Fat Stacks ®️

@aburgaburg Just an embedded email sign up form (several per post). I also have popups but they don't perform nearly as well as the embedded "Save this" form.

@FatStacksBlog do you use a pop up to deliver that message or just a sign up form inside the article itself?

9,435 email subscribers over the past 30 days reveals the following: Context: 1. Every subscriber signed up to a form that offers to email them the article they were on. 2. Every article was AI-assisted. 3. The two publications are in very different niches. Conclusion: AI-assisted content can be so good that 9,435 people over the past 30 days were willing to give me their email so that the article they read is emailed to them for future reference.

There’s a very simple explanation why some people report working more hours with AI instead of fewer. In a nutshell, as the cost of inputs (money and/or time) goes down, expected output will increase. That’s the corporate mindset. Always has been which is why tech seldom results in working less. I use AI extensively in my publishing business. I could easily work more hours than I did 5 years ago. But I don’t. I work less and earn more thanks to AI. And that’s because I didn’t increase my expected output. It remains the same. AI saves me time creating it so I end up working less. How do I earn more if output is the same? It’s simple. AI helps me make much better content than ever before which earns more from the same visitor volume.

Our fridge broke overnight. I had to move everything to the basement fridge first thing this morning. I could dwell on how much of a drag this is and bemoan having to potentially shell out for a new fridge if it can’t be fixed. I could stew about the fact the repair guy just called and said his vehicle broke down so he’ll be an hour late outside the four hour window he’s supposed to show up. Or, I can be grateful I have the flexibility to accommodate a changing repair schedule, the fact we have a fridge and a backup fridge, that there are repair people in our area (hopefully talented lol), the funds to pay for said repair all in a home I love. Silver linings. I try to see them among the clouds. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't.

@twit_graeme That's great. Thanks for sharing Graeme. Hope it goes well.

@FatStacksBlog One of your recent tweets inspired my to finally pull the trigger in a first draft generator for a client. It uses qdrant for vectorizing all the client material, existing briefs and accepted articles, and an n8n pipeline with ollama and API calls to anthropic for revisions.

Yesterday was a great day off. Not because I don’t like what I do but because I do better at what I love when I take time away from it. It wasn’t always that way. When starting out I had to forsake recharging time to build. That’s the upfront price to pay. Now that my publishing system is built, it’s all about constant improvement instead of building. Building required brute force. Improving requires clarity. And clarity doesn’t doesn’t materialize as readily when I’ve been glued to a screen all day.

The boring part of business is also the profitable part. You find something that works. You do it again. And again. You resist the urge to pursue some newfangled shiny object. Then you carve out maybe 10-15% of your time for experiments. New formats, new traffic sources, new monetization angles. Most won't work. A few will. The ones that work get rolled into the humdrum of rinse-and-repeat.

@MorganOMedia What’s a Google 😂? Same here.

Ya know what I realized today? I’ve barely use search engines at all anymore. I’m on the full AI train for most queries. When Google robbed me of my search traffic overnight in 2023 it felt like a curse. Today it feels like I was fortunate for being given an early heads up

Somebody asked me recently whether using AI increased productivity for my business and if so, by how much? My gut response was “yeah, it helps a ton” but then I had to think about the second part of the question… by how much does it help? Can I quantify it? Yes, I can quantify it by daily content output and quality of that output. The quality is 2x and improving as I improve my systems. The actual increased publishing volume is 4x. That’s not a guess or a gut feeling… it’s that precisely. Before having my fully integrated AI system, I could produce two articles per day on my own. With my system, I’ve done 8 and even 10 some days at a much higher quality. Moreover, revenue is increasing in line with that increase in output. So yeah, investing my time and money into building the ideal AI system for my publishing business is not only helping, but it’s now indispensable,

Three things I've learned about making tough decisions: 1. The data is never complete. Decide anyway. 2. The timing is never perfect. Decide anyway. 3. The outcome is never guaranteed. Decide anyway.

We need more urgent care clinics run primarily by nurse practitioners with the usual fleet of scanning equipment. So many "emergency" visits can be handled by nurse practitioners. NPs should be given ability to prescribe drugs as well. Adding hundreds of these clinics across the country would reduce wait times considerably. Also, NPs could take the place of family doctors... most family doctor visits can easily be handled by NPs. Having doctors as the gatekeepers to healthcare is part of the bottleneck. As for specialist shortages... that's another matter altogether.

As someone who has been to a hospital 7 times in my life, 3 of which have been in the past week, I'm absolutely dumbfounded by the Canadian Medical system and how this is real life

@EllardKing 🤣🤣🤣 that's about the truth of it. Takeaway: £397k inheritance has nothing to do with it... the secret trick is ditching Netflix and lattes.

Average tabloid newspaper reporting about how someone managed to buy a house at 21: - Cancelled Netflix - Stopped eating takeaways - Walked to work in £2 flip flops - Inherited £397k - Stopped breathing oxygen - Put one slice of ham in their sandwiches - Had 13 side hustles - Turned the heating down at Christmas

Someone recently said I’m biased. I admit it. I am. Everyone is. I pride myself on it because it means I have opinions. I have preferences. I make decisions which means saying no to some things and yes to others. That alone indicates bias. The unbiased writer does not exist and if they did, I’m not interested. The writer striving for no bias is a writer who writes for everyone which is the same as writing for no-one.

@EllardKing Same going on in my neck of the woods in Vancouver, BC. My biggest concern is if this continues, our kids will never own unless they inherit.

I asked my 74 yr old neighbour how much he bought his house for 35 years ago. £37,000. Mental. We just paid £465,000 for the same sized house. Pass me the bucket 🤮

My rule is simple. If AI can do it as well as I can, AI does it. if AI can do it better, AI definitely does it. The only things I touch with my own hands are the things only I can do or that I do best. I currently spend equal time building my AI architecture to run my brands as I do running them. As time marches on and as AI gets better, My efforts will continue to shift more toward building and improving the system than operating It.

Had a lead magnet to write on my to-do list for two weeks. Two weeks. Sat down yesterday because I was finally sick of seeing it there. Wrote the entire thing in 90 minutes. Spent 14 days dreading 90 minutes of work. The dread lasted longer than the work. By a lot. This is not the first time lol.

An online publisher business is a vineyard. You plant it. You tend it for three years and it gives you nothing but blisters. Year four it starts to fruit. Year five it feeds you. Year six the neighbors start asking what your secret is. There is no secret. You didn’t quit in year two.

@EllardKing Yeah, it was a great community... maybe restored again one day? Substack seems pretty good... I'm giving that a go as well.

@FatStacksBlog I’ve missed it. Been setting myself back up here for a push. Let’s see what it brings. I miss the old community days but hey!

I paid off £24,000 debt in 18 months. How? Went in HARD on side hustles. Trainer reselling, freelancing on fiverr, tutoring, surveys, website testing, focus groups... you name it I tried it. It took over my evenings and weekends but it was totally worth it.

@EllardKing Hangin' in. Nice to see you're still posting here. It's good to be back here even though I'm never all that active.

@FatStacksBlog And look at you now! Hope you’re well brother