E649: This year, I get clean.

I want to start off today's podcast by talking about something that happened in the world of content marketing about three years ago.

And this all ties back to what's going on in e-commerce.

And I'm just gonna talk about how I had to have a pretty big mind shift to kind of get over what had happened in the world of content marketing.

So about three or four years ago, ChatGPT rolled out their first public release.

And when this happened, it was all just, wow, this is amazing.

And Google SEO did not take an immediate impact from the first renditions of AI coming out.

There was no change.

In fact, our content websites, and I'm going to use EcomCrew specifically as an example, but we have two other major e-commerce sites.

EconCrew benefited very heavily from AI when it first rolled out.

Our writers were all of a sudden able to two or three X their content.

And we look like geniuses.

Our traffic, I believe at its height, we're getting about five or 6,000 uniques a day to EconCrew.

And a large part of that was that our writers were now just able to write more content.

Now, keep in mind, these are the early days of AI.

And so our content writers weren't really using it totally to its fullest potential, but they were nevertheless using it to get big productivity gains.

Now, shortly after though, ChatGPT really became public, Google rolled out something called the Google Helpful Update.

Now, when Google rolled out this update, almost anyone in the content marketing space saw their traffic go down 60 to 90%.

Ecom crew, we were definitely on the upper side of that drop.

And so we've seen our traffic go from five or 6,000 units a day to literally under a thousand a day, almost overnight.

Now, my first reaction, and Mike, who was also a part of EconCrew at the time, his reaction was to try to figure out what we had done wrong.

And naturally, what we did is we started blaming each other.

Oh, Mike, you screwed something up.

Oh, Dave, you screwed something up.

It took us a while to realize that, you know what, we didn't screw anything up.

This was just a massive industry change that was underway.