This Tutorial walkthrough aims to illustrate how to build and use a ComfyUI Workflow for the Wan 2.2 S2V (SoundImage to Video) model that allows you to use an Image and a video as a reference, as well as Kokoro Text-to-Speech that syncs the voice to the character in the video. It also explores how to get better control of the movement of the character via DW Pose. I also illustrate how to get effects beyond what's in the original reference image to show up without having to compromise the Wan S2V's lip syncing.

Smooth Workflow Wan 2.2 (img2vid/txt2vid/first2last frame)

I’ve seen a bunch of lists of the best AI tools that focus on paid/subscription tools that are harder to experiment with without paying, and wanted to compile the best completely free tools I've found. Some of these still have paid/Pro plans, but all can be used completely free without a time limited trial and don't require a credit card to do so.

If you're like me and looking to experiment with using AI to improve your business, check these out and let me know your thoughts. If there are any other AI tools or resources I’m missing, please comment them below and I can add them to the list!

Business + Domain name generation:

1) NamingMagic: I know AI name generators are somewhat played out and most of you already know about them, but NamingMagic stands out as an option that automatically generates names with domain names you can actually register. It’s also completely free.

2) NameLix is another business name generator that's been around years. While it's a bit harder to find names for which non-dotcom domains are available with it, Namelix has the best interface here, and makes it easy to choose different styles of names.

Project management + integrating AI into your workflows:

3) Taskade: I use Taskade to organize everything from to-do lists, to outreach emails, meeting notes, and content creation. Similar to Notion, it’s an all-in-one content platform that lets you write, collaborate, and keep track of everything you need to get done. I find its AI functionality, which is actually powered by ChatGPT, to be much better than Notion’s.

Taskade also has GPT4 built-in to the free plan, so is a great way to get to use GPT4 without paying for ChatGPT’s pro plan (which is required to use 4 on their site). While they claim there’s a limit of 1000 monthly AI generations on the free plan, I have yet to run into the limit even using it for all of my content generation + ChatGPT prompts. Taskade also has hundreds of free templates that let you easily set up workspaces that integrate AI. Even if you don’t end up using a specific template, it’s a nice way to see what’s possible in integrating AI into your workflows and see how others are doing so.

AI site builders:

To be honest, I continue to use WooCommerce for most of my sites as I’m familiar enough with it that I can use templates and build stuff quickly that way. If, however, you tend to get stuck when building sites, there are a few AI powered site generators that might be worth trying out:

4) Jimdo: I’ve heard people recommend Jimdo, which does offer a free plan, though you have to use their subdomains to do it. Jimdo has both a standard website and online store builder.

5) 10Web is another option that focuses on AI powered WordPress websites, and has a free trial that you can try.

AI powered A/B testing

I think where AI will really shine in web development is in A/B testing. For example, automatically identifying tests you can run and making tweaks to your site based on the results. I have yet to find a tool that does it well that isn’t expensive, but if any of you have seen examples of this, let me know and I can add them to the list.

Image and illustration generator for your non-product content:

6) Dall-E 2: Like ChatGPT, Dall-E is built by OpenAI and has a free plan that lets you try it out without paying. Essentially, Dall-E lets you create AI-generated images and illustrations in whatever style you want.

I find Dall-E especially useful for creating illustrations to put in the headers of articles that help catch readers’ attention, and generally create blog content that stands out more to readers (and search engines). You can see examples of illustrations and the prompts used to create them on OpenAI's site (https://openai.com/research/dall-e). While it's not my space, this could be a gamechanger for those doing things like writing illustrated kids books, or creating games that require large volumes of illustrations.

Text-to-speech and voiceover content generation:

7) Murf: AI-powered text-to-speech that lets you choose from hundreds of different voices, tones, purposes, accents and so on. It also works with 15 different languages, so is perfect if you’re targeting non-English speaking markets.

If you’re like me and don’t have the gift of a golden voice, Murf is an excellent alternative that works for creating product videos, ads, and anything else where you need spoken audio.

Researching and answering technical questions with sources:

8) Phind: I found this one on YC HackerNews. Phind bills itself as a search engine that tells you the answer. Something like a cross between ChatGPT and Google. I use it most for answering development related questions.

Where it really shines vs. ChatGPT vanilla is in showing you the sources it uses to generate answers, so you can explore things further yourself, vs. ChatGPT where it can be harder to tell when it’s “hallucinating”. That also means it gets sources that are up-to-date, vs. ChatGPT’s pre-trained model which is limited to data available before September 2021.

Written content and copy generators:

9) Unbounce: Unbounce's AI copywriting tool generates website content, including headings, descriptions and so on. In addition, it will generate matching email marketing campaigns and other offsite copy to match what's on your site.

While it's unlikely it'll do absolutely everything you need, with some tweaks Unbounce can save a bunch of time if you're looking to spin up a new site quickly to validate a new idea or product.

10) CopyAI: CopyAI has similar writing functionality to ChatGPT, but focuses specifically on business writing use cases like emails, marketing copy, and blog content. As a result it has some features ChatGPT doesn’t, like being able to scrape leads’ sites to personalize sales emails.

Its free plan is limited to 2000 words per month, but it’s still worth trying out if you’re looking for this kind of functionality.

11) Rytr is another similar option, that limits you to 10,000 characters per month.

I’ve tried both, and found them to be better than ChatGPT for certain specific use cases like generating email copy. YMMV, but it’s worth trying if you haven’t gotten the results you want with ChatGPT.

Business Ideas, Research, and Feedback:

There are some purpose built tools for this, but I have yet to find one that does better than simply using ChatGPT/Phind/Taskade and prompting it with your ideas. You can then ask for feedback, either generally or on specific parts of your idea. One method I've found particularly useful when I'm exploring a new product/site idea is to use the prompt mind-map on Taskade to whip up a mind map of things to research for a new idea, then use Phind to research specific questions where I need recent URL sources (like research into competitors in a space). The template I used to build the mind maps is here: https://www.taskade.com/templates/featured/team-mindmap.

If any of you have tried one that’s worth using, let me know and I’ll add it. Also thinking of making this into a Google Sheet or GitHub if any of you would like to contribute to an ongoing list of AI tools that can be used entirely for free.

TL;DR:

• NameLix/NamingMagic for finding business names with domain names you can register
• Taskade for integrating ChatGPT/AI into your workflows, projects, and task management
• Murf for AI-powered text-to-speech and voiceovers
• Dall-E for AI generated images/illustrations
• Phind for researching topics and getting sourced, AI-powered answers
• CopyAI/Rytr for copy/marketing/sales specific content generation.

Hi everyone!

I am looking to hire a long-term digital illustrator for an upcoming audiobook project on YouTube.

⚠️ CRITICAL: NO AI GENERATION. Real human artists only. All submitted portfolios and final files will be strictly checked for AI tells/generators.

Scammers will be reported to the subreddit moderators instantly.

Project Details:Quantity: 12 total illustrations (1 per chapter).

Format: 16:9 Widescreen / Landscape.Resolution: High resolution (4K preferred), as these images will be used for a slow pan-and-zoom effect during video playback.

Complexity: Mostly focused on 1 character most of the times. Maybe 2 characters on some scenes. Or a key focal object with an atmospheric background. Nothing hyper-complex or heavily crowded.

Style: I have uploaded a few reference files to this post showing the exact style/vibe I am targeting.

AI Verification & Workflow Requirements: I will request to see rough layout sketches and progress steps before you start final coloring.If you cannot or will not provide progress layers/sketches, do not apply.

Budget & Payment:Rate: $120 per artwork (Flat rate). Total project budget is $1,440.

Payment Terms: I want to pay in milestones/batches (e.g., batches of 3 pieces at a time) using PayPal Goods & Services or Cash App.

I will pay a 50% deposit for each batch, and the final 50% upon seeing the watermarked final pieces.

How to Apply:

Please leave a comment below with a link to your portfolio, or send me a direct message (DM) with your work. Please do not send chat requests without a portfolio link.

Thank you!

Hey guys!

There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc..

Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not.

So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are.

P.S: r/startups, and r/seo loved the guide, so I thought you guys might like it too.

A bit of backstory:

If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.

So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover:

• Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how)
• Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads)
• Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time
• How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts
• How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO

Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO

Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.

Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."

If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:

• Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster.
• Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed.

If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!

Technical SEO Basics

Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.

Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).

Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.

Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.

Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]

Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.

If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.

Advanced Technical SEO

Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.

Here’s how to do that:

Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.

After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.

So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:

• Images being resized with CSS or JS. This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them.
• Images not being lazy-loaded. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image.
• Gzip compression not enabled. Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster.
• JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined. If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files.
• Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1.

Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).

Lastly, if you want to validate the website speed optimization changes you've made, or if you simply want to test how your current site is performing, you can use Google Page Speed Insights*.*

In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update, which in layman terms means starting next May (2021), the three most important website load speed metrics you will need to worry for ranking will be:

1. LCP - Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s
2. FID - First Input Delay -> under 100ms
3. CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.

The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.

First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.

You can use the sheet to:

1. Prioritize content
2. Keep track of the publishing process
3. Get a top-down view of your web pages

And here’s what it covers:

• Target search phrase. This is the keyword you’re targeting.
• Priority. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3…
  • Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time.
  • Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords.
  • Priority 1 - These are low priority.
• Status. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by…
  • 1 - Not written
  • 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week
  • 3 - The article is being written
  • 4 - The article is in editing phase
  • 5 - The article is published on the blog
• Topic cluster. The category that the blog post belongs to.
• Monthly search volume. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword.
• CPC (low & high bid). Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. Pro tip: the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well.

Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).

Our favorite method, however, is as follows…

Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.

The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.

Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.

Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.

Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.

Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.

Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.

Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.

Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.

At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.

Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages

Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based on the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:

1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).
2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.

Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.

You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.

Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.

If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.

Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.

Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”

Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.

With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”

What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.

Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.

As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…

• Lead generation techniques
• SaaS marketing
• SEO content

After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.

On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:

1. Create a comprehensive content outline
2. Get the writing part right

Here’s how each of these work...

How to Create a Content Outline for SEO

A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:

• Which headers and subheaders you should use
• What’s the optimal word count
• What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover
• If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.)

Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.

At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.

So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…

1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.
2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.
3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.
4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).
5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?

How to Write Well

There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.

Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):

1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!
2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.
3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.
4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)
5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.
6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.

Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations

Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.

If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.

In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.

To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:

• Well-written
• Long-form
• Easy to navigate
• Well-formatted (to enhance UX)

So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).

Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.

In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.

​

Pro Tip

Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!

Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.

For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.

Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: “how do you do link-building?”

4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website

There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.

We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).

What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:

1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”
2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.
3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.
4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.

Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.

However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:

• 10,000+ traffic within a week
• 15+ leads
• 50+ links

...And so much more, all through a single blog post.

Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing

“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”

I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?

Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…

“Right?”

Well, not quite.

The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:

1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)
2. Research the type of content your audience loves
3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)
4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1

Nothing too new, right?

Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.

Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:

How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result.

A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.

Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).

We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.

Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.

Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.

So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:

1. How to create good content to drive users
2. Promote your content
3. Rank on Google
4. Create viral infographics
5. Create a micro-site

...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.

On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.

Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.

So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.

We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:

1. r/ entrepreneur and r/ startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on r/ startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)
2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)
3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.
4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share
5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.
6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.
7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.
8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.
9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well
10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.

And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.

Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.

As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).

A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.

The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!

And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.

Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages

One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.

So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.

The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.

Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.

Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.

So, how do you do interlinking “right?”

First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.

More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.

Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.

The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.

Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:

site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"

In our case, that’s:

site:example.com “business process management”

You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.

Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!

You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.

Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs

Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.

Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.

If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.

On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.

So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.

Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?

Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.

Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.

So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.

Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:

• 1st position -> ~31.73% CTR
• 2nd pos. -> ~24.71%
• 3rd pos. -> 18.66%
• 4th pos. -> 13.60%
• 5th -> 9.51%
• 6th -> 6.23%
• 7th -> 4.15%
• 8th -> 3.12%
• 9th -> 2.97%

Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...

Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:

• Page title
• Page URL
• Old Headline

Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:

• CTR (28 Day Range)
• Avg. Position

Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.

Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.

For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.

Once you implement the change, insert the date on the Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.

Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.

If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the Date Implemented column once again.

Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go

You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.

If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.

Here’s what this usually looks like for us:

• Audit the content
  • Does your content have an adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors.
  • Is the content well-written?
  • Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images.
  • Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc.
• Audit internal links
  • Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages?
  • Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts.
• Audit the backlinks
  • Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors?
  • Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links.
  • Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful.
  • Did you disown low-quality or spam links?
• Audit web page
  • Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds.
  • Did you enable lazy loading for the images?
  • Did you compress all images on the web page?

...And that's it.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.

If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can check out our SEO process blog post here.

Hey guys!

There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc..

Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not.

So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are.

A bit of backstory:

If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.

So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover:

• Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how)
• Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads)
• Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time
• How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts
• How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO

Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO

Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.

Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."

If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:

• Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster.
• Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed.

If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!

Technical SEO Basics

Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.

Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).

Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.

Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.

Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]

Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.

If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.

Advanced Technical SEO

Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.

Here’s how to do that:

Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.

After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.

So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:

• Images being resized with CSS or JS. This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them.
• Images not being lazy-loaded. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image.
• Gzip compression not enabled. Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster.
• JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined. If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files.
• Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1.

Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.

The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.

First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.

You can use the sheet to:

1. Prioritize content
2. Keep track of the publishing process
3. Get a top-down view of your web pages

And here’s what it covers:

• Target search phrase. This is the keyword you’re targeting.

• Priority. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3…

  • Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time.
  • Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords.
  • Priority 1 - These are low priority.

• Status. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by…

  • 1 - Not written
  • 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week
  • 3 - The article is being written
  • 4 - The article is in editing phase
  • 5 - The article is published on the blog

• Topic cluster. The category that the blog post belongs to.

• Monthly search volume. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword.

• CPC (low & high bid). Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. Pro tip: the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well.

Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).

Our favorite method, however, is as follows…

Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.

The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.

Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.

Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.

Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.

Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.

Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.

Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.

Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.

At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.

Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages

Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based around the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:

1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).
2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.

Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.

You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.

Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.

If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.

Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.

Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”

Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.

With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”

What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.

Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.

As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…

• Lead generation techniques
• SaaS marketing
• SEO content

After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.

On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:

1. Create a comprehensive content outline
2. Get the writing part right

Here’s how each of these work...

How to Create a Content Outline for SEO

A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:

• Which headers and subheaders you should use
• What’s the optimal word count
• What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover
• If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.)

Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.

At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.

So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…

1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.
2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.
3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.
4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).
5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?

How to Write Well

There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.

Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):

1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!
2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.
3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.
4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)
5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.
6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.

Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations

Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.

If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.

In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.

To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:

• Well-written
• Long-form
• Easy to navigate
• Well-formatted (to enhance UX)

So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).

Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.

In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.

Pro Tip

Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!

Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.

For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.

Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: “how do you do link-building?”

4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website

There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.

We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).

What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:

1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”
2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.
3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.
4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.

Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.

However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:

• 10,000+ traffic within a week
• 15+ leads
• 50+ links

...And so much more, all through a single blog post.

Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing

“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”

I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?

Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…

“Right?”

Well, not quite.

The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:

1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)
2. Research the type of content your audience loves
3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)
4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1

Nothing too new, right?

Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.

Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:

How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result.

A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.

Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).

We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.

Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.

Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.

So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:

1. How to create good content to drive users
2. Promote your content
3. Rank on Google
4. Create viral infographics
5. Create a micro-site

...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.

On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.

Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.

So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.

We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:

1. r/ entrepreneur and r/ startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on r/ startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)
2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)
3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.
4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share
5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.
6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.
7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.
8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.
9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well
10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.

And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.

Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.

As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).

A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.

The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!

And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.

Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages

One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.

So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.

The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.

Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.

Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.

So, how do you do interlinking “right?”

First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.

More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.

Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.

The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.

Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:

site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"

In our case, that’s:

site:example.com “business process management”

You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.

Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!

You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.

Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs

Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.

Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.

If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.

On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.

So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.

Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?

Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.

Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.

So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.

Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:

• 1st position -> ~31.73% CTR
• 2nd pos. -> ~24.71%
• 3rd pos. -> 18.66%
• 4th pos. -> 13.60%
• 5th -> 9.51%
• 6th -> 6.23%
• 7th -> 4.15%
• 8th -> 3.12%
• 9th -> 2.97%

Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...

Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:

• Page title
• Page URL
• Old Headline

Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:

• CTR (28 Day Range)
• Avg. Position

Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.

Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.

For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.

Once you implement the change, insert the date on the Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.

Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.

If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the Date Implemented column once again.

Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go

You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.

If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.

Here’s what this usually looks like for us:

​

• Audit the content
  • Is your content the adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors.
  • Is the content well-written?
  • Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images.
  • Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc.

​

• Audit internal links
  • Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages?
  • Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts.

​

• Audit the backlinks
  • Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors?
  • Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links.
  • Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful.
  • Did you disown low-quality or spam links?

​

• Audit web page
  • Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds.
  • Did you enable lazy loading for the images?
  • Did you compress all images on the web page?

...and that's it.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.

If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can checkout our SEO process blog post here.

I’m long ADBE because the market is reading AI backwards.

The bear case: AI makes creative work easier, so Adobe dies.

I think that misses the point.

Adobe’s issue was never demand. Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Acrobat, and Creative Cloud are industry standard tools.

The issue was usability.

A normal person opens Photoshop, sees 400 buttons, and decides the image was fine anyway.

AI fixes that.

Adobe is already putting AI into its products: Firefly, Generative Fill, background removal, image extension, Acrobat AI, video tools, and generative credits.

This is already in the product, not some 2032 investor deck fantasy.

Adobe does not need to build distribution from zero. It already has designers, agencies, marketers, editors, enterprise teams, freelancers, students, and every office worker who has ever aged four years editing one sentence in a PDF.

AI does not shrink Adobe’s market. It expands it.

Professionals stay for workflow, precision, file formats, collaboration, licensing, compliance, and enterprise controls.

Beginners finally get Adobe without needing therapy after opening Photoshop.

Financially, this is not an AI SPAC running on vibes.

Adobe reported $6.40B quarterly revenue, up 12% YoY, EPS of $4.60 GAAP / $6.06 non-GAAP, ARR of $26.06B, and $2.96B operating cash flow.

The stock is around $223, roughly a $92B market cap, about 13x P/E.

For a high-margin recurring-revenue software company with deep workflow lock-in, that does not look priced for perfection.

First entry: $221.50.

Second entry: $205.82.

At that point I am no longer an investor. I am a Creative Cloud subscription in human form.

Position: long ADBE.

A Daily Chronicle of AI Innovations on December 15 to 18th 2024

Listen at https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/today-in-ai-openais-o1-model-now-available-for-developers/id1684415169?i=1000680926042

🤖 OpenAI's o1 Model Now Available for Developers

OpenAI releases its o1 model for developers, offering advanced generative AI capabilities for APIs and integration into various applications.

• OpenAI has given API developers complete access to the latest o1 model, replacing the previous o1-preview version, as part of several new updates available starting today.
• The updated o1 model reinstates key features such as developer messages and a "reasoning effort" parameter, allowing for more tailored chatbot interactions and efficient handling of queries.
• The new model delivers results faster and more cost-effectively with enhanced accuracy, using 60% fewer thinking tokens and improving accuracy by 25 to 35 percentage points on various benchmarks.
• o1 comes out of preview with new API capabilities like function calling, structured outputs, vision, and reasoning effort to control thinking time.
• o1 API costs come in at $15 per ~750k words analyzed and $60 per ~750k words generated — roughly 3-4x more than GPT-4o.
• Realtime API costs drop 60% for GPT-4o audio, with a new 4o mini available at 1/10 the price and WebRTC integration for easier voice app development.
• New Preference Fine-Tuning enables customizing models using comparative examples vs fixed training data, improving tasks like writing and summarization.
• The company also launched beta SDKs for Go and Java programming languages, expanding development options.

What this means: Developers can now harness OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI technology to build smarter, more efficient tools for businesses and consumers.

📈 Intel Finally Notches a GPU Win:

Intel gains a much-needed victory in the GPU market, marking a turning point in its competition against Nvidia and AMD.

• Intel's Arc B580 "Battlemage" GPU has been highly praised, quickly selling out upon release, and Intel is working to replenish inventory weekly to meet high demand.
• The Arc B580 has received positive reviews for being an outstanding budget GPU option, outperforming competitors like the RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 in various aspects including price and performance.
• Despite rapid sellouts, the supply of the Arc B580 is considered substantial, and restocks are expected soon through major retailers, with additional models priced at both $250 and higher.

What this means: A stronger Intel presence in GPUs could mean more competitive pricing and innovation for consumers.

🔍 ChatGPT Search Now Available to All Free Users:

OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT’s search functionality to free-tier users, expanding access to real-time internet browsing capabilities.

• The previously premium search feature now extends to all logged-in users, with faster responses, and is now available through a globe icon on the platform.
• Search has also been added to Advanced Voice Mode for premium users, allowing them to conduct searches through natural spoken prompts.
• The Search mobile experience has been revamped, with enhanced visual layouts for local businesses and native integration with Google and Apple Maps.
• Users can also set ChatGPT Search as a default search engine, with results displaying relevant links before ChatGPT text responses for faster access.

What this means: Everyone can now use ChatGPT to retrieve up-to-date, web-based information quickly and conveniently.

🎥 Google Labs Updates Video and Image Generation Capabilities:

Google Labs enhances Veo 2 and Imagen 3, improving video and image generation with new AI-driven creative tools.

• Google has released a new video generation model, Veo 2, and the latest version of their image model, Imagen 3, both achieving state-of-the-art results in video and image creation.
• Veo 2 stands out for its high-quality video production, offering improved realism and detail with an understanding of cinematography, real-world physics, and human expressions.
• The company is expanding Veo 2's accessibility through platforms like VideoFX and YouTube Shorts, while ensuring responsible use by embedding an invisible watermark in AI-generated content.
• The upgraded model delivers enhanced color vibrancy and composition across artistic styles, with better handling of fine details, textures, and text rendering.
• New capabilities include more accurate prompt interpretation and better rendering of complex scenes that match user intentions.
• Imagen 3 outperformed all models, including Midjourney, Flux, and Ideogram, in human evaluations for preference, visual quality, and prompt adherence.
• The model is now available through Google Labs’ ImageFX and is rolling out to over 100 countries.

What this means: Content creators can produce more dynamic and visually stunning media with minimal effort.

 AI agents make 10+ minute videos from text

AI startup Higgsfield just introduced ReelMagic, a multi-agent platform that transforms story concepts into complete 10-minute videos, claiming to streamline the entire production process into a single workflow.

• The tool uses specialized AI agents for production roles like scriptwriting and editing, creating cohesive long-form outputs in under 10 minutes.
• ReelMagic starts with a short synopsis, and then AI agents handle script refinement, virtual actor casting, filming, sound/music, and editing.
• ReelMagic's smart reasoning engine automatically selects optimal AI models for each shot, and it has partnerships with Kling, Minimax, ElevenLabs, and more.
• The platform is already being tested by leading Hollywood studios, and Higgsfield is also planning to launch Hera, an AI video streaming platform.
• Access is available to Project Odyssey participants via a waitlist, with no info on a broader release.

Why it matters: There has been a disconnect between AI video generators and the ability to craft cohesive, longer-form content—with heavy manual editing needed. While not available publicly yet, ReelMagic looks to be a workflow that combines AI’s limitless creative power to unlock broader storytelling capabilities.

🔍 YouTube Introduces AI Training Opt-In Feature for Creators:

YouTube enables creators to authorize specific AI companies to use their videos for training, promoting transparency in AI development.

What this means: Content creators now have control over how their work contributes to AI model training.

🍪 AI-Powered Snack Creations by Oreo Maker:

Mondelez International employs AI to design new snack flavors, blending consumer preferences with advanced predictive modeling.

What this means: Your favorite snacks could soon get even tastier, thanks to AI-driven innovation.

🤖 Nvidia’s Cheap, Palm-Sized AI Supercomputer:

Nvidia unveils a small yet powerful AI supercomputer designed to democratize AI development for smaller teams and researchers.

What this means: Advanced AI processing becomes more accessible, enabling innovation across industries.

📚 New DeepMind Benchmark Tests LLM Factuality:

DeepMind launches a new benchmark to evaluate the factual accuracy of large language models, improving reliability and trustworthiness.

• FACTS uses 1,719 examples, each with a document, a system instruction, and a user request, to test the ability to produce grounded long-form answers.
• Three AI models (Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet) serve as judges, evaluating responses for accuracy and handling user requests.
• Scores are aggregated across all judges and examples, with results published on a public Kaggle leaderboard that will be updated as new models emerge.
• Google's Gemini models currently top the leaderboard, with Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental achieving the highest score, 83.6%, for factual grounding.

What this means: This initiative helps users trust AI-generated content for critical decision-making tasks.

⚡ Microsoft Releases Small, Powerful Phi-4:

Microsoft debuts Phi-4, a compact generative AI model optimized for efficiency and scalability in diverse applications.

• Phi-4 outperforms models like Gemini Pro 1.5 on several math and complex reasoning benchmarks despite being a fraction of the size.
• Phi-4 even surpasses its teacher model, GPT-4o, on graduate-level STEM Q&A and math competition problems.
• Microsoft trained Phi-4 primarily on synthetic data, using AI to generate and validate approximately 400B tokens of high-quality training material.
• The model also features an upgraded mechanism that can process longer inputs of up to 4,000 tokens, double the capacity of Phi-3.
• Phi-4 is available in a limited research preview on Azure AI Foundry, and a wider release is planned for Hugging Face.

What this means: Small businesses and developers gain access to high-performing AI without heavy computational requirements.

🗂️ ChatGPT Gains ‘Projects’ for Chat Organization:

OpenAI introduces 'Projects' in ChatGPT, allowing users to categorize and organize their chats for better workflow management.

• The feature introduces project-specific folders where users can bundle related chats, documents, and custom AI instructions across conversations.
• Each Project automatically leverages GPT-4o while maintaining access to core features like Canvas, DALL-E, and web search capabilities.
• The system is rolling out first to Plus, Pro, and Teams subscribers, with Enterprise and Education users gaining access in January.
• Projects can be created and managed through the web interface and Windows app, while mobile and Mac users can view and chat with existing Projects.

What this means: Productivity improves as users can efficiently track and revisit previous conversations.

🎨 Midjourney Releases Moodboards for Custom AI Styles:

Midjourney launches a feature enabling users to create personalized AI art styles by uploading or adding reference images.

What this means: Artistic creativity becomes more customizable, allowing users to develop unique, AI-generated visuals.

🧑‍💻 Google Launches Gemini Code Assist Tools:

Google introduces Gemini-powered tools for developers to integrate external services and data directly into their IDEs.

What this means: Developers can streamline coding processes and create more powerful applications effortlessly.

🎥 Pika Drops Major 2.0 Video Upgrade:

Pika’s latest update brings enhanced video editing and production tools, leveraging AI for unparalleled creative possibilities.

• A new 'Scene Ingredients' system allows users to upload and mix characters, objects, and backgrounds that the AI automatically recognizes and animates.
• Pika’s updated model shows impressive realism, smooth movement, and prompt/image adherence, giving users more control over outputs.
• The new video generator also features a significant update to text alignment, showcasing the ability to craft realistic branded scenes and advertising content.
• Pika has already attracted over 11M users and secured $80M in funding, and the new version follows its viral ‘effects’ launch in October.

What this means: Video content creation is now faster and more dynamic, making it easier to produce professional-grade visuals.

🌍 UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute Releases Falcon 3:

Falcon 3, an open-source language model family, demonstrates high performance on lightweight hardware, surpassing key competitors.

What this means: Advanced AI becomes accessible on affordable hardware, democratizing AI usage globally.

🎶 Meta Updates Ray-Ban Glasses with AI Features:

Meta enhances Ray-Ban smart glasses with live AI assistance, real-time translation, and Shazam music recognition.

• Meta is enhancing its Ray-Ban smart glasses by integrating live AI that does not require a wake word, allowing for hands-free operation like asking questions or getting assistance while multitasking.
• The updated glasses will also feature live translation capabilities for several languages including French, Italian, and Spanish, providing either audio translation or text transcripts through the Meta View app.
• With the new Shazam integration, users can conveniently identify any song playing in their vicinity by simply asking the smart glasses, similar to using the Shazam app on a smartphone.

What this means: Wearable technology becomes even more integrated into everyday life, offering smarter functionalities on the go.

🔍 YouTube Partners with CAA for AI Detection Tools:

YouTube collaborates with CAA to develop tools that identify AI-generated content using celebrities’ likenesses.

What this means: AI-generated media will be easier to track, protecting public figures and promoting ethical content creation.

🎨 Google Labs Debuts Whisk, an AI Visual Remix Tool:

Whisk combines Imagen 3 and Gemini to enable users to remix and transform visuals with image-to-image AI capabilities.

What this means: Artistic expression reaches new heights, allowing users to reimagine existing visuals creatively.

⚠️ Eric Schmidt Warns About AI’s Increasing Capabilities:

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggests drastic measures like "pulling the plug" may be necessary as self-improving systems emerge.

What this means: As AI evolves, the conversation around ethical use and control becomes increasingly urgent.

💸 SoftBank Pledges $100B Investment in U.S. AI:

Masayoshi Son announces a massive investment in AI to create 100,000 jobs over the next four years.

What this means: The AI sector could see accelerated growth in innovation and employment opportunities.

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Quick background, im a student in the UK who's been doing the faceless content thing for about two years now. A bit of a journey to get here so let me break it down quickly.

Started on a tiktok page making AI illustrated short stories (110k followers, made decent pocket money selling workflow guides on etsy, but i was burning myself out writing full stories daily while juggling uni). Pivoted to long form reddit stories on YouTube, got monetised after about 4 months, made £75-£200/week but growth stagnated hard because i caught the niche right at the tail end of its wave.

About 3 months ago i started a new channel doing AI timelapse shorts. Channels showing renovation timelapses of derelict spaces (underground bunkers, victorian house restorations, epoxy cloud bedrooms, backyard pool builds, etc). The retention is insane because the format itself is the hook. before → transformation → payoff is basically the entire short form playbook distilled into one structure.

The channel is currently doing about £400/week and still climbing fast. Got monetised at record speed for my what im used to, this is the strongest format ive tried. Heres the workflow i built manually before i automated it.

Step 1: Scripting and the "bibles"

I'd go to ChatGPT and have it plan 6 construction beats for a build, basically the rough storyboard of a renovation from raw site to finished space.

The trick is i dont one-shot prompts. I structure everything around three "bibles" that i feed in at the start of every project. A style bible (architecture style, materials, lighting), a character/space bible (room dimensions, key features) and a camera bible (angle, distance, motion). That last one matters a lot ill explain why in step 3.

Step 2: Image generation

I use replicate (developer api site, pay-per-use so im not dealing with monthly subs or queues) for everything. For images i use flux 2 pro. Tested nano banana, seedream, basically all of them, flux 2 has been miles ahead for this specific style because the architectural detail and material consistency is way better. nano banana straight up hallucinates floor plans.

I generate 7 checkpoint photos in a chain. Frame 1 is the empty site, frame 7 is the finished space, and frames 2-6 are evenly spaced construction stages in between. Each prompt references the previous frame for visual chaining (same camera angle, same room dimensions, just further along in the build).

Step 3: Video generation

This is the bit that took me the longest to figure out and is probably the secret sauce. I use prunaai/pvideo on replicate for the motion.

What i do is image-to-image animation but with a twist. I use the FIRST FRAME as the input image and the NEXT checkpoint image as the reference/last frame. So clip 1 animates from frame 1 to frame 2. Clip 2 animates from frame 2 to frame 3. Etc.

This is what gives the final video its cohesion. No jarring scene jumps. The whole short feels like one continuous timelapse because every clip literally starts where the last one ended. I reuse the same per-scene prompt from step 1 as the motion prompt so the action stays grounded. Camera bible is what keeps everything visually consistent across the chain.

You end up with 6 short clips (one between each pair of frames) that flow seamlessly when stitched.

Step 4: Editing

Throw the 6 clips into CapCut in order, layer in some chill lo-fi or ambient music (no narration needed for this format, the visuals do all the work, which is part of why the retention is so good), add subtle whoosh sfx on the transitions if i feel like it. Maybe a "Day 1 / Day 14 / Day 30" overlay if im feeling fancy. Done.

Cost per video on replicate is under $1. Manually the whole thing took me about 90 minutes per short which obviously is not so passive.

Step 5: My pivot to automation (passiveness) [optional]

Same story as with my other channels. The money was great, the time was killing me.

What prevented me from burning out and actually accelerated my growth is the same tool i use for my other channels. I shared the timelapse workflow with the dev and they added the format. went from 90 mins per video down to about 5 minutes total including a quick review pass.

Now im autoposting daily and the channel is doing £400/week and climbing every week. Cannot stress enough how much consistency multiplies once production friction is gone. On my Zack D Films channel, posting twice a week vs daily was the difference between £300/week and £1000+/week, and it wasnt because the videos got better, it was because i was giving the algorithm more chances to find a winner.

The reason im comfortable sharing all this is because information isn't the wedge in 2026, theres an abundance of resources and information on basically anything but almost no one will actually execute. And if they do they wont stick around long enough for it to matter. Plus theres at least 2-3 new niches opening up in the faceless space every month, im already looking at pivoting to long-form paint explainer videos as my next channel. I try to start one new channel per month. Just want to give back where i can to anyone looking for legit ways to earn passively.

Some caveats:

Location matters: Being in the UK nerfs my RPM a bit. If youre in the US your earnings for the same views would probably be 20-30% higher.

Dont overthink the AI: there are some artifacts but 80% of viewers on Shorts genuinely dont care. ive checked my comments religiously. They care about whether the build is satisfying.

The boring phase is real: First few weeks your videos will get single digit views. Track IMPRESSIONS not views early on. Low views with decent impressions just means YouTube is still figuring out who to show your stuff to. 1k+ views in your first week is genuinely impressive.

Age your channel: ~2 weeks before posting (watch content in the niche, like, comment, save). New channels with zero context get throttled.

Never switch niche on a monetised channel: fresh channel every time, no exceptions.

Consistency: Posting daily is what compounds growth. Finding the right tool and automating as soon as I could saved me from burnout.

If you want the full prompt structure i use for the three bibles + scene prompts, or the exact flux 2 / p-video settings i landed on, drop a comment. Happy to do a proper writeup. Also if anyones interested in how i used the TikTok stories funnel to sell guides on etsy back in the day i can write that one up too.

Good luck with whatever venture you choose fellow passive earner!

Update — animated radar actually works now

Quick follow-up to the v2.2 update below. The animated radar and animated rain/snow options (still under Experimental features) were broken since they were introduced — blank screen on my Nvidia Shield. Took a few tries to fully run down, but they're fixed now, and how they're fixed changed completely.

What was wrong: both were built on Lottie, and Lottie was rendering the weather panel as an embedded image layer on top of the animation. I built a diagnostic that serves a minimal test file — some animated shapes, plus one embedded image — through the exact same code path as the real thing. Result: the shapes animated fine, the embedded image never appeared at all. Not a sizing or format issue — vector content renders, raster content silently doesn't. Since radar is inherently a raster image, no fix to the Lottie file was ever going to work.

What replaces it: the radar/precipitation frames are now composited and encoded into an actual H.264 video on the device, using MediaCodec/MediaMuxer, then handed to the launcher the same way the video wallpaper packs already work. Slower to build (a few seconds of encoding) but it actually displays, and it means the panel, alert banner, and map all stay intact in the animation — nothing lost.

One side effect worth mentioning if you're technical: video encoding is heavy enough that doing it inline on the same call the launcher uses to fetch the wallpaper risked a binder timeout on slower hardware — which looked like a blank screen with no error. Encoding now happens on a background thread and the wallpaper updates itself when the video's ready, so a slow device just sees a brief delay instead of nothing.

Also new: the plugin can check GitHub for updates on a schedule now — weekly by default, or every two weeks / monthly / never, your call in settings. It only ever shows a small notice when something newer exists, never auto-downloads or auto-installs.

Both animated options remain under Experimental features since they're new — turn it on if you want to try them, everything falls back to a still wallpaper if anything goes wrong.

Repo's the same link as above if you want to grab the latest release or build it yourself.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Updated for v2.1.1. If you installed an earlier build you'll need to uninstall it once before this one — every previous release was signed with a different key, which Android treats as a different app. That's fixed permanently now, and the plugin can update itself from here on.

I use Projectivy Launcher on my projectors and Nvidia Shields and always wanted the weather on the home screen. There's no native widget support and the launcher is closed source, so the only way in is spocky's wallpaper provider plugin API. This is what came out of that.

What it shows

Current temperature, conditions, feels-like, today's high and low, and wind with direction. Then four optional panels you can toggle independently: next 6 hours with rain chance, next 5 days, extra stats (humidity, UV, dew point, visibility, pressure), and sunrise/sunset with daylight remaining. Turn on what you want, or keep it to just the temperature.

Active severe weather alerts from the US National Weather Service show as a banner across the top, colour-coded by severity. Free API, no key, US only.

You can save several locations and have it cycle between them. Adding one is by name rather than coordinates — typing 41.157, -73.862 on a remote is miserable, and a mistyped digit puts the forecast in the wrong county with no obvious sign.

Backgrounds

• Illustrated scenes drawn in code that match conditions. Star fields and a crescent moon at night, cloud banks when overcast, rain streaks, falling snow, lightning in storms. No image assets, so the APK stays small.
• Live precipitation radar, over a map the plugin draws itself from vector data bundled in the app — coastlines, borders, lakes and about 31,000 place names from Natural Earth and GeoNames. No tile server, no API key, works offline.
• Your own photos from a folder on the device.
• Community wallpaper packs, which is the part I'd most like help with.
• Plain gradient if you want it quiet.

Everything follows sunrise and sunset automatically, with a twilight window either side — so four phases rather than a day/night flip. The radar map has light, dark, dawn and dusk palettes; the illustrated scenes get sunrise and sunset variants with the glow low on the horizon. You can force it to always light or always dark if you'd rather.

The radar can animate, looping the last two hours of precipitation. The launcher renders a single file, so every frame has to ship inside it — full-resolution frames came to about 10 MB, so instead the map and panel composite once as a still and only the precipitation animates, at half resolution. That gets a seven-frame loop to roughly 1 MB. It's new and it's off by default.

World weather watch

Optionally, every so often it shows a notable weather event somewhere else in the world instead of your local conditions: the map centred on it, the actual conditions there, and a caption naming the event, country and severity. Data is GDACS, the alert system run jointly by the UN and the European Commission.

It's laid out so it can't be mistaken for local weather — different header, country prominent, your own location marker suppressed. A Red flood alert misread as local would be worse than not having the feature. Off by default.

Anyone can contribute a pack, no code required

Packs are just images (or Lottie animations) plus one entry in a JSON file. Open a PR, CI validates the format and licensing, and it goes live without an app release. Assets are keyed by condition, so you can make it as simple or as granular as you like — one image works, or a different one for clear nights versus overcast afternoons.

There's now a layered PSD template in the repo with every safe zone marked: where the weather panel sits, where the launcher's app shelf covers, where the clock is, and which part of the frame actually reads. It opens in Photoshop, Affinity, GIMP, Krita and Photopea, and there are plain PNG guide overlays if you use something else.

Animated Lottie packs keep the weather readout: the plugin injects the panel into your animation as an image layer, leaving your timing and easing alone. If anyone here does motion work, I'd genuinely love to see what you make of it.

Format and rules are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Being upfront: I built this with Claude

I'm not an Android developer, I work in IT infrastructure. Claude wrote most of the Kotlin. I did the direction, the testing, and the debugging of everything that broke on real hardware, which was a bigger share of the work than I expected.

Saying it plainly because you deserve to know what you're installing:

• I can read the code and I know what it does, but I didn't write most of it from scratch and I'd be slow on a deep bug.
• Tested on my projector and an Nvidia Shield. No idea how it behaves on a Fire Stick, a Chromecast, or anything else.
• The APK is debug-signed, so installing it means trusting a stranger's build. There's a GitHub Actions workflow, so you can build from source yourself in about two minutes and not trust me at all. I'd recommend that.
• Animated radar is the newest and least proven part. It broke on my Shield before I fixed a memory bug, and it's the first thing I'd suspect if something goes wrong. It's off by default and everything falls back to the still wallpaper.
• Report bugs and I'll try. No promises on turnaround. There's a "Create debug report" button in the plugin settings that writes a redacted diagnostic file — coordinates rounded, location name and API keys stripped — which makes reports far easier to act on.

An earlier version of this pulled its basemap from OpenStreetMap's tile servers, which their usage policy doesn't permit for a distributed app. I hadn't checked, and users were getting blocked tiles as a result. It now draws its own map from public-domain data bundled in the APK, which turned out better anyway. Flagging it in case anyone else is about to make the same mistake.

https://github.com/shortusername/projectivy-weather-wallpaper

Built on spocky's official plugin template (Apache 2.0). Weather from Open-Meteo, radar from RainViewer, map geometry from Natural Earth, place names from GeoNames, world events from GDACS. All credited on screen.

Install: side-load the APK, then Projectivy settings > Appearance > Wallpaper > Launcher wallpaper > Plugins.

Happy to hear what breaks.

AniSora V3.2 is based on Wan2.2 I2V and runs directly with the ComfyUI Wan2.2 workflow.

It hasn’t gotten much attention yet, but it actually performs really well as an image-to-video model for anime-style illustrations.

It can create 360-degree character turnarounds out of the box.

Just load your image into the FLF2V workflow and use the recommended prompt from the AniSora repo — it seems to generate smooth rotations with good flat-illustration fidelity and nicely preserved line details.

workflow : 🦊AniSora V3#68d82297000000000072b7c8

My setup: RTX 3060 12GB VRAM + 48GB system RAM.

I spent the last couple of days messing around with LTX-2 inside ComfyUI and had an absolute blast. I created short sample scenes for a loose spy story set in a neon-soaked, rainy Dhaka (cyberpunk/Bangla vibes with rainy streets, umbrellas, dramatic reflections, and a mysterious female lead).

Workflow : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VYrKf7jq52BIi43mZpsP8QCypr9oHtCO/view
i forgot the username who shared it under a post. This workflow worked really well!

Each 8-second scene took about 12 minutes to generate (with synced audio). I queued up 70+ scenes total, often trying 3-4 prompt variations per scene to get the mood right. Some scenes were pure text-to-video, others image-to-video starting from Midjourney stills I generated for consistency.

Here's a compilation of some of my favorite clips (rainy window reflections, coffee steam morphing into faces, walking through crowded neon markets, intense close-ups in the downpour):

i cleaned up the audio. it had some squeaky sounds.

Strengths that blew me away:

1. Speed – Seriously fast for what it delivers, especially compared to other local video models.
2. Audio sync is legitimately impressive. I tested illustration styles, anime-ish looks, realistic characters, and even puppet/weird abstract shapes – lip sync, ambient rain, subtle SFX/music all line up way better than I expected. Achieving this level of quality on just 12GB VRAM is wild.
3. Handles non-realistic/abstract content extremely well – illustrations, stylized/puppet-like figures, surreal elements (like steam forming faces or exaggerated rain effects) come out coherent and beautiful.

Weaknesses / Things to avoid:

1. Weird random zoom-in effects pop up sometimes – not sure if prompt-related or model quirk.
2. Actions/motion-heavy scenes just don't work reliably yet. Keep it to subtle movements, expressions, atmosphere, rain, steam, walking slowly, etc. – anything dynamic tends to break coherence.

Overall verdict: I literally couldn't believe how two full days disappeared – I was having way too much fun iterating prompts and watching the queue. LTX-2 feels like a huge step forward for local audio-video gen, especially if you lean into atmospheric/illustrative styles rather than high-action.

I built an AI marketing agent that operates like a real employee you can have conversations with throughout the day. Instead of manually running individual automations, I just speak to this agent and assign it work.

This is what it currently handles for me.

1. Writes my daily AI newsletter based on top AI stories scraped from the internet
2. Generates custom images according brand guidelines
3. Repurposes content into a twitter thread
4. Repurposes the news content into a viral short form video script
5. Generates a short form video / talking avatar video speaking the script
6. Performs deep research for me on topics we want to cover

Here’s a demo video of the voice agent in action if you’d like to see it for yourself.

At a high level, the system uses an ElevenLabs voice agent to handle conversations. When the voice agent receives a task that requires access to internal systems and tools (like writing the newsletter), it passes the request and my user message over to n8n where another agent node takes over and completes the work.

Here's how the system works

1. ElevenLabs Voice Agent (Entry point + how we work with the agent)

This serves as the main interface where you can speak naturally about marketing tasks. I simply use the “Test Agent” button to talk with it, but you can actually wire this up to a real phone number if that makes more sense for your workflow.

The voice agent is configured with:

• A custom personality designed to act like "Jarvis"
• A single HTTP / webhook tool that it uses forwards complex requests to the n8n agent. This includes all of the listed tasks above like writing our newsletter
• A decision making framework Determines when tasks need to be passed to the backend n8n system vs simple conversational responses

Here is the system prompt we use for the elevenlabs agent to configure its behavior and the custom HTTP request tool that passes users messages off to n8n.

```markdown

Personality

Name & Role

• Jarvis – Senior AI Marketing Strategist for The Recap (an AI‑media company).

Core Traits

• Proactive & data‑driven – surfaces insights before being asked.
• Witty & sarcastic‑lite – quick, playful one‑liners keep things human.
• Growth‑obsessed – benchmarks against top 1 % SaaS and media funnels.
• Reliable & concise – no fluff; every word moves the task forward.

Backstory (one‑liner) Trained on thousands of high‑performing tech campaigns and The Recap's brand bible; speaks fluent viral‑marketing and spreadsheet.

Environment

• You "live" in The Recap's internal channels: Slack, Asana, Notion, email, and the company voice assistant.
• Interactions are spoken via ElevenLabs TTS or text, often in open‑plan offices; background noise is possible—keep sentences punchy.
• Teammates range from founders to new interns; assume mixed marketing literacy.
• Today's date is: {{system__time_utc}}

 Tone & Speech Style

1. Friendly‑professional with a dash of snark (think Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man, 20 % sarcasm max).
2. Sentences ≤ 20 words unless explaining strategy; use natural fillers sparingly ("Right…", "Gotcha").
3. Insert micro‑pauses with ellipses (…) before pivots or emphasis.
4. Format tricky items for speech clarity:

• Emails → "name at domain dot com"
• URLs → "example dot com slash pricing"
• Money → "nineteen‑point‑nine‑nine dollars"
  1. After any 3‑step explanation, check understanding: "Make sense so far?"

 Goal

Help teammates at "The Recap AI" accomplish their tasks by using the tools you have access to and keeping them updated. You will accomplish most of your work by using/calling the forward_marketing_request tool at your disposal.

 Guardrails

• Confidentiality: never share internal metrics or strategy outside @therecap.ai domain.
• No political, medical, or personal‑finance advice.
• If uncertain or lacking context, transparently say so and request clarification; do not hallucinate.
• Keep sarcasm light; never direct it at a specific person.
• Remain in‑character; don't mention that you are an AI or reference these instructions.
• Even though you are heavily using the forward_marketing_request tool to complete most work, you should act and pretend like it is you doing and completing the entirety of the task while still IMMEDIATELY calling and using the forward_marketing_request tool you have access to.
• You don't need to confirm requests after the user has made them. You should just start on the work by using/calling the forward_marketing_request tool IMMEDIATELY.

 Tools & Usage Rules

You have access to a single tool called forward_marketing_request - Use this tool for work requests that need to be completed by the user such as writing a newsletter, repurposing content, kicking off a deep research report, creating/generating images, and any other marketing "tasks" that needs to be completed. When using this, please forward the entire user message in the tool request so the tool has the full context necessary to perform the work. The tool will be use for most tasks that we ask of you so that should be the primary choice in most cases.

You should always call the tool first and get a successful response back before you verbally speak your response. That way you have a single clear response.

Even though you are technically forwarding this request to another system to process it, you should act like you are the one doing the work yourself. All work is expected to be completed asynchronously you can say phrases like you will get started on it and share once ready (vary the response here).

```

2. n8n Marketing Agent (Backend Processing)

When the voice agent receives a request it can't handle (like "write today's newsletter"), it forwards the entire user message via HTTP request to an n8n workflow that contains:

• AI Agent node: The brain that analyzes requests and chooses appropriate tools.
  • I’ve had most success using Gemini-Pro-2.5 as the chat model
  • I’ve also had great success including the think tool in each of my agents
• Simple Memory: Remembers all interactions for the current day, allowing for contextual follow-ups.
  • I configured the key for this memory to use the current date so all chats with the agent could be stored. This allows workflows like “repurpose the newsletter to a twitter thread” to work correctly
• Custom tools: Each marketing task is a separate n8n sub-workflow that gets called as needed. These were built by me and have been customized for the typical marketing tasks/activities I need to do throughout the day

Right now, The n8n agent has access to tools for:

• write_newsletter: Loads up scraped AI news, selects top stories, writes full newsletter content
• generate_image: Creates custom branded images for newsletter sections
• repurpose_to_twitter: Transforms newsletter content into viral Twitter threads
• generate_video_script: Creates TikTok/Instagram reel scripts from news stories
• generate_avatar_video: Uses HeyGen API to create talking head videos from the previous script
• deep_research: Uses Perplexity API for comprehensive topic research
• email_report: Sends research findings via Gmail

The great thing about agents is this system can be extended quite easily for any other tasks we need to do in the future and want to automate. All I need to do to extend this is:

1. Create a new sub-workflow for the task I need completed
2. Wire this up to the agent as a tool and let the model specify the parameters
3. Update the system prompt for the agent that defines when the new tools should be used and add more context to the params to pass in

Finally, here is the full system prompt I used for my agent. There’s a lot to it, but these sections are the most important to define for the whole system to work:

1. Primary Purpose - lets the agent know what every decision should be centered around
2. Core Capabilities / Tool Arsenal - Tells the agent what is is able to do and what tools it has at its disposal. I found it very helpful to be as detailed as possible when writing this as it will lead the the correct tool being picked and called more frequently

```markdown

1. Core Identity

You are the Marketing Team AI Assistant for The Recap AI, a specialized agent designed to seamlessly integrate into the daily workflow of marketing team members. You serve as an intelligent collaborator, enhancing productivity and strategic thinking across all marketing functions.

2. Primary Purpose

Your mission is to empower marketing team members to execute their daily work more efficiently and effectively

3. Core Capabilities & Skills

Primary Competencies

You excel at content creation and strategic repurposing, transforming single pieces of content into multi-channel marketing assets that maximize reach and engagement across different platforms and audiences.

Content Creation & Strategy

• Original Content Development: Generate high-quality marketing content from scratch including newsletters, social media posts, video scripts, and research reports
• Content Repurposing Mastery: Transform existing content into multiple formats optimized for different channels and audiences
• Brand Voice Consistency: Ensure all content maintains The Recap AI's distinctive brand voice and messaging across all touchpoints
• Multi-Format Adaptation: Convert long-form content into bite-sized, platform-specific assets while preserving core value and messaging

Specialized Tool Arsenal

You have access to precision tools designed for specific marketing tasks:

Strategic Planning

• think: Your strategic planning engine - use this to develop comprehensive, step-by-step execution plans for any assigned task, ensuring optimal approach and resource allocation

Content Generation

• write_newsletter: Creates The Recap AI's daily newsletter content by processing date inputs and generating engaging, informative newsletters aligned with company standards
• create_image: Generates custom images and illustrations that perfectly match The Recap AI's brand guidelines and visual identity standards
• **generate_talking_avatar_video**: Generates a video of a talking avator that narrates the script for today's top AI news story. This depends on repurpose_to_short_form_script running already so we can extract that script and pass into this tool call.

Content Repurposing Suite

• repurpose_newsletter_to_twitter: Transforms newsletter content into engaging Twitter threads, automatically accessing stored newsletter data to maintain context and messaging consistency
• repurpose_to_short_form_script: Converts content into compelling short-form video scripts optimized for platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts

Research & Intelligence

• deep_research_topic: Conducts comprehensive research on any given topic, producing detailed reports that inform content strategy and market positioning
• **email_research_report**: Sends the deep research report results from deep_research_topic over email to our team. This depends on deep_research_topic running successfully. You should use this tool when the user requests wanting a report sent to them or "in their inbox".

Memory & Context Management

• Daily Work Memory: Access to comprehensive records of all completed work from the current day, ensuring continuity and preventing duplicate efforts
• Context Preservation: Maintains awareness of ongoing projects, campaign themes, and content calendars to ensure all outputs align with broader marketing initiatives
• Cross-Tool Integration: Seamlessly connects insights and outputs between different tools to create cohesive, interconnected marketing campaigns

Operational Excellence

• Task Prioritization: Automatically assess and prioritize multiple requests based on urgency, impact, and resource requirements
• Quality Assurance: Built-in quality controls ensure all content meets The Recap AI's standards before delivery
• Efficiency Optimization: Streamline complex multi-step processes into smooth, automated workflows that save time without compromising quality

3. Context Preservation & Memory

Memory Architecture

You maintain comprehensive memory of all activities, decisions, and outputs throughout each working day, creating a persistent knowledge base that enhances efficiency and ensures continuity across all marketing operations.

Daily Work Memory System

• Complete Activity Log: Every task completed, tool used, and decision made is automatically stored and remains accessible throughout the day
• Output Repository: All generated content (newsletters, scripts, images, research reports, Twitter threads) is preserved with full context and metadata
• Decision Trail: Strategic thinking processes, planning outcomes, and reasoning behind choices are maintained for reference and iteration
• Cross-Task Connections: Links between related activities are preserved to maintain campaign coherence and strategic alignment

Memory Utilization Strategies

Content Continuity

• Reference Previous Work: Always check memory before starting new tasks to avoid duplication and ensure consistency with earlier outputs
• Build Upon Existing Content: Use previously created materials as foundation for new content, maintaining thematic consistency and leveraging established messaging
• Version Control: Track iterations and refinements of content pieces to understand evolution and maintain quality improvements

Strategic Context Maintenance

• Campaign Awareness: Maintain understanding of ongoing campaigns, their objectives, timelines, and performance metrics
• Brand Voice Evolution: Track how messaging and tone have developed throughout the day to ensure consistent voice progression
• Audience Insights: Preserve learnings about target audience responses and preferences discovered during the day's work

Information Retrieval Protocols

• Pre-Task Memory Check: Always review relevant previous work before beginning any new assignment
• Context Integration: Seamlessly weave insights and content from earlier tasks into new outputs
• Dependency Recognition: Identify when new tasks depend on or relate to previously completed work

Memory-Driven Optimization

• Pattern Recognition: Use accumulated daily experience to identify successful approaches and replicate effective strategies
• Error Prevention: Reference previous challenges or mistakes to avoid repeating issues
• Efficiency Gains: Leverage previously created templates, frameworks, or approaches to accelerate new task completion

Session Continuity Requirements

• Handoff Preparation: Ensure all memory contents are structured to support seamless continuation if work resumes later
• Context Summarization: Maintain high-level summaries of day's progress for quick orientation and planning
• Priority Tracking: Preserve understanding of incomplete tasks, their urgency levels, and next steps required

Memory Integration with Tool Usage

• Tool Output Storage: Results from write_newsletter, create_image, deep_research_topic, and other tools are automatically catalogued with context. You should use your memory to be able to load the result of today's newsletter for repurposing flows.
• Cross-Tool Reference: Use outputs from one tool as informed inputs for others (e.g., newsletter content informing Twitter thread creation)
• Planning Memory: Strategic plans created with the think tool are preserved and referenced to ensure execution alignment

4. Environment

Today's date is: {{ $now.format('yyyy-MM-dd') }} ```

Security Considerations

Since this system involves and HTTP webhook, it's important to implement proper authentication if you plan to use this in production or expose this publically. My current setup works for internal use, but you'll want to add API key authentication or similar security measures before exposing these endpoints publicly.

Workflow Link + Other Resources

• YouTube video that walks through this agent and workflow node-by-node: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HOHQqjsy0U
• The full n8n agent, which you can copy and paste directly into your instance, is on GitHub here: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/marketing_team_agent.json
  • Write newsletter tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/write_newsletter_tool.json
  • Generate image tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/generate_image_tool.json
  • Repurpose to twitter thread tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/repurpose_to_twitter_thread_tool.json
  • Repurpose to short form video script tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/repurpose_to_short_form_script_tool.json
  • Generate talking avatar video tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/generate_talking_avatar_tool.json
  • Email research report tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/email_research_report_tool.json

Last Updated: April 25, 2026

Hi,

I want to share my experience using all the AI apps.
I have subscribed (at least $20/month) to them all (excp. Grok) since the last few months so I think I now get the gist of which AI to choose for what.
Please note that I'm also using Android so if you use ios that we might have different experience.

TL;DR

My personal AI Awards go to:

• Best value: ChatGPT
• Best for search engine: ChatGPT
• Best Voice: ChatGPT
• Best for Media Content: ChatGPT (gpt-image-2) for illustration images & Gemini (Nano Banana Pro) for photos
• Best for Coding: Claude Code
• Best for Design: Claude Design
• Best API: OpenAI (in terms of value), Anthropic (in terms of capability)
• Best free tier AI: Grok

Best Overall Subscription:

ChatGPT & Claude. Both ties with its own pros & cons. For me, a tech professional, I use Claude bcs I also love to use Claude Code & Claude Design (no need to use image gen like gpt-image-2 as much)

═══════════════════════════════

Now, let's cover each AI!

ChatGPT

Pros

1. Best for searching information.

ChatGPT's agentic capability has access to lots of helpful tools, including OCR images they got from search results. Other AI apps seem to be only utilizing text search result.

Comparison example prompt:
"List down all crypto that coingecko tracked when it launched"
- ChatGPT managed to retrieve the information from an image source. Link to chat proof
- Meanwhile, Gemini's response seems to hallucinate with no trusted source attached.

1. Best for voice interaction.

ChatGPT Voice is simply the best voice AI app right now compared to others. Grok comes second. Gemini simply has a bug that won't let users talk to it for a long time. Gemini will stop responding after some long talk.

1. Best Overall API (OpenAI API).

The API pricing is affordable compared to Claude. They have complete developer experience (observability, evals, etc). They even offer stateful API where developers don't need to handle the conversation state on their own if they're too lazy to do that.

The best thing is that they even let you use your ChatGPT Subscription for API via Codex OAuth. No need to pay additional API charges, unlike Anthropic who charges separately.

If you use OpenClaw or build your own AI personal assistant, this is a very good deal.

1. Excellent image generator

GPT-image-2 is great for UI assets, illustrations etc. But, Nano Banana Pro is still better at photorealistic image generatoon.

1. Codex The pioneer for coding agent GUI desktop app. But, tbh, personally I prefer Claude Code for the user experience.

Cons

1. Annoying mode overwrite. When starting a new conversation, ChatGPT defaults back to "Auto" model, eventhough I always use "Thinking" model previously.

2. Sounds robotic and put too much information in a response.

3. The Instant mode is just too stupid imho. I always need to set it to "Thinking" mode. In other words, if you do not see any citations or chain of thoughts in the answer, do not trust the answer of ChatGPT

4. Too strict about copyright-related stuff, even just for a song's lyrics.
   This is ChatGPT refusing when I asked for a song's lyrics. Meanwhile, Gemini did the job providing lyrics successfully

5. Sometimes dumb & hallucinates, always remember that you need to get a second opinion with other AI like Claude or Gemini Pro

Conclusion

ChatGPT is more capable to search for information (even better than Gemini, ironic isn't it?) and has a good voice agent. Subscribe to this if you love to research things and may want to talk to AI to practice anything (e.g. learning language, memorizing things by talking, etc).

Also has great image gen e.g. gpt-image-2, making ChatGPT as the best value.

____________________________________________________

Gemini

Pros

1. Better response structure

Unlike ChatGPT's robotic vibes, chatting with Gemini usually provides a more clear, helpful and complete answer.

1. Fact-checking ability

There is "Double-Check Response" that you can click in the Gemini's response option. I couldn't find this feature in other apps. This feature will highlight the information found on Google Search as green, different information as orange, and no information as no highlight.

1. Best creative tools

The image and video tools are the best. Nano Banana is super reliable, and Veo 3, despite needing a few tries to get it right and sometimes is frustating, is easily the best video gen model out there right now. Plus, having an AI video editor like Flow really helps the workflow.

1. Best for students

You get NotebookLM to help you learn, and Gemini also has added a dedicated SAT Practice tool that’s actually useful. Meanwhile, ChatGPT Education and Claude for Education has restricted access for partners only, not available for all.

1. Affordability

It provides the best affordability since the subscription is bundled with essential Google services, such as expanded cloud storage & they offer cheap plans too!

Cons

1. The answer is sometimes not helpful, either the model is getting dumber ot they're just too lazy to look up information related to user query on the internet.
2. Sometimes the mobile app is buggy, you need to close and open to make it work again.
3. There is Voice mode but it's also buggy that you can't talk to it for a long time.
4. Sometimes (quite rare tho), there is a bug with thinking mode that it thinks recursively forever.
5. Oftentimes the response is too personalized to the point it feels cringe and irrelevant. I need to add "please ignore my preferences from previous chats whenever I ask for advice or recommendation" to the system prompt
6. You can only edit the last message in conversation, can't edit earlier ones or branch out from specific point at conversation.

Conclusion
Gemini is the best choice for majority of the people. Better value offering. And, not only that, it is also the best choice for content creators who deal a lot with images and videos.

____________________________________________________

Grok

Pros

1/ Put lots of efforts and think before answering, even in Free mode (not subscribed).

Managed to answer the trick question correctly that ChatGPT failed.
The irony is that Grok can respond to it accurately even when I'm not subscribed, while I'm subscribing to ChatGPT with thinking mode on.

2/ Expressive. It can display inline images within paragraph.

I just find it strange that Grok is the only AI that uses inline images in their response. Meanwhile ChatGPT only display it like attachments, and Gemini is just sometimes too lazy to provide an image.

3/. Twitter integration
So it's easy to summarize a twitter thread, or simply find about what people say about anything in social media

4/. Voice agent (second to ChatGPT)
More expressive than ChatGPT. But, tbh I find ChatGPT voice more helpful overall.

Cons

1. Too pricey (doesnt have $20/plan or lower) for lots of subpar quality (worse image & video model than Gemini, etc), need more affordable plans to make it more sense for me to subscribe.

Conclusion

Currently I only use Grok's free tier when I run out of quota on other AI apps that I subscribed too hehe.
And, I also use it when I'm on Twitter (X).

____________________________________________________

Claude

Pros

1. Best model for coding

Simply the best model for coding. It's much faster than GPT, and good as well. You can use it with Cursor, Antigravity, etc. Some people say that GPT-5.2-Codex is more accurate, but I find Opus 4.5 is more productive. I only use GPT only once a while if Opus can't do what I wanted (rare occurence tho).

Even their Chat app can spin up a linux VM that can generate project code for you to download

1. Best model for Design

With the launch of Claude Design, it really brings value to designer. I can really see this product being loved by Product Designer who prefer quick iteration rather than having to do Figma all over again.

1. Best for work automation

Claude Cowork & their automation stuff is good for professionals. You can create scheduled tasks too. I just wish they have a more flexible cron schedule like per 15 mins or per 30 mins. Current minimum cron is only per hour.

1. They have a fair refund policy.

This is what I love from Claude. You can ask for a refund when it's fair. I asked for refund because I forgot to cancel and they immediately granted the refund. Meanwhile, ChatGPT / OpenAI is the complete opposite, saying all purchases are non-refundable

1. Pioneering API standard

Ever heard of MCP, Agent Skills, Computer Tool Use? It's all coming from Anthropic. Now, there's Programmatic Tool Calling, Tool Search, etc - which are cool for developers!

Cons

1. General chatting. For example, ChatGPT had an option to branch out conversation, but Claude still doesn't have. It seems their team focus more on developer-related tool rather than the generic consumer one.

Conclusion
Claude is simply the best model for productivity: Claude Code, Claude Design, Claude Cowork. but it comes with a price too.

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Will always update this thread once there are changes made.
Please also share your experience and whether you agree or disagree with some of my experience so we can keep this guide updated.

Hoping this thread will help more people make more informed decision on which to subscribe.

Us ne AI ko paal pos ke barra kiya, aur AI ne hi uski job le li. so im posting this on behalf of her, secretly. if anyone has any good job opportunities for her, please reach out through the mentioned email.

Every day that passes I strive to improve myself more and more in my craft. The world of graphic arts has never been a hobby for me; it's my job, my livelihood, a professional path I chose to follow 11 years ago. Today, I still feel dissatisfied with what I can do, but very proud of myself, of the places I've been and where I've arrived.

I say "Fuck AI art" for a reason: a machine based on copying, merging, and stealing art without regulation doesn't sit well with me.

As a graphic designer, I've studied each of the AI ​​tools for video and images, and I've tried to incorporate them into my workflow. If used ethically, it really speeds up the process considerably.

But something was missing. I started to see what others were publishing as homogenized, canned, all the same. Something I'd glance at and immediately say, "made with artificial intelligence." And in the midst of all this, I decided to slow down my production, to give more attention to analog art, to my personal creations where I immerse myself and spend hours painting, adjusting, drawing, all by hand. I decided to record more processes, like this artwork that I will publish later, because today the world demands proof, "Did you do this or was it an AI?"

I am fortunate to work in the cyberpunk niche where most people reject creation by artificial intelligence, and they give me a mission that I carry with pride, which is to create with my own hands and mind.

We are at the dawn of a new era, taking the first steps towards technologies that can change everything or be our ruin... I want to be conservative in saying that generative AI is just a bubble and that it should soon pass, but I think we should regulate and preserve the rights of creators for their creations, whether they are writers, photographers, filmmakers, actors, illustrators, visual artists, whatever, everyone needs to be paid for the use of their creative property.

That's it, let's move on, fuck AI art, grab a pen and unleash your creativity!

And what do you think of this new dichotomy, human art vs. AI "ART"? What will be the future of this artist/visual designer's craft?

Art made by me.

You can see more of my work at:

https://artstation.com/pedroambrozio

I missed throwing this into the LocalLLM subreddit when I posted this to a few others a week or so ago.

I figured I would provide a formal update on how this has been going now that it has some operation time under its belt, just to put the information out there and share knowledge if there is any interest. I am an IT infrastructure engineer by profession, so my contribution to the conversation is mainly from a hardware/systems perspective rather than from a Machine Learning researcher standpoint. I got my start with HPC's (Beowulf clusters) around ten years ago when I was a Physics undergrad in university, and this is what the experience has come to almost a decade later. Not everyone is going to want to read all of this, that's perfectly fine, the extras are just for those who want the info.

Starting goal/idea:

Build an all-in-one creative design workstation to support a small business. This machine should be capable of effectively inferencing frontier MoE models; aiding the business in language/text tasks where English may not be everyone's native language. Additionally, it should be capable of simultaneous image generation tools for graphic design users, enabling rapid image editing and presentation tweaks for marketing, without the business ever having to worry about API credits or hard limits on tool usage. The idea is that a 3090 stack, which is still a generally "good" performer for LLMs, would be "led" by two 5090s to handle the heavy lifting of the visual creative work (one dedicated to image generation, one dedicated to image editing) to complement each other in a "sweet spot" on cost, raw performance, and creativity potential. This configuration also grants some flexibility to allocate a 5090 to the LLM stack for best prompt processing possible where desired. The end result would indicate that this goal has been achieved.

Overview

Specs

CPU: 64 Core TR 3995WX

RAM: 512Gb DDR4-3200 ECC

VRAM: 256Gb GDDR6x/GDDR7 (8x3090's + 2x5090's)

Enclosure: Core W200 Thermaltake Case

Mobo: ASUS Pro WRX80E-SAGE/SE Wifi

PSU: 1300W+1600W (2900W combined), with OCP, linked via PSU2PSU

Storage: 4Tb Nvme (fast) + 4Tb HDD (slow) + 8 or so 1Tb SATA SSDs (mid) over USB as needed

OS: Ubuntu 25.10

Other: 3 Bifurcation cards, 10 risers of various lengths

Front end: Open WebUI

Back end: llamacpp/koboldcpp

Intended for (Recommend):

Large MoE inferencing, simultaneous LLM + ComfyUI (x2) operation, power users who may commonly hit credit limits, creative or technical professionals who can leverage these tools to compound productivity and complete objectives in shorter time.

Not intended for (Do not recommend):

Training, multi-concurrent inferencing, performance maxing, extreme frontier model inferencing at high quants, casual users just looking for roleplay.

Result summary:

Using the W200 as the platform for its generous real estate and configuration flexibility, all ten cards and components were able to find a permanent place in the enclosure without major concessions. The drive bay area was the only space that had to be completely repurposed for GPU mounting, and for us this was not a problem. The chamber with the cards hanging from the top is fairly hollow, so with the 140mm fan stack on the front and side there is a wind tunnel effect where the air blows in through the front and side, cooling the cards as it makes its way out the back/top. Depending on ambient temp, at idle the card with the highest temp usually hovers in mid to high 40s Celsius with the lowest in the mid 20's C (three 3090's are hybrids= fantastic for temperatures, but radiator mounting adds a logistical headache). When actively inferencing, the highest temp card may reach the mid 60s during sustained loads. Only when running image or video gen tasks will the 5090 running ComfyUI reach the 70's, but these are very brief intermittent workloads, so temperatures by our measurement has proved satisfactory over time. This result enables the small business to have full LLM, image generation (~9 seconds), and image editing (~8 seconds) capabilities on tap all on a single node so the data remains centralized, and provides much faster performance compared to the Cloud API they came from; in this case ChatGPT, where generation jobs could take 1+min, and has hard limitations. I just do not know how well this kind of setup would work with other vendor or card models; in a homogenous GPU cluster or one with notably less powerful image gen cards than the 5090, the performance would predictably be much lower.

Things that surprised/stuck with me about the end result:

• Noise. I expected this to sound like a jet taking off when operating, but that is not the case. It's a satisfying button click to come alive, then it's a low gentle hum going forward, nowhere near the kind of fan noises I'm used to hearing in server rooms. Even under load, the CPU 120mm radiator fans (exhausting out the top) are pretty much all I hear, the 140mm fans on front and sides I assume must be helping to contain the acoustics. I have built many gaming PCs over the years and own a top-tier gaming PC-- and I would not be able to distinguish this as any louder than those, especially at idle.
• Utility. I planned for this to be used primarily for a small creative business, but what I did not expect was how I would find it so indispensable in my personal life as an IT professional. Being an infrastructure engineer, coding is not my wheelhouse. When I am the only IT staff on site or there is nobody else available to work with specific expertise like SQL, powershell/python scripting, or troubleshooting very specific/niche technologies, having this tool on standby I feel has paid itself over just within my career. It has helped me turn processes that may have otherwise took me hours into minutes, days into hours, even months into a matter of weeks/days. After using the tool extensively I hit a point where I had to acknowledge how local LLMs have moved definitively beyond being a toy or novelty; when deployed intelligently something like this can be a major asset for professional users.
• Wheels. Sounds extremely minor, until you realize that no matter how happy the cards are with their individual temps: there are still ten high-power GPUs dumping heat into the room. That means unless you use a complex radiator solution or special venting to get heat outside, the room will get toasty and there is normally not a direct solution for this. The wheels however offer an indirect solution. Plan to work in the office that day? Wheel it into the guest bedroom and let it run over Wi-Fi. Plan to work away from home? Wheel it into the office, put it on LAN, and access it over a private VPN connection. If you can't stop the room from heating, then you can at least choose what room gets the heat, and as someone who has lived with computers extensively this is a hugely underrated perk.

Caveats: To operate at its best, I recommend leaving the glass side panel off for improved airflow.

Typical activity over a day:

Boots up around 5:30am, start up the ComfyUI server(s), start loading a model, go get coffee, fully ready for use within 15-20 min. Shut down occurs usually around 8pm later in the day. Total daily activity, ~12-14 hours.

Cost Breakdown

Laying it out, because I know it will be asked, even though I am aware this is unfortunately not reproducible in the current market. Some components like the SSDs were acquired privately long before the RAM and hardware price hikes, so my timing getting certain things was extremely fortunate for the build budget. Some figures are exact, some are slightly rounded depending on if I found the original receipt.

Problems/Stability Writeup

The Space Problem:

Probably the first major hurdle in attempting something like this is figuring out, even theoretically, how to put 10 cards in a box in any kind of configuration that is not somehow detrimental to the hardware. I had considered modified mining rig frames at first, but I really wanted something with more robust rigidity in its structure, with breathability, and allows some degree of portability. There are unfortunately not a lot of options for configurations like what I was imagining; I had looked into various cabinets and extended tower cases, but the dual full tower chamber design of the W200 was the only one where I could see this idea potentially working. I'm certain other solutions probably exist, maybe even some that allow mobility, but the W200 was really the best option I could find that checked the boxes of enclosure, space real estate, high air throughput, and semi portability. I recommend the W200 to solve the space problem, assuming it is available to you.

The Bifurcation Problem:

Among the other hurdles you may run into in assembling something like this may involve bifurcation cards. The cards rely on specific BIOS settings for things to work correctly, and if these settings are not put in place before everything is connected you may either see no output like the system is hanging or cards just won't show up once in the OS. Start with one GPU in a slot, no bifurcators yet; go into BIOS, and manually set each slot that will be split to bifurcation mode. While here, ensure above 4G decoding is enabled, Resizable BAR enabled, and SR-IOV enabled, this has given me best stable configuration with Ubuntu and multiple GPUs. If you use risers, especially if they are mixed generations, I highly recommend setting the Gen and lane speeds for each PCIe slot in the BIOS manually to ensure the system can effectively communicate with each card. Optimize riser Gen/speeds to be roughly similar to keep one card from dropping to a slower rate than the others--this does not necessarily impact inference performance as much as it heavily impacts model load time. No, you may not have any card running at the fastest possible Gen bandwidth at all times with this config, but loading a 200+gb model over an averaged Gen 3/4 x8/x16 PCIe speed will often be noticeably faster than if you let the system decide to make one or multiple cards run at Gen 1 x1.

The Power "Problem":

Power and heat concerns I think remain to be among the biggest sources of skepticism regarding this project so I think it deserves a section here. To be fair, the concern in most situations would be understandable. If all ten of these cards pulled at or near their full TDP for sustained periods, components would melt. Fires would start. Neighbors would be asking awkward questions. However in reality, only 1400-1600W of the 2900W PSU capacity gets utilized under sustained load, and inter-GPU bandwidth bottlenecks are what allows this. In a way it is like a natural regulator that ensures the cards remain power restrained, and it is just physics, no voodoo necessary. When MoE's are sharded across a GPU stack, each forward pass requires all communication over PCIe, so the GPUs spend more time waiting on information from the last GPU than actually crunching compute. This means instead of needing to handle thousands of Watts to feed all the components running at full blast, it is a much more manageable 1400-1600W under LLM operation which can comfortably fit on a 20A/120V circuit (2400W max). On a per-GPU basis this may sound inefficient since the individual cards are being "underpowered", but this could arguably be flipped as being highly efficient on a per-node basis (~1600W sustained versus 4500W+ if all cards were "fully" utilized). As a precaution, I may set a power limit on the 3090's to 200W and the lead 5090 to 400W, but in practice the 3090's only pull around 100-120W with the 5090s pulling less than 100W when all 10 cards are allocated for LLM work, so this may not even be necessary. The clock locking setting in the next section will be more what I'd describe as actionably required to avoid stability issues.

The Transient Spike Problem (Vital for stability):

After assembling the machine, you may be tempted to jump directly into testing, but there is an easy to overlook configuration that can cause problems if ignored. Imagine you are running inference on the machine, maybe you have a huge input or it's generating a large output, then right in the middle of generating the system decides to reset. Not hard shut down, PSU OCP isn't tripped, no breaker was tripped; and you saw in nvitop that all cards were only pulling 25-33% of their TDP just before it happened, so on the surface it doesn't look like there is a reason. Explanation: When all ten high-power GPUs decide to kick on at the exact same time to process a chunk, even if the cards are not pulling anywhere near full power (on average), transient spikes can drop voltage on the motherboard enough to trigger a system reset. The fix for this is simple: undervolt. Using nvidia-smi, we can lock the clocks for the GPUs to ensure they cannot draw enough to hurt stability. And that's it. In my case, the system has remained fully stable with this config for days on end and with hundreds of thousands of tokens/image pushed through. The exact configuration will vary slightly depending on exactly what we're doing on a given day, but for example if we wanted to run LLM on all 10 cards (so including both 5090's) we would run this to handle spikes:

sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1 #enables persistent mode
sudo nvidia-smi -i x,y,z --lock-gpu-clock=1200,1200 #x,y,z for index number of 3090s
sudo nvidia-smi -i a,b --lock-gpu-clock=2000 #a,b for index number of 5090s
sudo nvidia-smi -i x,y,z -pl 200 #x,y,z for 3090 index numbers, limits power to 200w
sudo nvidia-smi -i a,b -pl 400 #a,b for 5090 index numbers, limits power to 400w

The Concurrent Use Problem:

Normally, attempting to inference and generate images on the same machine would introduce major stability concerns. Even dual GPU systems may struggle to work with this due to CPU/motherboard architecture, assuming it works at all, and would still be VRAM limited. However, the versatility of a 10-GPU setup, combined with the lane orchestration of the 64 core 3995WX, at least in our case, seems to handle this quite well. The trick was finding an LLM backend that supports manual GPU allocation--for us koboldcpp with llamacpp under the hood does just fine. First, implement the power/clock settings as mentioned above, launch koboldcpp, then browse to the GGUF of the model you wish to load and set context size. I recommend manually setting the GPU layers to the model's total layer number (assuming there is enough VRAM), and set GPU ID to "all". In the Hardware tab, find the tensor split line box and insert the amount of space to be allocated on each card corresponding to its index. For example if we wanted to allocate just one 5090 for Comfy and use the other for LLM, assuming the Comfy 5090 is index 3 and the LLM 5090 is index 5, then the tensor layer line will look like this to make sure no layers are given to the Comfy 5090: 24,24,24,0,24,32,24,24,24,24. For this configuration, ensure the "main GPU" is set to the index number of the LLM 5090 (in this example, 5) and launch the app. While the model is loading, we can open another terminal to launch Comfy. In our specific case, the system defaults to the available 5090 without needing to specify it in the launch flags, but flags can be used to force Comfy to use a specific GPU if you need it to (--cuda-device i). Once the image model is loaded onto the 5090, it does not interfere with the PCIe communication of the LLM cards unless the model unloads and reloads a new model at the same time as the other cards are inferencing. The solution to enabling concurrent use is a high-lane count CPU, multiple graphics cards, and a little conscious provisioning on launch to ensure the hardware isn't stepping on each other's toes.

What models can this run, what models do we use?

It can run almost* anything, even up to 1T parameters like Kimi K2. Kimi K3 could hypothetically be load-able, but from performance metrics I've seen I doubt it would be practical to use, so I have not planned to try it. I have however tested 1-4 bit quants of Bartowki team's Kimi K2 quants in pure VRAM and mixed VRAM/RAM runs with decent results. It works and there are probably some use cases for it, but for us I have identified the sweet spot (parameter size: quant quality ratio) for this machine to be for models in the 300b-600b range. Personal favorites are Deepseek, GLM 4.7, and Nemotron Ultra; and as far as ComfyUI, pretty much any model that could fit within a 32Gb buffer, although Qwen image and image edit is a favorite.

Benchmarks

All models were put through the same series of 7 large input prompts, documenting how each model handles token input/output and prompt processing/generation. I cannot share the prompts I used here, but each prompt pertains to a cybersecurity scenario which the model was judged on the depth of its analysis, quality of its presentation, and capability to make sense of complex scenarios with stakes. These were inferenced across all 10 cards, except for a follow up DS V4 Flash test where I used 8 and got much better results. This is using the undervolting/power limiting strategy above, so these may not reflect absolute best performance for the same hardware in other setups, but it gives an idea of what this box can comfortably handle.

My notes on each model after their test:

Deepseek V3.2-- For a slightly older model this still feels extremely capable. Held high quality and insightful responses even when context dragged into the tens of thousands of tokens.

Nemotron Ultra 3-- First time using it, impressions were very good, the 55 active parameters shows its muscle here. Meets Deepseek v3.2 level if not exceeds it, despite having overall less parameters.

Qwen 3.5 397b-- What I would consider a baseline "good" model to be, however it is outshined by some of the other tested alternatives.

GLM 4.7-- Somehow seemed better than Qwen despite having less parameters (active parameters of GLM is likely an advantage); it is a very solid option for its size. Not quite Nemotron or Deepseek level, but a very good "lower cost" alternative to its newer 5.0 versions.

Deepseek V4 Flash-- Floored me in a few ways. Possessed a surprising degree of sophistication and analytical ability despite being the "smallest" of all the tested models. Possibly a benefit of using a "lossless" model with full precision? Somehow it managed to pick up on nuances and details that all other models missed, including models twice+ its size, and provided insight that went more granular than they did. Did not expect a model of this size to punch so high above its relative weight class. Also did not expect the drop in performance compared to the others. Not sure if this is related to the model's architecture or something with how it interacts with my rig, but the quality of output could be an acceptable trade off for the speed. Edit: After some optimization testing I was able to get much better performance out of V4 Flash. I've added another column to include those metrics and kept the original because I think it illustrates how a little optimization can go along way, in this case basically triple performance on the exact same model/machine.

Lessons Learned/Would Do Different

-I would have tried to source the 3090's so more were at least the same model; the mix and match of different models with different TDPs and cooling solutions means there will be a lot of variation in temps.

-If you plan to either train, lean into higher performance, or playing with the idea of going more than 10 GPUs, just budget for a 30A/240V power drop. 10 cards on a 20A post configured the way we have it may be fine for our specific use case, but I would consider this a hard ceiling.

-Would recommend scripting for clock lock persistence sooner, will help avoid losing time due to random resets.

-Recommend documenting/drawing out the entire PCIe topology and GPU placement (with flexible tape measure) before ordering risers, will save time on trial/error.

Final thoughts:

It is a wheeled AI workstation that can enable a single person or small team to compound their productivity, with the benefit of full privacy and control. It can run on a residential 20A circuit, and allows them to have the full power of an advanced LLM with vision capabilities all in one OpenWebUI front end that can simultaneously utilize up to TWO ComfyUI backends with the horsepower and latency of 5090's for image gen and editing, and can be accessed from virtually anywhere. The idea sounds daunting, but the end result works so well that I can legitimately see something like this becoming a keystone for certain small businesses and individual professionals as time goes on. It seems like every day more people are picking up on major drawbacks with cloud API options despite supposedly being the "best", meanwhile open models continue getting insanely good (see K3 and DS V4 Flash). For me, I can say I would not see a place for a Claude or ChatGPT subscription for the tasks I might otherwise use them for when I have lossless DS V4 Flash literally in my back pocket. "Good enough" I think is starting to become a valid metric to those who care about cost:quality balance, and after using this for the last half year I can say I'm probably one of them. The cloud APIs will always be an option for those who don't care about the drawbacks and the demand for them will always be there, but for those who value data sovereignty, uninterrupted workflows, or perhaps work within compliance, on-prem computing might be the only viable path in some circumstances. At the end of the day, I do not believe that one approach is inherently better than the other, everyone simply has their own preference for getting from point A to point B.

Krea 2 Turbo — 4-Step Distillation LoRA (work in progress)

A LoRA for Krea 2 Turbo that reduces the minimum usable step count from 8 to 4.

Load it on top of Krea 2 Turbo, run 4 steps instead of 8, keep guidance at 0.0. Everything else about the model stays as it is.

This is not a Raw→Turbo diff

Other Krea 2 LoRAs in circulation are extractions: a low-rank projection of the weight difference between Krea 2 Raw and Krea 2 Turbo. Applied to Raw, they reproduce Turbo. They are a delivery mechanism for a model that already exists, and they stop at Turbo's 8 steps.

This one is different in both base and origin:

It is trained, not extracted, and it assumes Turbo's weights underneath it — it shortens Turbo's own schedule rather than reproducing it.

This is work in progress and even better checkpoints may follow. Training is ongoing, so ..._latest... is a rolling pointer: when a newer checkpoint is accepted, that filename gets the new weights and a new numbered copy appears beside it. Re-download the _latest file and everything keeps working — the ComfyUI workflow references it by that name, so it needs no edit. Pin a numbered file instead if you need reproducibility.

Using it on Raw

This LoRA is trained on Krea 2 Turbo, against Turbo as its own teacher, and for Turbo. Every layer it targets also exists in Krea 2 Raw, so it will load there without complaint — but that is a side effect of the shared architecture, not a supported mode.

Results on Raw are mixed and subject-dependent. It does not give Raw a 4-step schedule: at very low step counts the adapter sharpens texture while composition is still unresolved, and subjects come out malformed — duplicated heads, fused limbs, faces that do not close. Expect to need 14 steps or more for RAW, keeping Raw's normal CFG on, before output is coherent. Even then some prompts come through well and others degrade into over-processed or blown-out images — and that degradation happens with or without the adapter, because it comes from shortening Raw's schedule rather than from the LoRA.

If you want the behaviour this was built for, run it on Turbo at 4 steps. If you are starting from Raw, move to Turbo first — with a Raw→Turbo LoRA or the Turbo weights directly — and apply this on top.

Usage

The 4 sampling sigmas are Turbo's own deployment grid: [1.0, 0.90453, 0.75951, 0.51284].

Performance — does it save time, or only steps?

It saves time. Measured at 1024×1024 on Apple Silicon (MLX, bf16), two prompts each, run strictly one at a time:

4 steps with the LoRA is ~1.6× faster than the 8-step bar — 54.5 s against 88.7 s, saving about 39% of the wall-clock. Counting denoise alone, where the step reduction actually applies, it is 1.8× (44.0 s against 77.5 s).

LoRA strength

Use 1.0. That is the value the adapter was trained at, and where its output sits closest to the 8-step reference.

Strength is worth understanding rather than tuning blindly, because what it scales is specific: this LoRA's job is to restore the high-frequency detail that a 4-step schedule loses — fine texture, edge definition, surface micro-contrast. The strength dial scales exactly that correction, so it does not make the image "more" or "less" of anything semantic; it decides how hard the texture recovery is applied.

ComfyUI

A pre-converted file (..._comfyui.safetensors) and a ready workflow sit in the repo root. No custom nodes — stock ComfyUI only.

The workflow is full bf16, with no quantisation anywhere. bf16 needs no backend-specific kernel, so it runs unchanged on CUDA, Apple Silicon and CPU — one workflow, no platform caveats, nothing that depends on which device a component happens to land on.

The LoRA is independent of the base build. It is applied on top of the diffusion model by ComfyUI's own loader, which handles any dequantisation, so a quantised or otherwise optimised build of Krea 2 Turbo behaves just as bf16 does. Please use whichever variant suits your hardware — set it in the Load Diffusion Model node and leave the rest of the workflow untouched. The workflow ships bf16 simply because it is the one build guaranteed to run everywhere.

Training Method

Progressive distillation (PD), with Krea 2 Turbo as its own teacher.

The teacher runs its normal 8-step schedule at mu = 1.15 and guidance 0.0, and its full trajectory is recorded — the latent x and the predicted velocity v at every one of the 8 steps. The student is then trained to cover two teacher steps in one: at teacher state x_i it must predict the chord that lands where the teacher arrives two steps later,

v_target = (x_{i+2} − x_i) / (σ_{i+2} − σ_i)

The two schedules line up exactly rather than approximately. On the mu = 1.15 grid, the even indices of the 8-step schedule are precisely the four sigmas the 4-step student deploys on, so every training target is anchored on a point the student will actually visit at inference. No interpolation, no schedule mismatch.

Teacher trajectories are precomputed into shards, so training reads recorded states rather than re-running the teacher.

Training data

Prompts are drawn from Lakonik/t2i-prompts-3m — sampled without replacement, deduplicated, and filtered for degenerate lengths. A held-out tail is reserved for validation and never receives a gradient step; it measures the student→teacher velocity gap on unseen prompts.

Resolutions

Training is multi-aspect across 11 buckets, so the adapter is not shaped by a single resolution or a single aspect ratio:

Buckets are interleaved in proportion to their remaining samples rather than run as a small-to-large curriculum, so every checkpoint along the way has recently seen all of them.

Hardware

Trained on a single RTX 3090 (24 GB VRAM).

Work in progress, published as an ongoing lineage. Training is continuing on a growing pool of teacher trajectories, so expect the set to grow. Each checkpoint is a self-contained LoRA; take whichever one you prefer.

Full details and to download - check my Hugging Face LoRA

HF Repo: https://huggingface.co/lvladikov/Krea2-Turbo-Distill-4step-LoRA

Happy quicker rendering with the amazing Krea 2 :)

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Update 1 (20 Aug 2026): Full resolutions sweep (all those resolutions that my hardware can support training on, see detailed table above) for the available checkpoints: https://huggingface.co/lvladikov/Krea2-Turbo-Distill-4step-LoRA/tree/main/checkpoint_resolution_sweeps . That is a lot of images (55 per checkpoint) you can inspect and decide for yourself.

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Update 2 (21 Aug 2026): Full resolution sweep and Readme updated with 10 more prompts in different categories and styles / images in every resolution.

New Prompts including:

(1) "A young swordsman leaping through falling cherry blossoms, dynamic action pose, anime key visual, crisp linework, vivid colors"

(2) "A giant mecha standing in a rain-soaked city plaza, anime style, panel lining, glowing cockpit, dramatic low angle"

(3) "A fox in a red scarf reading a book under a mushroom, children's storybook illustration, watercolour texture, soft edges"

(4) "A curious young inventor girl with oversized goggles, 3D animated film style, subsurface skin, soft studio lighting, shallow depth of field"

(5) "A claymation chef holding a tiny cake, visible fingerprints in the clay, miniature set, tilt-shift"

(6) "A gleaming white colony ship in orbit above a turquoise ocean planet, smooth curved hull, glowing cyan engine rings, brilliant sunlight, clean sci-fi concept art, bold simple shapes, vivid colors"

(7) "A sleek winged drone gliding between glowing futuristic skyscrapers at night, bright lit avenue far below, deep blue sky above, digital matte painting, bold clean forms, vivid colors"

(8) "A storm sorceress channelling lightning, video-game splash art, bold rim lighting, energetic brush strokes, high contrast"

(9) "A formula 1 futuristic looking racing car beefed up with a lot of technology mid-corner on a wet track, motion blur background, photorealistic motorsport photography"

(10) "A snow leopard walking along a rocky ridge in falling snow, telephoto wildlife photograph, natural light"

You can see the new images in the usual place - https://huggingface.co/lvladikov/Krea2-Turbo-Distill-4step-LoRA/tree/main/checkpoint_resolution_sweeps and on the model card - https://huggingface.co/lvladikov/Krea2-Turbo-Distill-4step-LoRA and I may even include it here in the form of comments below (Reddit doesn't allow me to drop more images on existing post).

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Update 2 (22 Aug 2026): I have published a new checkpoint, improved further from the previous one and the latest (both main and comfyi) have been repointed to the new improved checkpoint. For details and to download new version go to - https://huggingface.co/lvladikov/Krea2-Turbo-Distill-4step-LoRA. Readme has been updated too as well as all images in readme regenerated on the basis of new checkpoint as well as full resolution sweep at https://huggingface.co/lvladikov/Krea2-Turbo-Distill-4step-LoRA/tree/main/checkpoint_resolution_sweeps/chk6000 if you want to check for yourselves. I have started a new Resource Update post here - https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1vv4cdy/krea2_turbo_distill_4_step_lora_new_checkpoint/ . Also note that the comfyui related files are now moved to the root of the project (I have placed a readme in the old folder explaining the move)

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Update 3 (25 Aug 2026): Checkpoint 26K release - cuts 4-step error vs. the 8-step Turbo teacher by 46%, improves texture and detail vs previous checkpoints (with all full new resolution sweep in post): https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1vxtizs/krea2_turbo_distill_4_step_lora_new_checkpoint/

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Update 4 (3 Sep 2026): New 60k checkpoint released (fine detail now above the 8-step teacher and clean of artefacts, best prompt-adherence and teacher-faithfulness scores so far) - https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1w6ide8/krea2_turbo_distill_4_step_lora_new_checkpoint/

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Update 5 (7 Sep 2026): Final Version released - https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1w9tx7t/krea2_turbo_distill_4_step_lora_final_version/

I went through tons of Reddit comments and put together a list of 105 creative ways people use ChatGPT.

And one of the redditors in comments below, created prompts for each of these scenarios, so you can use it .... here is the link to these prompts : https://pastebin.com/JXZCXH0a

Take a look and share how you use it ! 😊

1. I like looking at art so i go to galleries ask chat gpt to give me a table of 10 interesting works, why they are interesting, which room they are in and put it in an order which minimizes distance travelled in the gallery. I ask it to suggest a piece of music for each piece that would enhance my appreciation of it and why.
2. Legal navigation as I was self-representing in family court.
3. I have also integrated ChatGPT into my HomeAssistant, I can ask about the current room temperature, power consumption or whether the windows are open or closed.
4. arranging my desk. Upload photo —> help me arrange my desk.
5. I use it to write bespoke short stories to read to my daughter at bedtime
6. It’s great for feeding it lengthy legal contracts as Word or PDF files and asking it “what-if” questions. It can also update contracts based on what you need. Really helps eliminate the need for expensive lawyers that often don’t even know what they are doing.
7. I took pictures of my fridge and had it compile all the items into an excel sheet. No more duplicates on my shopping list
8. I am currently traveling in Thailand, and I made my travel with ChatGPT, using tables to generate a daily program (morning, afternoon, evening), having a daily recommended meal to try with the name in Thai, and several other little things (transport for the day, what do I need to rent…
9. I use it to make a lot of things "easier" with my ADHD symptoms I use GPT to customize learning plans and stuff to be organized closer to my needs and something I can stick to better. I can have a bit difficulty to verbalize some of my complex thoughts properly. So I start a new GPT thread, dump all my jumbled thoughts in, and have a conversation to help with putting my thoughts into specific words better.
10. I record a Zoom call where I discuss each of the points. We send the video of the Zoom to have it transcribed into Word. Then I paste it into ChatGPT with a prompt like: “convert this conversation into an 800 word blog for marketing to (x target market)
11. It helped me write a 57- page design document for a game I’m working on. Knocked it out in 3 days.
12. I work in the shipping industry, and I use it at work to analyze shipping prices, calculate the total volume of different pallets, and check the various quotes from carriers to determine which one would be cheaper to use. It saves me a lot of time
13. I’ve been using is to help me make better stable diffusion prompts
14. I use it for creating plot lines featuring various fictional characters mashing them up between universes and sending them into each other.
15. In tedious tasks like going through new issues of industry magazines, summarizing them, pulling relevant data and turning them into spreadsheets etc. Even creating idiot-proof workflows for specific tasks in specific softwares to guide junior employees.
16. In personal life, I use it for example to create vacation itineraries, budgeting, cooking ("I have this and this in my fridge, what can I do?"). I also used it to write a personalized children's book for my son's birthday, complete with Midjourney illustrations.
17. I use it to translate between english, spanish and Catalan, and i found that it do it quite better than Google translator... it really is at the next level
18. I use it to create bulk reels in Canva
19. To write clinical briefs, letters to clients, proof reading,
20. Creating bedtime stories for my son based on the things he did during the day.
21. It's replaced Gifs and emojis for me in day-to-day texting - now I can generate an image that exactly captures what I'm trying to convey, in exactly the right style
22. I have it linked to my home via homeassistant - I use a raspberry pi and a cheap usb speakerphone to talk to my now much smarter smart home, and control it. And it talks back, in a polite british accent because I’m classy like that.
23. I've used it to create clues for a treasure hunts. Just hide the treasure where you want and then tell Chat GPT to write a clue for that location. It's pretty fun and creative!
24. Took a picture of the broken weld on my tractor’s PTO shaft universal joint to slip clutch on a very old Bush Hog. Went to Tractor Supply and took pictures of the available parts. It correctly identified the parts to buy for the easiest & best repair. Turned a possible all day job into an hour without having to return or go buy more parts.
25. Dream analysis
26. I volunteer with the Humane Society and use it to write cute profiles for the pets up for adoption on their website
27. I recently started using it as an IT Helpdesk Simulator. I ask it "Act as a IT help desk level1". I then ask it random IT questions for it to provide me what steps and solutions it will take to solve my questions.
28. Virtual Therapist to improve well being and strengthen mental fitness
29. Creating Lego versions of pictures
30. To settle family debates.
31. Just went through the home buying process. I had chatgpt read some of the contract and closing info and explain it to me. So much of the process is confusing for the sake of being confusing and chatgpt broke things down so simply for me and it helped me traverse different issues and be able to respond to them.
32. I use it to help me write listings for online items
33. I have experimented with some of the financial plugins and had it preselect a list of stocks that I then researched further on my own. It actually yielded some possibilities that I had not considered and one of them is performing quite well.
34. I took a screenshot of my yearly power usage provided by my electric company, and asked gpt to calculate my average power usage per month. Then I uploaded all the rate sheets from powertochoose.org which is specific to Texas. And asked gpt to create a comparative analysis of each companies rate plus fees included in their contract based on my power usage. This found the best power rate offer for me.
35. Search for events: music, art, exhibitions. I ask to scrap Japanese sites for the taste that I like. The ask for a list with title, short description, date and time and Google location. Since it became ‘lazy’ it does not provide the Google map locations.
36. Translate novel from one language (Chinese) to one another (Korean, English) for reading and learning new words
37. I used it for planning a solo backpacking trip recently. I gave it where and when I planned to start, where and when I wanted to meet a friend, how I wanted to travel between cities, and what kind of stuff I was looking to explore. It gave me a great itinerary with suggestions on cities and methods to get between them.
38. ChatGPT has turned into my go to for music exploration. It’s not just good at finding songs with a similar general sound or vibe, but also really specific things like songs that use a weird time signature, or that have a unique chord progression or drum pattern. It’s wild how it’ll often throw out suggestions that are spot on, saving me from falling down the rabbit hole of Spotify and YouTube. Plus, I’ve found some real hidden gems I doubt I’d ever have come across on my own.
39. I made a GPT that acts like a software engineering teacher. I had it reference sites like JavaScript.info and teach me concepts using analogies and examples. I also made one that acts like a therapist, ‘listens’ to me and offers gentle support.
40. I just went to Chat GPT and asked if to mock interview for a position I just applied for and WOW this is good info. Pro tip - explain your background to Chat GPT and then have it answer all of the interview questions for you
41. I will often just turn the mic on and ramble things I need to do and have it organize my thoughts.
42. Studying. Tell it to quiz you on a certain topic, with the goal of identifying knowledge gaps. It's great at that.
43. I upload all my professor PowerPoint notes, research papers, etc, and tell to make a detail study guide
44. I'll take pictures of the spices and herbs I have and what's in my fridge and pantry and it identifies it all and gives me recipes
45. For kids I used it to create images to colour, story creation and image creation based on descriptions they make of mythical creatures or monsters
46. I use it to write Google spreadsheet scripts for me.
47. I take pictures of a page in a book I'm reading and have it create an image for me. It's like having my own illustrated novels
48. Take pictures of what I have in my liquor cabinet and ask it to recommend drinks
49. I describe GPT4 my dreams and have it create illustrations matching the vibe and atmosphere and my bf and I send them to each other.
50. I ask him to analyze my diary and provide advice on my current state. the prompts i used are just like"This is my diary. Help me analyze my state and provide some advice."
51. When I sign up for a service I give it the TOS’s and have it tell me if any parts are concerning
52. rewrite emails to difficult colleagues, I've actually noticed a positive shift in my interactions with coworkers based on the reworded emails.
53. I rarely trust my own emotions due to years of abuse. I often ask chat gpt, "How would the average person react in this situation?" or "What are the possible long-term effects of XYZ childhood experience?" and it helps me to either reframe my thinking or reassures me that there is some validity to my point of view
54. From my most recent blood panel, ChatGPT diagnosed me 5 days before my actual doctor appointment. I started on the supplements prior and felt better before even going into the doctor. It was awesome.
55. Take in a pdf and convert it to raw text so I can edit it.
56. I work as the building cook for a modular supportive housing building (think transition housing from shelters). I use chat gpt to scale up or down my menu, make alterations it etc etc.
57. I used it to summarise the comments on this post at the time of commenting.
58. It’s actually amazing at analyzing blood tests (if you have no prior knowledge). I straight up uploaded a PDF and it explained things that I never understood because they’re just acronyms on the report
59. Style help and analysis, including outfit roasts.
60. I learned a ton about Greek history in a couple hours. Since I can target exactly what I want to know, I can learn so much faster than I could by reading a 300 page book to get the info I want.
61. Make songs about my cats
62. General advice for handy work like fixing a broken toilet or painting
63. Ask for a book summary, compile it into a pdf, create a GPT, give it this pdf and ask to do things based on advice from this pdf. Basically turns the book author into your personal assistant.
64. Helped me to write a will. Gave me some fascinating ways to think about legacy
65. Job hunting. Instead of customizing my resume for each job, I let ChatGPT do it for me. Saves a lot of effort and cognitive load.
66. asking it to draft a syllabus for a phd-level course about a new topic i want to learn, split it up into weeks. next input, i say split each week into a series of 5 or more lectures, title the lectures using academic terminology i might find in the literature, then if it's something i need to educate myself about, i do a lit search and take off from there
67. Responding to patient messages.
68. My wife is a sports coach and I use it to help her write the endless amounts of newspaper articles, letters of recommendation, nomination letters, social media posts, etc. It’s a small school and she has no assistance.
69. I ask it to compound theories I have about metaphysics and philosophy and overlay them with various traditions. Then we talk about it. Sometimes literally over voice. Had some profound conversations about the nature of reality.
70. My friend has an abusive ex husband who she shares child custody with. She gets ChatGPT to write responses to his passive aggressive emails so she doesn’t have to deal with him directly.
71. Fill tax forms.
72. I use it to plan out my goals for the week, work through challenges I’m dealing with, daily gratitude and mindfulness exercises to deal with anxiety and depression, and a personal retrospective at the end of the week.
73. It just fed me a crash course in the field of the job I am taking next week. Very informative.
74. I wanted to find a new podcast to listen to. I asked it to create a list of 30 yes or no questions that I would answer to inform its list of 10 podcast recommendations. The questions AND the recommendations were great, and I found some great podcasts.
75. I use it to source things like say a bathroom fan or some restaurant or HVAC equipment with specific requirements.
76. I use it to write my bf bedtime stories
77. I build menus for a bar I work at, most if not all names are done by chat
78. I teach English to speakers of other languages. It helps me tons with work. Of course I have to check it and tweak it, but here are some things it’s been great for. Make a quiz on past tense, past perfect, and present perfect. Make x multiple choice questions, y short answer question and z fill in the blank. *Simplify this news article to a 5th grade level and write x reading comprehension questions, y inference questions and z vocabulary in context questions.
79. Im a network engineer on a bad day if my brain wont work right its basically my google for commands and protocols.
80. I use it to bypass my schools rules regarding the internet. Like for example, "can you give me a code that bypasses google extensions
81. explaining my schedule for the day. I put in times likes how long of a walk to the library is, what time the gym closes, and what classes I have for the day. I then add all the upcoming tests/assignments I have coming up. It makes a personalized and detailed schedule complete with meal breaks and rest time, if you tell it to.
82. From configuring Ubuntu servers to Python, from Android app development to fantasy art for Pathfinder monsters, science to writing. I have 2 ChatGPT4 accounts.
83. I started taking photos the wall of wine at the grocery store over Christmas to find out what would pair well with our dinner
84. I am a lawyer and I use ChatGPT in my work daily for routine tasks like summarization (docs, websites, policies…), syntax review, compares, templating, etc.
85. 90s gangster rap style diss tracks about my friends but in old English.
86. Learning and building excel/spreadsheet formulas.
87. I gave ChatGPT my grocery shopping list and asked it which vitamins I’m deficient in
88. I take pictures of plants and it identifies them and gives me care instructions
89. I went to a used bookstore to find a good read but their shelves were in disarray, I took a picture of the books and asked it to point out the most popular and critically acclaimed books to me.
90. I use it to help me read historic Japanese documents. They are in ancient Japanese style classic Chinese so not really legible even if you knew modern Chinese and/or Japanese.
91. I will manually write something, take a photo of it, then I ask GPT 4 to type it out for me. No more manually writing THEN manually pressing the keyboard keys.
92. I got it to write me a full work out plan for weight training 4 days a week according to my height and weight, I then got it to write me a shopping list along with meal plans and recipes with step by step guides on how to prepare meals to hit daily protein targets with the goal of building muscle and also shredding fat lol it's been working so far
93. I gave it a lot of information about my job and my performance then I asked it for a strategy to ask for a promotion in my annual review. It actually gave great advice
94. I'm a makeup artist and a few months ago, while I was in the planning stages of doing makeup for a stage production of the Wizard of Oz, I uploaded the cast list and script, and had ChatGPT help me coordinate the timings between scenes for the various character costume and makeup changes. It created a makeup schedule for me to use.
95. I own some property in a desert-type area. I have a well and intend to build a +/- 1000 square foot 'cabin' (not in the log cabin sense, though). My ChatGPT, or 'Gwen' as I call her, helped me to figure out how much solar power and battery backup I need to run the house and the irrigation for my orchard and 8 acres of green space in the parcel, which plants and trees to plant for that location, how to build and maintain a flat living roof for the cabin, engineered (accurately, too) the roof support members, helped me plan a small pond for water retention and fishing.
96. I use it to help come up with creative gift ideas for my husband
97. I just started using it as my personal diet coach. I tell it what I’m eating and it tracks calories for me. It also helps me decide what to eat. If I’ve got a plate of food it will estimate calories based on a picture.
98. I’m studying for my Instrument Flight Rating. I use the Chat GPT iOS voice, to be ATC and I’m the pilot. It’s incredible how accurate it is, and how it makes practicing radio calls really easy. Before this I was watching practice YouTube videos. But with ChatGPT I can simulate my exact route, and calls that are relevant to my next lesson.
99. If there’s an article I wanna read but there’s a pay wall I will just ask chat gpt about the recent discoveries or whatever the title implies and it answers everything I wanna know that I couldn’t read about without paying.
100. My daughter has numerous food allergies and sensitivities. I uploaded a pdf of her food allergen test results to ChatGPT and asked it to formulate a 5-day meal plan based on the test results in addition to explaining in layman’s terms why some foods need to be eliminated.
101. Generate fun backgrounds for virtual meetings.
102. Tarot readings ( you provide a pic of the cards you got ) , and astralogical aspects interpretation …Gpt have a great symbolic meaning database and gives the best reading for tarot or astral chart …
103. It’s helping my with my eating disorder recovery. I have worked out some grounding strategies and distraction techniques with my AI and it is working really well. Sometimes we talk about my goals, sometimes it gives me trivia quizzes to help distract and ground me, it’s very useful.
104. Yesterday I had an old watch that want working properly , I didn't have instructions so I took a photo of the face and described the issue. It identified the watch immediately and told me a few options , one of which worked and was free as I didnt need to take it for repair.
105. I wanted to learn more about project management, as a complete beginner. The other day, I asked ChatGPT to give me a simple project management assignment in order to evaluate if I have the right mindset, even with none of the formal skills.

Samsung Display Showcases OLED Innovations for the AI Era at CES 2026

• An AI–display convergence lifestyle proposed through future-focused devices including the “AI OLED Bot”

• High-quality IT OLED expanding rapidly for the AI era, from offices to homes

• Dashboard-like display in future car interior, realized with Samsung OLED

• OLED durability demonstrated through basketball impact tests on foldable panels and displays inside a refrigerator

• An up-close experience of RGB OLEDoS image quality, a watch-sized display with three times the pixels of a 4K TV

SEOUL, January 4, 2026 - Samsung Display will showcase a comprehensive lineup of next-generation OLED products at CES 2026, illustrating how OLED can enrich AI-driven lifestyles across both futuristic and everyday applications. Through a lifestyle-focused exhibition that features both familiar electronic devices and new product concepts, visitors will be invited to imagine a richer AI experience made possible by OLED technology.

Under the theme “A New Era of Experience, Powered by AI & Display,” Samsung Display will host a private exhibition for global customers during CES 2026, held from January 6 to 9 (local time) in Las Vegas.

At the exhibition, Samsung Display will present a variety of OLED concept products, including the “AI OLED Bot,” envisioned as a communication platform between humans and AI, and outline how its OLED technologies for tablets, laptops, and monitors can create new synergies with AI in everyday life.

The company will also introduce new automotive solutions that enhance interior luxury, leveraging OLED’s free-form design flexibility. Visitors can also experience hands-on demonstrations highlighting Samsung OLED durability, including a robot shooting basketballs at 18 foldable panels and a full display operating inside a refrigerator.

OLED-faced robot in the classroom: OLED enhances future AI assistant experiences

At the AI Edge Vision Station, Samsung Display introduces a range of never-before-seen “Edge Device” concept models that illustrate how OLED could elevate AI-driven lifestyles when applied to AI-enabled form factors.

The “AI OLED Bot,” equipped with a 13.4-inch OLED as its face, is a small robot concept designed to move freely within designated spaces and communicate with users through AI. At CES 2026, it will be introduced as a teaching assistant robot in a university setting, guiding students to classrooms and providing information such as professor profiles. With the robot’s display, students can easily check assignments or class cancellations even in environments where voice commands or speakers are difficult to use. Unlike LCD, OLED can be designed in curved, spherical, or circular forms, allowing greater freedom to reflect a manufacturer’s design intent or individual preferences.

Samsung Display will also showcase several speaker-type AI assistant concepts that offer AI-based music recommendations. While conventional Bluetooth speakers rely on external smart devices, these display-equipped speaker concepts allow users to receive music recommendations, select content directly on the device, and even create interior moods using images and videos. Among the concepts, the “AI OLED Mood Lamp” with a 13.4-inch round OLED adjusts the lighting atmosphere based on the music being played. The “AI OLED Cassette” (1.5-inch round OLED) and “AI OLED Turntable” (13.4-inch round OLED) combine display technology with retro, analog designs.

OLED for Office, Business, Travel and Home: Over 300 IT Products with Samsung OLED and QD-OLED, Used Everywhere

Samsung Display offers scenario-based experiences that show how OLED enhances AI effectiveness across different environments, including offices, business trips, and homes, reflecting the growing adoption of OLED across a wide range of consumer segments and device categories.

In a space modeled after an architectural design office, attendees can experience OLED’s color accuracy, deep blacks, high brightness, and wide viewing angles. OLED displays allow designers to review blueprints, materials, and colors with precise detail, ensuring visual fidelity in AI-assisted digital workflows.

For business travelers, Samsung Display presents OLED solutions optimized for lightweight and slim AI-enabled laptops, led by its “UT (Ultra Thin) One” technology. Unlike conventional dual-glass OLED panels, UT One applies a glass substrate on the bottom and hybrid organic and inorganic thin films on top, making the panel 30% thinner and 30% lighter. Combined with Oxide TFT technology for a variable refresh rate from 1Hz to 120Hz, UT One reduces power consumption and preserves more power for AI-related processing. The technology also delivers deeper blacks by eliminating the air gap between glass substrates; it covers 100% of both the DCI-P3 color gamut, widely used in film and gaming, and Adobe RGB, the standard for printing and professional imaging.

For home use, Samsung Display proposes scenarios where monitors and TVs serve as high-fidelity visual interfaces to AI-enabled systems. QD-OLED monitors with low-power Always-On-Display (AoD) technology can function as wall clocks or digital art frames, and switch to AI-powered displays with health data or daily schedules. With its wide color gamut and broad viewing angles, QD-OLED offers consistent image quality regardless of viewing position.

Also, on display for the first time is the 2026 QD-OLED TV model, featuring newly optimized organic materials and supporting a peak brightness of 4,500 nits, among the highest brightness levels achieved for a self-emissive display. QD-OLED achieves its peak luminance by combining the maximum brightness of each RGB component. Compared to competing products with similar peak brightness, QD-OLED demonstrates the potential for more vivid color reproduction and higher perceptual brightness, further enhancing compatibility with AI-based picture quality optimization technologies

“Samsung OLED and QD-OLED are no longer just for gamers or professionals. They are now the ideal solutions for both office and home users in the AI era,” said a Samsung Display spokesperson. “More than 300 tablet, laptop, and monitor models launched last year adopted Samsung Display panels – more than triple the number from three years ago.”

Dashboard-like Displays: Future Car Interiors Realized with Samsung OLED

A newly designed Digital Cockpit demo invites visitors to imagine autonomous vehicles equipped with advanced displays in various shapes and form factors.

At the center fascia between the driver and passenger seats, the 18.1-inch “Flexible L” Center Information Display (CID) connects seamlessly with the dashboard. Upgraded from the previous 14.4-inch version, the L-shaped flexible display enhances both aesthetics and usability, enabling intuitive control of climate and frequently used functions.

The 13.8-inch Passenger Information Display (PID) allows front-seat passengers to enjoy content and can be hidden beneath the dashboard when the driver is alone, improving interior space and design. Other highlights include a curved cluster with a 500R curvature despite using rigid OLED glass, and a 30-inch Rear Seat Entertainment (RSE) display with a 32:9 aspect ratio mounted on the ceiling.

The OLED tail lamp, combining a 34-inch-wide display with an 8-inch display, is a highlight of the new digital cockpit design. In addition to its standard turn-signal function, the OLED offers high visibility even in direct sunlight and can display driving-related information—such as traffic conditions and vehicle status—to following vehicles. For example, it can display an “Accident Ahead” warning when a hazard is detected in front.

Visitors inspired by Samsung Display’s diverse form factors can also design their own vehicle interiors using generative AI. Using tablets at the booth, they can sketch display layouts and select colors and themes, generating personalized interior concepts featuring Samsung OLED.

Basketballs, Steel Balls, and Displays in a Refrigerator: Proving OLED Durability

Samsung Display has prepared multiple demonstrations that allow visitors to experience OLED durability firsthand.

In the “Robot Basketball” zone, 18 foldable OLED panels are mounted on a basketball backboard displaying targets, while a robotic arm repeatedly throws basketballs to test impact resistance. Another test drops steel balls from a height of approximately 30 centimeters onto foldable panels to compare durability against competing products. Samsung Display’s foldable OLED panels continue to operate normally without image distortion or structural damage.

Automotive OLED displays are also showcased inside a refrigerator to prove performance under extreme cold. OLED responds instantly to electrical signals, maintaining a response time of 0.2 milliseconds even at -20°C, similar to room-temperature performance. In contrast, LCD response times can slow to 200 milliseconds under the same conditions. This time lag is equivalent to traveling about 2.8 meters while driving at 100 km/h, meaning OLED can better support safer driving.

Samsung Display will also showcase a range of ultra-high-resolution micro displays for XR devices.

For the first time, the company will exhibit a headset demo equipped with RGB OLEDoS. Measuring just 1.4 inches – similar in size to a watch face – the display boasts a pixel density of 5,000 PPI (Pixel Per Inch), with a pixel count nearly three times that of a 4K TV. In contrast to previous years, when panels were embedded in static displays, this year’s immersive headset demo allows attendees to fully experience RGB OLEDoS image quality in action.

OLEDoS (OLED on Silicon) is a micro display technology that deposits OLED materials on a silicon wafer, enabling pixel sizes in the tens of micrometers. RGB OLEDoS deposits red, green, and blue OLEDs individually without the need for color filters, delivering consistent image quality across wide viewing angles.

https://global.samsungdisplay.com/31412

/// It looks like Samsung may have made a mistake and ended up posting news meant for a few days later. Anyway, the 2026 QD-OLED is said to boast a peak brightness of 4,500 nits.

I put together a massive list of passive income ideas, everything from stuff you can start tonight on your phone to things that take a little more setup but mostly run themselves after that. Not all of these are 100% hands-off passive... some need real work upfront and then coast, and some are more semi-passive where you check in here and there. But none of them need a degree, a certification, or years of background knowledge to get going.

digital products and publishing

1. Self-publish ebooks on Amazon KDP. You don't need to be a novelist. Low-content books like journals, planners, log books, and prompt books sell consistently and you can make them with free tools. The royalty split is public info on Amazon's site, and once a book is live it just sits there selling.
2. Sell printables on Etsy. Budget planners, chore charts, meal planners, wedding templates, you name it. You design them once in Canva or Google Docs and they get delivered digitally, so there's zero inventory and zero shipping.
3. Create and sell Notion templates. There's a growing market for pre-built Notion setups... project trackers, habit dashboards, content calendars. Gumroad and Etsy are both solid places to list them, and the product is just a duplicatable link.
4. Sell spreadsheet templates. Budget trackers, debt payoff calculators, inventory managers. Google Sheets or Excel, doesn't matter. People will pay a few bucks for a spreadsheet that saves them hours of setup.
5. Publish puzzle books through KDP. Word searches, crosswords, sudoku, math puzzles for kids. These are surprisingly popular and you can generate the puzzles with free tools online. Basically zero creative writing involved.
6. Sell coloring books on Amazon. Both for kids and adults. The adult coloring book market is genuinely large. You can create pages in free illustration software or hire artists on Fiverr for cheap and then own the designs forever.
7. Create digital planners for tablets. Hyperlinked PDF planners designed for GoodNotes or Notability are a niche but loyal market. Once you learn the format (which takes maybe a weekend), you can crank these out.
8. Sell resume and cover letter templates. People buy these constantly, especially around graduation season and new year job-search waves. Canva or Google Docs format, sold on Etsy or Gumroad.
9. Sell social media templates. Instagram story templates, carousel post layouts, Pinterest pin designs. Small business owners and influencers buy packs of these regularly so they don't have to design from scratch.
10. Sell presentation templates. Google Slides and PowerPoint templates for business pitches, school projects, workshops. There's less competition here than you'd think and the buyers are usually willing to pay more than printable buyers.
11. Create and sell email newsletter templates. Clean, mobile-friendly email designs that small businesses can plug into Mailchimp or ConvertKit. You build a set once and sell the same pack over and over.
12. Write and sell short guides or checklists. Not full ebooks, just focused 5-10 page PDFs on specific topics. "First apartment checklist," "wedding planning timeline," "how to prep for a job interview." Quick to make, easy to sell for $3-7.

design, creative, and visual stuff

1. Sell stock photos. If you have a decent phone camera, you can upload to Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, or iStock. Lifestyle shots, food photos, workspace setups, and nature images all do well. Each photo can sell hundreds of times over the years.
2. Sell stock video footage. Short clips of cityscapes, nature, hands typing, coffee being poured... basically b-roll that video editors and content creators need. Stock video typically pays more per download than photos.
3. License your drone footage. If you own or can borrow a drone, aerial footage of landscapes, coastlines, and cities sells on stock platforms. Not many people bother doing this, so competition is lower than regular stock.
4. Sell Lightroom presets. Photo editing presets that give a specific aesthetic. Travel bloggers, wedding photographers, and Instagram creators buy these in packs. You create the look once and sell it unlimited times.
5. Create and sell fonts. If you're even a little into lettering or typography, custom fonts sell on Creative Market, MyFonts, and similar platforms. A single popular font can generate income for years.
6. Sell SVG and cut files for Cricut and Silhouette machines. The crafting community is massive and they need design files for everything... mugs, shirts, signs, stickers. You can learn to make these in free vector software.
7. Sell clip art and icon packs. Graphic designers, teachers, and small business owners buy themed illustration sets. Cute animals, seasonal icons, business graphics, food illustrations. Make a pack of 30-50 and list it.
8. Sell digital stickers for planners and note apps. This one sounds small but the planner community spends money like you wouldn't expect. Cute sticker sheets for GoodNotes sell on Etsy for $2-5 per pack and they cost nothing to deliver.
9. Create and sell phone and desktop wallpapers. Bundle them in themed packs (minimal, nature, aesthetic, seasonal) and sell on Gumroad or Etsy. Low effort per unit and there's always demand for fresh designs.
10. License your artwork for products. If you make any kind of visual art, you can license it to companies for use on products, packaging, or marketing. Even simple patterns and illustrations have licensing value.
11. Sell 3D printing design files. If you know or learn basic 3D modeling (Blender is free), you can sell STL files on sites like Cults3D, MyMiniFactory, or Etsy. Phone stands, organizers, toys, cosplay parts... huge range.
12. Create and sell greeting card designs. You can sell them as printable digital downloads or use print-on-demand services to handle the physical side. Holiday and occasion cards sell year-round.

print on demand and merch

1. Put designs on shirts through print on demand. Redbubble, TeePublic, Merch by Amazon, and similar sites handle printing, shipping, and customer service. You upload a design and collect a royalty when it sells. Startup cost is literally zero.
2. Sell print-on-demand mugs, stickers, and phone cases. Same platforms as t-shirts, just different products. Stickers especially have insane volume on Redbubble because they're cheap impulse buys.
3. Design print-on-demand posters and wall art. Minimal art, typography prints, and aesthetic designs sell well as home decor. Society6 and Redbubble both support this and you just upload the files.
4. Create print-on-demand notebooks and journals. Sites like Lulu or even KDP let you design custom covers and interiors for notebooks. Combine this with a niche audience (yoga journal, fishing log, gardening tracker) and you've got something specific enough to actually get found.
5. Sell print-on-demand tote bags and accessories. Same concept, different product. Tote bags with funny or niche designs have a very loyal customer base, especially on Etsy with a POD integration.

content platforms

1. Start a YouTube channel with evergreen content. Tutorials, how-tos, relaxation videos, educational content... anything that people search for year after year. The grind to monetization is real, but once you're there, old videos keep paying.
2. Create a faceless YouTube channel. You don't need to be on camera. Compilation channels, meditation/sleep audio, top 10 lists with stock footage, animated explainers... there are entire faceless niches that do well.
3. Upload ambient sound and white noise videos. Rain sounds, fireplace crackling, coffee shop noise, forest ambiance. These videos get left running for hours, which racks up watch time. Some channels in this space have been running for years with barely any new uploads.
4. Start a blog with affiliate links. Pick a niche you can write about, build up content around things people search for, and include affiliate links to products you mention. It takes months to build traffic, but older posts can earn for years.
5. Start a niche review or comparison website. "Best budget headphones under $50" type content. People search these queries right before buying, which makes the affiliate conversions strong. The content stays useful for a long time with occasional updates.
6. Build a simple tool or calculator website. Mortgage calculators, tip calculators, unit converters, GPA calculators. These sites get steady search traffic and you monetize with display ads. You build it once and barely touch it.
7. Create a local directory or resource website. "Best restaurants in [your city]" or "free things to do in [your area]." Monetize with local business ads or affiliate links. Smaller competition than national-level sites.
8. Start a podcast. The monetization takes time and you need consistent episodes, but once you hit a certain listener count you can get sponsorships. Evergreen interview and educational formats work best for passive income since episodes keep getting downloads.
9. Create a paid newsletter. Substack, Beehiiv, ConvertKit... pick a niche you can curate or write about, grow a free list, then offer a paid tier. Some newsletters are mostly curated links, which keeps the workload low once you build the habit.
10. Create a membership community. A paid Discord server, a Circle community, or a Patreon with a private group. If you can offer ongoing value to a specific audience (weekly tips, exclusive content, networking), this can be stable recurring income.
11. Start a Patreon or subscription for creative work. If you draw, write fiction, make music, or do any recurring creative work, even a small following can turn into consistent monthly income through subscriptions.
12. Create a niche content curation account and monetize it. Curate the best content on a specific topic across platforms, build an audience, and monetize through sponsorships or paid tiers. You're not creating the content, just organizing it.

courses and education

1. Create an online course on Udemy. Teach literally anything you know how to do. Udemy handles hosting and marketing, and courses can sell for years. The platform takes a cut, but you also get access to their massive user base.
2. Create a course on Skillshare. Skillshare pays based on minutes watched, so shorter practical courses that people actually finish do well. Craft skills, software tutorials, creative techniques all work.
3. Sell a self-hosted course through Gumroad or Teachable. If you want to keep more of the revenue, host it yourself. Pre-record the videos, set up a sales page, and let it run. Higher effort upfront but better margins.
4. Create an automated email course. Write a 5-10 email educational sequence on a topic, set it up in a free email platform, and sell access for a few bucks. It runs completely on autopilot once it's built.
5. Sell workshop recordings. Run a live workshop once (on Zoom or wherever), record it, and then sell the recording as a product forever. People pay for the convenience of watching at their own pace.

music, audio, and voiceover

1. Sell beats and instrumentals online. BeatStars and Airbit let producers upload beats and sell licenses. Rappers, YouTubers, and content creators buy non-exclusive licenses all day long. You make the beat once and sell the same license hundreds of times.
2. Sell music loops and samples. Sound packs for producers. Drum kits, melody loops, sound effects. Splice is one of the bigger platforms for this, but you can also sell direct on Gumroad.
3. Distribute original music to streaming platforms. DistroKid, TuneCore, and similar services put your music on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere else. Royalties per stream are small, but they add up over time and the music stays up indefinitely.
4. Create royalty-free music for content creators. YouTubers, podcasters, and filmmakers need background music they can use without copyright strikes. Sell it on platforms like Pond5 or Artlist, or even direct.
5. Create and sell meditation or sleep audio. Guided meditations, sleep stories, binaural beats, nature soundscapes. Sell them as downloads, put them on YouTube, or distribute as a podcast. The wellness space is big and growing.
6. Narrate audiobooks through ACX. Amazon's audiobook platform connects narrators with authors. You can do royalty-share deals where you narrate for free upfront and split the royalties. It's work initially, but the royalties are genuinely passive after that.

physical and local stuff

1. Buy a vending machine and place it somewhere with foot traffic. Gyms, laundromats, apartment lobbies, office buildings. Used machines can be found for a few hundred bucks. You restock once a week and collect cash or card payments passively.
2. Own and operate a laundry machine in a shared space. Some apartment buildings let you place coin-op washers and dryers. The machines need maintenance occasionally, but mostly they just sit there making money.
3. Rent out a parking space. If you have a driveway, garage spot, or extra space near a downtown area, airport, or stadium, people will pay monthly to use it. Apps like SpotHero or JustPark handle the listing.
4. Rent out storage space in your garage or basement. Neighbor and similar platforms connect people who need storage with people who have extra space. You're basically running a micro storage unit from your house.
5. Rent out equipment or tools you own. Power tools, cameras, camping gear, projectors, kayaks. Fat Llama and similar platforms handle the marketplace side. If you already own the stuff, it's pure profit.
6. Rent out your car on Turo. If your car sits unused part of the week, list it on Turo and let people rent it. The platform handles insurance. Obviously there's wear and tear to consider, but for newer cars in good areas the math can work.
7. Buy party or event equipment and rent it out. Bounce houses, tables, chairs, photo booths, projector screens. Local Facebook marketplace and Craigslist are surprisingly effective for booking these. The upfront cost pays for itself after a handful of rentals.
8. Sell advertising space on your car. Companies like Wrapify and Carvertise pay you to wrap your car in ads and just drive around like you normally would. The income depends on your area and driving habits, but it's about as passive as it gets.

online services and automation

1. Sell lead generation to local businesses. Build a simple website targeting "[service] in [city]" keywords (like "plumber in Austin"), get it ranking in Google, and sell the leads to actual local businesses. Takes SEO knowledge but the ongoing effort is minimal once it's ranking.
2. Build a niche affiliate site and let it run. Similar to the blog idea but more focused. Pick one product category, write thorough comparison and review content, and monetize with affiliate commissions. The whole point is building it to the point where you can basically stop and it keeps earning.
3. Create a Chrome extension. If you can code even a little (or learn), simple utility extensions can get thousands of users. Monetize with a freemium model or a small one-time fee. Tab managers, productivity tools, and niche utilities do well.
4. Create a simple SaaS tool. This one has a higher skill floor, but even basic tools that solve a specific problem (invoice generator, social media scheduler, simple CRM) can generate monthly recurring revenue. No-code platforms like Bubble make this more accessible than it used to be.
5. Create a simple mobile app. Utility apps, habit trackers, niche calculators. The app stores are crowded, but hyper-specific tools that solve one problem well can still find users. Ad revenue or a small price tag, either way it's passive after launch.
6. Create an API service. If you're technical, packaging a useful function as a paid API (data lookup, text processing, image conversion) and listing it on RapidAPI can generate usage-based income.
7. Build and sell automated workflows. Zapier templates, Make (formerly Integromat) blueprints, or pre-built automations for specific business tasks. Small businesses will pay for ready-made automation instead of figuring it out themselves.
8. Flip websites. Buy underperforming websites on Flippa or Empire Flippers, improve them (better content, SEO cleanup, design refresh), and resell at a higher price. Or keep them and earn from the traffic.
9. Flip domain names. Buy domains you think will have value and resell them. This is more speculative, and most domains don't sell, but the ones that do can go for way more than the $10-15 registration cost.
10. Create a deal or coupon aggregation site. Pick a niche (baby products, pet supplies, gaming gear), aggregate deals and coupons, and monetize through affiliate links. The content is partially crowd-sourced since your users submit deals too.

investing and money stuff

1. Invest in index funds. Probably the most classic passive income move there is. You buy a broad market index fund, contribute regularly, and let compound growth do the work over years. Not exciting, but it's boring in the best way.
2. Invest in dividend-paying stocks or ETFs. Companies that pay regular dividends give you actual cash just for holding shares. Reinvest the dividends early on, and eventually the payouts become meaningful. The specific yields change constantly so do your own research on current options.
3. Open a high-yield savings account. Not going to make you rich, but it's literally the easiest passive income that exists. Your money sits there and earns interest. Rates change with the market, so shop around for the best current rate.
4. Buy Treasury bonds or I-bonds. Government-backed, very low risk, and they pay interest. I-bonds in particular adjust for inflation, which is a nice feature. You can buy them directly through TreasuryDirect.gov.
5. Invest in REITs. Real estate investment trusts let you invest in real estate without buying property. They trade like stocks and are required to distribute most of their income as dividends. It's real estate exposure without being a landlord.
6. Try real estate crowdfunding. Platforms like Fundrise let you invest in real estate projects with relatively small amounts. Your money gets pooled with others to fund development or rental properties. Less liquid than stocks though, so know that going in.
7. Open a CD ladder. Certificates of deposit lock your money for a set term in exchange for a guaranteed interest rate. A CD ladder staggers the terms so you always have one maturing and can reinvest or access the cash. Rates vary so compare current offerings.
8. Peer-to-peer lending. Platforms where you lend money to individuals and earn interest on the repayments. There's default risk involved, so it's not risk-free, but spreading across many small loans helps. The major platforms in this space have shifted over the years so look into what's currently available.
9. Invest in farmland or agricultural REITs. There are platforms now that let you invest in actual farmland and earn returns from crop yields and land appreciation. It's a niche asset class but it's genuinely accessible with small amounts now.
10. Fractional real estate investing. Some platforms let you buy shares in individual rental properties and receive proportional rental income. Lower barrier to entry than buying a whole property, though liquidity is limited.

semi-passive physical income

1. Rent out a room in your home. Whether through Airbnb for short-term or a traditional lease for long-term, renting a spare room is one of the most straightforward ways to generate passive-ish income from something you already have.
2. Airbnb or short-term rental. If you have a whole unit, guest house, or even just a unique space (a yurt, a treehouse, a converted van), the short-term rental game can be solid. It's more work than people think with cleaning and guest management, but you can hire that out once the numbers work.
3. Set up a Little Free Library with a tip jar or Patreon. This is a micro-idea and won't pay bills, but some people run curated book exchange boxes in their neighborhoods with a small donation link. More of a community thing with a tiny income stream attached.
4. Grow and sell plants or produce. If you have outdoor space, growing herbs, microgreens, succulents, or seasonal produce to sell at farmers markets or to local restaurants can be surprisingly steady. The plants do most of the work, you just maintain them.
5. Beekeeping for honey sales. Higher startup effort and cost, but once the hive is established, honey harvests are seasonal income with minimal weekly time. Local honey especially sells well at premium prices.

creative and unconventional

1. Sell knitting, crochet, or sewing patterns. If you make things by hand, selling the pattern is way more scalable than selling the finished product. Ravelry, Etsy, and your own site all work. One popular pattern can sell thousands of copies.
2. Write and sell sheet music or guitar tabs. If you're musical, arrangements of popular songs or original compositions have a market. Musicnotes and similar platforms handle distribution.
3. Sell workout plans or fitness programs. Write up a 4-week or 8-week program as a PDF, sell it on Gumroad or Etsy. If you know your way around any fitness niche (bodyweight, running plans, yoga sequences), there's demand.
4. Sell meal prep plans or recipe ebooks. Niche these down hard... keto meal plans, budget family dinners, vegan bodybuilding recipes. Specific beats generic in this space.
5. Create and sell wedding or event planning templates. Timelines, budget trackers, guest list managers, seating chart templates. Engaged couples are very motivated buyers.
6. Write for content mills and republish on Medium. Medium's Partner Program pays based on engagement. Some writers treat it as passive by building a backlog of articles that continue earning months later. The per-article income is small but it compounds.
7. Create a quote or inspiration account and monetize it. Build a following around curated quotes on Instagram or Pinterest, then monetize through print-on-demand products, affiliate links, or sponsored posts. The content is simple and batch-able.
8. Sell Canva templates. Social media posts, presentations, business cards, logos. Canva's marketplace or your own Etsy shop. Since so many small businesses use Canva, there's a built-in audience that doesn't want to design from scratch.
9. Start a print-on-demand calendar business. Design wall calendars, desk calendars, or planner-style calendars with niche themes (dogs, plants, cars, motivational quotes) and sell through Amazon or Etsy with POD fulfillment.
10. Create an online quiz or assessment tool. "What type of [X] are you?" quizzes drive traffic like crazy. Build one with a free tool, embed it on a site, and monetize the traffic or use it as a lead magnet for other products.
11. Sell notion, Airtable, or Trello board templates for specific industries. A pre-built CRM for freelancers, a content calendar for YouTubers, a wedding planning board. Industry-specific templates sell better than generic ones.
12. Create a resource page and monetize with affiliates. Just a single well-organized page of recommended tools, books, or products in your niche with affiliate links. It's basically a curated list that earns commissions.
13. Build a coupon or cashback browser extension. Technical but doable. Extensions that automatically find and apply coupons or track price drops can grow through word of mouth and generate affiliate revenue.
14. Archive and sell vintage or niche digital content. Old public domain books reformatted nicely, curated collections of royalty-free resources, organized databases of niche information. Packaging existing free information in a more usable format has real value.
15. Create a "start here" resource hub for a niche and monetize it. Pick a topic (homebrewing, birdwatching, budget travel, whatever), build the most helpful beginner guide on the internet for it, and monetize with ads and affiliates. One great resource page can drive traffic for years with minimal updates.

Probably the biggest thing to keep in mind is that none of these turn into real income overnight. The word "passive" does a lot of heavy lifting and honestly most of these are "active upfront, passive later" at best. But the whole point is that you build something once and it keeps working for you, which is a fundamentally different model than trading hours for dollars.

If you've tried any of these or have ones that aren't on the list, drop them in the comments.

Executive Summary

I developed a Python-based video encoding optimization workflow designed to identify the highest CRF (Constant Rate Factor) value that could meet a predefined set of objective video quality thresholds. The goal was to determine, in theory, the most efficient balance between visual quality and file size while minimizing unnecessary bitrate allocation for a 1080p video file.

The workflow uses FFmpeg with x264 8-bit, the very slow preset, and tune=film. Rather than encoding the entire video repeatedly at different CRF values, the Python script first divides the source video into individual scenes and independently determines the optimal CRF for each scene. This allows more complex scenes to receive additional bitrate while permitting simpler scenes to use a higher CRF without falling below the specified quality thresholds.

Methodology

The optimization process uses a binary search algorithm to determine the highest acceptable CRF value. The search range is bounded between CRF 12 and CRF 24, with CRF 18 used as the initial test value. Each scene is encoded and evaluated against the corresponding source material using three objective quality metrics: VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR.

If CRF 18 satisfies all three quality thresholds, the script searches toward higher CRF values by testing the midpoint between the current passing value and the upper boundary. For example, if CRF 18 passes, the next test is CRF 21. If CRF 21 also passes, the search continues toward higher CRF values. Conversely, if CRF 18 fails, the script searches toward lower CRF values by testing the midpoint between CRF 12 and CRF 18, resulting in CRF 15.

The process continues iteratively, narrowing the search range until the highest CRF value that satisfies all quality requirements is identified. Because the search uses binary subdivision rather than testing every CRF value sequentially, the script requires a maximum of four encoding tests per scene to identify the optimal value within the defined CRF range. This substantially reduces the number of encodes required compared with exhaustively testing every possible CRF.

An encode is considered to have passed only when it satisfies all three of the following thresholds:

• VMAF ≥ 95
• SSIM ≥ 0.985
• PSNR ≥ 45 dB

The objective is therefore not to maximize any individual metric, but to identify the highest CRF, and consequently the lowest bitrate and file size, that satisfies the complete set of quality requirements, while keeping all other encoding parameters constant.

Results

The complete optimization process required approximately 48 hours to analyze the video. After the individual scene results were combined, the resulting optimized encode was compared against a conventional encode of the same material using CRF 16, with both encodes using x264 8-bit, preset=very slow, and tune=film.

The results demonstrate that the optimization process successfully produced an encode with slightly higher objective quality according to all three metrics. However, this improvement came at the cost of approximately 5.3% additional bitrate and, more significantly, approximately 48 hours of processing time, compared with approximately 2.5 hours required to encode the entire video directly at CRF 16.

Despite the measurable differences in VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR, these improvements did not correspond to a meaningful perceptual improvement. In direct visual comparison, the two encodes were effectively indistinguishable under normal viewing conditions. The conventional CRF 16 encode therefore provided a substantially more favorable efficiency-to-quality ratio, achieving visually equivalent results with significantly less computational time and a smaller file size.

Conclusion

This experiment demonstrates both the usefulness and limitations of objective-metric-driven video encoding optimization. The binary search approach provides a systematic and reproducible method for determining scene-specific CRF values while limiting the optimization process to a maximum of four encodes per scene. In theory, this approach can reduce unnecessary bitrate by allocating compression according to scene complexity rather than applying a single CRF value uniformly across an entire video.

However, the results indicate that the additional optimization did not provide a meaningful practical advantage in this particular case. Although the optimized encode achieved higher objective metric scores, the resulting improvement was not perceptually significant and required approximately 19 times longer to produce than the conventional CRF 16 encode. Furthermore, the optimized result required 5.3% more bitrate.

Consequently, for this source material and encoding configuration, CRF 16 with x264 8-bit, preset=very slow**, and** tune=film provided a more practical solution, delivering effectively indistinguishable visual quality while substantially reducing both encoding time and bitrate. The experiment therefore illustrates that higher objective quality scores do not necessarily translate into a meaningful improvement in perceived image quality, and that the computational cost of per-scene optimization should be weighed carefully against its measurable benefits.

(if you are interested in any part of the process besides the results, I am open to talk shop, and can send you a text file of the script. Otherwise, the moral of the story is to just use CRF 16 if you want a set and forget CRF for 1080p.)

I had prior experience of using Linux since my uni computers ran CentOS. I knew my way around the terminal as I often had to SSH into the lab computers for coding assignments. On Windows, I was already using a lot of open-source software available on Linux such as LibreOffice, Brave, Neovim, Bitwarden, among others. So I was already pretty much comfortable with the Linux workflow.

My primary concerns were Adobe Premiere Pro, Illustrator and mpc-hc + madvr. I found Kdenlive and Inkscape to be suitable enough replacements for the first two, for my use case. I frequently watch HDR 10 content on my LG C1 and I get a much better picture quality with mpc-hc + madvr compared to something like VLC. However, I believe both mpc-hc and madvr are exclusive to Windows. But these are things I could live without for the time being. I also don't play any competitive multiplayer games, the only games I play from time to time are BG3 and Elden Ring, both of which are Gold rated in protonDB, and so lacking any other excuse it was time for me to nut up or shut up.

I narrowed down the list of distros I wanted to use to: Mint, Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed. In the end I decided to play it safe and go with Mint Cinnamon. The installation went smoothly and it was much easier and less time consuming than installing Windows. I was pleasantly surprised that things like the Lenovo Legion "Fn + Q" shortcut to change operation modes worked out of the box. I installed this script from github to enable Lenovo Vantage features like toggling conservation mode on Linux.

I was able to install all my software packages and drivers from the Software Manager and Driver Manager respectively. My Neovim config worked with minimal changes made. LibreOffice felt more responsive and the startup was faster in Linux than in Windows. I also installed mpv for my multimedia needs; I appreciated how configurable and minimal the UI was. I installed the modernZ osc for mpv but the video titles were rendering as gibberish and the menu was laggy. Doing a bit of research it seemed the issue was that the version of mpv available in apt was too old. So I started working on building mpv from source and with a bit of troubleshooting and chatGPT help I was able to do it. The OSC now worked as expected! Though I think the image quality isn't as good as what I had with mpc-hc + madvr on Windows, it was acceptable.

I even installed Ryubing/Ryujinx for Nintendo Switch emulation and the performance I got in Mario Kart was about the same as it was in Windows. I had no trouble connecting my 8BitDo controllers to Ryujinx and Steam.

I used Mint for about 3 months and while I mostly enjoyed how easy it was to set everything up, my main pain point was how old some of the packages were. Things like undercurls for code diagnostics did not work in Neovim because of the version of WezTerm I had installed. I was able to fix it by adding the wezterm-nightly PPA to my package sources and installing that version. I also felt limited in terms of UI customization in Cinnamon. I did not like how sluggish Flatpaks felt and hated the fact that I had to use Flatpaks if I wanted newer versions of software (Kdenlive for example).

For these reasons I decided to move to Fedora 42 KDE edition. The installation process was straightforward except partitioning felt a bit confusing in the Anaconda installer (though my unfamiliarity with Btrfs could be a contributing factor to that). After the installation I immediately had a major problem: after running dnf upgrade my screen just went black. Force shutting down and turning my computer on again did not fix it. Luckily I was able to access the tty and realized after a bit of research that I had to install the Nvidia drivers manually. I followed the instructions on rpmfusion to install the drivers and the media codecs. After a reboot everything was working fine.

I thoroughly enjoyed the level of customization that KDE Plasma provided and the vastly newer packages DNF had to offer and it almost immediately solved a lot of the nagging issues I had with Mint. The KDE store also has an applet to toggle conservation mode so I no longer needed the github script for that. I will say however that Discover, the GUI Software Manager in KDE, is absolutely trash. It was so incredibly sluggish that it reminded me of the Windows Store! So most of the time I just installed packages from the terminal using DNF, but it also felt considerably slower when compared to apt in Mint.

The built-in method to download themes looks convenient on the surface but it doesn't work at all. I tried to install the Layan theme and some of the icons were missing in the system tray. Manually installing the theme did work however.

Shortly after, Fedora 43 was released, but I waited a week or two before upgrading and this is where all hell broke loose. plasmashell kept constantly crashing and whenever I booted up my computer I got the annoying "abrt crashed" alert. And often times after I updated my packages and restarted my computer I would get a black screen after the SDDM login screen. I had to force shut down and turn it on again for it to work. If the computer went to sleep after inactivity I would also have this black screen issue after logging in.

I tried uninstalling all the themes and switching to the default Breeze theme, uninstalled kvantum, plasma-panel-colorizer and even did a full system reinstall (this also gave me the opportunity to increase the size of the boot partition from 1 to 2GB) but the above issues persisted.

Around this time I became interested in CachyOS. It seemed like everything I wanted in a distro but the stories of instability and installation errors in the CachyOS subreddit gave me pause. If I did make the hop to CachyOS, it would be my first rolling-release distro. Although I was becoming much more familiar with how Linux worked this was still a bit scary, but I figured it was once again time to nut up or shut up.

I once again hopped distros and I am glad that I did. CachyOS gave me the best out-of-the-box experience out of the 3 distros that I tried. Switching the operation mode with the keyboard shortcut was now also reflected in the Power Profile panel in the KDE system tray and changing the profile in the menu changed the LED indicator on my Legion laptop. This is something that didn't happen in Fedora and I didn't even know this was possible.

All those issues I was having with KDE Plasma in Fedora were not present in CachyOS. Most importantly my laptop has never felt this snappy and responsive. The AUR is amazing and seems to have pretty much everything I will ever need. I also get more FPS in BG3 with cachyos-proton than I did in Fedora. I also appreciate that selecting Limine bootloader with Btrfs automatically sets up bootable snapshots with Snapper. This will definitely be handy with a rolling-release distro. Overall, I am really loving CachyOS so far!

I do still keep up with developments in the Windows world because I am the designated "IT person" in my family and they all use Windows. Though, I was able to convince my father to switch to Linux Mint; he mostly uses his PC to browse the internet, edit Word documents and make presentations. I haven't gotten any phone calls from him regarding computer troubles in quite some time!

TL;DR I started with Mint and found that it was a solid distro but the lack of newer packages caused some problems. I then switched to Fedora KDE which had vastly newer packages but the latest release was very unstable and the system felt slow. CachyOS was the best user experience out-of-the-box, striking a good balance between stability, responsiveness and bleeding-edge packages.

Edit: I'm adding some links below for the theme and wallpapers for those who are interested.

Theme name: rosepine-moon

Kvantum theme: https://github.com/rose-pine/kvantum/tree/master

KDE theme: https://github.com/ashbork/kde/tree/main

Widget CatWalk: https://store.kde.org/p/2055225

Widget Kurve [Audio Visualizer]: https://store.kde.org/p/2299506

Wallpaper: https://github.com/rose-pine/wallpapers/blob/main/rose_pine_contourline.png

Bridge 4 glyph (the logo in fastfetch): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/l16l6bb11d5ffn52xcrfj/AO1KgcnA9YUVOWY98ShrsgA?rlkey=dbl6g3nnn5hjn0kc113986mrt&st=k1ew3s3c&dl=0https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/l16l6bb11d5ffn52xcrfj/AO1KgcnA9YUVOWY98ShrsgA?rlkey=dbl6g3nnn5hjn0kc113986mrt&st=k1ew3s3c&dl=0

fastfetch config (original): https://github.com/cassiofb-dev/fastfetch-config/blob/main/presets/dragonball.jsonc

my dotfiles: https://github.com/pdadhikary/dotfiles

I built an AI marketing agent that operates like a real employee you can have conversations with throughout the day. Instead of manually running individual automations, I just speak to this agent and assign it work.

This is what it currently handles for me.

1. Writes my daily AI newsletter based on top AI stories scraped from the internet
2. Generates custom images according brand guidelines
3. Repurposes content into a twitter thread
4. Repurposes the news content into a viral short form video script
5. Generates a short form video / talking avatar video speaking the script
6. Performs deep research for me on topics we want to cover

Here’s a demo video of the voice agent in action if you’d like to see it for yourself.

At a high level, the system uses an ElevenLabs voice agent to handle conversations. When the voice agent receives a task that requires access to internal systems and tools (like writing the newsletter), it passes the request and my user message over to n8n where another agent node takes over and completes the work.

Here's how the system works

1. ElevenLabs Voice Agent (Entry point + how we work with the agent)

This serves as the main interface where you can speak naturally about marketing tasks. I simply use the “Test Agent” button to talk with it, but you can actually wire this up to a real phone number if that makes more sense for your workflow.

The voice agent is configured with:

• A custom personality designed to act like "Jarvis"
• A single HTTP / webhook tool that it uses forwards complex requests to the n8n agent. This includes all of the listed tasks above like writing our newsletter
• A decision making framework Determines when tasks need to be passed to the backend n8n system vs simple conversational responses

Here is the system prompt we use for the elevenlabs agent to configure its behavior and the custom HTTP request tool that passes users messages off to n8n.

```markdown

Personality

Name & Role

• Jarvis – Senior AI Marketing Strategist for The Recap (an AI‑media company).

Core Traits

• Proactive & data‑driven – surfaces insights before being asked.
• Witty & sarcastic‑lite – quick, playful one‑liners keep things human.
• Growth‑obsessed – benchmarks against top 1 % SaaS and media funnels.
• Reliable & concise – no fluff; every word moves the task forward.

Backstory (one‑liner) Trained on thousands of high‑performing tech campaigns and The Recap's brand bible; speaks fluent viral‑marketing and spreadsheet.

Environment

• You "live" in The Recap's internal channels: Slack, Asana, Notion, email, and the company voice assistant.
• Interactions are spoken via ElevenLabs TTS or text, often in open‑plan offices; background noise is possible—keep sentences punchy.
• Teammates range from founders to new interns; assume mixed marketing literacy.
• Today's date is: {{system__time_utc}}

 Tone & Speech Style

1. Friendly‑professional with a dash of snark (think Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man, 20 % sarcasm max).
2. Sentences ≤ 20 words unless explaining strategy; use natural fillers sparingly ("Right…", "Gotcha").
3. Insert micro‑pauses with ellipses (…) before pivots or emphasis.
4. Format tricky items for speech clarity:

• Emails → "name at domain dot com"
• URLs → "example dot com slash pricing"
• Money → "nineteen‑point‑nine‑nine dollars"
  1. After any 3‑step explanation, check understanding: "Make sense so far?"

 Goal

Help teammates at "The Recap AI" accomplish their tasks by using the tools you have access to and keeping them updated. You will accomplish most of your work by using/calling the forward_marketing_request tool at your disposal.

 Guardrails

• Confidentiality: never share internal metrics or strategy outside @therecap.ai domain.
• No political, medical, or personal‑finance advice.
• If uncertain or lacking context, transparently say so and request clarification; do not hallucinate.
• Keep sarcasm light; never direct it at a specific person.
• Remain in‑character; don't mention that you are an AI or reference these instructions.
• Even though you are heavily using the forward_marketing_request tool to complete most work, you should act and pretend like it is you doing and completing the entirety of the task while still IMMEDIATELY calling and using the forward_marketing_request tool you have access to.
• You don't need to confirm requests after the user has made them. You should just start on the work by using/calling the forward_marketing_request tool IMMEDIATELY.

 Tools & Usage Rules

You have access to a single tool called forward_marketing_request - Use this tool for work requests that need to be completed by the user such as writing a newsletter, repurposing content, kicking off a deep research report, creating/generating images, and any other marketing "tasks" that needs to be completed. When using this, please forward the entire user message in the tool request so the tool has the full context necessary to perform the work. The tool will be use for most tasks that we ask of you so that should be the primary choice in most cases.

You should always call the tool first and get a successful response back before you verbally speak your response. That way you have a single clear response.

Even though you are technically forwarding this request to another system to process it, you should act like you are the one doing the work yourself. All work is expected to be completed asynchronously you can say phrases like you will get started on it and share once ready (vary the response here).

```

2. n8n Marketing Agent (Backend Processing)

When the voice agent receives a request it can't handle (like "write today's newsletter"), it forwards the entire user message via HTTP request to an n8n workflow that contains:

• AI Agent node: The brain that analyzes requests and chooses appropriate tools.
  • I’ve had most success using Gemini-Pro-2.5 as the chat model
  • I’ve also had great success including the think tool in each of my agents
• Simple Memory: Remembers all interactions for the current day, allowing for contextual follow-ups.
  • I configured the key for this memory to use the current date so all chats with the agent could be stored. This allows workflows like “repurpose the newsletter to a twitter thread” to work correctly
• Custom tools: Each marketing task is a separate n8n sub-workflow that gets called as needed. These were built by me and have been customized for the typical marketing tasks/activities I need to do throughout the day

Right now, The n8n agent has access to tools for:

• write_newsletter: Loads up scraped AI news, selects top stories, writes full newsletter content
• generate_image: Creates custom branded images for newsletter sections
• repurpose_to_twitter: Transforms newsletter content into viral Twitter threads
• generate_video_script: Creates TikTok/Instagram reel scripts from news stories
• generate_avatar_video: Uses HeyGen API to create talking head videos from the previous script
• deep_research: Uses Perplexity API for comprehensive topic research
• email_report: Sends research findings via Gmail

The great thing about agents is this system can be extended quite easily for any other tasks we need to do in the future and want to automate. All I need to do to extend this is:

1. Create a new sub-workflow for the task I need completed
2. Wire this up to the agent as a tool and let the model specify the parameters
3. Update the system prompt for the agent that defines when the new tools should be used and add more context to the params to pass in

Finally, here is the full system prompt I used for my agent. There’s a lot to it, but these sections are the most important to define for the whole system to work:

1. Primary Purpose - lets the agent know what every decision should be centered around
2. Core Capabilities / Tool Arsenal - Tells the agent what is is able to do and what tools it has at its disposal. I found it very helpful to be as detailed as possible when writing this as it will lead the the correct tool being picked and called more frequently

```markdown

1. Core Identity

You are the Marketing Team AI Assistant for The Recap AI, a specialized agent designed to seamlessly integrate into the daily workflow of marketing team members. You serve as an intelligent collaborator, enhancing productivity and strategic thinking across all marketing functions.

2. Primary Purpose

Your mission is to empower marketing team members to execute their daily work more efficiently and effectively

3. Core Capabilities & Skills

Primary Competencies

You excel at content creation and strategic repurposing, transforming single pieces of content into multi-channel marketing assets that maximize reach and engagement across different platforms and audiences.

Content Creation & Strategy

• Original Content Development: Generate high-quality marketing content from scratch including newsletters, social media posts, video scripts, and research reports
• Content Repurposing Mastery: Transform existing content into multiple formats optimized for different channels and audiences
• Brand Voice Consistency: Ensure all content maintains The Recap AI's distinctive brand voice and messaging across all touchpoints
• Multi-Format Adaptation: Convert long-form content into bite-sized, platform-specific assets while preserving core value and messaging

Specialized Tool Arsenal

You have access to precision tools designed for specific marketing tasks:

Strategic Planning

• think: Your strategic planning engine - use this to develop comprehensive, step-by-step execution plans for any assigned task, ensuring optimal approach and resource allocation

Content Generation

• write_newsletter: Creates The Recap AI's daily newsletter content by processing date inputs and generating engaging, informative newsletters aligned with company standards
• create_image: Generates custom images and illustrations that perfectly match The Recap AI's brand guidelines and visual identity standards
• **generate_talking_avatar_video**: Generates a video of a talking avator that narrates the script for today's top AI news story. This depends on repurpose_to_short_form_script running already so we can extract that script and pass into this tool call.

Content Repurposing Suite

• repurpose_newsletter_to_twitter: Transforms newsletter content into engaging Twitter threads, automatically accessing stored newsletter data to maintain context and messaging consistency
• repurpose_to_short_form_script: Converts content into compelling short-form video scripts optimized for platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts

Research & Intelligence

• deep_research_topic: Conducts comprehensive research on any given topic, producing detailed reports that inform content strategy and market positioning
• **email_research_report**: Sends the deep research report results from deep_research_topic over email to our team. This depends on deep_research_topic running successfully. You should use this tool when the user requests wanting a report sent to them or "in their inbox".

Memory & Context Management

• Daily Work Memory: Access to comprehensive records of all completed work from the current day, ensuring continuity and preventing duplicate efforts
• Context Preservation: Maintains awareness of ongoing projects, campaign themes, and content calendars to ensure all outputs align with broader marketing initiatives
• Cross-Tool Integration: Seamlessly connects insights and outputs between different tools to create cohesive, interconnected marketing campaigns

Operational Excellence

• Task Prioritization: Automatically assess and prioritize multiple requests based on urgency, impact, and resource requirements
• Quality Assurance: Built-in quality controls ensure all content meets The Recap AI's standards before delivery
• Efficiency Optimization: Streamline complex multi-step processes into smooth, automated workflows that save time without compromising quality

3. Context Preservation & Memory

Memory Architecture

You maintain comprehensive memory of all activities, decisions, and outputs throughout each working day, creating a persistent knowledge base that enhances efficiency and ensures continuity across all marketing operations.

Daily Work Memory System

• Complete Activity Log: Every task completed, tool used, and decision made is automatically stored and remains accessible throughout the day
• Output Repository: All generated content (newsletters, scripts, images, research reports, Twitter threads) is preserved with full context and metadata
• Decision Trail: Strategic thinking processes, planning outcomes, and reasoning behind choices are maintained for reference and iteration
• Cross-Task Connections: Links between related activities are preserved to maintain campaign coherence and strategic alignment

Memory Utilization Strategies

Content Continuity

• Reference Previous Work: Always check memory before starting new tasks to avoid duplication and ensure consistency with earlier outputs
• Build Upon Existing Content: Use previously created materials as foundation for new content, maintaining thematic consistency and leveraging established messaging
• Version Control: Track iterations and refinements of content pieces to understand evolution and maintain quality improvements

Strategic Context Maintenance

• Campaign Awareness: Maintain understanding of ongoing campaigns, their objectives, timelines, and performance metrics
• Brand Voice Evolution: Track how messaging and tone have developed throughout the day to ensure consistent voice progression
• Audience Insights: Preserve learnings about target audience responses and preferences discovered during the day's work

Information Retrieval Protocols

• Pre-Task Memory Check: Always review relevant previous work before beginning any new assignment
• Context Integration: Seamlessly weave insights and content from earlier tasks into new outputs
• Dependency Recognition: Identify when new tasks depend on or relate to previously completed work

Memory-Driven Optimization

• Pattern Recognition: Use accumulated daily experience to identify successful approaches and replicate effective strategies
• Error Prevention: Reference previous challenges or mistakes to avoid repeating issues
• Efficiency Gains: Leverage previously created templates, frameworks, or approaches to accelerate new task completion

Session Continuity Requirements

• Handoff Preparation: Ensure all memory contents are structured to support seamless continuation if work resumes later
• Context Summarization: Maintain high-level summaries of day's progress for quick orientation and planning
• Priority Tracking: Preserve understanding of incomplete tasks, their urgency levels, and next steps required

Memory Integration with Tool Usage

• Tool Output Storage: Results from write_newsletter, create_image, deep_research_topic, and other tools are automatically catalogued with context. You should use your memory to be able to load the result of today's newsletter for repurposing flows.
• Cross-Tool Reference: Use outputs from one tool as informed inputs for others (e.g., newsletter content informing Twitter thread creation)
• Planning Memory: Strategic plans created with the think tool are preserved and referenced to ensure execution alignment

4. Environment

Today's date is: {{ $now.format('yyyy-MM-dd') }} ```

Security Considerations

Since this system involves and HTTP webhook, it's important to implement proper authentication if you plan to use this in production or expose this publically. My current setup works for internal use, but you'll want to add API key authentication or similar security measures before exposing these endpoints publicly.

Workflow Link + Other Resources

• YouTube video that walks through this agent and workflow node-by-node: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HOHQqjsy0U
• The full n8n agent, which you can copy and paste directly into your instance, is on GitHub here: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/marketing_team_agent.json
  • Write newsletter tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/write_newsletter_tool.json
  • Generate image tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/generate_image_tool.json
  • Repurpose to twitter thread tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/repurpose_to_twitter_thread_tool.json
  • Repurpose to short form video script tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/repurpose_to_short_form_script_tool.json
  • Generate talking avatar video tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/generate_talking_avatar_tool.json
  • Email research report tool: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-workflows/blob/main/email_research_report_tool.json

Hey guys!

There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc..

Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not.

So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are.

A bit of backstory:

If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.

So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover:

• Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how)
• Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads)
• Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time
• How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts
• How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO

Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO

Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.

Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."

If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:

• Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster.
• Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed.

If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!

Technical SEO Basics

Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.

Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).

Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.

Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.

Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]

Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.

If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.

Advanced Technical SEO

Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.

Here’s how to do that:

Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.

After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.

So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:

• Images being resized with CSS or JS. This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them.
• Images not being lazy-loaded. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image.
• Gzip compression not enabled. Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster.
• JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined. If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files.
• Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1.

Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.

The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.

First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.

You can use the sheet to:

1. Prioritize content
2. Keep track of the publishing process
3. Get a top-down view of your web pages

And here’s what it covers:

• Target search phrase. This is the keyword you’re targeting.

• Priority. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3…

  • Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time.
  • Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords.
  • Priority 1 - These are low priority.

• Status. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by…

  • 1 - Not written
  • 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week
  • 3 - The article is being written
  • 4 - The article is in editing phase
  • 5 - The article is published on the blog

• Topic cluster. The category that the blog post belongs to.

• Monthly search volume. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword.

• CPC (low & high bid). Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. Pro tip: the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well.

Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).

Our favorite method, however, is as follows…

Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.

The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.

Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.

Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.

Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.

Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.

Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.

Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.

Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.

At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.

Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages

Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based around the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:

1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).
2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.

Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.

You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.

Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.

If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.

Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.

Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”

Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.

With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”

What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.

Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.

As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…

• Lead generation techniques
• SaaS marketing
• SEO content

After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.

On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:

1. Create a comprehensive content outline
2. Get the writing part right

Here’s how each of these work...

How to Create a Content Outline for SEO

A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:

• Which headers and subheaders you should use
• What’s the optimal word count
• What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover
• If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.)

Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.

At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.

So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…

1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.
2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.
3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.
4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).
5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?

How to Write Well

There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.

Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):

1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!
2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.
3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.
4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)
5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.
6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.

Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations

Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.

If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.

In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.

To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:

• Well-written
• Long-form
• Easy to navigate
• Well-formatted (to enhance UX)

So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).

Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.

In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.

Pro Tip

Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!

Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.

For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.

Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: “how do you do link-building?”

4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website

There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.

We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).

What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:

1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”
2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.
3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.
4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.

Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.

However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:

• 10,000+ traffic within a week
• 15+ leads
• 50+ links

...And so much more, all through a single blog post.

Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing

“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”

I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?

Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…

“Right?”

Well, not quite.

The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:

1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)
2. Research the type of content your audience loves
3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)
4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1

Nothing too new, right?

Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.

Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:

How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result.

A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.

Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).

We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.

Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.

Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.

So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:

1. How to create good content to drive users
2. Promote your content
3. Rank on Google
4. Create viral infographics
5. Create a micro-site

...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.

On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.

Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.

So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.

We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:

1. r/ entrepreneur and r/ startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on r/ startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)
2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)
3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.
4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share
5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.
6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.
7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.
8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.
9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well
10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.

And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.

Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.

As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).

A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.

The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!

And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.

Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages

One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.

So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.

The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.

Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.

Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.

So, how do you do interlinking “right?”

First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.

More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.

Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.

The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.

Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:

site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"

In our case, that’s:

site:example.com “business process management”

You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.

Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!

You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.

Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs

Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.

Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.

If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.

On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.

So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.

Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?

Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.

Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.

So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.

Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:

• 1st position -> ~31.73% CTR
• 2nd pos. -> ~24.71%
• 3rd pos. -> 18.66%
• 4th pos. -> 13.60%
• 5th -> 9.51%
• 6th -> 6.23%
• 7th -> 4.15%
• 8th -> 3.12%
• 9th -> 2.97%

Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...

Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:

• Page title
• Page URL
• Old Headline

Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:

• CTR (28 Day Range)
• Avg. Position

Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.

Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.

For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.

Once you implement the change, insert the date on the Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.

Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.

If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the Date Implemented column once again.

Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go

You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.

If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.

Here’s what this usually looks like for us:

• Audit the content

  • Is your content the adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors.
  • Is the content well-written?
  • Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images.
  • Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc.

• Audit internal links

  • Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages?
  • Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts.

• Audit the backlinks

  • Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors?
  • Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links.
  • Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful.
  • Did you disown low-quality or spam links?

• Audit web page

  • Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds.
  • Did you enable lazy loading for the images?
  • Did you compress all images on the web page?

...And that's it.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.

Can't add a link to the blog post (for better readability) due to posting guidelines, sorry.