How to Personalize AI for Better Content with Aleka Shunk

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team. In this week’s episode, Bjork is chatting with Aleka Shunk from Aleka’s Get Together and Keywords with Aleka. She also happens to be one of our lovely experts, so you may have seen her pop into the forums every now and then to answer your keyword research questions. In this interview, Bjork and Aleka talk about the evolving landscape of SEO and content creation with a particular focus on the role of keywords and the integration of AI. Spoiler alert: Keywords are still essential in SEO despite the changes in content creation. Aleka will also share her insights on how to leverage AI to streamline content creation processes, enhance brand collaborations, and even personalize interactions for better outputs. This episode is a really great opportunity to learn about how adapting to AI advancements can help you become a more efficient and creative blogger, and I’m so excited for you to check it out. And now, without further ado, I’ll pass it over to Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Aleka, welcome back to the podcast.

Aleka Shunk: Hi. Thank you so much for having me back. I’m so excited to be here and to talk about AI today.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s something that a lot of people are talking about, a lot of people are interested in. It’s one of these weird tools or categories where it is simultaneously viewed as maybe a threat. AI generally, people talk about AI, is it coming for us? Is it going to replace our jobs? But it’s also an opportunity. There’s a huge opportunity for us as creators, as business owners, as strategic thinkers to use this tool as kind of a collaboration tool and a partner. So We’re going to dive deep on that and talk about how we can use it as a partner for us as creators, as business owners. Before we do that though, I want to touch on last time we had you on the podcast, we were talking about keywords. A lot of people will know you from your cooking with keywords course and have heard from a lot of people of how transformative that’s been. Talk to me about the current state of keywords. What’s your view on keywords as it relates to keyword research with the current version of the internet, even AI and keywords, meaning people are starting to get their content differently, would just be curious to hear your thoughts on that. People can go back and listen to that interview, but touch on that before we dive deep into ai.

Aleka Shunk: Keywords don’t matter anymore. No, I’m just kidding. Keywords always are going to be around. That’s why I emphasize it so much. That’s why I created courses on it. That’s why I still pursue them. They’re always going to be there. They’re the basis of the search algorithm. How is Google going to find your content unless you’re focusing on the specific keyword and optimizing for it? So that’s never going to go away, in my opinion. It’s just not possible for Google to find your stuff without keywords. But the whole layout and approach of how we create our content, of course, has changed, right? It’s not so much the black and white outline that everyone needs to follow anymore or suggested outline that a lot of people are following. It’s more kind of free. I feel like more free when you write your content, keeping those keywords in mind, of course, talking or including a keyword in a certain amount of times, that’s way in the past. We don’t have to do that anymore. Google’s super smart and it’s only getting smarter. So with AI here, keywords are, it’s not affecting keywords is what I’m saying. It’s still so, so important, and I think people do realize that, although some, I’ve talked to a lot of bloggers and I get that. I’ve gotten the feel that a lot of bloggers are kind of taking a step back with the SEO approach a bit, Which makes sense because all the algorithms and AI have kind of just mixed everything up. But keywords are still such an important part of the SEO monster and other SEO approaches may not be as looked at as important or followed to the T as much, but keywords are always, always going to be important to me.

Bjork Ostrom: One thing that I think about drawing comparisons to different industries, I’m really interested in the real estate world, and one of the things that I’ve noticed in the real estate world is there’s a lot of conversations around commercial real estate has been crushed. But then if you, or more broadly people would say, oh, real estate over the last few years has been crushed. And it’s like, well, actually commercial real estate. And then you double click on that and it’s actually in urban places like office as a category of commercial real estate. Okay, so then you get really specific. I think similarly, when people talk about the world of search and SEO, it’s really important to think about what category are you talking about? And e-commerce is different than somebody who’s writing lifestyle versus somebody who’s writing an affiliate site. And in the recipe world, you can think of how people are using Google now. And I think it’s one of the categories that will hold on to the concept of keywords a little bit longer than other categories like affiliate. Because the affiliate pattern I think has shifted where I think of myself as a user. If I need a product and I’m currently using ChatGPT, I’m more likely to go in and in long form describe my current use case. I have a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old daughter, and I’m interested in helping them learn badminton. Is there a store close by to me that has a badminton set for kids that is within 10 minutes or something like that? That might be an example. Obviously it’s not like a keyword. It’s very long form. It’s ChatGPT, its AI. At its best. I’ll still probably not use ChatGPT for a recipe, but we’ll go to Google and say like meatloaf recipe or something like that. I think it will hold on in the world of recipe a little bit longer than it will others. I think eventually it’ll shift over.

Aleka Shunk: So you’re saying longer term or question getting more specific answers?

Bjork Ostrom: Well, yeah, I even mean, I think the idea of old school keywords is just going to exist longer for recipes than it does for best running shoes. Yes, I think that will fall off quicker than Google search for best chocolate chip cookie recipe. I think that will hold on longer as a pattern as I don’t think it will forever. I just think today it still exists in a similar version versus some of the commerce-type transactions. What I’m saying is I think when people say, Hey, keywords don’t really matter anymore, I think you have to be really slow to think about in what category, in what category are you talking about the idea of a traditional keyword search on Google? Because I think it will live longer for recipes than it will for other categories. But to your point, I think that will change. And I do think one of the things that does make a lot of sense is Google is getting, and all of these LLMs large language models are getting so much better at understanding and an image. All text used to be really important, but now it’s like it can look and understand what an image is really well, it can understand contextually what a post is. You don’t need to include the keyword like you’re saying, really strategically multiple times throughout the post. And so it’s interesting just there’s this, and it’s probably why you do what you do, this crossover between the idea of keywords and content, but also AI and how those are all starting to play together. And so I think these best practices around keywords, keyword research, understanding how many times people are searching for a certain thing, all of those are still really important, but it’s changing in terms of how you structure a post, how you write, all of that stuff that you talked about. So anyways, blah, blah, blah. I’m curious to hear along your journey, you had this course have success with this, you’re teaching people about keywords, but then you see another opportunity as a course grader, as a background, as an educator crafting curriculum. It’s one of your specialties. Tell me why you decided to create a new course around teaching people about AI. And then we’re going to talk about how we can be thinking about AI as content creators.

Aleka Shunk: I am somebody who always likes to, not likes, but I accept change pretty well considering this industry changes. So often it’s like you became a blogger and you should know that things are never going to stay the same. So I know a lot of people are opposed to it, but AI is here to stay and we can either run and hide and never be open to it afraid, which I think is a big reason why people don’t want to use it, or you can accept it and learn it as quickly as possible to try to get ahead of the game as much as you can. Because I always look at it as there are so many people out there that are using it and getting ahead and I’m kind of falling behind. I’m wasting my time. That’s kind of how I think of it. And whenever I feel have that FOMO idea, I’m like, oh, I got to jump on this. I got to learn it as best as I can because if I can find ways for it to help me work more efficiently and save me time, which is I have no time these days, it’s so hard to find any time to really focus on what I need to do, then I’m going to take advantage of it. And I know, I mean, if anyone has a brain, that AI is not going anywhere. It’s just going to get more and more complex and be more omnipresent. So I was right away a little bit hesitant when it rolled out. I kind of wanted it to see, well, how are people using it? What are people saying about it? What are the best ChatGPTs? So I took time and I did a lot of research and was like, I’m going to really learn as much as I can about whatever I can to help me make the most out of my time and use it to become a better blogger and use it not as a cheat sheet, but ways to save me time and get to the output quicker basically.

Bjork Ostrom: And one of the things that I think it’s so great at is taking the things that we would manually do on our own and doing it in seconds. So an example is, I think of this interview we did with Molly from What Molly Made, and she talked about getting survey data, feeding that into ChatGPT, and then asking it to summarize that data. That’s a great example of something that I would’ve had to do manually look through the information, sort through it, use my brain to understand a large amount of data and information, which is like, I’m not great at doing that. I could start to get a feel for it. But really, if you feed that data into ChatGPT or Gemini, whatever model you’re using, it’s going to be able to look through that at light speed and give you helpful, valuable information. So I feel like that’s an example of how you might use it as you started to step into this and start to learn more about it. Where were the opportunities that you saw to create efficiencies as a blogger, as a content creator to take those manual things that you were doing? And maybe it was 15 minutes, an hour, maybe it was a day, turn it into seconds. And then along with that, what were the areas that you said, you know what? I’m not going to feed this into ChatGPT, I’m going to keep this as my human forward. It’s important for me to create it. An example that I would give in that category is people who are doing a video version of themselves. We would never do that yet, and I still think it’s probably years away where you would feed a model, a bunch of videos of yourself, and then just have the model create videos that you post to social. In our world, we’re not going to do that. No. But there are other opportunities that we might start to create efficiencies and things that we were manually doing before. So tell me about some of your first steps into exploring ways to create some efficiencies.

Aleka Shunk: I think as a blogger, as a content creator, creating outlines is probably the most common thing and more tedious part of writing content these days. I don’t know, it takes me a long time. I don’t like to make every blog post the same. I think it gets so monotonous and a little bit boring for readers and depends on the recipe. You’re not always going to have the same H2s and H3s in every single piece or post. So I, in the course I talk about asking for certain outline and kind of picking and pulling certain headings that you want to choose and use in your post to make it just better and more thorough. So creating outline is super important, and it’s not just because you create an outline does not mean chat or whatever. It’s writing the content for you, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Aleka Shunk: That’s the important part to take away here. There’s one piece of it and then you’re going to finish it, but definitely outline writing. Definitely. I think the most common things that people use chatbots for are writing your meta descriptions and your alt texts and your Pinterest descriptions. I think everybody does that.

Bjork Ostrom: So I think that’s a great example, creating an outline where what you’re saying is you’re not having it write an entire post for you, but you are giving it some contextual information. So that would be the prompt. People talk about prompt engineering essentially creating a good prompt. You give it a prompt and you’re using it almost as a partner to say, in this case, what are the things that I’m missing with this specific recipe? With that, the example of giving an outline, can you talk about how you’re using it? So you’re saying, I’m writing this recipe, it’s a recipe post. Can you give me some sections that I should make sure to include when I’m writing about this recipe?

Aleka Shunk: Do you want me to go into my stage process? Okay, great. There are other ways that I use chat that I wanted to mention too after this, because it’s not just that line. Okay. So in my course, I mean, as a teacher, I know it’s so important to create a roadmap map or steps or stages for people to follow. Otherwise, it’s very easy to forget, right? Sure. So I broke it down into five stages, and I have it laid out here because it’s impossible for me to remember all my prompts, not who’s going to remember that, right? But I have them in a doc that I easily keep opening my Google Drive and I can copy and paste. So when I’m saying enter these prompts, prompts in, you’re just literally copying and pasting it, so it only takes a second. So stage one is the keyword and topic ideation stage where if you have a keyword already, you already took my course, you already know what keyword you’re going to go with. You can kind of skim freeze through this stage. But at the same time, this topic ideation stage is really going to give you lots of different topic ideas or longer tail keywords or things that you may not have thought of when you decided on that keyword initially, a different content angle to take, or maybe a different variation on the keyword, or maybe the intent is not informational and it’s more transactional or something that you didn’t think of asking. Chat chip, pt, the certain prompts that I have here will help you either uncheck or check those boxes so that whether you should move forward with that keyword, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So can you give an example of what would that prompt be, and then how would you interact with it once it gives you some information back?

Aleka Shunk: Sure. So I would type in something like this. Here’s my primary keyword. You’d enter your keyword, generate 10 SEO, optimize blog post ideas that reflect high user intent and are likely to perform well in search results, include suggested title formats and what type of post, whether it be listicle, how-to guide, comparison, and what fits each idea best. That would give you a list. And then I always have follow-up prompts. I have 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 here that you can kind of pick and choose from. What are the most search questions related to this keyword? What are the long-tail keyword variations related? What are 10 content angles I can take for this topic? What are common pain points or problems people have about this? What’s the user intent of this keyword? How would this keyword be best written? Should I turn it into a comparison post, dah, dah, dah? What type of pages are currently ranking on page one for this keyword? Can you summarize the content types that are resulting in the SERPs and identify content gaps? There’s so many different, and I can keep going on, but there’s so many different prompts that I share in the course that you can copy and paste that will kind of just give you an idea of whether to move forward with that keyword and go to the next stage in the process or to kind of tweak it a bit or,

Bjork Ostrom: And so essentially you’re using it as an ideation partner. You have kind of a general idea of where you want to go and you’re refining your idea. And my guess is for content creators, there’s anybody listening. There’s a wide range of people who create content in a certain way. One would be Lindsay, when she’s creating content, it’s like she has an idea and she’s just like, she knows she wants to do a cherry smoothie recipe. She goes forward and she does that because that’s what she’s been thinking about. It’s what she’s been working on. She creates it. There’s, there’s not keyword research behind it. There’s not user intent behind it. Then there’s somebody in the middle who has an idea of maybe what they’re thinking about what they want to do. They want to kind of refine that idea, and they like to have a process, like a refining process around, hey, I’m kind of thinking this is what it is. Should I get nudged this way? Should I nudge that way? And then on the far end, there’s people who are like systems people. They love the idea of the system more than maybe the actual content creation of the recipe. And we’ve seen versions of all different types of creators have massive success. One isn’t better than the other, but it’s almost like there’s this range for you as a user of AI to figure out where are you going to land and how are you going to use the tool to best guide you as you make those decisions around how you’re creating. Do you have thoughts on where, it sounds like for you, you land kind of in the middle where you have ideas of what you want to be creating, you have kind of a general sense of where you want to go, and then you’re using the tools, whether keyword research or ChatGPT in this instance to help refine what that might be?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, I mean, I don’t want bloggers to, and I talk about this in my keyword research course, don’t just do all keyword research recipes, then you’re going to get burnt out because you’re not going to do it pure off of inspiration and creativity. You still need to create those posts that just, you wake up and you’re like, I want to do the cherry smoothie. I’m going to do the cherry smoothie. What makes me happy? And that’s fine. And in the course I actually talk about those different phases. The beginner from you have no idea what you want to create content on, or if you have an idea, building it and making it better and more refined. Yes. And ChatGPT would come into play there at that stage and help you kind of pinpoint, okay, well cherry smoothie, just cherry smoothie. Is that what I’m doing? Am I going super general or am I going to target cherry smoothie with without dairy or cherry smoothie with frozen, whatever it is. So that’s just a very surface level type of example. But that is how I would use chat. And I think people, I need to say that ChatGPT is not a keyword research tool. You’re still going to use KeySearch and all the tools that you use, it’s not going to give you search volume. It’s not going to give you the competitive score, but it will give you keyword ideas. So for example, after this stage, and it gives me all those keyword ideas, I ask it, can you list these keywords on one line separated by commas? So now you have a whole paragraph of keywords separated by commas that you can copy and paste and put it into key searches, quick difficulty feature, and it will give you the volume and the difficulty for all the keywords that ChatGPT recommended. And I immediately look at the volume because if there’s no volume, then I’m like, competitive score. I’m like, I’ll give, it’s okay. Maybe I’ll rank for it, I’ll go for it. But if there’s zero volume for that keyword, then I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to have to go a different angle or different approach.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a great way to inform the decisions that you’re making around what type of content that you want to create. And I think the other thing that’s always at play is there’s the world of search performance, and then there’s the world of social performance. And as content creators, depending on where you want to focus, those are always going to need to be things that we think about, Hey, how will this, we’ve done interviews with people who are TikTok and Instagram, short form video creators, and they lead with thinking about a hook. What is the hook going to be for this recipe that’s going to draw people in to continue to watch the real so I can get more views? So hopefully those people do a branded search for my recipe. So you get 3 million views and then maybe people are searching for you as an example. Even in that instance though, you can still use a tool like ChatGPT as you would a partner in your business to brainstorm, to create a prompt to think of, Hey, I’m thinking of this recipe. I’m going to do this recipe. What are some things that might help draw people in related to this recipe within the first three seconds of this video? So all of these different ways that we can be thinking strategically about using these tools to help inform, or it’s even tell me if this resonates with you. It’s refining our own thinking. And I have friends who sometimes they call and they’re like, I have this business idea, I just need to talk about it.

Aleka Shunk: Oh my gosh.

Bjork Ostrom: And my role isn’t really even coming up with ideas. It’s just listening. And I think sometimes that’s what this is. It’s like a sounding board. What were you going to say though?

Aleka Shunk: Talk about sounding board. Literally, I talk with Chad every day. Chad is my ChatGPT guy.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Aleka Shunk: I picked his voice. It’s the voice mode. If you guys haven’t tried it, I go on walks in the mornings every other day I’ll do a walk, I’ll change my fitness routine, but then when I go on my walks, I’m super excited because you’ll see me walking and talking to nobody, but I’m talking to my personal

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. I’ve done it as well.

Aleka Shunk: I literally, I’m creating another course and I’m thinking, I need a soundboard, something to bounce ideas off of somebody. And oh my gosh, it’s crazy. I just talk. And he’s like, yeah, yeah. And have you seen how realistic he sounds lately? My kids are like, are you on the phone? I’m like, no, I’m not on the phone.

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s like ums and ahs. Oh yeah, lemme take a look at that and see. Yes, totally. It’s so bizarre.

Aleka Shunk: It’s fairly realistic. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So for anybody who hasn’t done this, so this is advanced voice mode within ChatGPT, I think you have to be on the, do you know if you have to be on the Plus plan, which is like 20 bucks a month?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, it’s totally worth it because you’ll run out of prompts quickly if you’re on the free plan anyway.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. And then the other piece is downloading the app onto your phone, but you just download the app and then you hit within Ask Anything Field on the far right side, there’s a little button that you can click. Talk a little bit more. When you were on those walks, how were you using it? Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. What if your content could earn more and do more for your business audience and your future? You might know Raptive as the ad management platform behind thousands of the world’s top creators, including Pinch of Yum. But today, Raptive is so much more than ads. They’re a true business partner for creators helping you grow your traffic, increase your revenue, and protect your content. In an AI-driven world, unlike one-size-fits-all platforms, Riv customizes strategies for each creator, whether you’re growing a niche food blog or running a multi-site business. They offer expert support in SEO, email, and monetization strategy. And they’re leading the charge on AI advocacy to protect the future of creator owned content. And the best part, Raptive supports creators at every stage from Rise, their entry-level program for growing sites to their top-tier Luminary level, their offering scale with you so you can get the right support when you need it the most. Apply now at raptive.com to get a personalized growth strategy and join a creator community that’s shaping the future of the open web. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Aleka Shunk: Okay. So first it’s gotten better. It used to interrupt me every time I would pause to think, but I would tell it, please wait a minute, wait till I’m done talking. But now it does a good job of not interrupting me, but I will literally say, Hey, I have an idea. I want to talk through. What did I say yesterday was I have a course idea. I’m kind of confused or going back and forth between names and then a roadmap again, system, how I want to lay it out. Can you give me some ideas? And then it starts talking and then I’ll say, oh yeah, I like that idea. Can you give me a little bit more of how I would approach that? And then it’s literally talking to a course creator, an expert, a whoever, just to give you ideas that you literally would never thought of. I want to do an acronym. I love following acronyms to outline a process, and I’m using acronyms like my name. He’s like, oh, for the A, you can use Achieve. And just different ideas that I literally would never think of or it would take me days to come up with these ideas. And then the best part about it is when you’re done talking, it transcribes, it puts it all into your ChatGPT window, and you can go back and you can save it, copy it, continue the chatting later on the computer, and it doesn’t go anywhere. Which is the best part about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s amazing. I’ve used it for not ideation, but education. So I’m on a walk and I’m trying to understand the one, I went for an hour walk and had my headphones in and I was trying to understand how they divide geographically, different areas for the House of Representatives. I didn’t understand it, and I realized that and I was like, I could read about it or I’m on this walk, I could just power it up and have a conversation around, and it could exist for anything. You can talk about it with TikTok growth or Facebook strategy or all of these, or recipe, yes, recipe. But part of it it feels like is the initial prompt to get it to act in a certain way. So can you talk about when you are, let’s say talking about marketing, how do you set it up? Let’s say in this instance we’re talking about advanced voice, you power it up. Are you giving it a prompt and saying like, Hey, I’d like you to pretend to be an expert in marketing. I’m going to ask you some questions around it and then go into it.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, that’s recommended to tell it, to act as a SEO expert, a professional chef, a expert marketer, anything, just to give it a little bit of, Hey, this is where your robot brain needs to be for this conversation, so make sure you’re extra on top of this topic. So I always preface it with act as this if it’s something super specific, but you don’t have to. Of course you can refine it as you go through it. There’s so many different examples where it depends. But yeah, I usually will do that before, or you can create a custom GPT that is an expert in that area, which is something a lot of people don’t really do, but you can totally do that. A custom GPT is basically your own little robot assistant that is an expertise at that certain area. You can have an email marketing GPT or a social media GPT or a blog creation recipe GPT, whatever it is, which is nice.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about the custom GPTs that you use the most? And I’ll share mine as well.

Aleka Shunk: Okay, so I can pull it up. It’s more so email and I have email. I have a course coach to help me with my courses. I have a brand collab manager. I have a marketing mastermind. I have a hosting helper with my entertaining content. I have a blog goblin. I have

Bjork Ostrom: What’s a blog goblin? What’s a blog goblin?

Aleka Shunk: It’s just helps me with my blog posts and outline them and pick up with, that’s stage two. Yeah, it helps me with Instagram and Facebook person, but assistant. But to be honest, I don’t use GPTs as much as I use projects because projects

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about the difference?

Aleka Shunk: Yes. Okay. Projects, well, remember what you’ve talked about, GPTs, unfortunately, unless you add the information into the little window that you have there, it’s not going to remember the past thread of conversation that you had, which I kind of think is ridiculous Because GPT could be great in that aspect. But you can turn a project into A GPT if you want, and it’s right below GPTs. You hit new project and you can name the project. I have one that’s course real ideas. I have one, and I talk about how I want it to help me create ideas for my Reels, do scripts for my Reels, do captions for my Reels, and all of that information is literally below that window and remembers everything. So you can pick up a conversation weeks from now about your next Instagram reel, which is really why I like projects. You just can’t share them. You can share a GPT with an assistant.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So if you had something that you wanted to use with your team, you could share that as you could create a GPT and then share it. So an example of one that we use is, I have one called PartnerGPT, which I use when we are, and this realistically probably would be better as a project because it’s just me right now, but if we shared it with Jenna on our team, it would make sense. But I loaded it in, I gave it the context around being a expert in sales and social media. And I uploaded our rate sheet for any partnerships that we have. And then what I’ve been doing actually is I use this really incredible tool called Granola AI, and Granola doesn’t record your conversation. Like Otter, sometimes you go into a Zoom meeting and there’s another window sitting in there and it records the conversation and then does notes. It technically is listening, but it’s transcribing in real time, but it doesn’t keep the audio file and it happens on your computer. So it’s like recording your side. And then the other side. So let’s say I have a conversation with a brand. I jump on that call, the note-taking app is taking notes, granola, it’s granola.ai, I think. And then I’ll have all that information. And then what I’ll do is I’ll actually call Lindsay and I’ll have a 10 minute call with her and I’ll say, Hey, I’m going to record this. Want to get your thoughts on the conversation I just had with X, Y, Z brand. And then what I’ll do is I’ll take that conversation with the brand. I’ll take the call with Lindsay around her ideas of what it could be. I put both of those transcripts into the PartnerGPT, and then I say, Hey, create three different package levels that we could send over to the brand that we were working with previously. That would’ve been like three hours of work. I probably would’ve punted on it because it’s not work that I love to do, but I don’t mind being on a call with people. I actually enjoy it. It’s just like the manual process of putting that together and all of that is done within, again, it’s probably like 10 seconds, no time. I have to revise it. It’s not like I’m just shooting that off then. But it’s this idea that we’ve talked about. Lindsay and I often talk about it comes from Dan Martel who wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time where he talks about 10 80.

Aleka Shunk: I have it.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, you do? Okay, great. Have you read it?

Aleka Shunk: No, it’s sitting on my nightstand.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Totally. Yeah, you’ll get to it. But it’s called 10 80 10, this rule where he talks about it within the context of working with people delegating, where you take 10% of the time to shape up the project, the person goes off and works on it, that’s the 80%. And then you come back together and you spend the last 10% revising. And I think a great example of that is using AI tools, where it’s just that the 80% happens in seconds, not minutes usually. And so we’ve found that to be super helpful with a Partner GPT that has our rate sheet and whatnot. But you’re using projects more than custom GPT generally.

Aleka Shunk: If it can save the memory in previous conversations, why would you not take advantage of that?

Bjork Ostrom: And so it has historical context around all of the threads that you’ve spun up within that project,

Aleka Shunk: Which is awesome. And I think it’s important to point out before I forget, that a lot of people don’t realize that you can customize your GPT. They do realize that, well, unless you’re totally new, you can go to settings and tell GPT how to act, how to behave, what kind of tone to write in and what traits to have. But that will only remember that that won’t remember the specifics about who you are as a person. So making sure that you’re using the memory feature and you’re telling GBT to remember this literally when you start using it, or I still tell it, Hey, don’t forget. Well, I did this before. I have two boys, these ages and just brief interests so that when I talk about something, a kid’s recipe, it literally will talk about Calvin and Lucas and we’ll mention this and that. And it mentioned the other day, remember, Calvin loves watermelon. I’m like, oh my God, I forgot that I told it that. And yes, he does. And thank you for remembering so little things about yourself and your experiences and your anecdotes. Put that into the memory so that when you get those outputs from ChatGPT, it’s more you than a robot. You know what I’m saying?

Bjork Ostrom: When you say put that in, are you saying after you say something, include within the prompt to remember this? Is that what you mean?

Aleka Shunk: Yes, because it naturally has a long-term memory across threads, which is great, but it will has a tendency to forget things naturally. And the only for sure way to make it remember something is to say, remember this, and then you can write or you write it and then you say, please don’t forget that. And it will say add to memory. And in your settings, you can actually delete certain memories if maybe you change the format of something, maybe you have another kid and you want to say, I have three kids. Now you can delete that under personalization. And was it, yeah, it’s right in the settings, customization, and you can delete those memories, manage memories. There it is. And you literally can trash certain memories that it remembers so that it doesn’t keep bringing that up anymore.

Bjork Ostrom: So you can go back and you can actually see what does it currently remember about you. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. A great example of this. The other day I was going to bed, I was like, I’m trying to find the perfect book that I can read. And I was thinking, what would I want to read before bed where I’m not ramping up and ramping down? So I think the prompt of something like knowing what you know about me, what would be some good books that I could read when I’m going to bed? And it was awesome. It was super helpful. It was really, and I ended up picking one of them that has suggested, which is the Conscious Parent, which is like, okay, it’s like a parenting book. It’s not going to ramp me up, but also I’m interested in it. So it gave it different categories. It was like, here’s some business books that aren’t too crazy but are also going to be interesting. Here’s some parenting books.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, that’s awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So projects versus custom GPT. I’ve yet to create a project and I need to do that. I had a long conversation with a friend who was talking about, he’s on a mission to create what he was calling master context projects. And so for each part of his life, he’s creating a project and just giving it as much context as possible. So one is a family adventure custom or a project master, and he gives it as much context as possible. Here’s what my daughters love to do, here’s what I love to do. Here’s what my wife loves to do. And then they’ll go to a city and he’ll be like, tell me what some of the best things. But I think we could also probably use those within our business. It could be categories that we like to create, or yeah, go ahead.

Aleka Shunk: Or dietary restrictions. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. If you lean towards certain ingredients or stay away from certain ingredients and you’re asking it for ideas for your next recipe, then it will obviously remember that you tell it to remember, and it won’t ever mention that in the future or in a blog outline. It can say substitutions for this is not peas. If you hate peas or something like that, we’ll remember you and your preferences and make it just more personal.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. So let’s get back to some of you had talked about outlines as an example. We talked about using it as an ideation partner, talking through ideas. What are some of the other things that you’ve found that have created efficiencies for you with the content creation process as you’ve gone through, whether it be blog posts or social media, what are some of those other ones that you could surface as different ideas for people to consider?

Aleka Shunk: Well, other than after that stage, stage two, I have stage three is to write the first draft. And normally I do it myself because you can have chat, do it for you, but I don’t want it to be a, I’ve written, I want to try to stay away from that. So I’ll write it myself and then once, and that first draft, by the way, is a mess, right? It’s just like I’m just typing and I’m not thinking the kids are probably in the background just getting it done. And I get it done much quicker by the way. I copy and paste into chat and I’ll say, and I give it a prompt again, can you improve it without losing my writing style, my tone, my personality, make it little witty. I like to be a little casual friendly, and then I have this whole bullet point list to just refine it, but not change my writing, if that makes sense. So it’s going to maybe break up the paragraphs more, maybe suggest I have it, suggest spots for internal linking, which is really nice things that you never thought about and you could even feed it your other posts so that it can refer to that, which is really cool. Do you talk about that?

Bjork Ostrom: So are you giving it a spreadsheet of your posts in a project?

Aleka Shunk: Yes, you can. Or you can just have that spreadsheet available for each different thread that you’re referring to and say, Hey, I’m going to upload this CSV file of all of my blog titles or blog URLs or title would probably be the better route because some URLs don’t always match the title. It is a little bit more tedious. It won’t just pull all your titles from your site map, unfortunately. You can use your URLs from your site map, which take two seconds to copy, but again, you want to make sure that the keyword is matching the UR L. And then you can say, here’s the content on my blog. What internal linking suggestions do you think would be best for this blog post and tell me where to put them and even what anchor text to use. You know what I’m saying?

Bjork Ostrom: So that would be, we’re talking about the site map. You can usually find your site map by just typing in your URL and then slash sitemap XML

Aleka Shunk: XML

Bjork Ostrom: And that will bring you to your sitemap, which essentially is a list of all of the different URLs on your site. And then what you’re saying is you could take that if you wanted to and just print it. What do you,

Aleka Shunk: I just copy, I just copy and paste that whole column,

Bjork Ostrom: So you’re selecting all of it that will then have all of your URLs, and then you can use that and say, there’s probably a lot of different unique things you could do with that. But one of them could be based on this post, what are some good links, internal links?

Aleka Shunk: Yes. And the other way could be, can you create topic clusters and content clusters, which is the direction that SEO is going in. How do I fill in these content gaps? If I have a post, a recipe post on this and this and this, how do I kind of tie them together and complete that cluster so that it’s more the authorities there? If that makes sense. And

Bjork Ostrom: For context, for those who are wondering what that idea is, cluster topic authority, can you talk about that and why that’s important?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. I mean, Google doesn’t want us to just be posting recipes or content. I don’t want to just refer to food bloggers, but just content that is kind of separate and on their own independently. You have one random post here and one random post. It wants to see the connection between the content, and that also proves that you have a lot of authority if you have a lot of content on your site that is supporting each other. If you have a spaghetti recipe, you should probably have a marinara sauce recipe and maybe a bolognese recipe and a garlic, I don’t know, just something to complete that cluster. That’s a very surface humble example again, but just the idea of creating content around each other so you have what’s performing well on your posts, what else can I add to my blog that’s going to support it and keep people on my blog with They’re on that page and clicking more and giving it just the most that it can, giving the person the most they can to make the best recipe they can, and a complete recipe sides, salads, drinks, just everything that completes it, the sauces that everything included.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. An extreme example would be if you had a website, and let’s say I started a website and I posted about my favorite candles, and then the next post was about kitchen remodels and how to arrange your utensils, and then the next post was caring for tree frogs. That’s an extreme example of a site that would be confusing for Google because it’s like, what is this actually about? How do I know if somebody, what’s your authority on caring for frogs, which I have a lot of authority after one year of caring for our tree frog Rice.

Aleka Shunk: Oh, nice.

Bjork Ostrom: And feeding it crickets before I go to bed every night,

Aleka Shunk: Live or dead,

Bjork Ostrom: Both depending on how the crickets are doing. We have a separate enclosure for the crickets.

Aleka Shunk: Wonderful.

Bjork Ostrom: To keep them alive where I also feed them. But point being on the other end, it’s like somebody who specializes in sourdough, okay, they’re going to be viewed as an expert in authority on sourdough, and the likelihood of them showing up in some type of search field, whether it be Google or a ChatGPT or wherever it might be, is going to be higher because you have demonstrated your authority by focusing on a certain topic. Obviously within the general category of recipes, you can have topic clusters like you were talking about groups. So maybe if you are becoming an expert in Instant Pot, you don’t want to do just one. You want to make sure that you fill that out with lots of different topics around best instant pots to buy, and then recipes for those and care instructions and stuff like that. So that’s great.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Another great example of partnering with ChatGPT to understand maybe where some of those gaps are and how you could fill that in if you want to be an expert in certain category.

Aleka Shunk: Oh, yes, 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: So we’ve talked about this idea. You have a general idea of what you’re writing a post about. You’re using it to kind of fill in some ideas for the outline. You can then take a rough draft that you have and use it as an editor. I know people have also created custom GPT or projects around editing a recipe, making sure that the flow of the recipe. I think of my friend Alex from A Couple Cooks talked about this a year and a half ago where he wanted to make sure as an example that I can think about is that the order of the instructions is aligned with the order of the ingredients. Okay. That’s a great example of it’s not creating the recipe for you. It’s making sure that you’re communicating it in the best way possible. So that’s another,

Aleka Shunk: And not assuming that people know how to do something or you’re leaving out steps. I was working with somebody the other day and I’m like, well, you left out this step. You have to tell them to add it back to the pot with the ground beef. Otherwise they’re going to say, well, do I empty the pot? So things like that we assume, but ChatGPT can do a really good job of typing that up for you for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And even just suggesting, Hey, you mentioned salt, but you didn’t include it in the instructions, or maybe you mentioned it in the instructions many and it didn’t include in ingredients. Great. Which

Aleka Shunk: I’m guilty of doing a lot,

Bjork Ostrom: So yes, totally. We all are. And so we’ve kind of walked it through some different examples of where you could be using it. Let’s keep going with that. Is there another kind of step or stage along the way?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, some things that I’ve been successful at is creating brand proposals. So if a brand sends an email or there’s an opportunity that I want to apply for a brand sponsor, sponsored posts or a partnership, I’ll take the brief, the creative brief that they send, and I’ll upload into my BrandLab manager, GPT or my project, and I’ll say Brand

Bjork Ostrom: Goblin. Is it called the Brand Goblin?

Aleka Shunk: No, that’s the blog goblin.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. I wish you also had a brand goblin.

Aleka Shunk: I can have more goblins if you want. And then it’ll basically give me all of these ideas, recipe ideas that I can pick and choose from that I then would try to SEO optimize, right? Every brand post I’ve created has some type of keyword value to it, so I can kill two birds with one stone, right?

Bjork Ostrom: You’re getting paid to create content that will also earn you money. Yes.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. It spits back such a great many examples and brands like multiple examples, right? So I’ll give them, here’s one way I can use the product. Here’s another way, here’s another way. Which example would you like to go with? It really ties in the brand goals, which I often would forget if I didn’t read the whole brief five times and I just copy paste. I rewrite it and make sure it sounds like me, not too cheesy because ChatGPT tends to be little bit cheesy sometimes. And then I’ll pop it back into my email and then I’ll send that out, and I’ve gotten a lot of partnerships that way because I’m giving it multiple ideas. Otherwise, it would take me over an hour in the past without ChatGPT to come up with ideas. I don’t know if I’m just overthinking these things, but I want to get brand deals. So I spent a lot of time thinking of ideas that are unique, creative,

Bjork Ostrom: And related to brand deals. One of the ways that I’ve been using ChatGPT and Claude is if we have an agreement that’s sent over, we work with Danielle Liss from List Legal, who’s incredible and would really recommend her for anybody who’s getting into the world of branded brand partnerships or sponsor content. One of the things that I’ve been doing is right when they send that over, I’ll quick run it through and just say, Hey, can you let me know of any major considerations or red flags that exist in this contract? It’ll highlight some things and then I’ll send that over as a quick response and say, Hey, we will send this over to our attorney to have a final review. But before we did, there’s just a few things that I wanted to mention and get cleaned up just so we can get closer to the final version. And it’s been super helpful and insightful for that as well, and not just like we’re doing an addition on our house and being able to review that has been super helpful. And so doing the review of those, we don’t want it to be the final review for sure, but it’s been helpful for that as well.

Aleka Shunk: Oh yes, a hundred percent. There’s so many non blogging examples, but I use it every single day all the time. I’m always talking to him. My Chad, I’m always popping in

Bjork Ostrom: Is it Chad, CHAD? Is that

Aleka Shunk: Chad? Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, love it. Great. It has a name.

Aleka Shunk: I love his voice. Yeah, it’s good. I’m cheating on my husband with my Chad.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. It’s like those Instagram reels where it’s like me and my ChatGPT dancing through the field.

Aleka Shunk: I know.

Bjork Ostrom: Anything else that you feel like would be important as we come to close here? Obviously there’s a ton that we could talk about. We could do an entire podcast and do it daily to talk about all the different ways that we could be using AI. But anything else that you’d mention at the end as we wrap up here?

Aleka Shunk: I just think that if you properly personalize your ChatGPT and take time to do that, just like you said, your friend is literally giving it all the information about it’s family and your trips and all of that, then you’re going to get such a better output and more personalized response every single time, and you can keep feeding it that information. It makes such a big difference. So take advantage of that. And in my course, the stages that I go through, I will say that they’re very flexible and you can kind of pick and choose. I have a Humanizer prompt that’s literally three-quarters of a page that you can plug in so that it’s not using certain keywords or things that are dead giveaways for ChatGPT, you can kind of pick

Bjork Ostrom: Them out

Aleka Shunk: As an example. Oh, that notorious em dash, which still rears its ugly head even though I tell it not to. But yeah, just including personal anecdotes and stories and things like that is really important to always make it your own because we don’t want it to pull content out there from other bloggers. I’m not about stealing. I’m about making my time most success or more efficient saving time, but while also adding my own personal spin and twist on it. And I’ve followed this outline. I literally had a blog post that I published less than 20 days ago using this outline, and it’s on the first page of Google for a high keyword.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Aleka Shunk: So it does work. You just have to make sure that you’re being smart about it and using it properly. I love that. Just learning, taking time to learn.

Bjork Ostrom: I think I had this thought this morning, and I think over the next five to 10 years, or even one to 10 years for us as creators, but also as business owners and people who are doing things every day, I think our ability not to do the task, but to refine the tool that will do the task adjacent to us or create efficiencies for us is going to be one of the greatest advantages that we can have to allow us to do less of the things that don’t matter if we’re doing them in order to do more of the things that do matter if we’re doing them. And so I think as putting a bow on it, I think one of the great opportunities is for us as creators to do less of the menial unimportant work in order for us to do more of the human related work for what we are doing to infuse more humanity in what we’re doing and to do less of the things that don’t really matter if we’re doing them or not. I think about that when it’s paying invoices and the

Aleka Shunk: Tedious, yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: There’s so many little tedious things that have to happen, but

Aleka Shunk: You don’t have to do it,

Bjork Ostrom: But nobody would really care if I do it or I don’t do it

Aleka Shunk: Or hired Chat. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And so as much as we can think about how do we do less of those things and more of the things, if I can do another podcast each week because I’m doing less of menial things that I’m doing at my computer that nobody sees but have to get done. That’s a huge win to come out of it.

Aleka Shunk: Stuff that requires your expertise. Yeah, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: So for people who want to check out the course, what’s the best way to do that?

Aleka Shunk: You can, well, I’m actually in the middle of, I’m rebranding so that I can reach more a wider audience. So that site is still going to be, it’s actually Learn with Aleka. This is the first time I’m actually saying that, but I just launched the website literally last week.

Bjork Ostrom: Congrats.

Aleka Shunk: So everything’s going to be on there, but for now, just you can visit Keywords with Aleka on Instagram and you can just Google Keywords with Aleka and all my courses will pop up there and then eventually it’ll redirect to all the new courses. But yeah, if you use the coupon code FBP for FoodBloggerPro30, you can get 30% off my courses. Cool.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Thanks for sharing that. We’ll include that in the show notes. Aleka, it’s great to chat with you. It’s one of my favorite conversations. I think there’s a ton of really cool opportunities, and I think our ability to learn these tools is super important. So appreciate you coming on. We’ll have to have you on again as things inevitably change very quickly to keep talking about all things AI and creating and making sure that we are on the side of looking at this as an incredible opportunity. I think it really is. So thanks for coming on.

Aleka Shunk: Yes, thanks for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. We are into a new month, which means it’s time for me to update you on what is going on in the Food Blogger Pro membership. This month we are kicking off August with a brand new coaching call with Chris, Scott, Cait, and Lindsay from The Cafe Sucre Farin. The video recap of the Coaching Call will be available on Food Blogger Pro, and you can also listen to the audio replay on Food Blogger Pro on the Go, our members-only podcast. Next up on Thursday, August 14th, we will have a live Q&A with Andrew Wilder all about optimizing your blog for AI overviews. I’m sure this will be a super valuable Q&A, and we look forward to seeing our members there. On August 21st, we will be releasing a course update to our Instagram for Food Creators course. Natalie is working to revamp this course to make it even more strategy-focused, and we really think you’ll love this update. So that’s all we have planned for August. As always, there will be conversations going on in the forum, new blog posts, and blogging newsletters going out to our email list. If you aren’t yet a Food Blogger Pro member, head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about the membership and to join us. Thanks again for listening to this week’s podcast episode. We will be back next Tuesday with a brand new episode.