content marketing at Ahrefs, which honestly feels weird to say. I'm still acclimatizing to not calling you CMO of Animalz.
• 2:05
  Anyways, Ryan, we haven't chatted in a while. I'm excited to catch up today.
• 2:08
  I'm assuming that pretty much everybody who's listening to this podcast knows you, but would you mind giving an intro, maybe with a focus on the last twelve months?
• 2:18
  I mean, I'm not sure exactly how long you've been at Ahrefs. A year-ish, maybe focus on that, but include some of the stuff on your, your kind of longer term content background too. Yeah, sure.
• 2:26
  And yeah, I keep finding myself defaulting to saying Animalz and then having to like slap myself on the wrist as well. I'm not there anymore.
• 2:32
  You know, I was obviously at Animalz for like five and a half years, doing everything from like content writer up to eventually being CMO and learned a crazy, crazy amount working with people like you and Walter and Andrew and Devin and Haley.
• 2:46
  I left Animalz last May, something like that.
• 2:49
  Took a few months to panic and work on some personal projects, and then trying to work out what the heck next to do with my life, I had a chat with the amazing Tim Soulo at Ahrefs, obviously CMO, and he basically said, you know, "I'd love you to come and join the team, kind of whip us into shape a little bit, particularly help us write the kind of content that we're not particularly experienced at, like you know, thought leadership and opinions and all that kind of thing."
• 3:13
  So I joined Ahrefs, I think, back in like last August as their director of content marketing. So primarily I work with the blog team. I have a few direct reports. I write for the blog as well.
• 3:24
  I'm very much, I try and have skin in the game. That was a big part of like what I wanted to get out of this job.
• 3:29
  But I also help out with some of the broader marketing initiatives, been to some, like, events and conferences with the team, and even helping out a little bit with some of the new, like, product features we're building out, which has been super interesting- Nice...
• 3:41
  and super exciting. So yeah. Yeah, it's been a blast. Ahrefs is this amazing content brand, so I feel very privileged to come and join an already amazing team. [chuckles] Yeah, yeah. It really is a great brand.
• 3:51
  You probably don't know this, but one of the primary drivers of new signups to the Slack community is Ahrefs from a blog post that I actually don't-- I, uh, Rebecca maybe wrote it a couple of years ago. Yeah, yeah.
• 4:04
  And it's like a, you know, the seven best communities for marketers type of thing. It must rank really well though, because we get quite a few people coming into the Slack group from that. So thank you. Oh, pleasure.
• 4:15
  Yeah, I always-- It's very easy to think, you know, when you're writing a listicle that it's just you're trying to get some traffic, but then you talk to somebody that you included and you're like, oh, okay, that actually, that had a big impact on like their business or whatever.
• 4:25
  It's, yeah, search is pretty crazy in that mechanism. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, I have some questions for you about search [chuckles] that I would love to chat through.
• 4:34
  One thing I did want to chat about briefly though was when you left Animalz, you did something very smart, and it's like a, something you only get to do a few times in your career, maybe.
• 4:44
  You know, you go on LinkedIn, you say like, "Hey, this was an amazing experience. Thank you so much to all these people. I don't know what's next for me, so hit me up if you wanna chat."
• 4:53
  And like, that doesn't usually happen. Usually people are looking for jobs kind of behind the scenes, and they never really get the opportunity to throw it out there to let everyone who might want to know, know.
• 5:05
  What was that like? I mean, I'm gonna assume that you got hit up left and right for months afterwards. Yeah, it was kind of scary. I just, I think I just reached a point where I was just, I dunno, I needed a change.
• 5:17
  I was just ready to do something completely different and it's really hard making that decision, working out what you wanna do when you're also trying to do a good job at- Yeah...
• 5:25
  the thing you're doing day to day, like at the day job. So I thought, you know, I'll take a bit of a bet on myself. I'll bet that within like three months or something, I should be able to get a job.
• 5:34
  I won't end up completely destitute and homeless. And, you know, failing that, I'll try and chuck out some side project in a desperate attempt to, you know, have some money to pay our mortgage.
• 5:45
  And yeah, I think it was, with hindsight, a really lucky, really awesome thing to do because if you kind of quietly go and apply for a job, you're limited to what people are actively looking for at the time.
• 5:56
  But by being a bit loud about it, by encouraging a bit of discussion, there were plenty of opportunities that people weren't trying to hire, but they thought, "Hey, maybe this, you know, this could be a cool serendipitous thing here."
• 6:05
  Like Ahrefs, actually. There was no director of content marketing job on the Ahrefs website at the time.
• 6:11
  It was just this kind of lucky culmination of, you know-Problems they were having in their business that the skills I hopefully could bring to the table.
• 6:19
  So yeah, I talked to, I think I took 80 calls- Oh my God [laughs]... which with hindsight was like it was, it was actually a terrible idea. I let my scarcity mindset win out.
• 6:27
  I shouldn't have done that because I basically like burned myself out on that, ended up ghosting a bunch of really generous, gracious people that took the time to talk to me.
• 6:36
  So I should've been more selective about what I wanted, had a bit more self-confidence there. But yeah, it did thankfully pan out in the end.
• 6:43
  And I will just say a big, big huge shout-out to Devin, obviously lovely Devin that we used to work with. I basically copied her resignation [laughs] post almost word for word. Oh, nice.
• 6:53
  She edited my one as well, like gave me some advice on it, and also just gave me the confidence to do it in the first place. Yeah, that was a huge help. [laughs] That's fantastic.
• 7:02
  I remember seeing that post and I was like, "This is brilliant. This is brilliant. Ryan's gonna land a sweet job out of this 100%." And you did. And so you come into Ahrefs, and also clarification on the pronunciation.
• 7:14
  You pronounce it Ahrefs. Is that because you're British or is that how everyone pronounces it internally?
• 7:18
  So that I, there I, I looked up like interviews of Tim saying it before I talked to him on the calls just so I wouldn't mess it up. Ahrefs is how people say it- Ahrefs... at the company. Yeah. Okay. All right.
• 7:27
  That's how I will forever- I don't, it doesn't matter... say it. Like there's no, no, um, Ahrefs police that are gonna go around and tell people off, but yeah, that's how, how we say it. [laughs] Okay. Cool. All right.
• 7:35
  Ahrefs, got it. So you come in and like what's the experience like? You come in, it's a new role, you have a team. Was the team there on day one? Have you built the team since then? Are you doing an audit of the blog?
• 7:46
  Like kind of what's the first, I don't know, 90 days or so in the job look like? Yeah.
• 7:51
  It was really interesting coming in because a lot of what I've done with content marketing is like starting from scratch for companies that have never done it before, and this was just like the polar opposite of that.
• 8:01
  I came in with a bunch of like exciting content ideas, some programmatic content ideas I wanted to do, and we'd either done it like five years ago or it was in the process of being done.
• 8:11
  And I really had to like shift my mindset. You know, I'm not gonna be the guy that finds a bunch of low-hanging SEO fruit for Ahrefs because there are like 50 people that have already done that for the company.
• 8:22
  So I, I think I focused primarily on learning the product as best I could.
• 8:26
  I did like a good few weeks actually in customer support, getting really like nitty gritty, in the weeds learning about stuff I never knew anything about.
• 8:34
  Writing my own content, trying to like get some reps in and build up my confidence on that side of thing, you're trying to have opinions on an industry I'd not really thought about or worked about for a while, and mainly helping the existing team improve their processes a little bit.
• 8:48
  Not to say they were bad before, but I think there had been like a slight waning in like content quality.
• 8:54
  We were writing more SEO content just for the sake of ranking, and we were losing the stuff that made it interesting or unique or exciting for people to actually read.
• 9:03
  So I spent a lot of time changing the editorial process. We restructured the team a little bit.
• 9:08
  We cut out some of the stages and tried to give people a bit more creative license to write about things that they think are interesting and helpful, even if there aren't keywords to back it up as well. Yeah.
• 9:18
  Is it true that Ahrefs doesn't use Google Analytics? Yeah, very true.
• 9:23
  And it's just kind of funny, like we're a big data company that has this amazing, you know, data platform, and in terms of us understanding how our marketing works, it is largely intuition and qualitative feedback that we get in terms of shaping that.
• 9:36
  Which is cool, you know. I'm a bit, I'm a bit of a skeptic about the value of analytics. I think you probably are in some ways as well.
• 9:41
  Like unless it will actually change your behavior, it's probably not worth collecting a bunch of data.
• 9:46
  So between using the Ahrefs platform and seeing how things perform through that mechanism, and also just our own qualitative experience, that tends to be enough to shape where we go. Absolutely.
• 9:56
  I never made the switch to GA4. It just seemed like a headache and I didn't do it, so we don't have Google Analytics anymore. I don't, I, I mean, I didn't check it before and I have nothing to check now.
• 10:05
  It's kind of nice actually. But you use your own tool obviously. Does that potentially skew your bias towards SEO content because the thing you can most easily measure is how stuff's ranking? Yeah, exactly that.
• 10:19
  So I've published a few like non-SEO posts, and looking at the data in Ahrefs I'm like, "I'm awful. I'm terrible." [laughs] "No one is looking at these whatsoever."
• 10:28
  And you do have to rely on, you know, social media responses or newsletter features or backlink acquisition or that kind of thing as a bit of a heuristic for whether people actually care about the topic or not.
• 10:38
  Yeah, yeah. How big is the Ahrefs team overall? Like how many employees total? I really have no sense for the size of the company. And then tell us about the content team and the structure of that team too. Yeah.
• 10:49
  So I think the whole company now, we're about 127 people, something like that, across like 30, no maybe like 20 odd locations,
• 10:59
  which was really interesting because for comparison we're about a 10th the size of Semrush, for example. Oh, wow. Like far, far smaller, far leaner compared to, you know, otherwise fairly comparable company.
• 11:09
  And in terms of the content team or the marketing team, we've obviously got Tim, CMO in charge of everything.
• 11:15
  We have the content team which is led, well, the blog team rather, which is led by, kind of dually led by myself and Josh, so that might be an interesting thing to talk about.
• 11:24
  We both manage something like, you know, seven writers or something like that. We've got the video team, which is run by Sam with a couple of like video editors.
• 11:32
  We've got a design team, which is like a shared resource across us, but also product.
• 11:37
  And then we've got a bunch of kind of specialist marketers who do things like events and PR, community, product, paid advertising, and even we have Eric doing like Spanish language stuff for us as well. Oh, cool.
• 11:50
  So we're indexed super heavily on like the blog because that has always been the primary growth leader for Ahrefs and, but actually a ton of growth has come from the video content recently.
• 11:59
  Sam has been doing such a good job over there.
• 12:01
  You know, every now and then someone will post in the Superpath Slack community about like, "Can anyone share some good resources for learning either beginner or advanced SEO?"
• 12:09
  And people always point to the Ahrefs YouTube channel. There's really good stuff there. Yeah.
• 12:15
  And it's really interesting 'cause, um, you know, Sam started offI think approaching it as like an SEO exercise, you know, what keywords can we rank for through YouTube search?
• 12:23
  But he's actually kind of moved away from that, and he's now creating content that is just, is meant to be, like, fun or interesting or have some experiment or a stunt associated with it.
• 12:32
  And so far, like, it's been a step change in terms of the amount of people that engage with it and watch it. It's been absolutely crazy to watch.
• 12:40
  So hopefully he's at the cusp of like, you know, that's maybe part of the next era of where content marketing's heading a little bit. I hope so. I think B2B YouTube has the potential to be so cool.
• 12:52
  You know, like if you just kind of observe like what's happened on YouTube over the last couple of years, like YouTube is amazing. Like, so often- Yeah...
• 12:59
  when I go sit down on the couch to watch TV, which doesn't hardly ever happen now that I have two kids. [chuckles] But when I do, usually I'm pulling up YouTube, not Netflix, because there's just so much cool stuff.
• 13:11
  It's so, like, niche. You can learn about something, you can be entertained. It's all there. And I feel like mostly untapped. So that's very cool. Yeah. What about the seven writers?
• 13:20
  Those are freelancers or those are in-house folks? We are all in-house now, which was actually a change we made just before I joined the company.
• 13:28
  Over the years, like Ahrefs has scaled a very big like freelance content team, and there's been some amazing content created.
• 13:34
  I think it was just we wanted to see what it was like to have slightly more control over the editorial process, 'cause it was getting quite inefficient, I think, when you're pitching all these topics from all these different sources.
• 13:45
  We have such a huge library of existing content, even just like working out whether we'd covered something or not was really hard, and then also managing the editing and the distribution of that content.
• 13:55
  So we actually, yeah, I think we hired a lot of the writers full-time that were working in the freelance capacity, and we now do stuff just in-house, which has actually been really, really good fun.
• 14:04
  I love working really close-knit with a couple of writers and going super deep into their drafts and their editing and helping them improve how they think about content. Yeah.
• 14:13
  That's very cool and actually somewhat rare nowadays to have seven full-time writers on your team.
• 14:19
  A lot of companies work with seven writers, but freelance for sure, and maybe each of those people writes a post a month or something like that. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know.
• 14:28
  That's something I think we just care a lot about as a company. You know, Tim is CMO, and he still writes blog posts. Yeah, that's cool.
• 14:34
  I carry a full, like, writing workload like any other writer does, as well as you doing a bunch of other stuff. And yeah, long may we continue to invest in full-time content, I think. Yeah, that's cool.
• 14:45
  And so you mentioned that you kind of co-manage the blog team with Josh, I think you said his name was. What-- Tell us about that. How does that relationship work? Like, you all split duties somehow, I imagine. Yeah.
• 14:56
  It was, it was interesting joining because I was like, so Josh, Joshua Hardwick, is like, he was the blog guy at Ahrefs, you know? He's been at the company for like seven years. He's amazing.
• 15:04
  He's written like 200 or more of the posts that we have currently ranking. And I was kind of thinking like, "What do they need me for?" Like, where do I fit into this puzzle?
• 15:14
  And the thing that struck me about Ahrefs is just how flat like the whole company is. Although we've got different titles and stuff like that, we all work together collaboratively on a bunch of different things.
• 15:24
  There's really not much in the way of like hierarchy and that kind of thing. So it's kind of a split function. We both run like half the content team. I think maybe Tim almost brought us together as like yin and yang.
• 15:37
  You know, we both think differently about content, and in some ways, that almost tension between how we do content has actually been really productive. We challenge each other a lot.
• 15:45
  It does have a few, like, inefficiencies. Like, I'll come up with a new content process and then, you know, there was already a version that we were using and then a bit back and forth.
• 15:53
  So there's still some niggles to iron out, but generally it's been really fun just having like a peer, someone to work super closely with at, like the same sort of level. Yeah. That's really cool. I like that.
• 16:04
  I have not [inaudible] come across that, but, you know, I feel like one thing that Walter, you see back in the Animals days was, you know, put two or three people on a problem and then encourage a healthy debate among them, you know, in the hopes that the best answer would emerge from multiple people thinking about something versus one, which worked really well, I think.
• 16:22
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Totally. And I, I kind of thrive on like a little bit of conflict. I don't feel like I'm doing a good job unless someone has challenged my idea.
• 16:30
  So actually having a bunch of-- Like, Tim does that a lot. He still cares a lot about content, so we always have a lot of debate about the ideas we're coming up with. Nice. I like-- I miss that.
• 16:40
  That's one of the things I really miss working mostly by myself is like there's no one to debate things with, you know? Although the Slack group can be good for that, for sure. Okay.
• 16:49
  You know, on most episodes, I shy away from asking about generative AI. I just have gotten a little bit like everybody's doing the same thing. Like, you know, everyone's like finding these like small efficiencies.
• 16:59
  There's not anything like really that interesting happening in asking many, many people.
• 17:04
  However, I do want to ask you about it because you've been writing about generative AI since, I think, before ChatGPT, which feels-- I mean, I remember seeing some of your posts on Animals and thinking like, "What is this?
• 17:16
  What is he talking about?" Like I-- It was, it was ahead of the curve, you know?
• 17:19
  And then I was watching your video that you posted on LinkedIn after the Brighton SEO conference, and you were saying, like, this stuff is only just now kind of hitting the mainstream.
• 17:28
  So I'm just curious on your personal take and maybe Ahrefs' take as a company as well, since generative AI is sort of poised to disrupt search. Maybe, maybe not. I guess we don't really know.
• 17:39
  How are you feeling about generative AI, AI right now? What are you seeing? Do you have any strong opinions about kind of where we are at the moment and where this is heading over the next year or so? Yeah. I don't know.
• 17:50
  It's such a [chuckles] it's ba- it's something I think about every day.
• 17:53
  Like, I have ChatGPT in my browser tab, and I use it maybe like 20 times a day, kind of for what you say, like the menial process optimization stuff, like writing Google Sheets formulae or helping me like debug code snippets or brainstorm blog post titles and stuff like that.
• 18:10
  It's kind of like semi-interesting. One of the things Tim always says, he's very skeptical of AI because even when it does a good job, he feels like it's not quite as good as like what a person could actually do.
• 18:19
  We have to put a lot of effort into these tools to getIn some cases, fairly, like, marginal benefits out of them. Yeah.
• 18:25
  So I feel like they're not quite in their final form yet in terms of being, like, this amazing revolutionary, like, you know, everyone's gonna be unemployed, and we'll have to live on universal basic income kind of technology.
• 18:37
  But I think it's gonna move to the background and become almost like the kind of operating system for a lot of how companies function, you know. The technology's too good, too cheap.
• 18:44
  I think it's gonna be a part of every app we interact with every day, probably in a kind of background capacity.
• 18:49
  What I don't think is gonna happen is all these people, you know, pumping out, like, a thousand AI-generated, like, one-shot blog posts every month.
• 18:58
  And even when they're seeing good results from it now, I think maybe they've not been around long enough to remember what happened to all the content spinners like, you know, 10 years ago, where- Yeah. Yeah...
• 19:07
  eventually the stuff does get trashed and does get dinged. Totally. Yeah. Um- We've been there. Yeah.
• 19:13
  And even, you know, something I learned from Animals when we had our own kind of experiment with making system and deliverable based on this stuff is that skilled people didn't like the process.
• 19:23
  We don't want to give away the parts of writing that we enjoy. So by trying to scale like an AI-generated content service, we basically, like, made people's lives much less interesting and much less enjoyable.
• 19:34
  So I think it's something we all need to learn about, and there will be some instantiation of it in every tool that we use.
• 19:39
  But I feel like prompt engineering and one-shot blogging and a lot of the, like, hype use cases for it at the moment are just totally misguided, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:48
  What kind of stuff were you hearing at BrightonSEO? So, [sighs] this one talk which really, like, stuck in my mind.
• 19:54
  It was basically like, I don't wanna give too many specifics 'cause I don't wanna, like, diss anyone too vividly, but there was a talk about how you could scale up your content program using generative AI.
• 20:05
  And I think there are ways you can do that, right? There are companies investing a lot of money into, like, building out custom fine-tuned models that actually does create pretty good content.
• 20:14
  But this was basically like almost like search and replace, you know, replace this product name with this product name. Yeah. Like, things that would have sounded a bad idea like, yeah, 10 years ago.
• 20:25
  And there were so many people in the audience, like, taking notes, taking pictures of it. [laughs] And I just know they probably went away and tried to do that for themselves.
• 20:32
  And, you know, people should experiment, but I feel like that is the kind of use case that is just, is not good. And yeah, a lot of people are scared about SGE as well, the impact that's gonna have on search.
• 20:43
  We were worried about featured snippets when they came out. You know, suddenly Google was taking information from your blog post, delivering it straight to users, and cutting you out. Yeah.
• 20:51
  I think SGE is like that, but kind of ramp it up on steroids a little bit. But SEO changes, content changes. I don't think we should be too precious about how things are now.
• 21:02
  We just need to work out what opportunities exist in the, the new version of SEO, I think. Yeah.
• 21:08
  You know, there was a-- Someone posted an article in the Slack group the other day from Benedict Evans, like investor- Oh, yeah... writer guy.
• 21:15
  Anyways, and the article is basically about, like, we don't really know what to do with this technology yet because the use cases don't really even exist. And he likened that to the personal computer.
• 21:27
  Like, there was an era in the '80s when Steve Jobs was trying to sell people computers, and they said, "I don't even know what I would do with a computer."
• 21:36
  You know, and it just took time for things to kinda catch up, and then it's like, well, now everybody has a smartphone, a laptop. You know, they might go to their office where they have another computer.
• 21:46
  Like, uh, this just we're surrounded by these things now, and that was basically what he was saying is like the technology will find its use cases as it evolves and as we kind of evolve to, you know, whatever.
• 21:57
  Like, our society basically changes to have the needs that this thing could solve that we don't even really know about yet, which I found to be interesting and also, like, a little bit scary.
• 22:05
  Like, what will we be doing- I, I love it. Such a-... with this tech in five years? Like, I have no idea. [chuckles] Yeah. What will this tech be doing to us in five years maybe? Yeah.
• 22:13
  But, um, yeah, I love that as a, like a mode of thought, and I think if we were all just a bit patient, that would be fine.
• 22:19
  But of course, there's this like pseudo economy popping up where people are trying to, like, make a ton of money off- Yeah. Yeah...
• 22:24
  the technology now and insisting that the current version is all that you need, and yeah. You- But definitely not, not, not something to be ignored, I don't think, is it? [chuckles] For sure.
• 22:33
  You wrote an article for the blog titled AI Content is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy, and I feel like you really captured in that title exactly where we are right now.
• 22:44
  I think we should all keep chipping away, like, what can we do? How can we push this technology?
• 22:48
  What can we-- Not just how can we create efficiency in our existing workflows, but is there something that new we could do that we really couldn't do before? And we'll, we'll get there eventually.
• 23:00
  You know, I have this, this thing bouncing around in my head about the content playbook needing to be rewritten, and I think it will only be rewritten- Yeah. Yeah. Yeah...
• 23:07
  as people chip and chip and chip and chip away with this technology. And then use cases will start to emerge, but then one company will do it, and then everybody else will follow.
• 23:16
  And then that will sort of continue to happen until this new playbook is kind of fleshed back out. I, yeah, totally agree with that. And I'm kind of sympathetic.
• 23:24
  I kind of, I trashed the whole like, you know, content heist. Let's publish a thousand articles at once in that article. But we do kinda need some people to test that out and see what happens. Yeah, true.
• 23:35
  Um, I'm kind of, you know, our job as, like, marketers and content marketers is to, we have a responsibility, I think, to test out every new technology and see if there is some advantage that we can confer to our company through using it.
• 23:47
  I just think we've reached a point now where enough data has been collected to see that that one-shot content play is probably not a very good idea in most industries.
• 23:56
  But yeah, if anyone does have ideas for the next generation of the content playbook, please DM me on Twitter or something. I have a Starbucks gift card for you.
• 24:03
  [laughs] You know, I have one kind of like niche use case I-I would like to figure out with generative AI, which is how to turn five years of user-generated content in our Slack community into search-accessible content.
• 24:16
  Like, in theory, we could create the Quora of content marketing because we have tens and tens of thousands of questions and then answers for all of them. I think there's a way to do it.
• 24:28
  I don't know what it is yet, but then we also have toFigure out how do you kind of protect people's privacy. You know, like people didn't post these things with the intention of it being searchable on the open web.
• 24:40
  You know, there is like some amount of privacy in a Slack group.
• 24:43
  But I feel like there's probably, I don't know if that necessarily perfectly fits the definition of programmatic SEO, but I do feel like there are things like that where you're sitting on this mountain of material that you could run through a model and spit out actually great stuff because it's already been generated by a person.
• 25:01
  You just need to form it in a way that it would be more enjoyable to read and make it accessible to people. Yeah. And I love that because you're basically building a search engine at that point, aren't you? Yeah, yeah.
• 25:11
  Because not only are you trying to, like, answer queries, but also if you've got multiple answers within the Slack group, you're gonna have to find some way of ordering and ranking those queries as well.
• 25:20
  And I think we're seeing a lot of that, you know.
• 25:22
  People, at the same time that people are the least happy they've ever been with the existing Google search results, we also have the most fragmentation of like alternatives to that.
• 25:31
  Like if I wanna know about content, I'd probably rather search the Superpath archives than I would Google because it's like a vetted community of- Mm-hmm... people that actually know what they're talking about.
• 25:41
  And yeah, I don't know, it'd be interesting to see how that pans out over the years. You know, are we gonna see more of these specialized kind of mini search engines emerge? Yeah, yeah. Kind of cool. That would be cool.
• 25:49
  Yeah, totally. Any other takeaways from Brighton SEO?
• 25:52
  I mean, I actually watched your video with a lot of curiosity because I haven't been to a marketing conference in, I think the last one I went to was in twenty-fourteen, I think. So 10 years. It's been a long time. And
• 26:05
  in your video, you basically said, "Hey, this was fantastic. I had a great time. I learned a lot. I met all these cool people," you know. Any takeaways from that? Like, do you plan on doing more event stuff? Yeah.
• 26:14
  So it was kinda cool joining Ahrefs 'cause it is actually a very, like, event-oriented company. I didn't really realize that before I joined.
• 26:21
  We have like, we regularly sponsor a lot of these events, so we're like one of the main headline sponsors of Brighton.
• 26:27
  We also attend lots of events as well, and we actually like financially support and sponsor lots of like meetups and workshops and that kind of thing.
• 26:35
  It kind of falls under that umbrella of like, you know, marketing activities where it's really hard to prove the ROI, but also you know it's there because you meet these people and they recognize you and they talk about you and they're really like...
• 26:46
  I talked to Chima Mmeje, actually. She's the content manager at Moz, and she's got this amazing like nonprofit charity organization and she said, "You know, Ahrefs was the first financial supporter of that."
• 26:57
  And it's those tiny little things, you know, that has a huge ripple effect, I think, down the line in terms of people, the goodwill and thinking about your business and that kind of thing. That's great.
• 27:05
  That's really cool. Um, yeah, super, super interesting experience.
• 27:08
  I'm a massive introvert and I, you know, like sitting at my laptop typing all day, but couple times a year, put me in a conference with a few people, I, yeah, I had a really good time. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's awesome.
• 27:18
  And you all are hosting an event this fall, or is that right? Yeah. We're actually running our very own conference in Singapore for the first time, which is kind of staggering.
• 27:26
  Like, in the process of like solidifying the speaker lineup at the moment. Tickets are gonna go live, I think maybe next week or the week after.
• 27:33
  Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see what it's like actually being on the organizational side of it. I reckon it's probably gonna be really freaking hard, actually. [chuckles] Yeah, yeah. Are you going? Yeah.
• 27:42
  Apparently I'm speaking as well, so I should probably- Nice... uh, put something together. Oh, that's awesome. That's really cool. I have a couple other questions I wanna ask you, just on a semi-professional note.
• 27:52
  Like, you're sort of famous for some of your side projects. Like, you have two courses up, you've written novels. I saw the other day that you took a Python course and have been learning to program.
• 28:05
  Like, I guess I am sort of curious about like the part of your brain that like always needs to be noodling on something else. And then very specifically I'm curious about the Python thing.
• 28:13
  That caught my eye, that you wanna be able to interact with APIs. I'm just sort of curious like what kind of stuff you're working on. Yeah. I mean, I just, I get bored very, very easily.
• 28:21
  It just, that was one of the reasons I loved working at Animalz actually.
• 28:24
  You know, there was always stuff happening, different parts of the company, and there was a little bit of chaos, you know, so I was able to go and get my hands stuck in into whatever fire was burning at the time, and I, I just, I liked that.
• 28:36
  I enjoy that. I think learning new stuff is probably the most fulfilling part of my job. So I'm always, yeah, always trying to learn, always trying to do new stuff, always trying to like fill in gaps in my understanding.
• 28:47
  And a lot of it, yeah, what was it like to write a book? I didn't know, so I eventually had a go at that. We thought about launching the Animalz Academy at some point, like a kind of training thing. Mm-hmm.
• 28:56
  And when that didn't kind of like get off the ground, I thought I'll just do it for myself, you know, and see what that process is actually like. Yeah, it's been good fun.
• 29:04
  I, I, yeah, I always, I try and dedicate like a little bit of my brain every week to furthering some kind of side project in some capacity. Yeah. Are there more courses coming? Uh, yeah, I've got...
• 29:13
  I al- I'm always thinking about it. I've got one idea I'm noodling on at the moment I think it would be fun to do.
• 29:19
  So hopefully between a very full on and fulfilling job and very full on and fulfilling children, I'm, at some point- Yeah. [chuckles]... maybe I might find a bit of head space. [laughs] And how about the Python thing?
• 29:29
  I've been thinking a lot about no-code lately and really trying to push my own skill set there. So like the latest thing I was working on was webhooks, learning how webhooks work- Okay... learning how to use them.
• 29:39
  And like now that I have like a basic understanding, my mind is sort of blown about how powerful webhooks are. Python keeps coming up.
• 29:47
  Like, that's a lot of thing as I'm in like no-code communities and searching around for solutions to things. It's like, oh, well you just use this Python snippet to do this or that. I'm like, "Ugh, okay.
• 29:57
  I think I might have to tackle that." What, I'm curious, like if you have a use case in mind for it and then, two, like what is the process of learning that been like? Yeah.
• 30:06
  It's really interesting you say that 'cause I, I always, I think I felt the same with you. I was kind of fascinated by no-code. It's the allure of code with obviously apparently not having to no code.
• 30:15
  And I played with like Bubble and a few of these other things, and even though Webflow, for example, I just kind of felt like it was code, but like disguised. Yeah, yeah. It was code with like extra steps. Right.
• 30:26
  And there was a part of me that was likeCan I just learn to code in some capacity? Like, what is the, like, simplest, most useful access point to that? I didn't really have an answer for a bunch of years.
• 30:36
  I didn't really do anything with it. And then actually Paul Graham tweeted about Replit's 100 Days of Python course in the context of, um, how few people complete it, actually.
• 30:46
  And I checked it out, and it was just exactly what I wanted.
• 30:50
  So Python, as you say, everyone recommends it as like introductory language to learn 'cause of how it's structured very simply, that kind of thing, and it's free.
• 30:59
  It's like thirty minutes a day or intended to be, and it's really, like, project focused. You come away with loads of things that you've made. And I could really quickly see how I'd actually use that in my job.
• 31:10
  So I- I've kind of stuck with that, and with a bit of ChatGPT at my side to, like, troubleshoot error messages and, you know, suggest improvements and that kind of thing.
• 31:17
  It's actually been really, really cool, really good fun learning how to do it. And yeah, so the most useful thing I've done so far is just learning how to call an API.
• 31:26
  Andrew at Animal showed me how to do this in a really, like, confusing way when I was there a couple years ago. Didn't really understand what I was doing. I can actually do it.
• 31:34
  I wrote my own script to call the Ahrefs API, get some data that would've taken me hours to get, and it was just like I was very, very proud at that moment. I felt like I've actually used this for good in my work. Yeah.
• 31:45
  Yeah. That's really cool. Also kind of an amazing way to dog food the product too, because the customers who are using the API are probably, those are probably sophisticated customers or, you know, they...
• 31:58
  I imagine their customer lifetime value is quite a bit higher because API's more expensive. It's integrated into something they're doing.
• 32:03
  Like, so understanding even at a basic level how to do it probably informs the way you think about the business development part of Ahrefs as well. Yeah, totally.
• 32:14
  And, uh, you know, I've been to two Brighton SEOs while working with Ahrefs, and I always had enterprise customers come up to me and ask very specific technical questions about the API, and I would, I always dreaded that.
• 32:25
  But now I can at least have some semblance of understanding of, like, what they're asking for. And that was kind of one of the motivations for learning generally, right?
• 32:33
  Working at a software company and not understanding code, I just felt kind of, like, mute, like I wasn't speaking the same language as the rest of the company.
• 32:40
  And maybe I, you know, I don't have to learn that language, but I kinda want to. I wanna just understand a bit more and absorb it a bit more. And yeah, it's been good fun so far. That's very cool.
• 32:50
  ChatGPT, like you said, is amazing for this kinda thing. Anytime I bump into an issue with any of the no-code stuff I've been working on, I just ask ChatGPT.
• 32:58
  It literally the other day wrote a script that I was able to put inside of an Airtable automation that I could never have did. I mean, maybe if I studied it- Yeah...
• 33:07
  and learned, you know, JavaScript or whatever, I could have figured it out six months from now, but it did it in thirty seconds, and I was like, "Whoa, that, yeah, that is amazing."
• 33:17
  And I find it particularly useful in a programming context because it just has to be correct.
• 33:22
  You know, part of the problem with generative AI from a content perspective is that it needs to be interesting and have personality and based on, you know, real-life experience.
• 33:31
  But for code, it just has to be, it's either right or it's not right. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm sure that, I'm sure a programmer would listen to this and say, "You have no idea what you're talking about."
• 33:40
  But for the use cases I have, it just, if it works, dot, I'm thrilled. Yeah, exactly that.
• 33:45
  'Cause, yeah, in, like, content marketing, I feel like we're always fumbling around the edges of code, you know, with like CSS or HTML, trying to like add like a CTA to a blog post in WordPress or something, and it's been really good for just, yeah, expanding the horizons a little bit and making me a bit more fluent in the language of code.
• 34:03
  Yeah, yeah. It's been really cool. Really cool stuff. Ryan, I wanna be respectful of your time.
• 34:07
  You told me be- before we started recording that you don't have a Superpath hoodie, which I am stunned and frankly embarrassed about, so we will get one in the mail to you as soon as possible.
• 34:17
  Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you have a lot going on between work and family and everything else, and novels and learning code and building courses and all that, so we really appreciate the time.
• 34:26
  Where can we direct people to follow along with the work you're doing for Ahrefs and then any personal stuff you have going on? Ahrefs blog is where, you know, most of my writing and thought ends up these days.
• 34:36
  I've actually got a, hopefully a really cool post coming out this week that people might like.
• 34:40
  And otherwise, LinkedIn and Twitter, they're the two places I spend, uh, slightly unprofessional amounts of time at the moment. [laughs] Perfect.
• 34:48
  We'll have links to everything in the show notes for, for folks to go quickly access all those things. Ryan, great to catch up. Thank you again. Hope to do it again soon. Oh, thanks for having me, Jimmy.
• 34:57
  Always a pleasure. Take care. [outro music]