Music.
Your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news.
Music.
Interviews, and live events.
Hello and welcome everybody. This is Joe from StartupRate.io,
your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany, the authority on GSA startups.
Today, I don't have necessarily a entrepreneur here with me,
or that is not the main focus of today's interview.
Because I welcome Stefan here with me. Hey, welcome. Hello, hello.
Happy to have you here. We may tell our audience that you are the brain behind
one of our partnerships called modernIQs.com, where people can create SEO articles.
And so we thought, maybe it's a good idea to show the people not only who's
behind it, but also how to do that. That's why we're not going into your very
long and extensive career as an entrepreneur.
We rather go directly into the tool that is your brainchild.
Can you tell us a little bit how you got the idea and what you want to achieve with it?
And then we'll go through an article that you'll actually do for me on a test account.
And then we can talk about what's important there and also a few factors many
people don't have in mind, because I learned from you, the speed of a website is important.
That's why Startup Radio would need to work on the internal linking and stuff
like this. So the stage is all yours.
Thank you. Thank you. So look, I had multiple old projects. One was appcolumbus.com.
And that was a platform for software as a service tools, right?
And so I got paid when I had a lot of people clicking my links, right?
And so I was creating blog articles and I had Google Search Console installed.
So I saw how much traffic was coming in and it was like, yeah,
well, it wasn't too much, but it was like, so I had a reach on Google of a thousand
people in a month, right?
So, and I was creating those blog articles and it took me like, I don't know, maybe.
Two to four hours per article and when i was i think i think i actually had 69 articles.
Before i used ai tools to create text to put it on so you have to imagine this
is like we're talking about a page for software as a service tool and by the
time i had 69 articles on i i used this AI and generate a text.
So what I was doing is I was creating a description, a feature block,
and a summary for every tool.
And I did those in one day. So in one day, I was creating 69 descriptions,
69 feature blocks, and 69 summaries.
And I put the text on to this platform on this day as well.
And I could see, just like Almost the next day, it started to come up.
And one week later, I saw, wow, traffic is going up.
And it actually went like 130x in one or two months.
So that means two months later, I had 130,000 reach on Google per month.
And I was like, okay, so now I didn't know that blog articles can get you so
much, so much more reach and traffic than, you know, my social media activities combined it.
So that was like at least 10 times more. I have one question here because a
lot of people will go out there with their startup and have a very neat.
Clean, orderly website.
Maybe they have a blog, most don't. And if they do have a blog,
they have like every four weeks something posted on there.
We recommend them to do a little bit more.
Look, Google has one of the strongest things, Google and search,
I guess every search engine is kind of following Google.
So that's called eat. So you're showing your expertise.
The better you cover your topic with high quality, insightful content,
the better Google sees you as an expert in the field.
And the more Google sees you as an expert in the field, the more it sends you traffic. Right.
So to do that, I mean, look, I always have the sentence saying,
if you have a website without blog articles, it's like having a supermarket without products.
You can walk in, but there's nothing to buy or see there.
So why should people walk in? It's the same with Google.
Why should Google, I give you a very simple example for, let's say, a restaurant, right?
Well, let's say a cocktail bar. So you have a cocktail bar somewhere in town
and nobody, everybody has a website, but nobody has recipes for cocktails on their website.
So if somebody is searching for, you know, Long Island iced tea,
whatever, Long Island, Manhattan or whatever,
and you're the only restaurant that has content to show, who's Google going to send the traffic to?
It's like Google won't send people into an empty supermarket.
So, right? So this is why you should have a lot of content.
Like the more content you have, the more Google sees you as an expert,
if it is high quality, right?
So only ChatGPT, you have to be way more lucky if you only have text.
And, you know, like what our system does is automating hundreds of steps you
usually need to do by hand.
So that's part of the quality. Yeah.
For example, which steps? Because I know a lot of people out there have Gemini,
Claude, or ChatGPT access, and they're tempted to do this by themselves.
Well, so something ChatGPT does, for example, already is a headline structure.
So if you have a blog article, you're only supposed to have one H1 headline.
So that's the title headline, right? And then the subheadlines H2,
H3, and in the correct structure.
So if your blog article has –.
In h1 and h3 and then in h2 this is not making sense right so it's like it needs
to be clean structure that's the headline structure that's one out of i don't
know maybe 200 ranking factors,
you you gotta have a table of contents your images need to be small you have
need to have multiple images they need to be small so the site is loading fast
they need to have alternative image texts that the name,
I mean, even, even just the images are hours of work, finding the right one,
resizing the, the reducing the size,
finding, uh, renaming it correctly, uploading it to your website, right?
All this stuff we automate and the stuff like plagiarism checks and so on,
which nobody really does.
And if you have plagiarism on your website, Google is
not gonna like you yeah that is
one of the reasons why we do um what we
do different articles at first we've been on medium
but we've been not very happy um also
with the results we've been getting there because they're more and more focused
on monetizing the website where on the other hand we have been we have been
seeing less and less traffic there even though our podcast has grew to considerable size.
We have like 2.5 million impressions just in the first half of this year,
and that was totally not reflected in our Medium blog.
So we thought that kind of keeps people away.
So far, our website has shown that this was the case, at least for us.
And therefore, we first completely stopped Medium.
But now we're doing kind of a wrap-up, easier version on medium.com also to
keep the people who are following us there kind of abreast of what we're doing
in our normal podcast episodes.
Yeah. So the second part of why I did this is healthline.com.
And healthline.com is like the golden standard of high quality content.
And that's what we're trying to reproduce automatically. So they are getting
200 million monthly website visitors by only by like mostly they don't spend advertising money.
As far as I know, the only thing they really do is blogging.
So, so that's like, that's the thing what you have to consider is like,
if you have a lot of high quality content.
The chances are that you get millions of visitors monthly without paying so
that that was that was the goal always like create a blog article in 10 seconds
that has healthline quality,
i see you see and that's when you came up with modern accuse if i look into your,
linkedin profile you're working on the project for a little bit over two years
now is that how long it took for you to to really create that tool Well,
we're still like, so automating, automating 200 ranking factors is,
is it's still a work in progress.
So the next big thing is going, we're going to integrate internal linking and
like a heck of a lot of stuff. But yeah, most of the time was developing and improving the quality.
So every ranking factor we automate, the quality improves the average quality.
I see. So let us show everybody who's listening to this.
We're now going on your Modern IQs website. And there you basically show us
just one tiny little example of what this thing can do. and then we go like generating a blog post.
Everybody knows if you use the affiliate link from celebrate.io down here in
the show notes, you'll get two free SEO articles a month from your modern IQs.
And now let's show us how to do that before we get into how to do more with the tool.
Yeah, okay. So this is a register site. I already created an account and I'm
just going to quickly sign in.
So, here we go. That's the account creation page.
Now we click on blog articles, and this is the blog article generator.
So basically, the thing what you got to do is every website has one or several main topics.
In your case, we have prepared some information already.
So that so what you want to
focus on now what you want to create a lot of content
for is the main topic become a podcast
advertiser right so this
is what comes in here and then we have so this
is basically this field you only need to
fill out once for hundreds or maybe even thousands
of articles you want to create then the
second field is the blog article category everybody don't
forget to change this when you change the category because otherwise well this
the content will still be okay but the ai might get a little confused right
so the category here is how to start podcast advertising right and then we have created right,
Prepared headlines and background information.
So, okay.
So what's important here? This background information field,
this is where you tell the AI what general direction you want the content to be about.
This is not 100% necessary. If you have a cocktail bar, if you have a restaurant,
if you want to create a blog article for chicken teriyaki Amsterdam, right?
If your headline is best chicken teriyaki Amsterdam, this is not really needed
to tell the AI what is chicken teriyaki, right?
It can do it. But in your case, obviously, we're trying to create expert quality
content, expert insights and so on.
And that's why telling it what kind of direction, what the article should talk
about, what core ideas should be in the article, this is what you have to fill in here.
I recommend always something like a couple of sentences. This is your perfect.
We may tell our audience that when we started with all that stuff,
I gave you something like almost a whole blog article and basically you said
way too much, way too much. You stick to five sentences.
It helps. Look, I guess it helps to be more specific.
But the thing is, this is supposed to be a one-click tool, right?
So it's not really, in most cases, it's not needed.
Like this is a perfect format here. I was creating lots and lots of articles
with a couple of sentences of background information, telling the AI something
like, write the article around this idea.
And then I describe what I want inside the article.
And so it takes the combination of the website topic, the category,
the headline, and the background info to create what you want and fast.
So we can do this now. So I did now set up WordPress.
To set up this takes one minute and we have a description, a tutorial video below here.
So that's done very easy. And now we create the article. I got to choose the language as well.
Here we go. And now the system takes like one or two minutes.
We are going to switch to OpenAI 101 quite soon.
And then the article creation will be longer again, but it will be more higher
quality, even higher quality.
So give the system a bit of time because there is hundreds of things running
in the background now, and it takes a little bit, right?
This is not an app which you click and, you know, it does a little thing.
This is like 20 hours of human work which are happening now.
So it takes a little bit. Yeah. So you tell the tool it's going to produce this
blog post and then if you have a WordPress website, you can then instantly,
when you give it the credentials,
instantly go into your WordPress management view and can basically publish it
right from there, right?
Yeah, true. So I have set up WordPress now, and this is taking one minute.
We have a tutorial video below here, and the article should be created now as well. Here we go.
So let me just quickly preview. What you can see here now is that's the headline, right?
This is my fake test account. That's my fake test website.
And here we have the table of contents, are clickable
and everything headline structure is perfect then you
have image layout and everything already
um and you know the
article length is is something which is in the what we think is the golden spot
is like above 1000 words but below crazy amounts which this is not needed in
the future anymore so this is how an article looks like and basically all you gotta do is
if you want to create the second article,
is exchange the headline,
exchange the background information.
I usually do this by dictating into my Mac.
This is an advantage as well. So it's possible to do this in like 10 seconds
or maybe in a minute, right?
And that's really the purpose of the tool. How fast can you create something
like 10 articles or something?
So the use case, right? And if you are a small business, like a cocktail bar,
you can create 1,000 articles in one hour.
So because it's not necessary, let's say a hundred articles in five minutes or 10, right?
All you got to do is like enter the headline. Like I always suggest recipes
because people would like to, would look for recipes.
So Long Island iced tea recipe, Berlin, right?
Yeah. And like five variations for each season plus a Christmas version.
Something like that yeah and then people people
look for the recipe once because they want to do that do
it themselves and the next time they're like ah i'm
i don't have the ingredients let's go to the bar which bar should we
go to right this this kind of thing yeah so it's
it's it's a fast tool right the upload even just
reducing image size and uploading this to your
website and linking everything up and selecting the images and
so on this is like crazy amount of work yeah how
many images do you think is optimal for a
blog post well it can
it depends on the length of of the post but um
uh five to ten images are
aren't like one image is if you don't
have an image that the chances are drastically reduced
for it to rank if you have one image it's like the absolute absolute bare minimum
but um google likes to see this right i mean look we like to see this as well
we like to see something in between so so everything looks more pleasant right and um.
Yeah so um if you have more images don't hurt as long as the size is very small
and that for the loading time of the article is fast if the loading time is
slow there's nothing you can do I see.
That's something my website suffers from. And that's something I really have to work on.
But it takes a lot of like redoing a website that's not yet completely done.
So that may take some time.
People may know that I work really crazy hours from 8am to 10pm, like almost every day.
And if you then add another layer of work, that's quite a lot.
So I'll work with the two, but it'll take some time until I can really relaunch
the site in a way that is really good.
But thank you for the tip.
Yeah, sure. And, you know, especially for somebody like you, right?
You could possibly, if you would want to create like a second episode every
week or so, you could just use our content idea generator to get ideas for single
person episodes, right?
Where you don't interview somebody, you just talk about some topic.
And with this here, right, you can create hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of topics in seconds. Yeah.
So our philosophy is really always the one-click thing.
Make it very easy, very fast, very scalable. Yeah. It's not a play around tool.
It's a get shit done tool.
Yeah. And in terms of total amount, You said at one point, like when you have
one, two, three, four, five articles, Google doesn't care.
Where is the critical area right now as we're speaking mid of October 2024?
Where is like the midpoint when you start to become relevant to Google if you're
talking like about one or two certain related topics there?
Can you elaborate this? I'm not sure what you mean. The thing is,
if you have like one article, there is an almost zero probability that you get additional visitors.
How many articles would you need to really start a kickstart getting more traffic?
It's this is something i i have to say i i don't i don't know the more there's two factors um,
so so i give you an example on on those 69 articles i had on appcolumbus.com
there was one article that made 80 of the traffic right so 80 was coming from one out of 70.
Um so so the point is the more
articles you have the higher the chances are that
you get the one that is ranking extremely well right and and this is then getting
the most traffic but also everything is going to rank better the the more the
more you cover your topic right the more you show.
So for example, as a coach, a coach, coach always wants to show expertise,
right? Everybody kind of wants to show expertise.
So if you, if you would go on a website of a coach, for example,
and you would see his topic.
Sorted by category and every category you click in you see 50 or 100 articles
right then you would be like wow this guy knows everything google is kind of
the same and um so if the quality is is,
good enough and the loads load time is fast enough then um the this is like
a factor that ranks everything better yeah so the better you you cover it you
have like a double and use that because I've seen this over and over.
Startups do have a podcast where it's very, very easy now to get a transcript.
And you always said in my articles, you've been a little bit jealous because
those transcripts set you apart. Plus you can work with those transcripts as
a basis to develop not only one good article, but many good articles, right?
I'm addicted. I'm addicted to seeing our
tool creating articles from podcast
transcripts i i did one yesterday with
a new with a new factor we we automated and it was it was referencing the last
name of the podcast guest i think 50 times in the article so it's like extreme
in-depth quality content done with in one click basically is I love to see this. Yeah.
And there are a lot of tools out there who can really, really do a good transcript.
Sometimes it's a little bit screwed up because in our podcast,
we are shifting at least for names for certain topics.
We're shifting a few words into German that hugely screws up every translation
software because they cannot jump between languages.
But basically, we'll get a very, very decent result by now.
When I started out with Chris doing the startup news, instead of startup rate.io,
we got like star ballroom dancing.com or something that happened in the past quite frequently.
I remember one tool. It was like one of the very first iterations of Google.
It did this ballroom dancing, plus it always called me Jerome. Yeah.
I think ChatGPG is doing the best job with translation currently.
I think it's even better than Depot and so on.
Can you also use it to do transcript? You can, right?
I'm not sure, actually. But one thing I wanted to say before I forget,
when it comes to transcripts, the name's got to be in the transcript, right?
The transcript needs to show who is talking currently.
Then this is getting high quality, very, very high quality.
Look, for example, in our interviews, also in the show notes of this one,
I'll have Stefan with his full name, with his company and his title every time he speaks there.
So that's what we try to do. Yeah.
Great. Stefan, it was a pleasure having you here.
We did record a lot of time because we've both been pretty, pretty tired.
It's Friday late afternoon.
Our editor will have to do a hell of a job to get this straight.
But nonetheless, thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you.
And everybody who would like to learn more, down here in the show notes,
you can sign up for moderniqs.com with our affiliate link, plus learn more about
you on your LinkedIn profile.
Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Have a good day. Bye-bye. You too. Ciao, ciao.
Music.
That's all, folks. Find more news, streams, events, and interviews at www.startuprad.io.
Remember, sharing is caring.
Music.